Positivity In The Time Of Coronavirus
Can you really look on the bright side of a global pandemic with a side of economic panic? I think you can...and you should.
Now, let me be clear, I'm not advocating for pretending nothing is wrong or for ignoring the problems at hand. They are real and they are here, but how we deal with them says a lot about who we are and who we ultimately want to be.
Do we want to be the people that calmly secure everything in the boat as the sea gets rougher? The person that cowers in the corner spending all of their energy on a heightened emotional response? The person that's so ignorant about how bad this storm is getting that they're blown overboard?
I'd like to be the one that battens down the hatches and rides out the storm with the full crew intact, if a little worn down and weary from the whole experience.
And, if we ran into another boat having a rougher time than us, I'd like to think we'd offer whatever help we could safely provide. To leave the people we encounter better off, not worse off. That by cooperating (even without handshakes or high-fives), we could emerge better off than if we'd done it alone.
A Note About Realism:
Choosing positivity and being realistic are NOT mutually exclusive. You can choose to stay as positive as possible while being a pragmatist.
Revisiting my boat analogy, that means setting aside the project to build a new boat from scratch while the storm is raging. Instead, I'll focus my energy on keeping this boat in solid working condition.
That means telling a crew member to take a nap now, rather than making a possibly fatal mistake later because he or she was working tired.
That means making sure I have the right tools and materials on hand to get through the storm without weighing the boat down too low in the water. (That's the difference between preparedness and hoarding, by the way.)
It's Okay to Visualize Failure...In Fact, It's Astronaut Recommended
Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station and the author of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, has talked extensively about preparing for failure, so I'll let him take it from here.
In his book he says, “Do not visualize success, visualize failure. What’s the most probable thing that’s going to fail? We trained for thousands of things that never happened. When things really do fail though, you’ve got a whole armada of possibilities.”
Another way to think about it is this: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure...especially when it comes to the stress response that happens during a crisis response.
“The best antidote for stress, he says, “is competence.” Astronauts don't have a lot of time to respond when a big crisis happens. They prepare for the worst, so they can respond with competence, not confusion.
How do you want to show up in a crisis? Prepared and with positivity or confused and behind the eight-ball? We kindly recommend option one.