4 minute read
In Touch Up North
in touch - up north, think about your new “normal” day
I think we have now gone from day 35 of the Covid-19 year to about day 135 of it. On the positive side it’s now less then 6 months to Christmas and they haven’t managed to cancel all of that yet.
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To everyone that has spent far too much time working from home – join the ICCM club – it seemed a little odd nearly 14 years ago when I started doing it and everyone else is now finally catching on to what it is like. The bad news for you all, it takes about 6 months to get used to and hopefully people will be able to do a little less of it by day 180.
While we haven’t managed to have any anything that really resembles an old “normal” day, it has got me thinking about what we now accept as “normal”.
Firstly, an important point for anyone that knows psychology - normal is a bad word to use. There is an interesting article in Psychology Today that explains the myths of normal and how this can have a psychological impact on us. https:// www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/busting-myths-abouthuman-nature/201403/why-normal-is-myth
So far this year, everything has been turned on its head – even without the outbreak of Covid-19 the Black Lives Matter movement has led to protests over statues, bands changing their names, TV series being dropped or edited and apparently nearly every comedian apologising for older jokes. A thing that does strike home at times is that things happen for whatever reason and they make us who or what we are today, so again what we class as “normal” is just the current state.
“History is written by the victors” – a quote attributed to Winston Churchill is very apt. As it states, it doesn’t mean that the winners record everything exactly as it was, but they can put their interpretation on things – history is how they want you to remember it.
So, in our new almost rebooting world it now seems – much like a remake of a movie – it does need a little pause for thought. Do we need to wipe the whole slate clean, delete everyone that may have made an error, say things were always terrible and apologise all the time?
At times it almost seems that this is the right thing to do. Ban what was wrong, correct things based on our new views and set ourselves on a new “normal” path.
However, what happens if we have already been doing this and maybe, just maybe we need to be slightly more careful in throwing the baby out with the bathwater??
We accept that things weren’t always right in the past based on our new morals. For example, in our industry the funerals and attitudes of people who died with HIV have changed greatly since the 1980s.
We accept that people have more rights to different styles of funerals, and we offer a choice that we didn’t before. We also accept that how we talk to people is different to the past.
We talk about customers, where in the past it may have been mourners, we treat each funeral as the most important event, and we don’t ever try to make people feel like production line process. This is where we are now, but its only through change that we have achieved this. We can say that the service offered to the bereaved, our customers, has improved because we know that things were not always the way they should be.
If everything were already at the gold standard, there wouldn’t be a need for ICCM’s Charter for the Bereaved. It does exist, and it still needs to exist, because times change and the standards and morals we offer, or should offer, can change, and get better. There is always room for improvement!
So, what has all of this got to do with you? A thought you might well be thinking – be patient I’m just getting to that.
What we need to think about is that the past is the past. However, as humans we must accept it, not always endorse it, but surely don’t forget it or pretend it didn’t happen. Perhaps most importantly we should learn from it. Things go wrong for us at times but if we make a mistake, then we need to accept it and improve for the future. Some past ideas are good, some we can change when we can, and some we consign to history to learn from as mistakes, but they happened.
We work in an industry that is surrounded by the past lives of our customers, all of us literally live with the past, but it’s what we take forward that people will see when they are at their most vulnerable.
The experiences of 2020 have not always been good, but if you're reading this then you’ve got this far.
So, a new “normal” for us all? Definitely not, because it’s never been normal in the first place and neither have any of us.
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As ever drop me a message at – trevor.robson@iccm-uk.com to make sure you and your colleagues are signed up.
