A Whole Bucket of Crazy: Having a Support System
I was on vacation last week. Actually, I am going to stop calling it a vacation and instead more accurately say I was “working remotely from a hotel with a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean”! Tomorrow my eBook comes out about the diversity outreach efforts of the top 50 MBA programs. When I started the project four months ago, I planned to assess the individual programs and write up a brief summary of my findings. Well, my actual 30,000-word, 109-page final output outpaced my estimate by just a bit! This project completely disrupted my life and my plans over the last three weeks and I wasn’t prepared. Essentially, my life has been in mini-crisis – not crisis in the “call-the-shrink” crisis, but more like everything got turned upside down so my life was a “whole-bucket-of-crazy” crisis.
I knew I wasn’t in the best shape, but on Friday night I accepted my “whole-bucket-of-crazy” crisis. I was on the flight home from California completing my final review of the book, when my husband sweetly offered to do another edit when we got home. This offer was less about the actual edit – my editor had already reviewed it – though with four advanced degrees, a once-over look by my husband couldn’t hurt. It was my husband’s recognition that I needed some help (mostly mental) and support.
From my husband’s offer came my awareness that I really needed help. Don’t get me wrong, he’s generally a helpful guy, but we tend to give each other a lot of professional space – you do your thing, I do mine – it makes for a happy marriage. So for him to offer to read my book line by line with first round NBA playoff games on, I knew I was in crisis. In reflecting on this situation, a couple of things came to mind.
First, we can’t necessarily see the crisis coming. I am always getting on my mentees for not reaching out to me for advice or assistance until they are smack dab in the middle of a crisis. I want them to call me before so we can avoid the crisis altogether. My situation, reminded me that we often can’t predict the crisis to prepare for it or worse still, can’t see the crisis even when we are in it. To reduce the effects of this, you must surround yourself with at least a couple of people who (a) have your back and can discern when you are not yourself or need support, and (b) who actually have the capability to help you. The person has to have both of these traits. If my husband knew I had an issue, but couldn’t help, then he’s an empathetic listener, which we need sometimes, but that doesn’t generally get us out of the crisis. And if he could help me, but didn’t have my back, well, he’d be in the doghouse!
The second reflection was that in my time away, “working remotely from a hotel with a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean”, I didn’t have calls with my accountability partner. Every Monday we recap the previous week and plan for the week ahead. She holds me accountable for the goals that I’ve set for myself and I do the same for her. Beyond reaching our goals, the conversation allows me to objectively see in her what I have a hard time acknowledging about myself. We have similar interests and goals, so often her life mirrors what I’m going through and we are able to work through solutions that can help both of us. Interesting to note, she also had a few whole-bucket-of-crazy moments during our time off.
So I had a couple of takeaways beyond appreciating my husband and my accountability partner tremendously, it’s critical are that we have people in our lives to recognize our issues and support us through challenging professional situations, not just with words of encouragement, but actions to alleviate some of the stress. And we need people to help us avoid the pitfalls altogether by pushing us to consider possible scenarios in advance and then proactively preparing for them.
