Reminder To Self: No Need To Panic!

Wow, another week gone. Time flies. It’s been a year now, that I have not been working in the office. Well at least it’s finally weekend and time to share the last time I was about to panic at work. And how I was thankfully able to stop myself, before I could do some serious damage.

I am sure everyone of us has experienced this moment of growing inner fear. Both in work and in personal life. This moment, that catches us off guard and leaves us worrying we might have missed something or something might have gone or be seriously wrong.

“Panic”, as we commonly use it, can be a “normal” reaction of fear as I am describing it above. It’s not actual “panic” in the psychological term, but rather a moment of fear or stress.

But panic can become much more serious. Dictionary describes it as:

“sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior”.

In the psychological definition, panic can either come as attacks or even form a serious disorder. If you want to learn more about this, check out this article here.

In this post, I am talking about the stress / fear reaction, that we commonly describe as “someone panicking”, not the psychological disorder. It’s important to make this distinction, as my experience as well as my resolution are not directed towards helping with panic attacks or panic disorder.

Now that we clarified this, let’s talk about my last moment of “panic” , shall we? It happened at a meeting at work. During this meeting, we discussed a KPI (key performance indicator), that caused some concerns in our Servicing organization. I am managing the partner company who supports servicing our network. I was on the invite to represent their performance and their side of things.

The partner had been outperforming our inhouse servicing organization in regards to this KPI. There were a lot of questions around best practices. But there were also some questions as to how the partner was calculating said KPI. I assumed this was mainly to maybe find mistakes in the calculation and as an outcome to show their performance might not have been as good after all. Never assume! (Find my blog post, here).

The invitation was rather short notice and the week leading to this meeting was quite busy. I had asked my team to provide me with the data I thought I needed and felt I should be able to maneuver. But I was wrong. Some of the questions and the intend I assumed, caught me off guard.

And I did not have the answer(s). To make things worse, an element of what drives this KPI is very unique to the US and I am German and not at all familiar with the subject matter.

And as if that all wasn’t enough, my boss was in the same call and kept “grilling” me through our chat tool whether certain elements were reported correctly or not. I just did not know. And bam – there was that brief moment of “panic”. Had the partner reported this KPI incorrectly the entire past year? Was our performance actually a lot worse? Maybe even worse than our inhouse peer teams’? Holy! Racing train of thoughts in my head.

My heart sunk into my stomach. I managed to confidently share that I would provide detailed answers to the questions after the call and made it through the call.

Right after I started to jump to action (maybe not wildly but definitely unthinking). I wrote an email to the partner, basically now “grilling” them on the details of the KPI, too. Of course I asked for my questions to be answered “immediately”. To make that clear, I invited them to a meeting the next day, a Friday, in the afternoon to go through all details.

Right after I hit send on that meeting invite, I paused. What was happening here? Ha! I had fallen into panic mode. A huge disadvantage of panic is, that our brain is not working properly. I was just acting – unthinkingly. Knowing that this won’t go anywhere (I’ve been around myself for almost 46 years now), I stopped. Took a deep breath, got up from my “couch office” and stepped away to walk around.

While walking I asked myself, what DID I actually know? As in “facts”? Not much. So it was as likely, that the partner had reported everything correctly as it was, that they did not. Hmm. So I went online and did some research on the KPI element that I was not yet familiar with. Facts! And interesting ones, too. My research showed me, that even if we had not reported this 100% correctly, the impact could have only been minimal.

So I did the only right thing. I made a plan, that actually made sense. I reminded myself that we were not curing cancer. Even if this KPI was slightly higher than reported, it would not change the world. And it did not need to be resolved before the weekend. I canceled the meeting for Friday and apologized for the “fire drill” I had caused. Instead I sent a new invite for Tuesday and asked the partner to walk me through the KPI details, the elements I as a German was not used to and how they were managing it. To make myself knowledgeable.

Knowledge is power. But not in the sense some commonly use and understand it (keeping information to themselves). It’s powerful to have the knowledge, as it will make us confident. It provides us with the facts, that we can set against our own assumptions. Since we can’t trust our assumptions, especially not in a moment of panic, facts are a lifeline.

I am lucky. Because I am quite self-aware and was able to stop myself, before I went all crazy with the “poor” partner. They were probably wondering what just had happened. I did apologize for the fire drill, because as a leader, that’s what we should definitely do.

This was a great reminder that, as soon as I start feeling my heart sink and a pit form in my stomach, I need to NOT act. At all.

Instead I should excuse myself (if necessary) and take a short break. Step away and walk a little, as moving our body helps moving our perspective, too. And take a deep breath. Just focus on breathing, can already take our minds off the topic, that causes fear/panic or concern.

Next, if in a similar situation, I should let my leader know he will get his answers, but before we jump to conclusions, I need him to give me the time to research and get the facts.

Yes, there it is again. The best antidote for “panic”, in this sense, is facts. We just need to make sure our assumptions are not clouding our judgement.

If you are suffering from panic attacks or panic disorder, please consider getting professional help! While facts could help you as well, you might need more support to allow those to sink in and my post can’t provide that support. But there is support out there. This page could be a starting point for you. Click here.

For those of us who experienced this brief moment of fear or “panicking” in work or personal life: if we observe ourselves closely and manage to break through the fear by taking a deep breathe, things will likely be just fine. Because even if something went wrong or things are seriously bad, a clear mind will help us find a solution. And I promise, there is one!

Do you agree?

Nannette

PS: The KPIs had been reported correctly, go figure!