What To Do When You Can’t See A Way Forward

It's been noticeable to me that in this crisis there is a bit of a mismatch between what people need to do and what they are able to do. Specifically, the people in business who most need to take a step back, think, and plot a way forward are the people least likely to do so. Not because they do not see the need or are stupid, but because they are frozen in place with the scale of what is happening to us all.

All of my social media is filled with well meaning (if occasionally preachy) posts and tweets from people either bragging about their own equanimity or advising people to use this enforced down-time to plan, restructure, re-skill and generally level-up their lives and their businesses. And I agree with the message. But there is a fundamental problem; the people who need to do that are too busy freaking out because of the mountainous piles of stress and problems that they are facing to hear the message.

Winston Churchill reportedly said “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” which a neat aphorism but assumes that you are heading in the right direction in the first place. It also ignores the basic human truism that in the face of an overwhelming problem most people are, well, overwhelmed by it. 

To give you an example of both, two friends of mine have had very successful businesses in Spain working in the leisure and hospitality industry. They had grown into a very strong position working with clients of all nationalities in the Costa del Sol, Ibiza and Mallorca, and the Costa Blanca. One also had strong business in Barcelona, and the other in Madrid. They spent the winter doing the same as usual; investing in getting everything set up and finely tuned for the tourist onslaught that always starts in mid March and goes through to the end of October. Well, obviously, not this year.

And what is the difference in response between two otherwise very similar business owners? It could not be more stark. One has freaked out and frozen. The other has, in the space of four weeks, started three businesses which are aimed at a massive audience and sell purely online. Both could have done that, but only one has. The first has hunkered down and even taken down their business websites to save money and is praying that the delayed summer season starts at some point. The second has pivoted, and taken their skills and knowledge to do something dramatically different which, to be honest, they will probably enjoy more than their other business anyway. 

Please note that my friend who has launched the new businesses is not assuming that his original business is dead. Instead they have deliberately built new businesses that can be automated so that they can run easily and effectively even when the world comes out of lock-down and people start craving the Spanish sun again. In other words, they are creating their own growth rather shrinking back in fear.

And guess which has been happier for the past couple of weeks? No prizes for answering that one.

Why do different people react so differently?

So what's the difference in their reactions? The answer to why the majority of well-meaning advice offered by experts and pundits during this crisis will be ignored, no matter how useful or or on the mark it might be, lies not with the advice, or with the people being advised. It lies in the timing and syntax. Let me explain.

It is a truism that people only hear what they want to hear. It has several names; confirmation bias, the echo chamber, prejudice, being blinkered, liking what we like. Social media only makes that behaviour worse as people select who to follow or watch. So good advice about when and how to level up a business, taking time to learn new skills, starting a new business that might have been constantly on hold and so on will only be heard by those people who want to hear it. The ones who go looking for those topics and headlines. 

Which is great if you are the one offering the advice, as those people who are interested in those topics in any case are now extremely motivated to read or watch, click through and take some action.

But the people who might most need the help are the least likely and able to get it, because they will ignore the posts in their timelines and feeds and they will certainly not go looking for any advice or guidance.

The key to change is to get people ready, willing and motivated to change. Then the actual change is easy. The same is true with getting people to lift their heads from the currents that are overwhelming them - current news, current problems, current fears - and look to the future. The ironic thing is the very same thought process that causes the fright and freeze is also the way to create action.

I would love to be all happy-clappy and tell you that the majority of people take action because they are excited by a goal and are keen to move toward it. Truth is, though, that people just do not work that way. People move toward a goal, certainly, and having that in mind is crucial. If you don't know where you are going, pretty much any road will take you there. But what gets people moving, taking action today instead of tomorrow or simply sitting in place frozen, is not what they are moving toward, but what they are moving away from. 

