Building Community: Family
When it comes to building resilience in your community and home during these times, it is helpful to have both structure and flexibility. This is a great opportunity to listen to what your family members are most concerned about, what they are interested in learning about, what their dreams are, and so much more.
Check-Ins
Quick, focused family meetings that move around the table and provide time for each member to talk. Vary who leads the discussion on each check-in. Open the agenda to whatever may be on your family’s mind but cover news, debunk rumors with researched facts, check perceptions of behaviors outside the family, and brainstorm ideas on what could be done to help others. Discuss the risk and responsibility and build understanding when it comes to both.
Create accountability for each person’s personal goals and celebrate the progress and benchmarks to get there. Take consensus on meals and activities to develop a strong sense of team and family community. This also helps foster individual responsibility toward one another and builds confidence in sharing ideas and feelings with the group over time.
Spiritual - Mind and Body
Ritual Meditation, visualization, focused thought practice. Not only are you training the mind to let go of draining thought patterns, but you are helping build grey matter, lower stress levels, and create a more empathetic mindset. And you are in good company - greats like Michael Phelps, Navy Seals, Arianna Huffington, Oprah, and so many more.
Sustain hope! Whatever higher power belief system you believe in, find an at-home practice routine to support your connection. Comfort and support help define what is in your power and what we cannot control. MLK articulated it as the arch of the universe bending toward justice. It’s important to recognize that as a people we’ve made great progress and evolved to higher and higher levels of actualization and insight internally and externally.
Academic
Just like with creating structure for yourself and your work team, it is important to develop a schedule for your kids. By knowing what is ahead of them, you limit the number of arguments and negotiation (relatively speaking) around certain tasks and assignments all while fostering a more stable environment for them to feel safe and comfortable in.
Your child’s school is most likely providing guidelines and instructions on their set-ups and, depending on your child’s age and the class, their lessons will either be live or pre-recorded. I recommend checking in on your social media feeds and seeing which of your contacts are teachers offering help via Facetime and Google calls for parents and students. The generosity and support of your community is there and available to tap into if you are feeling overwhelmed or out of your comfort zone when it comes to the lessons.
Life Lessons
This is a great time to teach one another new skills, habits, or share fascinating information with one another. This doesn’t have to be limited to those in your home either. Over video calls - do a cooking class with a friend, interview grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors about their lives, make a video lesson about one of your talents for a niece, nephew, godchild, get creative and swap talents, knowledge, and skills with one another! In times of crisis and limited control, it’s very helpful to focus on how one can help others in and out of the house.
Creative Time
Either create a project together or send everyone off to work on their own and come back to show each other your handy work. You can make a movie, write stories, draw, write music, paint, craft, and so much more. This doesn’t have to be limited to those in your house either. It can be via email, video calls, voice calls, or social media.
Carving out time to be creative helps limit screen time for all of us and helps the brain let go of the need to be constantly checking-in on the status of things, checking for updates, or spinning itself within its own thought patterns.
When we share our creative endeavors or simply talk about what we worked on or are working on, we can learn a great deal about one another that we may not have had the opportunity to learn otherwise.
Staying Active
This is important on a number of levels. Staying active helps keep your immune system up, helps manage stress, clears the minds, and releases endorphins into our system to help us feel good physically and mentally. Setting a time to workout with those in your household or picking the same workout to do with friends or family members all in their own homes can be a wonderful mood booster for the whole group and is a shared, positive experience to bond over. Almost every fitness, yoga, and meditation app are now offering free temporary memberships to help people during this time - so there is a perfect fit for everyone.
Our friends over at Work. Play. Train. (www.workplaytrain.com) have opened up both their sites through July. For teens and adults, streamable workouts, yoga, mindfulness practices, and Happiness Practices are available at www.workplaytrain.com and for kids -www.workplaytrainkids.com- ages 8-14 workouts, yoga, mindfulness, and more!
This is stressful and trying times for families and households across the globe. There is so much we don’t have control over at the moment as individuals, but if we take time to recognize what we can control and make the time together a little happier, brighter, and more connected, then we will come out of this stronger and more resilient for it.