Navigating Crisis with Confidence

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: If you're ready to learn how to navigate work and life challenges with confidence, listen in. Welcome to the Two Marketing Mom's podcast. I'm Kelly Callahan-Poe and today's episode is called Crisis Navigation with Debra Woog. Debra is a crisis navigation partner who helps women leaders face challenges with clarity, confidence, and compassion. Thanks for joining me today, Debra.

Debra Woog: Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here with you.

Kelly: I'm ready to dig into some of these questions because it's so relevant today. There are so many competent women trying to power through a crisis alone. Why do you think we do that?

Debra: So many reasons. You want to emphasize the alone part or the powering through part? Where do you want to start?

Kelly: Both! Pick one.

Debra: Okay, so the powering through, the powering through because highly competent women, we've been relying on ourselves. Things are getting harder over time lately as time goes on. The economy is changing. Employers are increasing their expectations of employees. At the same time, public and private companies are shifting more administrative work from their employees to their customers, clients and patients. So, we have more to do than ever just to consume services. And also, over time, public and private technology and infrastructure systems are breaking down. So, this is leading to us all having a lot more to do. The fantasy 25 years ago that I know about you, but I had when I was just a young and an MIT Sloan excited about e-commerce, was everything's going to be so much easier. But in fact, in a lot of ways, I think life is harder now, 25 years after the internet boom, the dot-com boom and bust. So, I think we power through because there's very little that's optional these days for working mom professionals, especially when we're working for ourselves, like you and I do, it's just that what we need to do is endless. Why are we doing it alone? Well, sometimes it's because we don't have the partners that we wish we had. Sometimes it's because we don't live near family like they did on the little house in the prairie and a lot of other cultures and a lot of other times. Sometimes it's because the person who is our partner isn't competent to be our partner right now because they're going through a health crisis or they're going through a mental health crisis. And as you know, the mental health crises are becoming increasingly important. And that's just a few reasons I can think of why we're alone and why we have so much more to power through.

Kelly: To just kind of take a step back and ask, how would you define a crisis? A personal, professional crisis? I mean, I feel like we know what personal crises are, the death of a loved one, a divorce, losing your job, but what would you identify?

Debra: Getting sick. Yeah. So those are personal crises. And when you are working, they sometimes become professional crises as well. But the professional crises could be going through some sort of dispute or a downsizing. Like one time, soon after I was out of business school, I in the dot com boom and then bust, I had to lay off almost everybody who worked for this hundred-person company, because I was ahead of people's strategy, like HR, I had to lay them all off and then bring my own little layoff letter into the CEO and say, could you please sign this? So that was a crisis to go through as a leader. And then, of course, then I didn't have a job. So personally, it affected me as well when two co-founders are kind of getting a divorce. That can be an example of a crisis. I worked with two sisters who ran a business together for 20 years and then they had kind of a split emotionally and then they needed to split up their business. That's a professional crisis and that affected them personally as well. So, there's a lot of overlap. What do I consider a crisis? A crisis is anything where you can't carry on with your regularly scheduled programming of life, of being a mom, of being a partner, of being an employee or an entrepreneur, because what's happening is so big that it's taking over most of what you have to think about and do every day. So, there's catastrophic crises like a pandemic or a plane crash or wildfires wiping out a neighborhood. The crises that I tend to focus on are ones that are really happening much more locally to a woman and her family, a woman and her team, a woman and her company, not so widespread. Although I worked with a lot of people during the pandemic and obviously the pandemic affected people globally and locally. But that's the kind of crisis that I'm working with people in the most. Business crisis or personal medical or mental health crises.

Kelly: And before we dive into some of the ways to navigate challenges from your perspective based on your business, can you give me an example of what the most common crisis that women are navigating right now?

Debra: So yeah, women, most common is they are the point person for what I call a person zero, like a ground zero kind of reference somebody who's having a mental health crisis, new diagnosis or new episode. And, or sometimes it's physical. I have clients right now. The woman is just recovering from breast cancer, just getting ready to go back to work as a trauma nurse when in July she was diagnosed. I mean her husband was diagnosed with glioblastoma. So now she has to go back to work because he can't work, but she has to take care of him. Glioblastoma is one of the worst cancers a person can be diagnosed with and so many complicated issues because she's both the person zero in her own experience of still taking all the meds, although she's done with chemotherapy, she still has side effects and she has to go back to work and she's taking care of her husband and she's going to be losing her husband and she knows. So, there's so much going on there.

Kelly: So, tell me a little bit about how you have three keys to navigating challenges. Can you tell me what those three keys are?

Debra: Yeah, another way I define crisis is life's inevitable big challenges. So, what I realized is we all have crises in our lives, and we go through seasons of being in crisis as the point person or as the person zero and then we're not and then we are again. We don't know how to look ahead into life and I don't want to be Debbie Downer because my name is Deborah and I'm not really happy about that name Debbie Downer. But that's the truth. The fact is that we're living long lives on average, which is great. And at the same time, stuff happens. So, there's things you can do when you're in a crisis to help you manage it better, but those same things you can prepare for a crisis without knowing what the crisis is going to be. You can build those muscles so you're in better shape for crisis navigation when you face the crisis. So that's the backdrop. So, there's three keys that I see to navigating a crisis. One is communication. The next one is capacity, and the third one is community. So the first one I said was communication. A short period of time, and a lot of it needs to be interactive. You likely have a lot of difficult conversations, whether they're about gathering information or informing other people or negotiating to get what you want. Those conversations can be difficult because they can be emotionally loaded. There can be a power differential. You can be working against the clock. So if you can get more comfortable having difficult conversations, or if you don't have time for that and you need to have them now, if you can partner with someone like a crisis navigation partner, which is what I do and my team does, to help strategize for those difficult conversations, you're going to be in better shape. Sometimes what I find people come to me for is the most is that thought partnership and I'm listening to your story and I'm keeping track of who's who and I'm following it with you over time so that when you say Jane filed this paper at court, I know Jane is the junior attorney on the team for the defendant or something. So, the thought partnership of preparing for difficult conversations is one aspect of communication. I'm giving six talks on all these things next week. I could talk about each of these things for hours.

Kelly: Well, just with regards to communications, are there other ways that women can communicate more effectively? Are, other than having a thought partner, do you have other strategies for that portion of?

Debra: Yeah, things. Well, so prepare for difficult conversations, there's a lot of things you can do. You can be clear going into it what your intention is, what your goal is and what tools you're going to use. And I have a whole course I teach on this, like an online video course, but also, I do this with people more often one on one. So that's kind of general about difficult conversations. But there's also some other things I teach, one of which is called ring theory. And I find this really fascinating. So, picture your world as a set of concentric circles. So, the person in the center of the dartboard is what I call the person zero, the person going through the crisis, the person lying in the hospital bed, for example, or depending on your perspective, you the person who had to lay off all the people in the company. Okay, there's other people in crisis too, but if we just like to take that person, that leader's perspective, they're in the center, right? And then, one ring out from that bullseye is that person's partner or their person, their best friend, their sibling, whoever they're the closest to. And then another ring out is people who are still in their inner circle but are not their number one. And then another ring out, there's friends that aren't in touch very often. And you can imagine how this goes all the way out, right? So, if you think about your social life, and your professional life as that series of concentric circles. What ring theory says is comfort in, dump out. So, what that means is let's say your sister is dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis. This is a real story. I told it in one of my talks. That person has a breast cancer diagnosis. Her sister is the closest person to her. The sister has been so worried about what's going to happen to the patient that she keeps dumping her feelings on the patient saying, I'm so scared you're going to die. I'm so worried this is going to happen. Very appropriate, understandable, feelings are good. But what the person on that first ring needs to do is complain or dump to somebody in that outer ring, another sibling, their best friend, somebody farther away from the patient. Because the person who's trying to take in all this information about my gosh, I have breast cancer and I'm going through chemotherapy and my gosh, I'm losing my hair and I'm exhausted. They can't take on those feelings. And so often people expect person zero to be the one answering all the questions for the people who are rings out. So, one of the things I just remind people to do is you comfort yourself towards the center, and you share all your very reasonable feelings. I just dropped my head in an air pot. Or if you need to talk to your sister, the breast cancer patient about how you feel, that's okay too. Don't expect this patient to fix it for you. I can communicate but not go into person zero to solve my problem because they can barely solve the problem that they have right now. So that's an example of a communication strategy outside of difficult conversations that I teach.

Kelly: That is one of the most visually interesting analogies that I've heard because you can see in your mind's eye how it works. And I think that's really helpful for me. And I imagine that would be helpful to others. Now let's move on to capacity because I feel like that's also a challenge that women have many times.

Debra: So, we all have, I don't know if this number is stuck in your head, but it's stuck in my mind 168 hours a week. That's what 24 times seven is. It's 168. That's all we get. I know because I've tried to see if there's a way that I can bend time and put an eighth day at the end. Total failure on my part. So, our capacity is who we can be and what we can do in that fixed amount of time that everybody gets on this earth. Capacity is how on top of your game are you? Are you your executive functioning working at its best? Are you taking care of your body? Are you taking care of your mind? Are you taking care of your soul? Or are you doing what I've done sometimes, which is just working from morning to noon to night, and then occasionally saying hi to my kids, and then falling asleep. Sometimes we get in these modes where we are trying to power through, we are trying to do things ourselves especially if we're really solo like I've been a solo parent for it's going to be 17 years next month. That's crazy. So, for almost 17 years, there's just so much to do on an average day even when I'm not having a kid diagnosed with severe anxiety or with type 1 diabetes, so capacity is about shifting our mindsets to what is really essential to do right now during this crisis time. Maybe we're not going to be able to keep up with our volunteer commitments. Maybe we're not going to be able to do the networking that we had planned right now. Maybe we're not going to take the faster subway ride. This is an example from one of my clients yesterday who is literally in the middle of chemotherapy treatments, and she said, I'm going to take the subway downtown for my doctor's appointment today. Do you think that's okay? And I was like, in New York, are there germs on the subway like there are in Boston? Because you're immunocompromised. You're in the middle of chemotherapy. And this is a very smart woman, right? But she's just, she wants to stay in her usual habits and she's not thinking about a simple thing like a subway trip might compromise her physical capacity because she might pick up a bug or something and she can't afford to do that right now while she's getting treatment every week. Capacity has to do with mind, body and soul. And there's things we can do to expand our capacity. And so often when we're in the middle of a crisis, we tend to think, nope, I don't have time for that. Can't go to therapy now. Nope, now's not a time to go get a massage. When my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 10, the way that it happened then, this was 13 years ago, so I don't know if this is what happens now. But so, we got into Children's Hospital of Boston that night and we stayed there for four days, and they taught us how to deal with type 1 diabetes. You got him in a better place with his blood sugar and then they were just teaching us, teaching us, teaching us. And then the nurses would come over and say, Deb, you know, why don't you go out and take a break? I was like, I didn't take a break right now. I need to learn how I'm not going to leave. Finally, like on the fourth day, I actually did go out for a walk by myself. And it's really remarkable how that can kind of expand time just taking a mental or a physical break. So, it's ideal when we can work that spaciousness into our schedules in advance so that we have room to fit more things in in an emergency. But that's not always the case. And often I need to convince myself and other people, I'm much better at it with myself now, but from that experience, I'm convincing other people that you have to protect your capacity now. So, okay, you're not going to host the dinner that you were planning on six weeks ago because you didn't know. Like another example, just two weeks ago, I stupidly fell down and broke my clavicle. Okay. I had things I was going to do for the past two weeks, but it turns out it's not a crisis that I broke my clavicle, but that required a lot of sleep. I never broke a bone before. I did not know how much sleep healing a bone requires. Silly me. And so, I did not do a bunch of things that I planned to do in these two weeks. If I had been doing what I did lately, all through my 20s, 30s, and most of my 40s, which was to pack my days with appointments, commitments, promises, obligations, things I wanted, commitments I wanted to make, then there would be no room when something unexpected happened. I'm finally learning that for my lifestyle, I can spend however many waking hours I have. I cannot book a hundred percent of those waking hours. At most I can pre-schedule maybe 70%. So, I have to do like 40-50% of my waking hours, running my business and seeing my clients. And then an additional 20-30% taking care of myself and my family, which is easier right now because my kids are away at college. And then that other 30% do not book anything that I choose to do during that time to be something that's feeding me. Has to be restorative. Whether it's eating a nutritious meal or it's zoning out and watching Nobody Wants This, second season which just dropped last week on Netflix. I had to watch it. You know, whatever brings you peace and joy that especially now I'm just learning I have to leave room for that and not expect myself and not expect my clients and not let my clients expect themselves to function 100% of their waking hours day in day out five six seven days a week.

