Coronavirus and the Myth of Control
Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash, not an actual infected cruise ship
“It’s apocalyptic!” exclaimed one of my clients at the start of our session this week. The stock market had crashed, Costco shelves are empty, school is closed, friends in Italy are under lockdown, and when you drive over the Bay Bridge, you see the docked Grand Princess cruise ship with quarantined passengers finally being released onto various air force bases around the US.
With all the chaos going on in the world around us, it’s human nature to slip into a state of anxiety, fear, and helplessness. These states of being are our saboteurs, which hold us back from our full leadership potential. Saboteurs are limiting beliefs and inner critics that harshly judge ourselves and others, keeping us paralyzed in the present and limiting forward progress. One of mine is the Controller. As described by Shirzad Charmaine’s research, this saboteur is an:
“Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.”
Emotionally, there is the need to take control because you fear being controlled by others or life. Through these past weeks, with coronavirus potentially becoming a pandemic, we can obsessively focus on controlling the micro-actions around us in an attempt to mitigate the uncontrollable macro-trends relentlessly blaring at us through feeds and video.
What can we do about the anxiety?
Using a mixture of leadership coaching and design processes, we can control our own mindset and energy. We control how we react to the world around us. We control what choices we make when circumstances land upon us. Within the myth of control, we can exercise this 4-step NEED process.
N—Name it
Awareness that control is a myth and recognizing that your Controller is a saboteur is the first step. Call out the fear and anxiety for an emotion that you’re experiencing, rather than who you are. Instead of saying:
I need to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies to protect my family.
Try this alternative:
My Controller is anxious. It wants me to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies as it thinks it will protect my family.
Naming the myth or fear allows a bit of space and some choice to appear. It allows a separation of identity between who we are, and our saboteurs.
E—Empathy
Design starts with research, and research starts with empathy and understanding for people. Empathy is curiosity and listening to different perspectives on a situation.
It immediately shifts the perspective from one of selfish preservation to a deeper understanding of the risks to a high-risk patient.
Empathy stops us from judging & shaming others:
“You’re overreacting, you don’t need to wipe down your desk.”
“Stop wearing a mask. You’re not high risk and you’re using up all the supplies that others may need.”
“You bought 3 gallons of milk? Really?”
“Eww… did you really need to give me a hug?”
Brene Brown’s research has shown”
“Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgement. Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.”
When interacting with others in this age of coronavirus, start with empathy and curiosity. Ask how they’re doing. Share how you’re feeling. Make a connection.
E — Explore
From a place of empathy & curiosity, we can start exploring what makes sense for our reaction to coronavirus in this moment. I’ve recently shared how to Use the Design Process to Get Unstuck and it involves using the divergence of ideation and brainstorm to unleash creativity. As part of exploration, you can try on different perspectives, perhaps the ones of the various people around you and play out what that perspective could mean for you. For example:
I’m taking my family out to our cabin in the woods for 2 weeks.
I’m stocking up a 30-day supply of food & other necessities for survival mode.
When I wash my hands, I’m going to make like I’ve been chopping jalapeños and am about to put my contact lenses in.
Why take the risk? I’m going to limit all non-essential social gatherings.
If these are different perspectives, how would they feel for you to adopt them in your life? What else opens up when you try them on? How else could you react to this pandemic?
Another technique that Shirzad Charmaine advocates is the concept of 3 Gifts. Using the design process of divergence & ideation, it pushes us to adopt 3 positive perspectives for every negative circumstance. It can feel forced to begin with, but like brainstorming, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The process stimulates the brain to be creative and visualize alternate scenarios.
For example, consider the scenario: I’m really disappointed, I was going to give a keynote at SXSW and it was critical to launching my business. 3 Gifts could be:
I will move my talk online and potentially reach a broader, more international audience for this topic.
I can keep refining & iterating this talk. By the time I give it at next year’s SXSW, it will be even more powerful.
I had set aside a week of focus to travel to Austin. Instead, I’ll take that week to write the first draft of my long-awaited book.
D— Do Small Actions
Then finally after exploration, having all those ideas makes it easy to pick one or two actions that feel meaningful and can be small experiments around control. Design thinking is about divergence and then convergence. After opening up the creativity, it’s often very easy to move into problem-solving mode and do one or two small actions. Treat them as experiments. For example:
Try using hand sanitizer (and hand cream) every couple of hours for a couple of days. Does it make you feel better?
Try limiting reading the news to once a day. How does that feel?
Try planning out a Saturday of indoor time and family bonding. Was that fun, or frustrating?
Bottom-Line
The 4-steps— Name it, Empathy, Explore, and Do — make up the acronym NEED. In the coming days, when it feels like the apocalypse is here and you’re stuck alone working from home in a cramped apartment, recognize that you do have control over your choices, and think of what you NEED.