5 Take aways from the Covid-19 Pandemic

5 Takeaways from the Covid-19 Pandemic

And we are going to talk today about 5 takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic. I am recording this in April of 2022. So we are not done with the pandemic, there’s a new variant out, and it’s starting to kind of stir up some trouble here in the northeast, particularly in the larger metropolitan areas. 

They’ll go back to you know, in the fall, they’ll go back to all of these things. And we had so much promise and so much hope back then that it was going to be super short. And here we are two years later, still talking about it, still experiencing it, still having family members and friends get ill and possibly yourself if you’ve had COVID, very, very challenging times

But what happened during the pandemic has been, I would say a huge blessing to a lot of people because it’s shown some different things. And I want to talk about what those takeaways are and what we could learn from this pandemic, as business owners, and as people. The first thing that I want to talk about is flexibility. The ability of the entire world to pivot at the drop of a dime, in March 2020 was astounding.

Like literally every single person in the world, their lives changed within a week. And it’s just a staggering thing to think about how everything came to a screeching halt for everyone. And no one was immune to this, it didn’t matter how much money you have. It didn’t matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you live in, none of those things that usually kind of dictated what you do in your everyday life where you work. 

None of that even mattered because everything closed, right? There was a period of time when just every single thing was closed. We didn’t even know if restaurants would open back up. Like, what in the heck, how’s that even possible? What I want to stress is that we all learned flexibility. We all learned how to adapt, and we all learned how resilient we are. We all learn that. 

I predict that it will probably read some more. But I think we’re all kind of getting used to this pandemic, it’s become a normal part of our lives, it’s become something that we just live with, as opposed to two years ago, at this time, when we were all like, okay, maybe it’s only going to be a month for kids who go back to school before the end of the school year. 

Just because this happens doesn’t mean that can’t happen. People adapted and they, you know, started having birthday parties drive-by birthday parties, we went to a drive-by birthday party, or we like honked you know, and put the present out the window. And it was awesome. And the kid loved it. It’s flexible and adaptable

So that is probably the biggest takeaway that I see in our business lives and our personal lives from the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is a blessing because if we were inflexible before, like me, I’m a big planner. I like to know when things are happening. I love change.

But I want to know when it’s happening, and I want to be able to plan for it. So yeah, that didn’t work with the pandemic. And one moment my kids were in school, and then the next moment, they were all three home. How does that work?

Yes. And I’m sure that you had that same experience, but it was a huge blessing for people like myself Taipei’s that want to be able to plan everything, to know that we don’t have to plan everything and everyone’s still going to be okay. Everything’s still going to be okay.

The second lesson that we learned through the COVID-19 pandemic, is that online, business is paramount. You can literally make money from your living room, no matter what kind of business you’re running. That was probably one of the most staggering changes in the business world changes

That happened during the pandemic. Everybody went from driving to the office every day to wearing sweatpants to zoom meetings, like how does that happen? Like overnight to the entire world. I love it. So online is huge. It is definitely improving the quality of work for people.

It’s improved, you know, the overall quality of life for many people that, you know, maybe moms or dads that struggle to get to their kids’ events and things now have that flexibility of being able to work from home and setting their own hours as long as they get the work done. There are just so many benefits that have come from this online space kind of booming. 

And the other thing that I love is that a lot of restaurants and other places that were kind of sluggish about getting their menus online or hesitant about just kind of growing into an online business, kind of forced their hand.

And now we have access to almost any business online, a business that you may have only been able to purchase from in person before, you can now purchase those things online, because it forces them to get their websites up and get everything user-friendly. All of those things, it’s such a blessing for them. And for the consumer.

The third thing that we learned, and this kind of goes back to what I said about number one, is grace, giving ourselves grace, realizing that we don’t have to have all of our crap together all of the time. This has been like a monumental, I guess, awakening for me in that I really like to try to have my crap together as much as I can. But I realized during this pandemic, that it’s just not possible all the time. And I realized that a lot of people are also struggling to keep their crap together all of the time.

So this is a huge blessing in that we all have learned to give ourselves grace, we’ve learned to give other people grace. So we interact during the day, and we learn to be nicer to people out in public, that maybe are struggling with their kids, or the cashiers having a rough day, or people are being rude to them. So you’re trying to lift them up, there are just so many different ways that you can give yourself grace, as well as give other people grace. And all of this has come from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fourth thing and this has been a really important thing for me in my life, and in my business, is to create very strong boundaries. And hold to them, some of the boundaries that we created were around COVID-19, like, we are not going to visit you if you are not vaccinated. Or if you don’t want to wear a mask or those kinds of things. 

We’re just not going to do it because our kids were not vaccinated for a very long time. And our youngest is still not vaccinated, but it’s just having those boundaries in place. And I think COVID-19 and also the social, all of the social justice movements that came up during this time, those also helped to form boundaries, like, Okay, you’re not going to be in my life, if you’re doing this. Or if you’re saying this, or if this is what you believe, then that’s not supporting us.

It’s not supporting my family, that’s not supporting my friends. And I don’t want to deal with that. So if you’re not open to thinking about new possibilities, then it’s definitely a hard boundary. So I love that COVID-19 has really given us these boundaries and allowed us to say no to things that we’re not okay with.

And I think it’s kind of given us permission to be okay with saying no to people, at least for us, or at least for me.I should say my husband’s great at saying no to people, I am not. But yeah, so I think it’s a really important part of doing that. Being able to stand up for yourself and make those strict, strong boundaries.

The final thing that I think we all, as business owners, should have learned from the pandemic, and I hope we all have is having a complete marketing system that works for you, and not against you. And you don’t have to work it and you don’t have to put a huge amount of effort into it after you have it set up is absolutely key because it allows you to focus on the other things that you need to focus on.

Like, I don’t know, all of the things that we focused on during the pandemic were to get toilet paper, that was a huge emergency at one point like nobody had any toilet paper. So how are we going to go to the potty, you know, that was a huge deal. And if you had a marketing system in place that would start with your website, generate traffic from your website, yet, organic SEO.

So if you’ve already had your website optimized, you’ve got people just going to your website, you don’t have to worry about getting new clients, you’ve got your Google My Business to optimize, you’ve got all of that setup, you’ve got review generation in place, and you’ve got this system that is constantly bringing you new customers and nurturing them with an email sequence and emails.

You don’t really have to put a lot of effort in once you have a system like that setup. So it’s taught us all that we need to have some sort of organic marketing system. And I don’t mean some sort of, I mean a very particular organic marketing system in place that will allow you to understand how to get clients without a lot of effort. How to get new customers through your door without a lot of effort and how to keep making them happy and show other people that your business is amazing and that they should be also customers or clients of yours.

Very important. And just keeping people informed of your business and of new changes in your industry, new products, all of those things through email is also going to drive them right back to your website. So all of these things are extremely important. And I hope that you have enjoyed some of these takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic.

And if you have any questions or comments on anything that we talked about, please email me at Amanda at the determined mom.com and I am really excited to talk about the next episode, five simple things you can do today to improve your website’s SEO. Super simple. Talk to you soon

Thank you for listening to the determined Mom show. We appreciate you. And we would love for you to leave us a review on Apple podcasts. 

10 Things You Should Be Doing to Get More Clients From Google Search 

Subscribe and Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach and help more mom business owners!