Contrary to the cliche, most people who are threatened do not fall into fight or flight. Only around 5% of people will go into fight mode, and they are not the ones to whom this article is written. In this context, those are the people who will have already taken the crisis on the chin and are already looking at how to come out of it stronger. Good for them. But the majority of people fall prone to the alternative - flight or freeze. 

The vast majority of people freeze in a crisis - and we are absolutely in a crisis no matter what Donald Trump might say - because they are afraid of what might happen in a given timescale, and that timescale is usually quite short. In fact, having watched a little of The Orange Terrorist recently, I think he has frozen completely and fallen straight back onto his own comfort zones of ad-hominem attacks and bragging about his ratings for the daily briefings, tweeting “President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise…” 

That is not the behaviour of someone fully in the driving seat of their own emotions. 

So when people are freezing, they are not open to advice about moving forward, because they literally cannot see past the current situation. They cannot think about the future because they cannot see past the present. 

What do you do instead of freezing?

Now, of course, not every business will terminate at the end of this situation. Some will be just fine and will be able to restart after a bit of hassle. And lots of people are in that situation, but simply cannot see it yet because they are looking too short term. If you look forward far enough and this applies to you, terrific and congratulations. 

But for the rest of us, there are people in a crisis who are not part of the lucky 5%, and whose businesses face calamity, who still manage to take action and start looking for and taking advice because they are afraid of what will happen in the longer term if they don’t. So how do we square that circle in reality?

To go back to my two friends that I mentioned earlier; one is stuck in place because they can’t get past the trouble they will be in if the tourists don’t return until late in the summer. 

The other has (after a period of behaving like a rabbit in the headlights) started a massive course of action building three businesses because they thought about what might happen if the tourists don’t return to Spain until next year, or even later. And they were also driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO) on the opportunity granted to them by months of enforced free time; an opportunity that is very unlikely to ever come around again. What if they looked back in a few years' time and thought “damn, I should have done more with that time in isolation?”

One is frozen by fear. The other is driven by it. The only difference is the timescale that they are looking at. Find the right point in the future where the fear of what will happen if they do not take action is dreadful enough, and people will get driven to take action.

Once people ask, or are asked, “Where will you be in (fill in the blank) if you don’t change and you stay on the trajectory that you are on now? And how do you feel about that?”, they find a reason to make changes if they find the right timescale. My first friend is just thinking about what happens if the tourist season is delayed. The other asked what will happen if the tourist season does not come back for a year or even two. The first is frozen because there are too many "What ifs” to make a decision. The other simply had to do something now because they might be out of business completely.

Obviously you can go too far with this. As Chuck Palahniuk pointed out “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”. And there is no fixed ratio or distance in the future to get the effect, but when you get it right the effect is real, profound and dramatic.

Using your motivation

Once someone has the motivation to change, it is relatively easy for them to come up with a positive alternative, which becomes their goal. Usually the new goal is obvious, but if it isn’t a very powerful approach is to simply take the projected future that is so horrific and flip it 180 degrees. Being poor with a single income that they have no control over becomes having several streams of income which are independent of each other and depend on no-one but themselves. Working all the hours God sends doing stuff they hate becomes having time for work or leisure that they enjoy because the crap has been eliminated or delegated to someone who is good at it and enjoys it. 

And once a person has the motivation to change and a goal to head toward, then and only then are they going to be amenable to all the coaching, strategy advice and help that people can offer - because they will be motivated to actively look for it.

But that is far from the end of the story of creating sustained and sustainable change. Once someone has a reason to change and be receptive to ideas and suggestions, the most important things are to get them started now instead of later and then to keep them on the path. And there are a number of scientifically proven systems for doing this. 

The first thing to understand is that warnings in and of themselves do not work. The brain is built with what has been called by Dr Tali Sharot a “positivity bias”. Telling someone that they will die a horrible death because of smoking might get them to change at some point. Telling them that their sex lives will be dramatically better might get them to change right now. 

Turning motivation into actio

So once people are motivated to change, there are three steps to keeping the motivation going and, more importantly, to turn the motivation into action.

