Mindset: Learning to See the Situation Clearly
The Coronavirus outbreak has ground our world to a screeching halt in recent months.
As death counts rise and commerce halts, many small businesses have been forced, unwittingly, to reassess their business models and try to find a path forward. Many have had to close entirely.
This disruptive force has caused a great deal of pain and uncertainty and, if you’re like most of us, we’re just starting to shake off the shock of these events and assess our situations.
At Newberry Consulting, we want to help business owners of any size and any industry navigate the coming days with grace and flexibility. For that reason, we’ve launched a free strategy session open to anyone and everyone who might find it useful.
To supplement and explain our approach a little better, I wanted to create a series of blogs to explain our thinking a bit more in depth. Today we’re talking about the first focus of our strategy, Mindset.
Mindset vs. Outlook
We’ve heard a lot about keeping your head up, staying positive, and being proactive. While all of these things are helpful, we’re not so sure they’re adequate to help navigate this crisis.
The reason is, frankly, a whole lot of this crisis is the opposite of positive and, in many cases, there is no silver lining for some people affected.
It’s just plain bad. It’s just plain hard.
We believe that two things contribute to a healthy mindset during these times:
Seeing the situation clearly.
Cultivating resiliency.
Seeing the Situation Clearly
When we say this, here’s what we mean:
Calls to stay positive or be proactive fall flat in the face of the enormity of the devastation that pandemic disease causes. At a certain point, it becomes delusional to continue in these modes of thinking.
We believe a better way is to work to see the situation, with all of its hardship and difficulty, as clearly as possible.
As a business owner, this means having a clear and thorough understanding of how this crisis could affect your business, your personal life, and your financial life. No one, not even you, is helped by insisting that everything is going to be ok, because it might not be.
Having a healthy relationship with the news, balancing your information sources, and generally cultivating an awareness of what’s happening in real time around you are all ways to stay mindful and aware during this time.
Do you live in a COVID hot spot? Is your family safe? How about your staff? How are you doing on food and other supplies? How are your clients and customers doing? Has your revenue been hit? Have you had to close your business?
The flip side of this is that you can’t become obsessed with the news. An hour per day of information consumption via the news and other outlets should be sufficient. Draw boundaries around your time with the news.
That way you’ll be able to see things clearly, but maintain your ability to maneuver and react.
Cultivating Resiliency
Resiliency is about being able to take a punch and get back up for the next punch.
Notice I didn’t say “block the next punch.” We’ll get to that in the next two posts.
For now, we need to quickly and effectively increase our tolerance for pain and try our hardest to identify the real threats we face and put aside the perceived threats.
Let’s start with a thought experiment.
Envision the worst case scenario for you, your business, and your loved ones. What happened? How did you deal with it?
Next, break down these scenarios into the steps required to arrive at these conclusions? What happened that led to these outcomes? Could any of them have been avoided?
Finally, you need to understand how likely these events, or steps, are to happen. It’s impossible to be 100% accurate with this, but making an assessment of the likelihood of an event taking place will help you understand which threats are most probable and which are least probable.
You’ve only got so much time, so much money, and so much capacity for work. You need to focus your energies on the threats that are most likely to take place and work down the list from there.
Practice this exercise daily. I recommend earlier in the day, after you’ve allowed yourself some time to wake up, get coffee or tea, and be prepared to face the realities of the day.
Mindset During a Crisis
Mindset during a crisis isn’t about cultivating a sense of peace as we normally understand it. It’s about cultivating a deep sense of focus and purpose and we do that by coming to terms, or making peace, with the reality of our situation.
Your business, your team, your family, and your friends all need you to be a leader right now. And as someone who started a business, you’re the perfect candidate for leadership.
Don’t sugar coat your situation. See it clearly. Understand which threats you and your business are facing and create mental models for dealing with them.
You owe it to yourself and the people who depend on you to have a clear understanding of what’s at stake.
You also owe it to yourself and the people who depend on you to have a plan.
We’ll get to that next time as we talk about Assessing Your Sphere of Influence.
Until then, stay strong and stay healthy.