Hal Gregersen

Executive Director, MIT Leadership Centre and Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation, MIT Sloan School of Management; ranked #16 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50

you are going through a massive WHEREVER YOU ARE IN THE WORLD, cross-cultural adjustment in your own home country. So many of us have been isolated or quarantined in our homes, which has been a culture shock. And as some of us start to go back to work, a reverse culture shock will take place. We are potentially going to be in for even more anxiety when we start moving out of the safety of our home spaces.

These days, we are asking ourselves all sorts of new questions, like ‘When should I wear a mask?’ and ‘Is it safe to go to the hospital anymore?’ We have lost the sense that we know what we’re doing, and with that loss comes grief. That is the core of all the anxiety we’re feeling, and collectively, it causes us to feel fragile and vulnerable.

When we’re in that fragile, vulnerable state, it’s easy to get emotionally flooded. A few weeks ago I found myself lying in bed thinking, Are we going to have a run on the banks and lose our home? I was catastrophizing, which can happen when we experience a deep level of emotional flooding. We have all heard the phrase, ‘Don’t just stand there, do something!’ The instinctual human response in such moments is to act to avoid the fear and just start moving. But I would argue that we need to reverse this logic to ‘Don’t just do something, stand there!’

There is a phenomenon called complicated grief. My first wife passed away almost 17 years ago, and between her diagnosis and her passing was 13 days. I had three children, and I did not know how to deal with the grief, so I just got up and started doing things — and I’m still dealing with complicated grief to this day because of it. If we don’t deal with the emotions we feel from going through a major transition such as this, we will pay for it sooner or later.

So, what do we need to do? Reflective quiet is very powerful. Some may meditate, others may walk on the beach. It’s about taking a moment to be reflective and creating some space for that. This allows you to examine what is going on inside of you, so you can pay attention to it instead of running from it. A good friend of mine who has climbed Everest five times and led scientific expeditions around the world once said to me, ‘When you’re in an uncertain moment, stop. And breathe’. And I would add to that, observe. Only then can you start asking emotionally grounded questions and reach out to others. We sign up for leadership roles to get great things done through other people. But that requires us to understand what is going on inside of us, first.