The Crisis Myth: Debunking the Overreaction to Everyday Problems

The comedian Jimmy Carr tells a harrowing story of an audience guest thanking him for giving them bonus years.

They were going through a depressive episode and were waiting for everyone in the house to go to sleep so that they could hang themselves.

To pass the time they started to watch YouTube and they found a clip of Jimmy Carr that made them laugh, then they watched some more and they laughed some more.

You can watch the brief clip here

Jimmy summed it up perfectly by saying it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Crisis or Current Challenge

We often catastrophize events. The thing that is in front of us seems like the most insurmountable and most important task in the whole wide world.

But we felt the same about the thing last week and the week before and the problem we had as a teenager and the problem we had as a child. This isn’t the first time that something has appeared to be a crisis.

Maybe it’s not a crisis. It’s just a thing you have to deal with right now?

Leading with Calm

Your team will respond to a situation based on how you respond to it. If it is truly a crisis, you should act accordingly and deploy the resources as required and escalate as needed.

If it’s not a crisis but you act like it is, then all of your team is going to be on high alert all the time which is going to put added stress on a situation that doesn’t need it.

Have you heard of the boy the cried wolf?

You want to develop a system for evaluating the legitimate challenge of any situation that you and your team are going through.

The Eisenhower matrix is a great place to start in terms of figuring out if something is actually important and if it’s actually urgent and then how you deal with things accordingly.

It is pretty self-explanatory. If it is really Important and Urgent, you better get your arse to do it.

It is not Important but Urgent, find someone to do it.

A task that is Important but not Urgent then put it on a list to be done in the future.

If it is not Important and not Urgent then who cares, you have better things to be doing.

Very few things are insurmountable. Yes, your team is facing a challenge, but put it into perspective, figure out a way to assess the challenge of each task, and get to make some magic.

Most problems are temporary, so don’t act like they are permanent.