Like many business leaders, Paméla Bérubé, CRHA, found herself caught off guard when the pandemic hit. Her business came to a halt during the first wave of Covid-19, only to start up again with dazzling growth and a multitude of constraints to manage. “We are in an era of performance,” she rightly points out. “As an entrepreneur, I don’t walk, I run! I have the typical ‘Go Big or Go Home’ profile.”

Over the past few years, even her quest for balance as an entrepreneur, mother and woman has been marked by the search for the optimal result at all costs. "With performance, there is always a gain or a loss. Either we achieve our goal, or we are sorry that it is not the case or that it took longer than expected. Performance therefore brings great joys where we are pumped up, but also failures where we put a knee on the ground."

The forced confinement therefore caused the young entrepreneur to question this model. "I asked myself the question: why not reorient my priorities towards relevance rather than performance?" Like many entrepreneurs, the return to deep values was an obligatory but revealing passage.

Accepting your vulnerability

Relevance is the meaning we give to our actions and which resonates accurately in the personal vision we have of our path to take, says Paméla Bérubé. How can I be relevant in my professional life? family life? personal life? What are my values? What can I act on here, now? "These reflections made me want to suggest to my clients to reevaluate their performance indicators around relevance, and therefore the meaning they give to their actions, to their corporate values. At what point do they feel on their X?" Ambition, the lure of gain or the thirst for success are among the factors that can divert our attention from relevance.

Returning to the source of our human values also means touching on a part of vulnerability, emphasizes the entrepreneur. “With the pandemic, we were all facing the unknown. My approach was to accept that I was learning and that I had to focus on the elements over which I had real control. I did what I could, I gave the best of myself, based on my knowledge and my intuition. I felt relevant in my caring approach towards my clients and my team, because we had to manage both our own reorganization and those of our clients! We took care of each file, taking the time to listen and let things emerge… Once we accept this state of affairs, our standards are much lower and we put our energies in the right places.”

5 key ways to add meaning to your actions and decisions

According to Paméla Bérubé, if we succeed in putting relevance before performance, we will have a healthier posture to begin the “post-Covid-19” era. A coherent reflection process must be carried out periodically, in order to be able to make the necessary changes to maintain this relevance and adequately respond to daily challenges, she advises.

Here are five ideas she suggests to get the discussion started:

1. Do you know yourself well as an individual, in your entirety?

In your values, your strengths and your weaknesses? Do the exercise of detailing everything, while having a benevolent look at your vulnerabilities.

2. Do you have a realistic and concrete plan that includes all areas of your life?

This plan should make your daily life easier, but also clarify your vision for the future, taking care to color everything with positive and constructive thoughts.

3. Are you able to translate your plan into concrete objectives and actions?

Allowing you to prioritize and contribute significantly to your quest for meaning and relevance? For example, do you want to be more present for your team at work or even more present at home? What concrete change will you make to your schedule?

4. Are you aligned with these three dimensions facilitating relevance?

● Your cognitive dimension : your satisfaction with your mission, the impact of your actions and the development of your potential. For example, does your job provide you with enough challenges, leading you towards a better version of yourself, in constant development?

● Your emotional dimension : your relationship to your positivism and your happiness index. For example, are you able to derive pleasure from your spheres of life (personal, family, work)?

● Your spiritual dimension: your feeling of contributing to something bigger, a promising project. For example, do you have the impression that your job, your company brings added value to a cause, to humanity?

5. Finally, if the quest for meaning and relevance sometimes becomes an object of performance, stop and take stock. At this point, it is very likely that you have lost sight of the essential, your deep foundations. Relevance sets in with the conscious pleasure of adhering to healthy habits.