Everything in the world feels like it’s falling apart and you own a local small business. How in the world do you keep it going so that you’re still standing when everything seems to calm down?

Today we’re talking about how to pivot your business and handle the chaos when everything in the world seems to stop. We’re not going to dive into the C-word. But we are going to talk about how the heck do you keep your business going? And yourself going when everything in the world seems to stop.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have spent Oh, I don’t know how long has it been a week trying to wrap my brain around what in the world is happening across the world with a Coronavirus? Oh, I said I wasn’t gonna say it the C-word. Because for me, it really feels like an out of body experience. And I’ve had a hard time wrapping my brain around.

How do I still run a business when it feels so trivial and when there are such big pressing things going on? And how do I support others whose entire livelihood and impact are going to be affected when people can no longer come to their doorsteps, and if they can’t move what they do easily to online spaces?

I want to walk through the process of what I’m doing and what I’m I’m walking my clients through just in case it’s helpful for anybody else who, like me is kind of been in this Limbo state of wanting to do something, wanting to make sure I’m active and doing all the right things and also at the same time feeling exactly paralyzed and frozen and not really sure how to take the next step or what the next step looks like.

I heard a Facebook Live from my husband’s CEO talking through shock and symptoms of shock and what we’re going through as a nation in a world and it really helped clarify for me why I feel the way I do and why I’m kind of stuck in business in life at this exact moment.

If your inclination right now if you’re like naturally pausing or freaking out a little bit, that’s totally normal. I think a lot of us are just still trying to figure out what’s happening, what’s going to happen. How bad is this going to get? Are we going to be safe? Is the economy going to collapse?

So I did some research into symptoms of emotional shock because no one is talking about how everyone is feeling across the world right now. Now emotional shock, that’s not a clinical term. I am not a clinician and I am not diagnosing anybody. Let me just make that disclaimer.

But I thought some of the symptoms and the ways that they manifest in people were really important because I am feeling them a lot right now. So for example, adrenaline rush. That’s the feeling when you either can’t fall asleep or you’re feeling a little bit hyper, like your skin’s buzzing a little bit.

Oftentimes you could feel sick to your stomach or just sick about whatever happening or you know, just kind of like all ill like a general malaise and not thinking straight. These are all potential symptoms of emotional shock.

Another one is feeling disconnected from what’s happening. That’s what kind of clicked for me because I’m like, ‘Yeah, I do kind of feel like I’m not engaged in any of it because I don’t really understand and can’t fully wrap my brain around it.’

Another symptom is feeling like I’m pulling away from things because of intense emotions. As a symptom, intense emotions are important when they are not normal for you, whether you want to laugh or cry, or even go and physically run away.

Two other symptoms or signs are feeling unusually exhausted or all over the place. Again, this is not a diagnosis of anything, but it was helpful for me to take this possible list of symptoms for emotional shock and compare it to what maybe some of us are feeling right now because it also helps you feel normal and not make super rash decisions.

Now, that we’ve addressed how so many people are feeling right now AND that it’s normal, I want to walk through...