Muddling Through The Middle

The fun part of the pandemic is over.

There was a fun part? Yes, I understand that sounds insane. We all have been disrupted — many of us haven’t seen loved ones and friends in person, business is a bit more challenging, kids aren’t in the best learning environment (sometimes that might mean they are in your working environment) and of course there are the health effects of COVID-19, sometimes very dire effects.

So, where’s the fun? Again, maybe fun is a little psycho to say, but perhaps it’s a little thrilling. I love the beginnings of movies and novels.

For me, the exposition of characters and setting are the best part. That’s where the magic is in Stephen King’s books and Steven Spielberg’s movies. In the movie “ET,” perhaps the most compelling part was the depiction of a real family in all its loving chaos.

I can leave a movie after the first act and be perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, stuff will happen to these characters, but that’s the boring middle. That’s when you hit the restroom and concession stand. Then go back and wait to see how it ends. (Well, in the old days when we saw movies in theaters.)

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic had all sorts of precedents that gave us a dopamine hit every time we picked up our phone. We all went into this altered state together. We all struggled with video. We all figured out remote working and selling. We all commiserated about the struggles.

Now we are in the boring middle of the pandemic. Or to put it more palatably, we are in the recovery stage.

That is how Catherine Hernandez-Blades, a senior vice president at Aflac, described the three Rs of our collective journey through this crisis: reaction, recovery and reinvention.

She offered this perspective during the American Council of Life Insurers’ virtual annual conference in October. The response period is full of adrenaline and everybody knows what they are marching for.

“Recovery is what I’ll call what we’re going through now,” Hernandez-Blades said. “And that’s the slog. That is the getting used to the new normal that is trying to be productive, when you’re absolutely exhausted, and you’re still trying to get the job done.”

The Boring Middle

Fittingly, this is the middle of this letter, the part you scan to see how it ends — “Will Steve bring the end back to the beginning? Let’s go see!”

Here’s the thing: This is where life happens. This is where we can get lost. This is the vast continent of Wegmans between the produce and the freezers, where your family wanders off and you’re on your own wondering if you really need this red vegetable peeler. This is where you learn to put down the peeler, find the important stuff, and gather your family to make it to the registers safe and sound. Maybe not sound.

“You have to make it through this slog of the recovery period so that you can set yourself up for a very successful reinvention,” Hernandez-Blades said. “That is the nature of how I think businesses should be looking at crises.”

People who have a hard time with focus have a difficult time in this amorphous middle.

Organizational skills and good habits play a part, but mindset has to come first. That was part of Annette Bau’s message in this month’s interview with Paul Feldman.

Bau started in the financial advising business and quickly ran into the deep mud. She was finding little success and heard nothing but negativity about her chances to succeed.

She spent enormous energy and attention on an unsupportive manager and work environment until one day she decided to redirect that energy. Bau instead turned all that energy to her clients. After a while, she racked up successes that led to bigger successes. This is the part of the story where our hero meets seemingly unsurmountable hurdles and, after some struggle, clears them.

Bau used a talisman of a sort, a grid that she describes in the interview with Paul Feldman. It is not a grid that you might imagine would incorporate the total span of failure and success. She uses the grid as a stand-in for that sucky middle.

Below the grid is level one where people are scared. They bully and blame others, and live in a pessimistic and negative state. The grid itself is level two, where people know what they should do, but they are not doing it consistently or not doing it at all; they are living in a volatile state, pinging from highs to lows and back. Above the grid is level three, where people know peace, joy and clarity, and live in a positive state of optimism.

Although the scale seems to range from worst to best, Bau says the middle is actually where people are at the worst stage.

“I actually think people at the grid are more dangerous than those who are above or below,” Bau said.

The middle area has the vantage point of seeing the right action but not doing it. So it is failure wrapped in self-loathing and resentment. This is where most of us live, quite frankly.
As someone muddling through the middle, I can tell you that I have often relied on a tip that Plato offered Aristotle.

The lesson is that when looking at the wide spectrum between cowardice and bravery, you don’t want to be near either extreme. A coward gets nothing done, and fearless people tend to meet an early end.

The key to being brave is doing brave things. Seems simple to say, but choosing the brave option in the next choice is stepping toward bravery. Each step gets a little closer, until we are in the middle zone between bravery and cowardice.

The Triumphant Third Act

We are looking forward to this phase of the pandemic, when an effective vaccine and treatments are widespread, and people can be with others again safely. The economy might bounce back to new heights, and we will absorb the lessons we learned during the plague. We dream of a happy ending.

That all depends on whether we do the right things in this middle period to make that possible, and also to get ourselves on that express train to better days.

Movies where things just magically resolve themselves are unsatisfying. Happy endings must be earned.