The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row

Now that I’ve done five full episodes of The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row is a series of conversations with smart, thought-provoking folks who are doing great things in ‘The Front Row’ of work, mental health, marketing, service and technology and how they came to their personal and professional path in life, I wanted to share a collection of insights from a question that I asked everyone:

“Three years after the world shut down because of COVID, what are three impacts on the communities you work with?”

From the ‘increased awareness of one’s isolation,’ to discussing our collective ‘loss of control,’ to implementing a ‘exaggerated communication’ strategy, the challenges of conducting a film shoot in Japan from Boston to dealing with a sudden increase in business success… each of these leaders had a very different take on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, ENJOY!

Dr. Jason Frishman, JourneyMen – Episode 1

What's interesting specifically about men and fathers and an impact that I haven't thought much about, but I've been thinking a lot about it recently, is that it may not be increased isolation, but there's an increased awareness of one's isolation… when you're off going to work and you're like you know what you’re leaving behind or going to. The awareness of that is stronger for a lot of the men that I'm working with.

I think that's really the big one that jumps out, there's an awareness of isolation, loneliness, separateness, disconnection that I think men who have always been impacted by this, are now feeling it in ways that are new, and they feel shitty about it.

What I'm saying is that there is an increased awareness of things being not right, but the solution is not there. Because we don't have the stories for it. We don't have teaching stories of how you start to address it. There are still men who will say, ‘Okay, I get that. I'm isolated, so I'll just fix it, you know.’ But men far too often say, ‘I'll just work harder.’

Matthew Doyle, CastleHill Counseling & Consulting – Episode 2

One of the things that has been really striking around this period of time is the loss of control. The more I've been thinking about this while talking with people, from a psychological framework standpoint, it is a major component of what we are still in recovery from, and that it shows up in a variety of ways.

It shows up in the significant social, emotional regression that we’ve seen in children and adolescents, there's a direct correlation to isolation during a very pivotal developmental point in time that was lost, that's a big deal, and we're not out of it yet in a lot of ways.

We're seeing academic losses happening with kids. Retention has been compromised. We're seeing attentional and concentration issues with social navigation in a much more consistent way than we did three years ago, and when I say consistent this is now impacting everyone.

That’s what we're seeing, kids are just feeling unsettled, and they are just coming into this recovery period after feeling like they had lost control in their lives. It's really an amazing sort of recovery effort, especially when you expand and include all of these different people and these different sorts of disciplines and arenas, right?

Patrick Ryan, Active & Connected Family Therapy – Episode 3

On the management side, the acceptance of telework and for Active and Conducted Family Therapy, it's been awesome, we've been able to connect with children and families in a different way. We do a combination of in-person and teletherapy work and with teletherapy it's much easier for the working parents to join a family session, so it's better involvement overall.

On the business side, we've been able to attract awesome talent from a number of different states, and what we're really proud of is we've been able to tap into spouses of our servicemen and women and spouses of our foreign service officers. These are people who normally put their career on hold as they follow their partner to the next deployment, but we've been able to employ people who are going to be able to stay with us as their spouse moves to different countries.

Now the challenge is, ‘how we build that connected team?’ I’ve been really encouraging something that I’ve labeled exaggerated communication. Which is making that extra effort to reach out in a personal way. For example, if I was going to send an email to a colleague to say ‘Hey, I need this really quick. Can you, do it?’ Instead, I pick up the phone and check in with that person and I can see how they're doing and if I hear a little stress in their voice, maybe I don't give them this task right now because they're crashing on something else, and I don't want to stress them more. Or it's encouraging people over instant messenger, where traditionally it’s all business, and sharing a lot of personal stuff as a way to keep in touch, whether it's pictures of kids or graduations or family vacations, just keeping in touch in that personal way.

Dan Gruenpeter, Executive Producer & Co-Owner, Bottle Tree Pictures – Episode 4

We were tasked with shooting a series of interviews with a gentleman who was high up in Toyota, at their offices, during COVID, in Japan, where rules were way stricter than the U.S. We're based in Boston. We then had to find a crew in Tokyo, which we found through my network, that is how we met the crew and within a day of having the brief, we had a crew ready to go to the Toyota offices in Tokyo and shoot.

That was really powerful in and of itself that we were able to direct from halfway around the world. I think from a business perspective and from the client’s perspective it was great because they didn't have to pay for flights, for us to go over to shoot. So, it was cost effective and we did it well.

It was great at those times and sort of great for our business at those times, but on the flip side, while it was powerful back then, is that still powerful these days?

Aaron Katz, Owner, Search Maven Marketing – Episode 5

Yes. With regard to business, things really took off, people were now home and online all the time. What would a better time to reach people than that. So, from a business perspective it was very positive.

From a professional development standpoint, I would say it was rough. Of course, networking events were all canceled. I'd say within the last 6, 8, 9, 10 months that they've started to come back. They tried to transition to Zoom Meetings and all that which were okay, but certainly nothing like in person meetings when you can really connect with other colleagues who are doing the same thing you're doing.