ESOMAR member, Priscilla McKinney, the Founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing was kind enough to have me on her podcast last week to talk about my candidacy for ESOMAR President.

Well, here we are; Q4 2020. When staff first started to work from home in Q1 (depending on where you are in the world), it’s unlikely many of us imagined we’d still be managing an almost entirely remote staff today.

Late last week Christina Blacken (Founder of The NewQuo.com) kindly shared with me a paper she’d authored titled “Change the Status Quo Through Your Narrative Intelligence”. What’s “narrative intelligence”? Blacken writes “it is the ability to leverage the psychological power of story to change behavior and inspire action.”

If you’ve spent any time in the marketing research or marketing performance sector (where I still spend a good chunk of my consulting hours), storytelling is paramount to delivering truly meaningful insights. Yet management teams seem to largely rely on traditional leadership practices, or as Blacken notes in her paper, those driven by “fear driven narratives around money, success, identity and leadership.”

If you’ve made it this far into 2020 and you’re still standing, chances are you have at least a dozen different examples of pivots you’ve made to both your personal and professional plans. Twenty-twenty has, if nothing else, kept us on our toes. One of the most common questions we’re asked is what differentiates companies that turn this 2020 plot twist into profit versus those who don’t. The answer isn’t something these companies do but instead, something these companies have. It’s something every leader should focus on: mental agility.

Remember when summers included planned vacations with travel, good food, and fun times with friends and family? Now, if I leave my state I need to be prepared to return to an extended period of lockdown and isolation.

The logistics of planning a vacation that is Covid-friendly and that you feel aligns with your level of willing exposure is challenging and enough to make many people stay home. Taking time off is critically important for performance and mental health, maybe even more so now than in our pre-pandemic reality. If your original plans have been scrapped, here are four tips for a revised vacation strategy: