There are many ways to manage challenging situations. One approach is to follow your principles, translate these into practice and do your best to get positive results.
Different people follow this approach in different situations. Some may aim to follow their principles when focusing on a challenge in their personal or professional life.
Some may aim to follow certain principles when making a decision that could shape the future for other people. They may do this when leading a team, organisation or country.
Imagine that you want to follow elements of this approach in your own way. This involves focusing on the following themes.
Principles
Some people aim to follow certain principles in their lives. They may aim to follow their own moral compass, a spiritual faith or a philosophy they believe in.
They focus on their principles when making decisions, managing situations or working towards a goal. They take this approach when building on successes or managing setbacks.
Different people may follow different principles. Here are some that people mention when describing their approach.
My Principles – The principles
I want to follow in my life are:
To have a positive attitude … To take responsibility … To encourage people … To care for my loved ones … To do work that helps people to achieve success … To find positive solutions to challenges … To do my best during my time on the planet.
Some people follow similar principles in both their personal and professional lives. They may adapt the way they express these principles, however, in order to achieve positive results.
Some may follow specific principles that apply to their profession. These principles provide a compass they can use when making decisions in their daily work.
People who work in medicine, for example, focus on certain ethics that guide their actions. They are encouraged:
To follow the key medical principles – such as being caring, respecting a person’s autonomy and aiming to do good rather than harm;
To apply their medical skills and deliver consistently high professional standards;
To do their best to help the patient and achieve the desired positive results.
Different people follow principles that relate to their particular profession. They may do this when working in healthcare, education, sports, business, government or other fields.
Many people find that their principles gives them strength when tackling challenges. They also provide a compass when making decisions.
Imagine that you want to follow elements of this approach. The first step is to clarify the principles you want to follow in your life. You can then add to these if there are specific principles you want to follow in your in work.
One approach is to start by brainstorming the principles you want to follow. It is then to settle on the top three you believe in. You can also bring these to life by giving examples. Here is the exercise.
Practice
Imagine that you have clarified your principles and aim to translate these into action. This can be relatively simple in everyday life but it can be more difficult when facing challenging situations.
Some individuals actually relish tackling such situations. They sometimes say the following things to themselves.
“This is an opportunity to follow my principles in a tough situation. It is something I have imagined and prepared for. Now is the time to translate these principles into practice.”
Different people follow this approach in different ways. Some people explore the following questions when making decisions and then translating their principles into action.
Different people follow their principles in different ways in challenging times. This was exemplified by how different people behaved during the Covid crisis.
Some people chose to care for their neighbours, support medical staff, supply food banks and help others. Others chose to make a quick profit by selling faulty medical equipment, marketing fake cures or phishing.
Samual and Pearl Oliner have studied when people follow their principles in extremely challenging times. Their books include The Altruistic Personality and Do Unto Others.
The Altruistic Personality chronicles the activities of people who protected Jews during the Holocaust. Up to 500,000 non-Jews risked their own lives to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution.
These were ordinary people, say Pearl and Samuel. They were farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs, factory workers, rich and poor, parents and single people, Protestants and Catholics.
Different people helped the Jews in different ways. Some offered them shelter, some helped them escape from prison and some smuggled them out of the country.
The rescuers committed themselves to helping Jews, knowing that capture would mean death for their families. Why? Many said, “It was the right thing to do.” Individuals also said things like:
“I was always filled with love for everyone, for every creature, for things. I am fused into every object. For me everything is alive.”
“I sensed I had in front of me human beings that were hunted down like wild animals. This aroused a feeling of brotherhood and a desire to help.”
“We had to help these people in order to save them, not because they were Jews, but because they were persecuted human beings who needed help.”
Samuel illustrates the moral of the book by describing his own experiences. As a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Poland, he fled the Nazis after his parents were captured. Knocking on the door of a family he hardly knew, he was taken in by the mother, Balwina.
Protecting him from the Nazis, she gave her instructions. Change his name to Jusek; go to church every Sunday; learn the Catholic Catechism; get a job and ensure nobody saw him undressed.
Balwina protected him for a while, but then the situation became too dangerous. He trekked across the country with other refugees and finally found safety.
Let’s return to your own life. Looking ahead, can you think of challenging situation you may face? What are the principles you may want to follow in this situation? How can you translate these into action?
If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
Positive Results
Some people follow their principles in challenging situations and do their best to get positive results. Sometimes these may be small things, sometimes they may be bigger.
A carer may help a loved one to get through each day … A medic may help a person to heal … An educator may help a dyslexic child to build on their strengths and get a success.
A footballer may use their money to run a foundation for people in their homeland … A mediator may help people to find solutions to a conflict … A scientist may make progress to finding a cure for an illness.
People who follow their principles may get a win each day by being true to themselves. Some may also aim to do positive things that help people or the planet.
Good organisations also aim to follow their principles. This can be relatively easy when things are calm. The hard part is following them in stormy weather. It can therefore be useful to test how to follow the principles in challenging situations.
One company I worked with took this approach. The senior team began by involving key people across the business in agreeing on the principles to follow in the future. These included the following:
Be Professional … Encourage People … Provide Great Service … Help Our Company, Customers And Colleagues To Succeed.
The company then held employee workshops where people explored how to translate these principles into action. It included this exercise.
The Principles Challenge
Choose a situation where it may be challenging to follow the principles.
Clarify the possible options for tackling the challenge together with the pluses and minuses of each option.
Clarify which of these possible options is the one where we can – as far as possible – follow our principles and translate these into action.
The employees threw themselves into the exercise and produced plans for tackling most scenarios. Sometimes there are no easy answers. The key was to encourage people to prepare properly, however, and follow the option that was closest to pursuing the principles.
Following Your Principles
In An Unpredictable World
Great workers, teams organisations often focus on stability, stimulation and success. But this begs a question: How can you maintain stability in an unpredictable world?
One approach is to continue to follow your core principles. These provide an inner compass and consistency in what can sometimes be chaotic circumstances. Let’s explore this theme.
During the past thirty years it has become a cliché to say that we live in a VUCA world. The term was coined in the 1990s to describe a world that had become increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Some people find such a world to be frightening. It creates opportunities for demagogues who promise simplistic solutions or who create scapegoats.
How to live in such a world? How to deal with challenging events in the midst of what sometimes appears to be chaos? As mentioned earlier, one approach is to keep returning to your principles. It is to ask yourself the following questions.
“What are the principles I want to follow in my life? How can I follow these in my daily life and work? How can I translate these principles into action?
You can make your principles the internal compass for your life. These will help to prevent being tossed around by events. When in doubt, you can return to these principles. These can help to provide some stability in your life.
Let’s return to your own life. Imagine that you face a challenging situation in the future. How can you follow your principles then and do your best to achieve positive results?
If you wish, try tackling the final exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
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