Kelly: I believe that to be true. I think when I was younger, I really thought that my energy was not finite.

Debra: Right. Yes. I'll just sleep less tonight and then I'll get it out. Yeah, I can do that one extra thing.

Kelly: As you get older, you realize, hmm, it is, and perhaps I need to literally schedule in your calendar those times of working out or doing yoga or resting, et cetera.

Debra: Or nothing. I mean, I literally have in my calendar now blocks every day that say spaciousness. I also have one that says every day that says quiet rest time. It's half an hour. I don't always do it, but it makes me feel better just that it's in there. And my rule with myself is I'm allowed to move my spaciousness or quiet rest time block around in the day as things arise, but I'm not allowed to delete it. I have to keep that somewhere in the day.

Kelly: That's smart. Now let's move on to community.

Debra: Community is your extra hands, your extra hearts, your extra brains, the people who will walk with you and be on your team when you need that. Maybe in ways that you don't even expect when you can't really imagine being in a crisis. You know, you've had a loss in your family in the past year, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have gone through this. Sometimes people, something unexpected happens or it is expected, but you don't know when, like having a death in your family. And then people show up for you in ways that you didn't even know people could show up for you. So, I am a big believer in having brilliance-based careers and brilliance-based businesses. And what that means is that for those of us, and I know you have this, and I bet a lot of the people in your community, not all of them, have brilliance-based businesses. They are, whether they're employed by them or they own them, they are showing up to work every day and working out of whatever is in their head, their expertise, their experience, their passions. If they're not being able to function fully for some physical or emotional or spiritual reason, their work suffers. So, for people who can't just go on route, there are some kinds of jobs where you just like time to make the donuts. You know, the Dunkin donuts guy from 25 years ago. I know. That's still how they make the donuts, but maybe it didn't matter so much when the guy was making the donuts, what was on his mind or if he had enough sleep, maybe I never made donuts for a living. But when you are in marketing, or you are in sales, or you are running your own business. You have to have those words coming to you, right? So, if you are down a quart on sleep, then you're not for whatever reason, even a really good reason, like you're in the middle of chemotherapy or you're not so good reason, like you just shattered your clavicle. You need other people to kind of step in and help you. So, the reason I bring up the Brilliance Based business is I really believe that everybody is brilliant in their own unique way. Every single person on the planet. And this is where community comes in. Allow people to help you from their brilliance. Brilliance is what comes, they're so good at it, it comes easy to them. And they tend to think, that's nothing. Just keeping your garden alive, you know, while you're in treatment. It was so easy for me, and it was fun. That could be an example of something someone does to support somebody in crisis that comes from their brilliance. Actually restores them and gives them energy while they're doing it even though it adds an extra thing to their day. So if you're trying to support someone in crisis, think about how you can support them from your own brilliance. What is easy for you? What comes naturally to you? What do you know a lot about? Be the community member who shows up not from a place of my god. I know you need help, but I'm so tired. What do you need? Okay? What do you just tell me? You know, but a person who's showing up from this is how I can help. Often, we say to people in a crisis, let me know what I can do. What can I do? How can I help? And if you've ever been in charge of anything, you probably have had the experience I've had, which is I make so many decisions every day. I don't even have time to think about how you can help me. It's gonna take that. I put that on my list. But if you come to me and you say, I've got your garden covered June and July while you're going through this, don't worry. My God, I can't even think about how my garden is gonna get taken care of. So, if you are offering support, deliver it from your brilliance. If you need support, let people let their brilliance shine on you. That's your community. A lot of times people are surrounded by the same people, and they see them all the time, but they don't really know who they can turn to when the chips are really down. I invite everyone as kind of a practice thing in advance, make a list. Who can you turn to? Who can you call at three in the morning? I would, when I was first a single mom, I literally made a note in my phone. These are the people who said it's okay to call them at three in the morning if there's an emergency. Cause at three in the morning, if there was an emergency, I'm not really doing my best thinking, but then I knew who I could call and who I could call for what this one could take my daughter overnight while my sons were in the hospital. It wasn't hard for her to have a friend there for them, you know, in the middle of the night, she lost some sleep, but she was able to help that way. There's so, so many examples. So let your community be there for you. And my suggestion is making yourself a note somewhere where you're going to see it of who are those people you can contact when you need them in the middle of the night and who are those people who have skills who are complimentary to yours? None of my brilliance is spatial relations or anything like visual design oriented. None of it. So, if I have a marketing emergency, I need to know in my business, I need to know who on my team I can turn to and say, can you help me lay out this thing that has to go up on my website right now? I'm just making this up, but I got nothing in those areas. There's other things that even when I'm exhausted come relatively easy to me like speaking spontaneously. So, I don't need someone to like to come in and be my spokesperson because I can do that. That's part of my brilliance. But I do need to know who I can contact who can help me in my areas where I have low aptitudes. We all have high aptitudes and low aptitudes. Good to know what yours are and have compliments.

