March 16, 2020
My dear family members,
At this moment, some of us have already recognized the coronavirus’s advance on the United States as a personal crisis. Given what we know, what we are being told by the finest medical scientist we have, it is altogether rational to recognize this moment as a crisis. As Dr. Fauci said repeatedly in March, 2020, on several Sunday shows, nothing would please him more than to be accused of having exaggerated the threat when this ends, if somehow the stars align, and this all abates without truly disastrous consequences. As it has turned out, he never exaggerated.
A real crisis is scary. It is frustrating and threatening. It gives you a sense of dizziness.
There is a difference between a personal crisis and an institutional one – meaning your place of work, or a different kind of larger entity or association, or even your Country. Each may exist in the same moment. However, when it is personal, you are the one who must figure out how to confront it.
When a crisis lands on your head many of the rules and principles that guide how to confront an institutional crisis get turned upside down. Academic modeling gets replaced by a gut check.
Like many, I have lived through a few crises. During one, for six months, my sleep ended every night between 2:22 to 2:26 AM. Sleep from that point was over. For a time, the precision of the wake-up scared the hell out of me. In time, I gave it permission to own me because there wasn’t anything I could do about it except get up, go downstairs and read a book until the new day arrived and it was time again to find a solution for the crisis.
From my personal crisis situations, I came to believe I had learned a few things about how to survive and even overcome a crisis.
My keys: intense focus, discipline, short term perspective, and a belief in positive unknowns.
The start position: confront the fear. Ask yourself, what am I most afraid of? Nobody is looking over your shoulder so you can look the devil in the eye. You can tap into your truth. Write down your answer. And if you are afraid of multiple things, write those down as well. Writing it down will diffuse fear.
Then, turn what you fear into a stated goal. What can you accomplish that might lessen your fear? You cannot act on fear. But you can act on a goal, or a set of goals. Goals equal target accomplishments. Absent a goal, you have nothing on which to focus your energy. Write it down.
Get creative. Think out of the box. Focus on actions, not outcomes. You don’t control outcomes. Imagine any actions that will accomplish almost anything that supports the goal.
Then throw out the actions over which you have no control and focus on those you control.
Unfreeze your energy. Now you are set. You know what to do – today, 24 hours from now; and the rest of the week.
Discipline yourself. Make yourself do things you don’t want to do – to make the call, have the conversation, separate needs from wants, pull the plug and make the choice, push forward when you want to grieve, try an approach when you want to give up. Don’t worry about getting over the bar. Jump, as best you can, with as much confidence as you can.
Trust in belief. Repeating this process will, in time, reduce or eliminate the threat, or reconstitute it into a new context with which you can deal. A so-called new normal. Taking action will reduce negative feelings of fear, frustration, threat.
You must put on blinders and discipline yourself to push the noise away and keep your energy focused on your actionable agenda. This will not be easy. Stay inside your circle of influence.
Some of your actions will produce positive things. Some will not. But positive unintended consequences may emerge each week. Yes, you got lucky. But, if you had not been there, luck would not have found you.
Personal crisis management, in my opinion, must be patient. You cannot make the threat go away – not in one stroke. You need to chip away at it. You need to take encouragement from small advances. You need to accumulate small victories. Stay intensely focused on what you control. Accept what you cannot. During the Kobe Bryant memorial, I heard a speaker use a metaphor to console the family which was new to me, and I thought it was beautiful: walk from the darkness, and keep walking, and walking; and in time you will walk into the light.
Every week you start over. Work the process. Same first question. The threats and fears are going to change. This may be especially true with something as dynamic as a pandemic. Every week you need a new attack plan. But every week you will be smarter. This is the power of iteration. You will come to know things that you could not have known had you not planned your way through the previous week. Put simply, there are things you cannot see until you have fully worked your way around the circle. The process creates new data.
In time, you will better understand the threat. In 1965 I was in a war zone and the invading army was dropping artillery shells four or five miles from where I slept, which I could see from my dwelling. It felt like the threat was next door. It scared the hell out of me. Two weeks into it, with no change in the shelling, my fear greatly diminished because I came to recognize that I was not in any immediate danger. A month later, I was used to it. Our initial reaction to danger can be very proximate. Then, as we understand it, the threat becomes more approximate. In time, we might even absorb the threat into a new normal.
If you are also asked to help solve an institutional crisis, knowing how to direct yourself, and not depend on the institution to resolve all of your fears, will make you a much stronger team member, and probably a leader.
During WW II, your grandparents and great grandparents functioned effectively on the home front. Pearl Harbor shocked the Country. The war effort built up and became enormous. People worked together. 16 million served in uniform, 11% of the population. Everyone knew someone in uniform, and most of them knew someone who had a loved one injured or killed. Many lost loved ones. There were over one million casualties, and over 400,000 killed in battle. This was also a new normal. What froze them in December 1941, put them in action in February 1942. Proactivity breeds confidence and eradicates fear. They were the greatest generation because they had no choice. Now we have no choice. So, let’s be great!!
