How is your social fitness?

Fitness comes and Fitness goes

If you have ever had an exercise program, you will be aware that your physical fitness will increase with regular exercise. You will also be aware that when you stop your exercise program your physical fitness level will drop. Fortunately, it restores again with the return of regular exercise.

Now replace the idea of physical fitness with ‘social fitness’, and replace the concept of the regular exercise with regular contact with other people. Is it possible to lose our social fitness when we stop having regular interactions with others?

Think about what happens when you’ve had an extended time away from work, whether it be for a holiday or an illness or some other reason; the length of your time away will fluence the how much adjustment you need to make when you return to work. Part of that adjustment is leaving the house by a certain time, remembering to take what you need to take, being at certain places at the right time, meetings, tasks, deadlines, working with colleagues (including the difficult ones), leadership, the politics, the rules and whatever you do – do not put your dirty cup in the clean dishwasher.

The Re-Entry

As an introvert, I have consistently found the start of the school year to be a challenge. I can totally relate to the students who find it overwhelming. At one school, they would start the year with a large, communal, all staff meal. That was a lot of people in a relatively small space. Lots of people talking about their summer break and what they did or didn’t do…and I would try to hide behind my plate of food and wish desperately that I was somewhere else – anywhere else. I loved my job, I had just lost my social fitness over the summer.

Re-entry after summer holidays would always take a few days. I needed to get my head in the zone of what I was doing, what we were doing, and establishing a sense of ownership over the program and content that were about to deliver for the next ten weeks.

How is your withitness?

Part of my education training was encountering the phrase ‘withitness’ – a word used to describe that student who gets it; they know what is going on, they’re working with the program and they get it. So how is your withitness?

For some of us, the past two to three months (or more) have been a strange existence of vague purpose. We wake in the morning and drift from the bedroom to the kitchen and then to the computer. Professional attire has been replaced by anything that is soft and stretchy and shoes with heels have either been gathering dust or have been hibernating in their shoe-box caves.

I read an article that suggested a recent popular search on google is ‘what day is it’. The irony that people have not only become so vague that they are looking up what day it is on a device that would have the time and date on display. Surely that is evidence of the level of vague that people have become in their state of lock-down or restricted movement and socialising. We’ve become like human cats and apparently, we have lost our withitness.

With Covid-19 restrictions lifting, many will soon be heading back to work. However, re-entry just got a whole lot more challenging. You better get your withitness on.

Not like the good ‘ol days

Yes, you will return to work eventually, but with social distancing. If re-entry was a challenge before, then expect it to be a greater challenge this time. Places of employment will still be required to maintain social distancing. Will our desks be further away from each other? Will we be positioned in different rooms? Will we be required to keep to our 4m² .  At least you won’t need to worry about the dishwasher anymore, chances are you will be carrying your own coffee mug with you at all times.

Meetings will still happen but differently. Output will still need to be maintained but…probably differently too. Hand sanitiser and elbow coughing are now the new normal.

Social fitness or fit-ness

Do not be surprised if you feel a little anxious about walking back into that place of work. While we may have been keeping to schedules at home with on-line meetings and work productivity – it has been without the extra stressors of being at your work place by a certain time. I have heard many comments on the benefit of being home in isolation – it is like they have found the pleasure of taking things at a slightly slower pace. There has been no more waiting on train platforms or coping with the rush-hours squeeze of public transport. There has been no traffic to sit in that makes the trip home just that bit longer. Work has still been work, but different.

Depending on your household, for some, it has been a very, very quiet few months. Whether it will be the work-space or the social-space, do not be surprised if you find yourself feeling tired by it. Interaction is tiring. Our on-line meetings were tiring because our brain was working hard to extrapolate information from less information. However, our brains are quick accommodate and that reduced information has become less apparent. It is possible that we will now experience a cognitive fatigue as our brains struggle to deal with too much information; but adjust they do, and adjust they will.

Part of this social fitness is the fit-ness; the ability to re-establish connection and re-establish the rules of engagement; the type of rules that we have not had to abide by before. The landscape has changed and we have had to adjust with it. My hope is that in all of this, we do not ignore our in-built need for connection with others and that we will find our fit-ness as we re-establish connection with friends, family members and colleagues (even the difficult ones).