Coping With Crisis: Stay Resilient By Managing Your Emotions

Ascend resilience executive leaders

The fast global spread of this health crisis has left leaders like yourself feeling concerned and stressed about how it will affect their organisation and team now, and in the future.

We introduced our Resilience Model to you in our previous blog, Building Resilience In A Crisis With The Right Mindset.

In this blog, we want to delve deeper into our Model and discuss how recognising and managing your emotions will help you to stay resilient and guide your newly remote team through this adversity successfully.

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But first, here is a note from our CEO, Bill Lawry, on how he is managing his emotions so far

As a family, we have just completed our first couple of weeks in lockdown. To be perfectly honest, with the sun shining and the luxury of a garden, it has been a pretty good week. It is wonderful to spend precious time with my wife and family. The kids have had online lessons, and, therefore have been occupied. Archie, the dog, has been walked to within an inch of his life.

I know that everyone has not been so lucky and my thoughts and thanks go out the those on the front line doing such important and amazing jobs. Of course, I am well aware that some of the joy and harmony I am feeling now will wear off pretty quickly as the sun disappears, we all get cabin fever, and the reality of the new business climate begins to sink in.

This is where being able to control, harness and be aware of one’s emotions is going to be vital if I am going to emerge from this adversity with a sustainably, successful business, team, and a (relatively) harmonious family.

With that in mind, here are three key ways to manage your emotions to stay resilient.

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1. Create Space to Manage Your Emotions

Being aware of our own emotions and being able to see how those emotions affect our behaviour (before it’s too late), then modifying our behaviour as a result, will be crucial when we or those around us get stressed. We call this ‘living in the gap’.

As legendary Holocaust survivor and neurologist, Viktor Frankl said,

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response".

It is really important to be in touch with how we are feeling and how these feelings might make us behave. We have the power to create a gap, that gives us time to choose the right behaviour and response.

One example that we’ve all experienced, is what we do when someone sends us an email or text that really annoys us. Many of us have learnt that, instead of sending an immediate reply that only escalates the situation, we can write a response, but not send it; sleep on it, then revisit the situation in the morning with a cooler head and send a more measured constructive response (or pick up the phone) that resolves the issue.

This is a perfect example of living in the gap.

Practising regular mindfulness and breathing techniques are also useful, as they both improve your awareness of how you are feeling, and what is triggering you to behave in a destructive or unhelpful way.

In a crisis, your team crave calm, considered, consistent executive leadership, not bursts of anger and inappropriate emotion.

2. Embrace Being An Empathetic Leader

Empathy is being aware of your team’s feelings, which is very important right now. People are processing the current situation in different ways and at different speeds. Just because you might be optimistic about the outlook, doesn’t mean your team members are, or indeed, just because you might be pessimistic, doesn’t mean they will be.

Feelings are contagious, so it is important to be aware of how your demeanour might be making your boss, clients or team feel. This is especially important across the technological channels we are currently using.

Being aware of how those around you are feeling and helping them to feel more optimistic about the future (or at least giving them a sense of certainty and safety) is a real leadership attribute.

3. Lean On Your Support Network

An essential element of successfully managing a crisis is having a strong social network you can lean on to help you with emotional distress, stress and anxiety.

Now that we are in lockdown, there are various physical limitations to this, but fortunately, there are a number of channels (e.g. Skype, Zoom, Facetime, Snapchat, TikTok etc.) to help us humans all stay connected (we are super-social animals).

It is important to maintain and utilise your close, social networks to help you share the personal and business emotional load. As far as others are concerned, it is good to make people feel, not just connected, but included.

The science tells us that in order for people to stay motivated and engaged, they need to feel like insiders - not outsiders.

Executive leaders should be doing all they can, at home and in their organisations, to make people feel like they are integral members of the team.

We have recently seen some wonderful examples of creativity around this. One leader we work with is running a weekly exercise class for her team. Another has set up a weekly virtual tea and cake party. Ascend had a Zoom (video conference) and wine night recently hosted by our CEO with five other members of our coaching faculty!

In summary, as the realities of the situation we find ourselves in over the next few weeks start to bite, and stresses and strains become apparent at work and at home, it will be more important than ever to:

  • be aware of our emotions and how they might affect our behaviour

  • create space to manage our emotions and response to things

  • have our empathy radar out to tune into the feelings of others and modify our behaviour accordingly

  • to keep our social networks alive, making people (including ourselves) feel like insiders - not outsiders

We know this is a difficult time and are here to help. Please contact us.

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Christina Grieve