Cultivating Your Crisis + Flourishing Mindsets

When everything sucks, we get through when we have the right type of crisis mindset. 

There’s a scale, and some of us are better than others across a number of variables, but our crisis mindsets determine our ability to get out of the crisis itself (at least with our wits, and hopefully with some semblance of sanity). 

But once you’re on the other side of the crisis, there’s another problem. 

You can’t have a crisis mindset when you’re not in crisis. Well, you can, but people like this are drama. 

In peacetime, we have to be able to shift to a flourishing mindset. 

There’s a scale, with varied levels and variables again, but our ability to make the best of peacetime determines our ability to grow without the resistance of crisis in our face. 

Both crisis mindsets and flourishing mindsets are amplified by the groups we are a part of. 

The right crisis team can embolden people, create permanent bonds, and allow survival when all things seem otherwise hopeless. The wrong crisis team will drain people, destroy trust, and lead to hopelessness.  

The right and wrong flourishing mindset groups can have similar impacts. For people who need drama to find purpose, peacetime is torture. They’re constantly on the search for new sources of resistance to work against, and it’s not going to be pretty. 

At work, at home, and with friends – knowing about these mindsets, how to spot them, and how to build positive versions of them is worth thinking about. h/t to Venkatesh Rao’s recent post “Crisis Mindsets” for reminding me (and I hope everything is OK with his pets and family). Here’s the quote he closed his post with, which I’ll close this post with too:

Getting better at all the practical aspects of crisis wrangling is of absolutely no use if you cannot learn to make the non-crisis moments count. Those are the moments that actually pay the psyche bills.