The Reset – The Importance of Creating a Restart

November 12, 2020

One thing is evident as the country waits for election results. We all need a reset.

This election and much of the last four years have been stressful. Regardless of which candidate you supported on November 3rd, we’ve all been wound up pretty tight. Whether you call it gas-lighting or not – we’ve never experienced four years like the last. Four years where there was a clear good team and a clear bad team and absolutely nothing in between, regardless of which candidate you supported.

When this all shakes out, and I certainly hope it shakes out one way over the other, we will all need a reset—a moment to pause, reflect, and return to the middle, where we see each other as humans and not as memes.

A reset can be done on an interpersonal level, with you and a group, or with you and the organization. It’s a handy tool when finding yourself in a rut with someone at work, a team, or the entire organization.

To reset, all you need to do is to stop. That’s it. You need to stop. We are often stuck in routines (positive and negative), and a reset is all about redirecting routines. To do that, you stop. Whatever it is that is causing you to bang your head against the wall. Just stop.

And if we are talking politics, we all need to stop. We are all on different sides with absolutely no middle ground. We are yelling in our echo chambers on social media, and we only hear our screams back. So we need to stop. Humanizing opposing opinions is hard, but that’s a reset. That’s how we find our way back to the middle. And forgiveness.

A reset is what we all need. So let’s start.

A quick clarification: When I say “the middle,” I’m not referring to the political middle – I’m not asking us all to be centrists. Instead, the middle relates to a place where we exist outside our echo chambers. The middle is where we start seeing each other as people with opposing views willing to re-engage.