BY ROWENA CROSBIE, president, Tero International

Are you using COVID as an excuse? Time’s up to be using COVID as an excuse not to do something. As we move into being vaccinated, it is getting a bit troublesome to hear it staying with us in the form of excuses. It could become a pattern.

Where is the line when it comes to our ability to use COVID as an excuse? Research from Money Pay says 24% of people will wait one to five minutes for being helped via phone, allowing for delays they feel are just due to COVID. Sixty-one percent of people feel phone delays are acceptable due to COVID. COVID has been presented as an excuse for myriad situations. Is this authentic or a pattern we are developing?

In our conversations, we get comfortable with patterns. When someone tells us something, we often use the pattern of the qualifier. We say “awesome” or “interesting,” which puts us in the role of evaluating the conversation rather than exploring it. It becomes a pattern.

When someone discloses something to us, we say we understand. Really? Or do we just say that to make them feel good when in reality we don’t have enough information to truly understand? We simply are not skilled enough to respond with a way to explore what they said. “I understand” becomes a pattern.

The phenomenon with COVID is that we have used it as an authentic excuse when it was authentic, and that in and of itself can lead to a pattern.

When we were experiencing the pandemic, we didn’t have to worry if someone would drop in or ask for something within a time frame. It was easy, and most times honest, to say we couldn’t do that due to COVID. Even kids started to argue that school should just be different and maybe not require their presence due to COVID.

What is interesting now is that while we are working our way out of the pandemic, the excuses are still lingering. They are seemingly becoming a pattern. Just in the last week we heard that a bill wasn’t processed due to COVID, and service wasn’t provided due to COVID. Yet COVID is not, as people get vaccinated, the same threat it was. Have you heard some things that cannot happen due to COVID?

As we move forward from the pandemic, we must do it realistically. Yes, things are different, but a year of being used to managing our lives and working under the umbrella of a pandemic is over. We can do and we need to do what is in front of us. Challenging ourselves when we say we can’t due to COVID will aid us in not creating a new pattern. One that isn’t true and also isn’t necessary.

Rowena Crosbie View Bio