Back in 2020, the sense that the ground had shifted and that nobody really knew what came next was a new and uncomfortable feeling.
Most of us assumed that the pandemic was a once-in-a-generation event. We’d rebuild, recover, and get back to something resembling normal. Instead, we got Ukraine. Then a cost-of-living crisis. Now conflict in the Middle East. Every day brings a new, more alarming headline.
Crisis doesn’t care when it arrives. In an environment where the next seismic shock is always just around the corner, the gap between ‘things are fine’ and ‘everything’s on fire’ has never felt smaller. The people who navigate it best aren’t the ones who saw it coming. They’re the ones who’d already done the thinking. So this week, I’m sharing what to do when different kinds of crisis hit – whether on a global scale or closer to home.
If you feel yourself freezing up… remember the 5 D’s
Whatever the crisis, whether it’s a redundancy letter, a business going sideways, a steep overnight market drop, it tends to unfold in a recognisable pattern. First comes the Drama: it’s happened, and now you’re at risk. The immediate response is almost always Denial, you put your fingers in your ears and hope it’ll blow over on its own, which leads to Delay. You put off fixing things, and a manageable problem snowballs. Eventually comes Deliberation, you realise you need to make a move, and finally arrive at a Decision. Too often though, it’s too late, and you’re left with a sixth D: Damage.
If you can take a shortcut from Drama straight to Decision, you’ll avoid a lot of the Damage. Simply knowing this pattern exists is often enough to interrupt it: catch yourself mid-Denial and ask: ‘am I actually dealing with this, or am I just hoping it goes away?’
If your judgment feels off… check your biases
When you’re panicked, your brain plays tricks on you and there are two in particular worth watching for. Confirmation bias is when you’re only looking for evidence that confirms what you’ve already decided. You’ve set your heart on a direction and you’re rejecting anything that contradicts it. That’s not logic, that’s wishful thinking with a good filter.
Continuity bias is the assumption that things will carry on as they are. When crypto collapsed a while back, people were told to ‘buy the dip’, because the market always bounces back. But that time it didn’t. Business models and markets change, a strategy that’s been working for years can stop working almost overnight.
If you think your thinking might be skewed, check in with someone you trust. Not someone who’ll just tell you what you want to hear, someone who’ll actually push back and challenge your thinking.
If your emotions are running high… step back before you act
One of the most understandable (and destructive) things you can do in a crisis is let your emotions drive your decisions. Panic is not a strategy, and neither is FOMO.
Years ago, a friend of mine told me he was doing brilliantly in stocks and shares. Like a flash, I was in the market trying to replicate his gains, because he’d pushed my buttons. Of course I couldn’t get the same results – I didn’t even know if they were real, or if he’d made up how well he was doing. For all I knew, he was up to his neck in losses and trying to front it out, but I’d decided I wanted a slice of whatever he had. Knee-jerk decisions, like jumping into something without doing your due diligence, made in the heat of a crisis almost never stack up to a win in hindsight.
If you feel completely overwhelmed… focus on your circle
A friend came to me once facing a potentially career-ending situation, with no idea what to do. The advice I gave him, which I’ve shared here more than once, was this: focus only on what you can control. Each of us has three circles of influence. The inner circle is you: your emotions, your behaviour, your decisions. That’s where your energy needs to go. The outer circle is the people close to you – you have influence, but not control. And then there’s the great beyond – the markets, the headlines, the geopolitical stuff – where you have zero bearing whatsoever.
Spend your energy in the inner circle. Don’t exhaust yourself on the rest.
If your instinct is to blame someone else… own it anyway
This is the hardest one. Say a business deal goes badly wrong. Your instinct is to blame the other party – they misled you, they changed the terms, they acted in bad faith. All of which may be true. But the uncomfortable reality is that you chose to work with them. You didn’t do enough due diligence. You ignored warning signs because you wanted the deal to work.
Once you stop pointing fingers and accept your role in a mess, you can actually start fixing it. Rather than self-flagellation, recognise that you have agency. If you put yourself in a situation, you can get yourself out of it. You can only escape a problem when you accept that you’re part of it. It’s not about fault. It’s about power.
If you haven’t planned for the worst… start now
We’ve had enough shocks in the last few years to know that ‘it won’t happen to me’ is not a strategy. Scenario planning isn’t pessimism, it’s the most practical thing you can do. Ask yourself: what’s the worst thing that could realistically happen here? Not the apocalyptic everything-burns-down version, but a genuinely plausible bad outcome. You lose a key client. A deal falls through. Your main income stream dries up.
Now work backwards. What would you need to survive that? An emergency fund? A backup plan? Skills you could fall back on? People you could call? Write it down and actually map it out. The goal is to remove the element of surprise. When you’ve already thought through the worst case, you’re far less likely to freeze when things go wrong. Fire drills aren’t fun – but they mean you know exactly what to do when the alarm goes off.
And if it’s something truly massive… go back to basics
Sometimes the crisis isn’t a difficult client or a bad quarter. Sometimes it’s a financial crash, a pandemic, a conflict that completely changes markets overnight. The kind of thing where no amount of personal planning could have fully prepared you. In those moments, every single principle above still applies, but the most important thing is this: go back to basics.
Protect your assets. Know what you can cut. Lean on your network. Focus obsessively on your inner circle. Don’t make big irreversible decisions in the first wave of panic: the 5 D’s play out at a macro level too, and the worst moves tend to happen in the Denial and Delay phase, when fear is loudest and clarity is lowest. Sit tight, stay flexible where you can, and wait for the picture to sharpen before you act.
The people who come through the big ones best aren’t necessarily the smartest or the best-resourced. They’re the ones who’ve built resilience before they needed it. And that’s the whole point of everything above.
Crises are inevitable. If the last few years have taught us anything, they’re a permanent feature of the landscape now, not a rare interruption to it. You can’t stop them. But you absolutely can control how you respond. The time to prepare is right now, while you still have the headspace to think clearly, because you won’t have that luxury when things actually go south.