Sent from Toronto.

To listen, click ▶️ on the postcard.

Here’s the transcript of Liane’s message:

Hi, this is Liane for the CultureLab Audio Postcards. Hello from Toronto, where I am riding out isolation as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I must say, I wasn’t dealing very well with this for a little while. And I was getting really upset about the loss of work. I was grieving some of the parts of my life that are now on hold and it took remembering a quote from President Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. And he said during the 2008 financial crisis: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” And the moment that I remembered that quote became an inflection point for me. And I turned to my husband, I said: “What would we do if we didn’t want to waste this crisis?”

It turns out that our family has gotten into some routines that are bad habits and not things that I’m particularly proud of, or things that I want to continue. Ways of parenting our kids, what we eat, how often we order in food, our willingness to spend when we’re happy and spend when we’re unhappy, and all sorts of things. And this became an opportunity to reset on some of those things. We don’t have income at the moment. We are isolated, we can’t go to a store and it became this great chance to start some new and positive habits for our family.

And so this is my inspiration to you. Are there opportunities in your team in your organization with your culture, to look at some of the habits that you’ve fallen into, and take this as the opportunity to change them? Whether that be too many meetings with too many people or too few people in them, or the failure to prioritize and trying to do too many things at once – whatever it is, is there an opportunity to think of this as the moment to start afresh, reset on things that needed a reset, and in that way to not waste this crisis? Maybe it’s also for you at home, and if so, I hope that this can be an inflection point there as well.

So I really encourage you to find a way to start anew because this crisis has allowed you to do things that never would have been possible without it. So, signing off from Toronto, this is Liane. Thanks so much, everybody. Stay well.