As I’m writing this article, we’re closing out the first year of Covid-19; deep into February 2021. We had such high hopes for change by now. But schools are still closed to some degree or another. Expectations of vaccine efficacy have been questioned. The one-two shot was supposed to get us back to some kind of normal within a month or two. Well, Anthony Fauci is now predicting the Fall of 2021.

This is the time of year when, all over the world, we traditionally pause to reflect on the past months to review what we learned and what we’re grateful for. This year, however, is a little different. Wouldn’t you say? If we were to run an imaginary video of the scenes from the year through our mind, we’d see a succession of images we couldn’t have imagined this time in 2019.

In a recent blog post, I had the pleasure of introducing you to Col. Nicole Malachowski (USAF, retired), the first female fighter pilot in the Thunderbirds, who inspires the principle to “fly loose,” advising us leaders to resist the urge to micromanage when conditions start getting, shall we say, “off plan.”

In stressful situations, people tend to want to micromanage more than they had in more normal times. If you’re intentional with your boundaries as we discussed above, you are better equipped to resist the emotional compulsion to “take the wheel.”

At this writing, we’re coming up on the start of Q4. What questions do you ask yourself about what’s ahead of us all for the rest of the year? Are your visions for the next three months based on negativity bias? Or possibility-oriented thinking? In this uncertain year, we could go either way in our imaginings.