Personal Isolation (PI), while serving as a leading tool in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, has left behind collateral damage to our personal, social, and political networks. PI has limited our personal growth, influence, and credibility.
What we lose during periods of personal isolation:
- Negotiation, collaboration and consensus-building skills and results – creating consensus – finding solutions that are acceptable to everyone.
- The benefit of diversity as a catalyst for developing solutions to problems through consensus and teamwork.
- Feedback, including criticism, observations, agreement, and suggestions about developing ideas, opinions, and ideologies (solicited or unsolicited).
- Compassion, understanding, and acceptance of all group or team members.
- Tolerance for new and different ideas, especially those we perceive as contrary to our own, or which are new and unfamiliar.
- Creativity. Isolation stifles the diverse thinking needed to expand and improve ideas.
- Objectivity. Isolation promotes self-centered, myopic, and fragile thinking.
- The water cooler / coffee breaks and other small, informal gatherings where ideas and opinions can take root and ferment.
- Lunch and dinner conversations, where experiences are shared, and ideas begin to take shape.
- Development of existing, new, and unexpected casual and professional relationships.
The loss of these interactions presents challenges that affect both the workplace and our personal lives, presenting lingering obstacles to our future development. Personal isolation has limited many of our professional networking interactions, including how we are viewed and evaluated when we conduct our job search.
As you propel your way out of the post pandemic era and into your next career move, I recommend you redefine your direction and emphasize what I call your Three Key Strengths – A Big Picture View, Creating Effective Working Relationships, and Developing Durable Work Ethics. These are fundamental elements which reach beyond job requirements or your job matching skillset, and appeal to all hiring managers.
I recommend you thoroughly integrate these three values and characteristics into your marketing plan. It’s time to regain the momentum we used to ride out the isolation imposed on us during the COVID-19 pandemic and direct our efforts to an uninhibited job hunt.
See other blogs for job hunting skills development and a refinement of the three key strengths skills, and look for my upcoming book, Job Hunting – Launching to Landing.
Ben