Last week in my blog I covered “Limiting your Pity Party” in dealing with a crisis. To assist you in limiting this pity party it helps to ask yourself good questions. Ask these questions of not only yourself, but of trusted others. By voicing these questions it helps in clearing your thoughts. It provides needed feedback and additional perspective from trusted others. It puts you on a path to solutions and helps you blow out the candles of your pity party cake in order to move forward.
Instead of asking yourself with self-pity .. “Why me?” flip it and ask “Why not me.” Ask… “what is the opportunity in this chaos?” Who can I call to bounce ideas off of for a solution? What are the possible answers or solutions? For me, in my Leap Year of Firsts, during the pandemic of 2020, one of my questions was “what can we sell to replace all of our lost business.” We were not selling any awards, which should have put us out of business. All of the events that needed awards were canceled. We were “non-essential.” Another question I asked was “how can we become essential?” The answers came in the form of selling PPE (personal protective equipment). We sold masks, hand-sanitizer, sneeze guards, thermometers and medical gloves for the distribution of vaccines. And we sold LOTS of them! We also became essential by turning our company into a call center for the next year making calls for the state of New York to set up COVID-19 test appointments. We then moved onto taking unemployment calls for the state of California to assist people who had lost their jobs get their benefits to stay afloat. What was impossible, became possible.
In asking good positive, solution finding questions it assists us fight the negative bias that is hard-wired into us as human beings. The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person’s behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations. To simplify it a loss will stay with us longer than a win. The loss will affect us deeper and longer. Asking good questions assists us in fighting this negative bias and helps limit our pity party. At least it did for me. Hopefully it will do the same for you!