Many of my readers are really struggling right now. Loss of work, lack of direction, confusion.

I had a chance to coach someone recently who was sensing this quite profoundly. Confined to his house, without work prospects, he’s finding it hard to move forward in any useful direction.

But here’s the thing: he’s actually been given a gift.

I’m serious! This is a period where he can reflect, plan, and invest in his future self.

These things cost time rather than money. And he’s been given an over-abundance of time.

Since he hasn’t had a lot of experience being the boss of a one-person business, I granted that to him. He’s the owner and leader of a very small organization. He has only one employee – with the exact same name, as it turns out! How curious.

As the employee, he’s struggling with lack of motivation and lack of direction. He’s worried about his family, his community, and the state of society – so that’s quite distracting.

As the boss, though, he has time to plan for a better future. He can do a lot of things that actually don’t cost much money, like market research, product design, prospecting conversations, and so on.

As the boss, he can set goals and deadlines. The employee – struggling with lack of direction, remember – would find that quite helpful. Get down to work and do something useful.

Yes, this is all a mind trick. But that doesn’t make it any less useful! In fact, he’s going to have a lunchtime conversation between the boss and the employee every day, to see how it’s going on multiple fronts.

The other things that’s powerful about this kind of exercise is that it helps him to keep a sense of humor about his situation. It’s weird, it’s strange, it can be fun.

Why not? We all need to keep a little humor in our lives right now.