Survival isn’t a phase you outgrow in business. It’s a state you re-enter when you feel threatened.
In my experience, there are four core states:
- Survival
- Achievement
- Awareness
- Flow
I’d love to tell you it’s a linear progression and once I “completed” each state, I never went back, but that’s just not true.
These aren’t steps you complete. They’re states you move in and out of, depending on your perspective and capacity.
I’ll cover the states in more detail in future newsletters. Today I’ll describe what happens when you’re pulled back into survival mode and what that looked like for me.
I was hitting all my external achievement metrics and thought I’d finally made it when my Technical Director gave notice. It had taken me years to release the death-grip I had on overseeing all the technical details in the first place.
This felt like proof that I shouldn’t have released control.
With two huge projects nearing completion, I was in a panic. What would the clients and the staff think? What would our competitors say?
Without thinking about it, in desperation I offered him a $50k bonus on the spot if he would stay. He said yes, and the relief was immediate. Problem solved.
He still left 3 months later.
I felt shocked and betrayed. I also felt like a fool because it never occurred to me that anyone would do that. Not only was I out $50k but I lost valuable time I could have been onboarding someone new.
This is a classic example of what happens when you’re pulled back into survival mode. I reacted with fear and urgency and I temporarily lost access to strategic thinking.
In the classic book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes two types of intelligence:
The Body’s Intelligence (System 1) is:
– Fast
– Reactive
– Emotional
– Unconscious
The body’s intelligence is efficient and protective, but it prioritizes speed over accuracy. For input it uses signals from your nervous system, responsible for fight/flight/freeze. It relies on pattern recognition and instinct to:
– Detect threats
– Create urgency
– Narrow options
Strategic Thinking (System 2) is:
– Deliberate
– Analytical
– Reflective
– Conscious
It requires safety, time, and energy to operate effectively. In other words, we can only think clearly when our body is calm. For input it uses values, context, and consequences. It’s responsible for:
– Planning
– Perspective
– Long-term reasoning
We’ve learned to prioritize strategic thinking. But the body’s intelligence evolved first, and for a reason: it keeps us alive. Historically, it carried real information about safety and threat. That’s why, under pressure, it overrides strategic thinking.
This is also why we say we want one thing, yet do another. Your mind doesn’t change, but your state does.
In my case I was thinking, “This makes me look bad. The company’s in danger.” I was feeling tense, frustrated, embarrassed, inadequate. I reverted to firefighting mode, draining my energy by fixing symptoms instead of root causes.
I couldn’t relax long enough to think clearly.
The body’s intelligence runs by default. Strategic thinking is optional and requires the right conditions for it to succeed. What helps me now is becoming conscious of what state I’m in before I act.
But if someone had told me back then to take deep breaths, go for a walk, or do a thought download to get my thoughts onto paper where I could see the feelings they were causing, I would have looked at them like they were crazy.
After all, I was in a crisis. I had to hurry.
I got through that period by doing the only thing I could think of at the time. I jumped back in and took over the technical development while I recruited the right person for the role. It was exhausting.
I once read that we don’t change until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.
For me, the pain of feeling like I was held hostage motivated me to simplify our business model and change the org structure so there were no single points of failure.
And the pain of losing $50k and feeling like a fool motivated me to stop making important decisions when I felt emotionally triggered.
I’m still learning.
I know I’m being pulled back into survival whenever I feel a strong a sense of urgency, or notice “all-or-nothing” thinking.
Now I listen to my body’s intelligence. Those signals are no longer instructions to act. They’re information.
They tell me I need to slow down, breathe deeply, move my body, and give myself enough time and space for strategic thinking to come back online and help me.
It turns out what I learned from that experience was priceless.
