Anyone who has been demoralized understands the importance of keeping a high morale. With high morale, you can experience setbacks and continue to press forward despite them. With low or no morale, you may not take advantage of great opportunities within your reach. The difference is staggering.
With high morale, you’re ready for anything. This state of mind puts you in peak creativity, peak confidence, and self-belief. Once the pandemic hit, most of the world’s morale was tested. We were locked in our homes, laid off, isolated, and knocked off balanced. Like all bad things that happen, the best we can do is learn from them. My morale was all over the place during the pandemic, with times of high morale and times I felt demoralized. Here’s what I’ve learned about keeping high morale.
Know Your Mood Stabilizers
I only recently discovered one reason for decreased morale during the pandemic—full court pickup basketball. I had simply forgotten how impactful playing pickup basketball for a couple hours was on my health and mood. Despite installing a hoop at my house, which was great, I still missed that level of cardio and on-the-court camaraderie.
You need to know the activities that keep your mood up. For a lot of people, it’s exercise, and possibly certain types of exercise. It could also be a hobby, or even a special person or group of friends. When you know what you need to keep in high spirits, you can better adapt even if it’s taken away from you. For example, if I know I need time with friends and the pandemic keeps us apart, I can purposefully schedule more zoom hangouts. It’s not the same, of course, but it could be enough.
Stay Assertive
If you want to keep high morale, plan more things to do. Making plans and being assertive prevents demoralization. High morale people are defined by being more active than demoralized people. If you picture someone demoralized, they aren’t doing anything. They’re leaning over with their head in their hands.
One of the more underrated secrets of life is to act the way you want to feel. If you want to feel confident, act confidently. If you want to feel smart, do things a smart person would do. If you want to feel high morale, act like you already have it.
Feelings and actions affect each other, but we have better control over our actions, which is why it’s so important to lead with action instead of hoping for the correct feeling to spur the correct action.
If you look back on your life, you’ll notice that whenever you start doing something, your disposition changes. I’ve found that I almost always enjoy doing things more than I think I will. Doing the dishes seems annoying until I begin and then it’s fine and even satisfying. Working out seems difficult until I begin and it feels great. Writing original content seems difficult, and it truly is, but it’s also frequently satisfying and worth it.
When you don’t feel high morale, it’s time to act like you do. I promise the feelings will follow.
Zoom In or Out
Zooming is a powerful tool for adjusting your perspective and mood. There are a LOT of ways to do it.
If one aspect of your life is difficult and threatens your morale, you can zoom in on another aspect of your life to focus on it or zoom out to see the many blessings in your life. Doing either one minimizes the pain and mood-killing impact of the one bad area. That’s not to say we should ignore our problems and hope they go away, it’s just a technique to keep your morale high and continue to press forward in life. It will actually help you solve more of your problems.
In theory, I think this works best:
- If one area is bad, zoom out to focus on all of the competing good areas.
- If a lot of areas are bad, zoom in to one good area to focus on as you deal with everything.
Morale is so critical, and it’s worth protecting. Bad days will happen, and that’s okay, but don’t let a bad day turn into bad general morale, because that can snowball against you. I hope these tips help in that regard.
To keep high morale:
- Know your mood stabilizers
- Stay assertive
- Zoom in or out as needed
