Maybe you’ve been interested in mindfulness, but you've never gotten around to trying it. Now that you’re facing a real crisis, you might be thinking “I wish I’d done this a while ago, and now it’s too late.” It’s not too late to start. This is in fact the best time of all for you to begin. Mindfulness practice can help you develop emotional stability and more wisely lead yourself and those around you - especially in a crisis.
Here are four steps you can try right now, that you can remember with the acronym, ROAM:
Recognize when you're feeling stressed
Open to awareness
Allow whatever is here to be here
Move forward with wisdom
Let’s dive in a bit deeper to understand what we’re doing in each step.
1 - Recognize you're stressed. This step is simply to notice when your threat programming has kicked in. Commonly called the fight, flight, or freeze response, this is the survival programming we’ve inherited through evolution. Without it, we wouldn’t survive - so it isn’t our enemy. However, when we misunderstand it, we become caught in a self-reinforcing loop. As a #leader, the biggest disadvantage of being caught in this loop is that it degrades your ability to think clearly and make decisions.
Just notice the experience of being caught or overwhelmed - almost as if you were a scientist standing off to the side with a clipboard. Oh, there it is, my heart is racing, I feel fearful, maybe even a little panicky. That’s all you need to do in this hugely important step; you are already interrupting the cycle of stress reactivity and bringing more of your brain back on line. Just take 5 seconds or so for this.
2 - Open to awareness. This step is about downshifting from high alert and opening up to your full capacity. In those first moments when your stress reactivity is triggered, it seems that your entire world consists of the threat. Like when you have a toothache, it seems the entire world is your toothache.
Feel the space behind you, around you, within you. (Yes, that may sound illogical; for now, just do it anyway.) Become aware of your peripheral vision as well. Feel a sense of continuity between the spacious awareness around and within you. Notice this spacious awareness itself is not stressed. This can be as short as 10 seconds once you’ve got the hang of it; if you have more time, rest here as long as you like.
3 - Allow. Now you’re positioned to see things in context without either exaggerating or minimizing. The practice is to notice the internal experience of physical sensations and mental activity — without personalizing them. So, you might say to yourself, there’s fear happening, there’s that thought again about my job, there’s a feeling of contraction in my gut. This isn’t a psychological or analytical process. In mindfulness practice, what’s most important is that we notice the actual experience happening now (sensations and mental activity); we don’t get entangled in the content or meaning. This step can be very short as well – no more than 15 - 30 seconds. If you have a mindfulness meditation practice, you could certainly spend more time on this step later on.
4 - Move forward with wisdom. Now you are better able to make decisions and take action that is in your own best interest and in the interest of your team, your family, and your community. You will now be responding wisely rather than reacting automatically. Trust in this capacity for wise and compassionate action.
You might be saying, “But wait a minute, there’s this ongoing, difficult situation, how do I deal with that?” You go through these steps each time you find yourself caught. The good news is, you don’t have to handle the "ongoing, difficult situation" (which in fact is a thought), you “just” have to handle this moment. Which is all that actually exists. By all means, plan, respond, strategize — move forward with wisdom. But just remember to hit the tennis ball coming at you now, not all the possible balls you imagine might be coming over the net in the entire match.
