Emergency! How Not To Panic In A Crisis Of Confidence

This article was originally posted on Forbes Coaches Council .

If you’re a high-achieving leader, you are constantly improving yourself. But to truly achieve your full potential, there will come a time when improvement isn’t enough. You will need to transform.

Transformation And Crisis

Unlike improvement, which is about getting better, transformation is about doing things differently: thinking differently, seeing yourself differently and allowing things around you to be different.

For many of us, that concept is scary. How do you do something you’ve never done before? How do you think new thoughts? But it can also be exciting, as you discover how creative, resilient and excellent you can be as you evolve. Throughout your transformation, you can support your success with key strategies, like getting support, recording your successes and tackling challenges as they arrive.

But then—inevitably—crisis strikes. Suddenly you don’t know what you’re doing! Failure feels a moment away. How can you not panic when it feels like you’re about to crash?

Let’s look at examples so we can think this through. Because when you have emergency strategies, even a crisis doesn’t have to be a crisis in confidence.

Leadership Emergencies

I often hear leaders minimizing the urgency of their roles as a way of talking themselves off the ledge when the going gets rough.

• "After all," said one executive of a streaming service, "we’re not curing cancer here."

• "It’s okay," said a motivational speaker. "There are no keynote emergencies."

And yet, there are instances when a situation feels like an emergency to us.

• I remember being on a call with a client once who was panicking because a session in a program I was leading hadn’t gone well. "We need to fix this!" she shrieked. All my cells freaked out at once. Emergency!

• I also recall the CFO of a tech company interrupting her coaching call with me because her CEO had arrived in the doorway, barking, "My office! Now!" Her face turned ashen. Emergency!

• On the positive side, another of my coaching clients called me the day she was promoted, as it sank in that she would no longer be the marketing expert she had built her career around becoming. Instead, she would be leading the business as its chief marketing officer—a totally different skill set. A wave of excited terror flooded through her. Emergency!

In each of these cases, it wasn’t just change that was required to succeed in the path ahead; it was transformation.

• My team and I had to totally transform the program we were running, even though all the sessions had been planned in advance. We had to go back to the drawing board and come back ready to deliver at a new and higher level.

• The CFO had to stop seeing herself as the CFO and recast herself as the CEO’s main lieutenant—ready to support and serve the grander vision of the company in ways she had never been trained.

• The newly promoted CMO needed to set aside her years of expertise in marketing to learn how to lead tens of thousands of people at once, which felt to her like a new career altogether, and one she had to learn overnight.

Maybe you’re getting some ideas about your pivotal moments, where suddenly all you have built seems at risk and nothing you have learned seems able to save you.

This is your crisis of confidence. This is when we need emergency strategies.

Emergency Strategies For Leadership Moments

We can quickly recover from our crises if we reframe them as leadership moments. This is when you step up, square your shoulders and surprise everyone, even yourself, with what you’re capable of.

You will succeed in this much more readily if you prepare in advance. The very nature of an emergency is that you don’t see it coming, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare. Just as the experts advise us to keep a "go bag" packed in case of a home emergency, you can set yourself up to be successful so that, in a "leadership emergency," you can respond with courage and calm confidence.

Here is a list of things that will help you prepare. Think about each of these items with respect to a crisis situation you may face.

1. Know your resources.

When an accident occurs, we call 911. When you have to make a sudden pivot, who do you call? What are your go-to resources, your cheat sheets, your key learnings? The time to ask this question is not when the moment arises, but ahead of time, so you can spring into action ready to react.

2. Build your confidence.

One reason firefighters and EMTs don’t panic in an emergency is they have confidence in their ability to respond. You also need confidence, which you build over time—and it’s not the confidence you already have. This confidence is confidence to be resilient, be responsive, listen in the moment, assess a situation and forge a path forward, even in a situation you’ve never faced before.

So give yourself practice, and notice how well you actually handle these moments, so that when The Big One comes, you’ll handle it with grace and skill.

3. Rely on your relationships.

I was in an earthquake once, and the first thing I saw was people looking at each other. An arm slung over a colleague to rush them to safety. Hands gripping in a moment of shared experience.

When you’re leading the way through a crisis, it’s important to have lieutenants right there. And the time to develop those relationships is every day, by building a strong and committed network of people who would do anything for you and for your shared cause, just as you would for them.

What's Next

Think about your next big moment. How will you respond? What do you need to do now to be ready?

Read more of my leadership advice on Forbes Coaches Council.