How to Show Resilience in a Crisis

  • 2 min read

My grandpa just died. Well, one of them. And I am in a state of total shock.

But it is Sunday night, and a lot of people are still counting on me. Which is why I’m writing this post.

I get that I can get out of everything if I just tell people I have a family emergency. I do, and my emergency is real. My grandpa was only in his early 60’s, and nobody has any clue why he died. He just collapsed. My grandma is completely lost, and my parents are some of the few family members she still has in town.

Worse, the news came just hours after my dad left on a three week business trip to Korea. As I type, he is probably just receiving the news, finally. And he is the one who could be the most helpful dealing with this situation.

There is maybe nothing I can do, yet when I found out what happened I felt an inextricable pull to St. Louis (my hometown). So,  I grabbed my dog and a suitcase full of clothes and got in the car; all the while thanking God that I work from home and my office is basically my computer and my phone.

It is Sunday night, and I have an inbox full of unanswered emails, including one reminding me to write this post. Oops.  [Editor’s note:  Oh, Monica, I wish we had known we definitely would be supportive of you!  Yes, your brand attribute of resilience is shining through.  Our thoughts are with you!]

I’m still writing it though, and that gives me comfort. Because I think an important part of personal branding is resilience. So,  here are my tips on showing resilience through a crisis:

Compartmentalize and carry on

This sounds harsh, but try to put your crisis in a box. Then put the lid on it. I feel like crying now, but I can cry later too; I have the strength to wait a few hours for darkness and a pillow to bury my face in.

And generally, if you can schedule a later time to freak out, that’s good enough to free up part of your mind to focus on an important task. And then you need to use the free part of your mind to tackle your to-do list.

Do everything on your to-do list quicker

I don’t think people should shut down and let their to-do list build up, especially during an emergency. It just makes the whole ordeal worse, knowing you have to deal with your crisis and then when that’s over, deal with a ridiculous amount of stuff that is behind schedule. But, nobody can expect the same level of quality when you have something important nagging at the edges of your mind every time you try to focus.

There is only way to do the same amount of things in a smaller time frame – cut corners. Like this blog post. About my crisis. Written in ten minutes.

Delegate things that you can’t or won’t do

Of course you should still do most of your to-do list –  but realistically, some things are just unimportant. Like the laundry. Wash a load and do the rest next week, really.

There are also some things that are really important, and you have to get them done right. This means #2 won’t work for those tasks, because you can’t cut corners or it will look like a crappy job. So find someone who has the time to do the job correctly.

What else do you do to make it through daily tasks in the midst of a crisis? Do you think showing resilience in a crisis enhances your brand? Or do you think people will understand if you disappear as long as it’s really an emergency?

Picture of Monica O'Brien

Monica O'Brien

Monica O’Brien is an MBA candidate with years of experience in business, strategy, and technology. She currently consults start-ups in the Chicago area on establishing their social media strategies. Monica attends the Chicago Booth School of Business (at the University of Chicago), currently ranked the #1 MBA program in the country by BusinessWeek, and is one of the 2007 Chicago Business Fellows. She concentrates in Marketing, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship. Monica holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, with a minor in Physics, from Truman State University. Her blog, Twenty Set, gives career advice to young professionals. Monica writes candidly about her own experiences. She has also written for Mashable and ProBlogger, and has been featured in major publications like the Christian Science Monitor.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Global English Editing
A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

The Blog Herald
University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

Global English Editing
A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

Global English Editing
Researchers reported in 2026 that they could plant a specific unsolved puzzle into a person’s dreams during REM sleep, and volunteers who dreamed about that puzzle were measurably more likely to solve it after waking up than volunteers who did not

Researchers reported in 2026 that they could plant a specific unsolved puzzle into a person’s dreams during REM sleep, and volunteers who dreamed about that puzzle were measurably more likely to solve it after waking up than volunteers who did not

The Blog Herald
Jordan Peterson opens Rule 6 of “12 Rules for Life” by asking, “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — arguing that the discipline to fix a small mess is the same discipline a marriage, a career, or a country eventually demands.

Jordan Peterson opens Rule 6 of “12 Rules for Life” by asking, “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” — arguing that the discipline to fix a small mess is the same discipline a marriage, a career, or a country eventually demands.

Global English Editing
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore