A few weeks ago, in an attempt to be useful during the pandemic, I offered free 30-minute Resilience Coaching sessions to my clients and professional network. I’m not a sophisticated online marketer so I sent bulk emails using bcc: and frankly didn’t expect many responses — unlike toilet paper, COVID-related messages are in overwhelmingly high supply right now.
And yet many organizational leaders did sign up for Resilience Coaching, so I thought I’d share here what I learned about how some leaders are responding to this crisis, in case you find it helpful.
Going into these sessions I had a few hypotheses:
- Most of us are in a threat-response state right now, so our tendency is to regress and focus on the self. Helping people think and feel beyond themselves could mitigate this regression and relieve some stress.
- Threat-response also narrows the emotional spectrum. Introducing broader feeling states (e.g. worried and hopeful) might enable people to gain some emotional equilibrium. Focusing on positive future outcomes, especially those connected to helping other people, should also help with this.
Here’s what I found:
- Focusing on the self doesn’t lead to greater self-awareness. It creates tunnel vision and makes it harder for us to be aware of our emotions. Many coaching conversations were about surfacing and writing down those emotions so they could be addressed consciously. Anxiety was a common feeling, probably because anxiety is fear without a clear object and with so much uncertainty it’s hard to figure out what exactly our fear is focused on.
- This narrowed lens of “self” makes it harder to think about other people. Our conversations were often about about expanding the tunnel vision to consider the emotions of other people, build empathy and also create more grace for others’ struggles.
- Impaired cognitive abilities from the threat state are causing leaders to hold onto assumptions that no longer serve. Having conversations with teams, clients and customers, to question our assumptions together, holds the potential for innovative thinking and also builds trust.
- When perceived threat and uncertainty are both through the roof, there’s a tendency to catastrophize, or assume the worst. It was helpful to leaders in this case to do the opposite of what I would normally suggest as a coach: move away from emotions and go to numbers. When leaders’ emotions had been hijacked by threat-response, we looked more pragmatically at likely scenarios, attributing probabilities to possible outcomes. Even though we are pretty bad at predicting probabilities, it was helpful for people to realize that their doom scenario is only about 10-20% likely.
- While it was initially challenging for leaders to consider the opportunities opened up by “The Big Reset” (as Josh Bersin calls it), this is where leaders found the most energy and grounding. As old possibilities faded, or were eliminated altogether, new ones opened up. Thinking in terms of “what do my clients/customers need right now?” opened up new lines of inquiry.
I’m grateful for the continued opportunity to help leaders during this crisis. The decisions they make today could have a lasting impact on the recovery, and all of us, for years to come. Please share your own observations and thoughts about what is most helpful to leading towards a flourishing future.