Throughout life we are met with crisis. It can sneak up on us at a moment’s notice. During every crisis we have a moral responsibility to handle ourselves with the upmost self-control. Furthermore, there will come a time where we have to facilitate crisis in our lives. How we do this is by taking complete control of our thinking and actions. This is the essence of “My responsibility to you is to take responsibility for myself.” Facilitating Crisis can be scary and unpredictable. It can induce fear and panic in others around us. Crisis tends to bring about powerful emotions and behaviors. People involved sometimes tend to lose the ability to critically think for a time. To be an effective facilitator of crisis it takes tact and purposeful intervention. This is only after we control our own thinking and behaviors.
Noticed I used the word facilitator of crisis and not some other word like Crisis Management. Facilitator brings more of the human aspect to this profound process. Facilitating is about being able to step back and look at the process of what is happening in the crisis. In addition, it’s about doing our absolute best to reduce harm to everyone involved. A facilitator is mindful, brings clarity to the process, creates conditions that are healthy and instills hope in others. Again, this is done through tactful, purposeful or meaningful interventions.
Crisis can change at a moment’s notice. A facilitator must be flexible with every second. It’s tough work and takes a good deal of mental endurance to discern what is happening in front of us moment to moment. We need to consider what we are seeing is not always what it appears to be. In fact, we need to continue to adapt whenever our awareness is raised to new information. Lastly, we need to remember what we think and do should be done looking through a lens of doing no harm to everyone involved in the incident.
You might have noticed I have used the word “everyone” a couple of times. This includes even those who may be causing the crisis. If we want to become the best version of ourselves, we must consider that it’s vital to treat everyone equally and having compassion for everyone and their situations. This sometimes takes a good deal of self-reflections to get to a level where we can see this. Often our thinking, values, judgments, bias and beliefs systems get in our way of being truly effective.
Facilitating crisis is about using every tool we have at our disposal to create a helpful outcome or a peaceful resolution. I’m not referring to external things although they can play a role in bring someone down to a more reasonable level of thinking and behaviors. What I’m talking about is our own internal war that is taking place between our ears. The following are the tools that I would take into a crisis every single time I enter.
1 Mindfulness
We need to enter crisis with an open mind. In other words, we need to be mindful of the ever-changing circumstances in front of us. Furthermore, we need to be mindful that what we are thinking and putting together is often wrong. We must get to a place where we can see the bigger picture. For us to even come close to this we need to step out of our own thinking, values, judgments, bias and beliefs systems. Mindfulness is difficult because most of the time what we believe translates into what we think is the truth. It helps us get into other people’s shoes. Mindfulness will no doubt help us facilitate a crisis that lessons the harm. Please check out the Mindfulness post to gain more clarity about this concept.
2. Always Seek Clarity
When we approach a crisis or are in the mist of it. We need to always look for what we are missing. Even though we think we have things figured out most of the time we are missing things that are important to the bigger picture. In fact, seeking clarity is vital if we want to do on harm to others.
Seeking clarity does a few different things. The first thing it does is gives us competence about what is happening in front of us. Secondly it will get us closer to having compassion for everyone involved. Lastly it will create many different conditions for those around us. Things like safety, trust dependability and so on. This list can go on for a long time. If you would like to take a more in-depth look at why Clarity is so important, please check out the post located in the foundation on the website Thinking Deeply Self-Critically.
3 Creating Conditions
As I stated before when you seek clarity you start to create some new conditions about who you are. Furthermore conditions have already been created about you the second you were involved in the situation. Actually, conditions may have been created prior to you entering the situation. We all create conditions about ourselves knowingly or not knowing. These conditions can be good, bad or natural. Some examples of conditions we may have created: Are you a listener, talker, do you have care and concern for others, can you connect with others, can you be trusted, is your body language safe and do you have integrity (meaning are you the type of person that is going to do what you say you are going to do). People that know us know these things about us.
Creating conditions coincide with the person we are through someone else’s lens. In other words, we create conditions that make up us but the important part to understand is how other sees us. Our interpretation of ourselves especially in a crisis doesn’t matter. This may sound complicated because it is. Furthermore, this is profound and blows my mind when I think about it but it’s the truth. If you want to dig into Creating Conditions, please check out the article in my foundation on the website ThinkingDeeplySelf-Critically.com
4 We Must Instill Hope
As stated, before we create conditions are interpreted by people around us. In my years of experience Instilling hope, it vital to facilitating crisis. We must create this condition in as many ways as we can and as tactfully as we can. This is an art, and we need to master it. A good self-evaluation question you should ask yourself after facilitating a crisis is: Did everyone walk away feeling whole or empowered? Or did they walk away feeling shameful and guilty about how it all went down or maybe they felt fearful or angry.
I’m not saying this is easy because it’s not. Instilling hope is a powerful condition that we create for ourselves. Again, this is complicated and extremely profound (and if you’re not grasping the magnitude of this, I may not be articulating it well) and there is so much depth to pulling this off. Ultimately what we are doing by instilling hope is defining ourselves to others. We are making a decision that defines whether or not we are becoming the best version of us or not. If you want more information on instilling hope, please check the article on the website ThinkingDeeplySelf-Critically.com. Instilling Hope is one of the four foundational pieces.
5 Minimizing Harm
Every single thought we entertain possesses the potential to influence others profoundly. It is remarkable how just a single thought can set us on a path of causing harm. Thus, it becomes vital to approach our thoughts with intention and productivity, ensuring we minimize any potential harm. Developing acute mindfulness of our thinking process enables us to swiftly halt counterproductive thoughts, leading us to achieve optimal outcomes. Ultimately, maintaining control over our thoughts becomes imperative in our quest to mitigate the risks of causing harm to others. Minimizing harm is vital to our success facilitating crisis.
Conclusion
Sometimes in life someone has to take the lead in a situation, crisis or not. To get the best results in any situation there are four extremely important fundamental things that a person needs to take with them. As you read above they are Mindfulness, Clarity, Creating Conditions and Instilling Hope. If you can profoundly understand these concepts you might stand a chance the next time you are faced with crisis or conflict in your life. I can’t emphasize enough how profound these ideas are and how complicated they are to articulate. They take time to develop within us and they take a good deal of practice. I guarantee that if you can apply these concepts to you it will bring you a step closer to becoming the best version of yourself.
Again, if you want some more clarity on what you have read, please check out the Foundations of Thinking Deeply Self-Critically which are Instilling Hope, Clarity, Creating Conditions and Mindfulness. Facilitating crisis in our lives is tough work but it will bring us closer to the best version of us the more we practice. Lastly, it will have a positive impact on those in our lives in ways we never thought possible.
If you like what you have read, check out other articles on the website ThinkingDeeplySelf-Critically.com the site is designed to give us tools and techniques to help us become the best version of ourselves. There are four main categories on the site. The Foundation, Our Responsibility to Us, Our Responsibility to Others and Facilitating Crisis. We can also be found on Pinterest.
