The article below builds upon Maltz, Maxwell (2015). Psycho-Cybernetics: updated and expanded. Penguin and expands upon a book summary by performance coach Dean Bokhari. Image by creativeart.
Crisis
A “crisis” is a situation which can either make you or break you.
Practice
To learn to turn a crisis into an opportunity, you first need to practice, in your mind, reacting to challenges without the pressure of a crisis situation. This is similar to practicing fire drills before a fire. You learn the actions without stress so you can take those same actions when the pressure is on.
When you practice in a relaxed way you are often more creative, have an open mind and can more easily improvise in stressful situations. Often, when you are too stressful in a crisis situation your thinking becomes narrow and you resort to a limited set of solutions. With practice you can remain calm under actual crisis situations and be more creative in the moment itself.
Be assertive
Also, learn to react to a crisis with an active- rather than a passive response. When you face a crisis, be confident and assertive. This means maintaining a goal-directed attitude, rather than a defensive, evasive, negative one: “No matter what happens, I can handle it, or I can see it through,” rather than, “I hope nothing happens.” Remember, you are by nature a goal striving machine meaning your ‘unconscious and spontaneous’ success mechanism will work better when you keep focusing on the goal (‘fighting’ to get out of the crisis) instead of moving away from the goal (flight).
Indirectly the above assertive stance implies that having a clear goal for a project that you are working on means you will likely better deal with a crisis within that project. What would you like to get out of the project from a professional and personal point of view? Having clear goals will automatically generate more of a ‘fight’ mentality for the project. Equally, when you don’t have a clear goal for a project you are more likely to take the ‘flight’ approach.
Such a negative ‘flight’ experience can also provide insights regarding your innate goals. If somehow during the project you couldn’t come up with an adequate goal and ‘success image’ for the project it probably means that you should adjust your goals or even abandon the project altogether. Even if you use willpower to proof to yourself that you can do the job, in a crisis situation you are likely to underperform or become stressed out.
Willpower will only get you so far because it is not innate to your success mechanism. Instead the success mechanism is fed by images. Remember Nietzsche who said that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”.
Evaluate
Finally, evaluate ‘crisis’ situations so you can identify the true ones from the ones that are not. Often this evaluation happens after a crisis occurs. We can take a step back and assess the level of a risk by looking at the impact and likelihood of occurrence. During a crisis you can make a crisis more manageable by contemplating the impact and develop a worst case scenario. When the worst case scenario is still manageable (you can always start again and make a comeback!) you become more relaxed and your servo-mechanism will work more naturally towards a solution.