21-Day Challenge Check-In With Melissa

We just completed week two of our 21-Day Strengths Challenge. We’re posting one question, every day from April 31 – May 3 to help you process how you’re doing right now during this in-pandemic time. Reflect on your own, or invite your colleagues, family, or friends to share their experience. We’re also challenging you to answer a secondary question about how your Strengths are influencing your answer(s).

PLEASE NOTE: these questions are relevant ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, with ANY group of people. If you happen to be reading this after the fact, please just look at the questions below and start your own challenge!

Today on the podcast, Melissa Hiatt, Senior Consultant here at Leadership Vision and I each discuss one of our questions. We hope it will help bring you some perspective and possibly encouragement. Many of us are dealing with a lot right now, but when we process and share with one another, somehow it doesn’t seem quite so bad.

Our Questions

Like the check-in last week with Heather, I first ask Melissa to share a bit about her current situation. Is she at home? Does she have kids? Is she working? How is that going? I’m constantly trying to compare my situation with that of others to help me make sense of the world.

As you’ll hear, Melissa and I take a bit of a meandering conversational path and stop at a few other topics that are both relevant and timely and I think you’re going to enjoy them.

Melissa shares some big picture concepts related to ambiguous grief, and ways that we can use our emotions as data points to help us better understand what we truly value. Then I get led down a path of self-compassion and self-kindness. I realize, sort of in real-time, that there is A LOT to unpack in the question I assigned to myself.

My question was, What patterns of behavior do you want to change? My answer turned out to be a deeper reflection than I had anticipated. I’m not a very patient person when things don’t go my way. This has become ESPECIALLY true now that I am with my kids virtually all day. I can overreact and focus on the little things vs the big picture. I want to work one being more present and look for the big pictures of what’s really going on. I’d be curious to know how other people might answer this question about changing behaviors.

Melissa answered the question: Who are you encouraging and helping? For as long as I’ve known her, I’d say Melissa is a naturally encouraging person. It seems that in each interaction she has with people, she is attempting to see and hear the person who is standing in front of her. This, from personal experience, leaves them feeling encouraged. But she shares that it hasn’t been easy right now.

In this season of social distancing, spontaneous interactions are fewer and farther between. However, as people come to mind, I am keeping a list and intentionally sending a text, email or picking up the phone and call.

Enjoy this mini-check-in today and please share your own reflections in the comments below, or on our social media channels!

The 21 Questions

Here are ALL of the questions we will be releasing during the 21-Day Strengths Chellenge:

1. How are you feeling?
2. Where are you flourishing?
3. What is a new frustration?
4. When have you felt accomplished?
5. With whom are you creating a deeper connection?
6. With whom are your feeling particularly disconnected?
7. With whom are you relying on for help?
8. To whom are you encouraging and helping?
9. What new patterns are you practicing, and why?
10. What old patterns are not working any longer?
11. What new adaptation are you enjoying?
12. Where do you feel the most confident right now?
13. Where are you finding meaning during isolation?
14. How are you seeing people around you struggle?
15. When do you feel the most alive and what are you doing?
16. When do you feel out of balance, and how do you find your balance?
17. Have you experienced too much change in your life?
18. What do you need to do over and over again that brings you satisfaction?
19. What decisions are easy for you to make, and more difficult?
20. What information are you looking to for help?
21. Who do you feel you are the most connected to right now?
22. Is there someone that you think is handling this change really well?
23. How do you feel you can make the greatest difference in someone else?
24. What changes can you make for others to cope better?
25. What patterns of behavior do you want to change?
26. Who do you look to for direction through this pandemic?
27. What example of good leadership have you noticed?
28. What is something you can be the best at?

You probably noticed there are more than 21 questions. We know. Once we got started we couldn’t stop.

Let’s Process LIVE!

We’d like to process this, in real-time. We will be hosting Facebook Live chats every Thursday at noon, CST. We will summarize the questions from the week, discuss, then invite two or three of you to join us on-air to share the question from the week that stuck with you the most.