Social incentives - as Dr Robert Cialdini pointed out in the seminal book “Influence: The Science Of Persuasion”, social proof is one of our key drivers. We love comparing ourselves with other people and, in a lot of cases, competing with them. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is a real thing. I even know people who are committed to the minimalist lifestyle who compare themselves with others - they end up getting rid of too much stuff just because they think they are not minimalist enough! People who track their performance against other people that they regard as peers (or even against people one step above in performance terms that they can aspire to emulate), teams or businesses who benchmark against competition or those in similar situations all tend to perform better and more consistently. League tables are so popular because they are a visible measure - and incentive.

Immediate reward - Candy Crush and other games are so popular because of the dopamine hit that they reward people with through their prizes, level ups, and surprises for constant or repetitive play. We motivate children with star charts on the fridge. Games motivate us with level ups, power ups and special add-ons given both as rewards and also as random “gifts” just for showing up. Both styles of immediate reward - those earned by performance and those for effort and consistency are important and create a drive to behave “well” in order to gain future recognition.

Progress monitoring - Recording and seeing progress over time gives us rewards for our progress, but it also gives us a powerful sense of control over our future; even if that control is illusory it is still highly motivational. Seeing our performance on a small number of metrics (never more than three, the brain cannot juggle more than that and will simply select three from a wider selection anyway!) and watching it improve, decline or flatline over time can be highly motivational and create a lot of stimulus. 

But there is a proviso here; the metric has to be perceived as being within our control. If you show me the performance of a ten person team that I belong to, that might theoretically motivate us as a group. But me as an individual? Possibly, but that depends upon how much control I feel over the total performance, and how much I am committed to the team. Better to show me my performance as an individual, together with the contribution that I and everyone else makes to the team. 

Doing that allows me to see the social proof of how I am doing compared to others, gives me an immediate reward of seeing my performance against the rest of the team improve, or the performance of the whole team improve, depending on my style of thinking, and if done properly can also allow progress monitoring over time. A triple hit of dopamine for my little monkey brain. Hoorah!

I started this article with the statement that the people who in this crisis most need to dramatically review their existing business or start a new one are the least likely to do so. My suggestion to those of you who are in that category but have read this far is that you are already on the way out. Ploughing through two and a half thousand words of well-meaning advice doesn’t mean you are ready to change. But it does mean that you are ready to consider it. 

Planning your future

Start by projecting forward in time to the point where you get past the current fears that are freezing you in place, to where the “maybes” all disappear and then consider. You might find that your life and your business will actually be just fine, in which case kick back, relax, enjoy the family and binge on Netflix or Amazon Prime! 

If not, then use the motivation that the exercise creates to decide what you want instead and work backwards down the timeline and ask at six or three month intervals “what has to happen for that to become inevitable?” So if in two years time you want to have three completely separate streams of income that do not depend on each other, what has to happen in eighteen months time to make that inevitable? And so on, reducing the timescale to three months, one month and then weekly as you get closer to the present day. 

Incidentally, it rarely works planning forward because you take too many of your current assumptions and limitations with you, especially at the moment. Planning backward like this gives your brain the focus on positivity that it so badly craves and sidelines the problems and limitations for the time being. Relax, those “realists” amongst you, you will have to deal with the crap that the world throws at you and how you plan to deal with it, but give your brain a reason to do it first...

Once you have your milestones in place, create the social incentives, immediate rewards and progress monitoring that allow you to start and keep moving toward those milestones. 

Now and only now should you do a little contingency planning about what might get in your way and how you will deal with it, because you have a positive framework of goals, milestones and actions to fit that into. 

And to those of you who are already motivated to change and wanted to get some good advice and suggestions? Hopefully you have found a little of what you wanted. 

In either case, please feel free to contact me on social media if you want to ask any questions or want any suggestions.

Stephen Long is a Partner in The Minimaliser & Box Of Marketing