509: Questions to Ask Yourself During This Crisis

What It Covers

Hiten Shah and Steli Efti explore specific questions to ask yourself and others during crisis periods to manage exhaustion, anxiety, and uncertainty while maintaining connection and perspective during challenging times.

Key Questions Answered

• •Personal check-ins: Start every team meeting with a personal minute where each person shares what's happening in their family and city life. This releases anxiety, creates human connection, and provides context that helps colleagues support each other better.
• •Reframing exhaustion: When feeling tired, ask yourself if you're actually bored rather than exhausted. This mental reframe creates different possibilities and solutions by spotting the situation from a new angle, potentially revealing the true source of your fatigue and opening alternative responses.
• •Deeper questioning: Replace surface questions like how are you doing with what are you worried about to unlock genuine conversation. This shift prompts people to share real concerns they otherwise suppress, enabling meaningful connection and allowing worries to be externalized rather than internalized.
• •Luck versus gratitude: Focus on feeling lucky rather than only practicing gratitude. Luck removes you from the equation entirely, acknowledging good circumstances without attachment to your role in creating them, while gratitude often includes things you had a hand in achieving, creating different psychological distance.