4 Steps For Confidence During A Crisis

When my wife Candice was three years old, she woke up in the middle of one night and felt like she couldn't breathe. And she started taking these bigger breaths and no matter how much air she tried to take in, she just didn't feel like she got enough. So she got really scared and she woke up her mom, it was a single mom at the time with her and her sister. And her mom, you know, started listening to her, find out what was going on. She could feel like she couldn't breathe, but then she was still getting air, it seemed like, so her mom sat with her and helped her. And then a couple hours later, it was the middle of the night, so the couple hours later, morning time, they went to the hospital and as soon as they got there, the doctor looked at Candice's mom and said, how did you not bring her immediately? What's wrong with you? And so Candice's mom, she's like a 21 or 24 year old woman, very young. She's afraid, she's anxious, she feels shame. I'm a bad mom. And she says, okay, she's in your hands, take care of her. And they put Candace into a bubble, like a plastic bubble that has extra oxygen pumping in it. She stays in that bubble for three days and nights as a three year old kid, a lot of the time totally alone. That is a crisis, that's a personal crisis. You might be experiencing a personal crisis right now. You might be experiencing a global crisis in terms of what's happening with the coronavirus and it's affecting you. So whether it's a personal crisis, a community crisis, a crisis in your business, a crisis in your relationship, something feels like it's falling apart with one of your kids, with your spouse, with a friend, with a parent. Crises happen in life. Here are four steps to staying confident, even in a crisis. During a crisis, we gotta maintain our confidence. How do we do that? So the first step that we gotta take when there's a crisis occurring is we need to contain the freakout, right? It's the same thing when it comes to the virus, right? They're talking about containing the virus through social distancing, slowing the rate of spread, right? So you gotta contain your own personal freakout. Because what happens as soon as there's a crisis, it pushes onto something button inside of us that's like my life's going to fall apart or I'm going to die, right? There's some version of that that happens inside of our nervous system and so that spikes our anxiety and if we don't contain that, if we don't contain the spread of that, it goes up into our mind and our mind starts saying, what if this happens? What if that happens? Oh my gosh, someone's going to die. I'm going to die. This is going to happen. This is going to fall apart. My business is going to fall apart. I'm going to run out of money, you know, and all those things, you follow those fears far enough down the thread, they all lead to, like, death and ruin and loss and pain in our minds. So our mind's spitting out all this stuff, then our body's getting more anxious, which then makes our mind go faster and faster. And it's uncontained, it's rampant spread of anxiety. And then we're fully contaminated by that overwhelm and anxiety. So we gotta contain that. How do we do that? I teach a ton of strategies in other videos on how to do that. I'll give you just one basic one right now is through your breath, in and out. If you have not studied Wim Hof and his breathing techniques, I highly recommend those. There's mindfulness breathing techniques as well. There's something called box breathing. You can look up. Breath is one of the fastest ways to interrupt that pattern. I love Wim Hof's method where you do 30 breaths fully in and out, Because unlike meditation and other things, it just disrupts your focus. It's like hard to. It really resets your nervous system in a powerful way. So I'd highly recommend that one. You got to contain the freak out. Another thing is to remind yourself, I can handle whatever happens. I can handle whatever happens. No matter what. You know, Alley, my worried brain goes down. What if this and what if that? What if that? Yeah, if that happens, I'll handle it. So that's number one. You got to contain the freak out. The next thing you got to do is you got to decide on the next right thing to do the next right thing. Now, that technical phrase comes from Frozen 2, which I've seen like a million times with my little kids. But anyway, it's like, what do you do? It's like you just do the next right thing because some part of you is like, what about that? What about that? What about the future? It's like, well, is there something to do right now? What is it? Another technique, by the way, notice my language just slowed down right there. It's another technique. If you're going a mile a minute in your mind, you can actually start to narrate Stuff a little bit slower. Like, what if this happens? What if that, what if that does happen? What would I do? You see how I, like started to slowly talk and you actually start to slow, consciously slow the thoughts in your mind by repeating them slowly or saying it out loud. And notice I started to slow us both down right now and say, okay, what is the next right thing to do? Just ask yourself that question. That's a powerful question. That's a million dollar question. What's the next right thing to do right now? And you'll see. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's, sit here, breathe. Maybe it's to take an action. Maybe it's to make a phone call. Maybe it's to make a shift. You know, there's things happening in your business or your industry or your life or your career with your kids or something. You're deciding what to do, how to navigate the climate as things are changing day by day. What's the next right thing? That's the second step. Then you gotta act. Step number three is act. You can't just say, what's the next right thing? Okay, I won't do it, right? No, you gotta go do it. You gotta decide and do it. Take action. Bold action. Maybe it's changing something, maybe it's canceling something. Maybe it's calling someone, maybe it's saying no to something. Maybe it's saying yes for something. Maybe it's making a pivot in your business or in your career, whatever it is, you find that thing and you do it. That's number three is the action. And then number four is you gotta get feedback and course correct. So number four is course correct. So if you take that action and then it's like not going very well, then maybe you shift that or maybe you tweak it some, right? So one example is we had our live event called Supremely Confident Conversation Master, which is an in person event that happens in April 17th through 19th. And you know, as the climate was shifting, people gathering in person, people getting on airplanes. That's not going to happen. Right. So what do we do? Step one, freak out. Oh, God, the world's falling. Business is over. We're doomed. Right? It's like, okay, all right, contain it. I can handle whatever happens. Another way to contain anxiety is to focus on other people. What's needed right now? What can I contribute right now? Who can I serve right now? What do other people need right now? Number two is what's the next right thing? The next right thing we need to do is Determine are we going to cancel this event or not? That was a little while back. Obviously at this point we decided we're not going to cancel it. We're going to adapt the format to make it online and make it powerful. So the next right thing is to change the format to an online format. For supremely confident conversation master number three, what do we do? We take action on that. We don't decide that and sit on it. We take action. We alert all the participants, we let them know, we put videos out, tell people, here's what we're doing, we're changing the format. And then number four is you got to course correct. How does that go? How does that work? What's needed? And for me it became, how do we make this event even more powerful than an in person event? Now that's a tall order because when we get together in person, it is powerful. The energy is strong and high. And like, how do we do this? How is this a gift? How does this strengthen us, Me, the community, our confidence, all of us? How can we grow from this? So no matter what the crisis is, whether it's a personal crisis, health crisis, financial crisis, pandemic crisis, follow these four steps to maintain your confidence. Because here, at the end of the day, you can freak out. You can freak out and let that freak out overwhelm you. And you could be justified. You could say, hey, I have a reason to freak out. Okay, look, everyone else is. First of all, I don't know if everyone else is. That's a generalization. Maybe someone's not, but also, so what? It doesn't serve you to flood your nervous system with stress hormones. Are you going to make better decisions from a freaked out place? Is your health going to be? Is your immune system going to be better? Are you going to make the right moves in your relationships when you're freaked out? Probably not. So follow these steps. Maintain your confidence. That's about total ownership for how I respond to things I'll talk about in a future video. How your circumstances are not created, your confidence is not created by your circumstances. You decide your confidence. So let's do this. Let's find confidence amidst chaos during crisis and get stronger for it until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are you to know on a deep level that you're awesome.