How Well Can You Handle A Crisis?

By Chris Hart.

When something dreadful happens, like your wife announces she wants a divorce, or you lose your job, is your mind clear, focused and alert?

Or are you quickly in a tailspin, assuming the worst and paralyses with worry?

Most people feel confused in a crisis and just wait to see what happens.

A few get extremely anxious and can’t think rationally at all. But around 15 per cent of us tackle calamities calmly, quickly pull themselves together and start making plans.

How do they do that? It isn’t that they’re luckier or tougher than the rest of us: they’ve developed a set of crisis survival skills that work for everything from minor troubles to deadly disasters. And they’re skills we can all learn.

Step one’s getting past the initial shock. Probably your thoughts go into overdrive as a crisis strikes.

Wondering how you messed up, missed the signs or whatever. Your brain can only process so much at a time, so when you face a threat, it shuts everything else down. Like while you’re worried or anxious, your decision making skills seize up.

Or if you freeze up talking to your boss, your confidence, assertiveness and arguing skills just vanish.
All that’s quite normal – what’s important is how quickly you get through it. Do something very familiar to get your brain back into gear. Like making a cup of tea, or silently reciting a simple prayer. The next step’s facing up to reality.

We so want things to be normal, we often ignore the signs that something’s going wrong. Like even when an organisation’s obviously downsizing, many people don’t start job hunting until after they’ve been fired.

Or they ignore a partner’s flirting because they don’t want to upset the relationship.

Survivors constantly scan for threats. So tune in to your environment, especially the subtle signals your friends and colleagues are sending. See reality for what it is, not what you’d like it to be, and re-jig your behaviour to cope with it.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by fears or worries. And even the most capable survivors have bad days.

What sets them apart is how quickly they climb back from despair into action. They find good reasons to be optimistic – and make plans to get back on track.

So cultivate the belief that you’ll always cope with your problems.

And then you will – because we all have huge reserves of resilience.

That’s why even though most of us experience at least one really major crisis during our lives, only one in 10 develop traumatic stress disorders.

Because not only does your strength soar when the adrenaline kicks in, you also uncover great reserves of emotional strength. Call on them – they’ll see you through the most awful situations.

But above all, practice your survival skills on everyday minor issues. Because then you’ll be fully trained for when something goes seriously wrong.

nyumbayangu@me.com. Chris Hart Writes for the Sunday Nation.