Imagining our New Normal - Capturing the Unique Opportunity Created by the Pandemic

As we’ve managed in these strange pandemic times, most of us have likely felt at least some of these feelings at some point – stress, fear, exhaustion, confusion, anger, frustration,

overwhelm, and so many more. These are legitimate feelings and are to be expected when confronted by what we have experienced.

As I mentioned in my last post, I try to focus on gratitude as much as possible. This hasn’t been easy during the pandemic. With some moderate risk factors, I have been pretty COVID-cautious. I took shelter-at-home pretty literally and didn’t venture out into public except for necessity. If I went to see my 93 year old dad in person it was always outdoors and at a distance. The camp I was operating at the time had to shut down and I was put on standby status from my job for 4 months. While my rational brain understood, this was a real blow to my self-esteem. It's not been easy, and I know for many people, it was much more difficult than it was for me. So, I’m not here to just say ‘let’s just focus on the positive and it will be ok’. What I am here to ask, though, as we begin to emerge from this pandemic, is what can we use from this experience to imagine a new normal that might be better than the old normal of two years ago?

I mentioned last time a few of my personal favorite things that have occurred as a result of the pandemic, including

• More outdoor dining

• Curbside pickup

• Zoom happy hours

• Streamlined online processes

• Working from home

Another has been personal health. Learning that COVID tends to be hardest on folks who are overweight and out of shape was a huge motivator for me to improve my own health. I got into a regular exercise program (thanks YouTube for the Zumba videos) and started eating better. I lost some of my excess weight and felt healthier and in better shape than I’ve felt in a long time. There's more work to do, but it’s now become a pretty regular habit.

In my work world at the time, the world of camp, we had to completely re-imagine how to operate. Twice. In summer 2020 our only option was to offer family camps, which was a very scaled down version of our usual family camp offerings. The summer of 2021 we were allowed to offer youth camp, which was our usual summer program. There were strict mandates in place and they were changing right up to the start of program. It was a crash course in adapting. This temporary new normal required us to change up ‘how we’ve always done it’ and find new ways of operating. Some of the bright spots that came out of this were:

• An entirely new check in & out process that ended up being much more efficient than our previous system.

• Shifting our health team to be mobile – complete with their own golf cart – so they went to the campers rather than campers coming to them. This resulted in a quicker response to camper needs and also eliminated campers seeking time in the health hut because they were feeling a little homesick – keeping them in activities and building friendships and resilience to get through hard moments.

• Meals were served grab-and-go style so cabin groups ate on their cabin decks rather than in the dining hall. This turned out to make meals a little more peaceful and provide more bonding time for cabins. While I’d never suggest ending meals in the dining hall, it is appealing to think about a few meals continuing to be at the cabin each session.

• Improved health protocols that help reduce illness of all kinds.

Of course there were plenty of challenges. It wasn’t perfect and we weren’t able to program the way we typically would, but it was fantastic to have kids back at camp laughing, playing and singing around the campfire. And, as it turns out, some of the changes ended up being improvements that will continue regardless of whether or not we are dealing with a pandemic.

Here’s one other huge bright spot. Camps tend to be places where people cling to “this is how we’ve always done it”. Having been in existence for decades and with campers and staff who have had their lives changed by their camp experience, it feels like there must be a certain magic in that experience and that must be ‘how we’ve always done it’. This makes any sort of substantial change extremely difficult. I’ve had the opportunity to create significant change at two camps. One camp was failing, having dropped to about 30% of occupancy. ‘How we’ve always done it’ was killing the camp. The other had strong enrollments but had experienced some significant staff issues and was likely on its way to a similar fate. In both cases, in looking at the program, there were things I saw that needed drastic change to improve quality and safety issues.

To strengthen these camps meant pretty drastic change which was met by strong resistance from campers and staff who had spent a number of years at the camp and felt like I was doing away with all the things that had made such a positive impact on their lives.

The photo here is a censored piece of a sand dollar that one of the teen leaders at one camp wrote on to express his frustration with me. (To clarify, at camp, we use ‘camp names’ – fun nicknames that we go by at camp which are different than our real names. My camp name is “Disney”.) As you can see, strong reactions. This is not surprising because camp creates extremely deep emotional connections. As it turns out, the teen and I ended up having a good conversation and I keep the sand dollar as a reminder of how hard change can be, and as a reminder that it’s worth it if we make change for the right reasons.

So, what does this have to do with the pandemic? Well, if I was going to either of those camps this coming summer to make those changes, I’d find a completely different story. The resistance would be minimal, if it even existed. Why? A few reasons:

• There is no longer a ‘how we’ve always done it’. It’s been two long years and most folks won’t remember the details.

• We’ve all had a crash course in adapting to change, and so are likely more skilled in it than we were two years ago. The pandemic has forced us to change our behaviors and expectations and changed so much of how we do things. While we might not have liked some or all of it, or might not have agreed with some or all of it, the fact is, there has been a LOT of change and going through that much change will build our adaptation to change skills.

• People will be so happy to get back to a sense of normal, they might not even notice things that would have infuriated them in the past. We saw some of that in 2021. In the early months of the pandemic we said things like “Masks? We could never do camp if masks were required”. In 2021 masks were required and no one – staff or campers – had any problem with them. They were so happy to be back at camp and back with their camp community that they likely would have done just about anything to make it possible. I don’t recall a single complaint all summer long about masks.

Why am I telling you this? Well, if you’re a camp director, it’s probably obvious. And if you’re not a camp director, I’m pretty sure camp isn’t the only place where change is resisted. If you’ve been wanting to make some changes but worried about the resistance, there won’t likely be a better time in your entire career than as we come out of the pandemic.

I invite you, actually I implore you, to consider what your new normal could be. What have you learned, personally or professionally, during the pandemic that could create positive change in your work or personal life? It seems like we talked about this a lot in the early months – the air is cleaner, we’re spending more time at home, we’re not going back to long work days, we’re going to have more balance – but I worry the fatigue from how long this has lasted has caused us to forget those realizations.

"What have you learned, personally or professionally, during the pandemic that could create positive change in your work or personal life?"

If you need a reminder, I encourage you to check out this beautiful video that came out in March 2020, the earliest months of the pandemic. It is a powerful reminder of the lessons we learned then that we may already have forgotten.

I hope you’ll take some time to reflect on all of this and what it means for you. We have already begun to emerge from the pandemic to some degree, and I'm hopeful we'll be more fully out of it soon. This is our moment! This is where we decide what life will look like on the other side. What will you do differently in your new normal than you did two years ago? I’d love for you to comment below or send me an email. I hope you’ll give it some serious consideration. I wish you good health and I wish us all to be past all of this safely in the very near future!