“Your dignity can be mocked, abused, compromised, toyed with, lowered and even badmouthed, but it can never be taken from you. You have the power today to reset your boundaries, restore your image, start fresh with renewed values and rebuild what has happened to you in the past.” ― Shannon L. Alder
There are a few meeting invites suddenly flushed into my email box in the last couple of mins. They are all related to the recent restructure across our tribe, and across the whole business. In the last few days, I felt that i had to force myself calm down when my emotion has been stimulated by the content those emails presented.
COVID-19 has made our life so different and more difficult.
Yesterday morning, on the standup meeting, our product manager -Joe announced that his role has been made redundant. It seems that there is no plan for the replacement of his role. To make it worse, this morning, the team got notified, our delivery lead and UX designer both were told to leave. All of sudden, i am working with a team which no long has a delivery lead, product manager and UX designer. In fact, it becomes a luxury dream if a team has a dedicated DL and UX designer. Under the newest structure chart, the specialists have been made centralised into their specific categories. We can only imagine, how difficult it could be to battle for the resources to get something done for our team in the near future.
I got a new slack message, my tribe manager -Daniel wants to have a quick chat. For a moment, I thought that i might have been made redundant as well. Daniel told me that he got some news and he felt happy about the arrangement as it is going to be beneficial for me. Well, that does not sound bad, at all. If my role was gone, then talking about benefit of myself seems does not make sense any more, does it.
From him, I knew that i would be reporting to a new line-manager -Samuel. Daniel thought that Samuel and I would be a good combination as his speciality would help me to improve my mobile app development skills. Without further consultation, I knew that Samuel had made his way out of the tornado. That needs great networking skills. Perhaps, it is the only skill that people needed during the pandemic to avoid being scooped out of the picture, apart from successfully survival from COVID.
After all, end of the day, we all need to make sure the food on the table, roof over the head. Interestingly, after thousand years evolution, our basic boiled down needs are still pure and simple.
However, during COVID, to meet those basic needs, we have to work extremely hard. There is no sign that tells us, when the job would be laid off. It is almost as bad as the Corona virus as there is no sign that indicates us the confirmed case is only a few yards away from us.
To be honest, I had never learned how to cope with fear. I believed that it was my weakness, my worst emery, as anything i did, any action i took, even any of my thoughts , would be effortless. The fear acts as a black hole and every single thing around me, about me, including myself, would eventually be sucked in to that hole.
Strangely, tonight, the more i think about that black hole, the clearer that my brain becomes. I could feel that seamlessly integrity between the fear and hope.
It is true, that there is very little that i could do to change the present. The not ideal scenarios would continue to occur for as many times as it is needed.
Individual element like me, can decide to take on the challenge and reset the image to empower the future self, rather than, let the black hole to eat my dignity and destroy the hope.