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What Beachy Head Taught Us
I attended a fascinating workshop delivered by an individual who had been working in a crisis service built up from scratch over many, many years. He and his group of volunteers based themselves at the notorious UK suicide spot, Beachy Head. They provide a service for people at risk of suicide, where they seek to talk them down and enable them to step away, literally, from the brink. Day in and day out, they were faced with crises. To equip his team and himself and to serve those people in their crisis, he looked at the skills that hostage negotiators develop. What he realised is that even the most experienced hostage negotiators probably only dealt with two or three hostage situations a year, whereas his team was dealing with a crisis almost every single day. A life and death crisis, literally on the edge of a cliff top, with somebody they’d never met before.
Emotion in Crisis
Much of what he learned was how you, as an individual, can best engage with a crisis situation. How do you support people who are in a crisis? The most important thing he realised was that you must manage your emotional state. You need to learn how to deal with the fact that everything in your system seeks to persuade you to respond with fight or flight. Indeed, the person in crisis, in some ways, mirrors your experience of crisis, and yet, to be able to support the people around you, you must manage your emotional state so that you can make the best possible response. In that context, it’s important to understand how you tend to respond to crises.
Character Preference
AQai, the tool for assessing adaptability, measures how individuals express their emotions as a subdimension of Character on a spectrum from ‘Collected’ to ‘Reactive’. Collected people tend not to share and express their emotional state, whereas Reactive people will. Both categories of people are experiencing a new emotional state. As a leader, it’s important to respond appropriately to how other people around you express their emotional state.
Personally, I tend to respond to crises by becoming more and more still, calm, and measured. If you are Reactive, this can just wind you up. You want me to respond with that sense of urgency that you’re feeling. Alternatively, you may find it reassuring that I stand firm while everybody else is running around, stressing or distressing. Until you have stilled your emotional state, you will struggle to make the right decisions to move forward in a crisis. When the immediate urgency is over, you still need to continue to manage your emotional state.
Crisis is not just a Moment
For many of us, a crisis is not just a moment in time; it’s something that reverberates for hours, days, and sometimes weeks, particularly in a business context. I remember a situation in which we were dealing with an extremely difficult relationship, and every single time we interacted with the other person, a sense of crisis was built. My emotional state became heightened, and I felt increasingly distressed and disturbed. It wasn’t just a one-off confrontation; it was the fact that this ongoing issue kept re-occurring and triggered an unhelpful reaction in me. I realised that unhelpful reaction was starting to incapacitate my ability to handle and deal with the crisis.
For people around us, when there is a crisis, we need to recognise that perhaps it’s not just a point in time; it’s not just fleeing a burning building; it can be something that continues to reverberate and continues to press in on us over an extended period. Yet, that sense of urgency, priority, sense of importance, and the sense of actual or potential disaster that is associated with crisis continues to dog us as we try to work things through.
Alternative Responses
We must recognise that our emotional journey will ebb and flow for us and the people around us and that we may not all respond in sync to the different things happening. Some of us need to withdraw and recover; for others, we feel that the best way to deal with our emotions is to get busy and do stuff, even if it’s not directly relevant to the challenge in front of us. Those kinds of displacement activities can be quite soothing and helpful.
As you think about handling crises, spend the time to reflect on some of the smaller crises you’ve experienced and how you have handled them emotionally. Perhaps consider some of the unhelpful ways that people around you have responded emotionally in crisis, and how you can prepare yourself to understand better your own emotional response to a crisis and how you can support others as a crisis hits, emerges, evolves and extends.
Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.