The View From The Kitchen Table,
By Geraldine Hughes
The view from this kitchen table is looking very typical November -damp and a bit dreary. Without the Christmas party season to look forward to it’s a little more grim than usual. So, what can we do about that then? Well absolutely zilch, since Uncle Tony has cancelled Christmas on us, and to be honest, who would want to party standing 2 metres away from each other, slathered in hand sanitiser?
But before we try to reinvent Christmas we have to get through November. Finding myself unemployed or to use the term furloughed again which kind of sounds like we’ve been put into storage, I’m struggling to amuse myself. Like the rest of us who are considered expendable by the powers that be, my house is painted, cleaned out, and re-organised to a degree that Marie Kondo would be proud of from the last prolonged stint at home. Along with reorganising everything, I did a bit of self-improvement reading and a lot of it spoke about having a Growth mindset. I am a hairdresser so having a growth mindset is nothing new to me or anyone who works in a fast-paced industry, and my job is all about changing it up, continual retraining, trying new products, dumping everything you know to embrace a new, and better way of doing things.
Not all jobs are like this, some are formulaic and need to be because that’s the way they work, but even then, a growth mindset is always preferable to a fixed one. It seems to me that when faced with a new situation, that new thinking might be required.
I should state at this point that although I am a hairdresser, I should clearly be on the board of NPHET, along with a few thousand others on social media but sure look, I might as well throw my thoughts into the mix as well! I think the government did what they were meant to do when faced with a pandemic. They implemented their Pandemic plan and that was right and correct and probably saved thousands of lives. I have no medical training and all I have to go on is opinion, not mine but those of the 50 clients I put through my hands each week, and what I’m hearing is that on a human level, this continued lockdown approach is not working.
I am seeing lonely, anxious, scared people. They are also angry, frustrated and confused and now they don’t even have us to vent to. I am feeling all of those things too, but mostly angry. I don’t pretend to have the answer, but I know there has to be a better way to tackle this than by putting retail, hair and beauty, gyms, hospitality and the travel industry on their knees. There must be a way forward to protect those that need it and let the rest of us get on with our lives. At the very least a debate with those who think there is another way, qualified people with a forward – thinking growth mindset. §