Kelly: So, to recap, you would say that you need to focus on gathering your network of allies and resources before you need them, correct?

Debra: Well, I think that's ideal and easy to say right now to the people who are in the middle of a crisis right now. I will say, are you letting people help you when they offer or not? Are there a lot of people saying, let me know how I can help? And you're slightly annoyed by that. The way I was describing before, like I don't have time to tell you how you can help me. Okay. But can some person help make a list and then go back to those people and dole it out for you or say which of these things can you take? I need dinner for the next week for my vegetarian family. I need rides to my treatments. I need someone to bring me new ice packs every 20 minutes for three hours, you know think about what those are and then maybe somebody else can brainstorm that with you and then go out with you not literally out but go out on your behalf to the people in your community and say, hey, Kelly needs these things right now, or which of these can you do? And then those people should pick the ones that are actually the easier ones for them. And in the community, sometimes we don't let people help us the way that we deserve to be supported. And I know that I'm guilty of that in the past. No, no, I can't ask someone else to do that thing, even though they offered. That person's also a single mom, and she also has all these things going on. And I can't do that to her. I can't add to her plate. No, no, no, no, no, I've got it. You know, that's my internal dialogue. Let yourself be supported. Please, especially when people are offering, but also don't be afraid to ask people who aren't offering. They have everybody to say no, if they say no, that's okay. But let yourself ask or ask someone to ask on your behalf if it's too much for you to do.

Kelly: Wonderful advice. You've worked with so many different types of women over the years. Is there one mindset shift that you see that helps women most often to move from feeling overwhelmed to actually feeling resilient?

Debra: So, my people that I tend to work with are kind of a version of me, right? I think that's true for all of us as brilliant space leaders. And so, the people that I tend to have come to me are people who are so good at getting stuff done, it's almost to their detriment sometimes. And often people are what I call hyper competent. And that's my definition for hyper-competent. They're so good at getting things done that sometimes it works against them. People are hyper-competent for a lot of different reasons, but often it has to do with some sort of core emotional wound. And an example of an emotional wound that's deep for people is, I'm not worthy, I'm not valuable enough. I'm not valuable. And another one is, I'm not enough, I don't deserve this. People frequently come to me with those, and I help them shift into believing that yes, you are worthy of having support. You deserve this. You need this. You can have this. I feel like that's the most basic mindset shift that I need to get people through is accepting that professional or personal support is allowed. You are not going to get an award for being the lone cowgirl out there through this crisis. And it's not going to help you or anybody else if you are. That's a big mindset shift for people. These kinds of people.

Kelly: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Debra, for joining me today. I appreciate it. Please find Debra's contact information on twomarketingmoms.com and don't forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.

Debra: Thank you for having me, Kelly.