Over the past 9 months, we’ve all experienced a fundamental change in habits and behaviors. Some people found these changes immediately beneficial. some made the conscious decision to embrace them, whilst others have found it stressful and difficult. For many, there has been a “mask of calm” covering true feelings.

We hosted an amazing panel recently, a cross section of disciplines from finance, internal controls, audit, consulting, risk management, technology, psychology, leadership coaching, business school education, meditation and even a yoga master! Many thanks to Elena Och, Sylvain Lonchay, Juergen Mueller and Mark Hookey.

The attendees at this recent poll-driven webcast highlighted a real variety in thoughts and emotions experienced in the changed way of life and work, and of change itself.

We wanted to learn from the last few months about organizing ourselves individually and collectively for the road ahead.

As professionals and business leaders, as well as from the perspective of individuals with different personalities and viewpoints, we will all benefit from better understanding the impact of this “enforced behavioral change” on ourselves, our colleagues, our organizations and our friends and families.

We asked some poll questions that stimulated some interesting responses across the participants, and some very perceptive comments from our panel;

• For you personally, what has been the impact of 2020?
• How has it impacted your sleep, diet, mood, exercise and perceived energy levels?
• How concerned have you been for your own health since the COVID crisis started?
• How concerned have you been for the health of relatives and friends?
• How secure do you feel with your employer/company?
• How has your spouse/primary partner (if you have one) relationship changed?
• How has your relationship with your work colleagues changed?
• How would you rate your level of self-discipline during the crisis?
• What helps you most during these months of uncertainty and change to keep focus, mood and energy up?

This last question also provided input for a thought provoking “word-cloud” from responses. You can see this below.

We concluded with some great comments from Mark Hookey of Swiss Re on Behavioral Change…

Juergen Mueller of PwC shared observations about emotions and brain chemistry…

Sylvain Lonchay of IMD Business School. Mindfulness, meditation and yoga masterdom talked about our perceived and real needs and how they may change on the surface, but maybe not as much as we might think…

Elena Och, leadership and team coach from MyBrainCoach discussed behaviour and the impact of thinking, feeling, saying and doing…

You can see the full discussion, and the results of all the polls we took during the webcast recoding here