The Pandemic From a Meaning and Purpose Perspective: Communicate

This is part two of a three-part “survival guide” to the coronavirus/COVID-19 Pandemic. In part 1, I determined to do something active that had a chance of increasing my connections to others. I also allowed myself a little venting and used humor (tried to use humor, at least) to cope with the bewildering state of life. Those four strategies—active coping, communicating, a little venting and using humor—are parts of a good crisis survival guide.

Here in part 2, I want to share the early lessons I learned going through the unveiling of this crisis because I think they will continue to be useful as future conditions will require constant adaptation.

I’m a university psychology professor, and around March 6 suspected I could see what was coming, and I began preparing the 100 or so students in my positive psychology class. Through that process, I learned these three lessons. I hope that they are helpful to you, especially those of you who are in a position of helping others understand what is happening with the pandemic. These lessons are most applicable in small groups rather than large corporations or organizations, but they each can be adapted to your specific context.

Here are those lessons:

1. Problem-solve openly
2. During a flood of electronic communication, a little old-fashioned talking goes a long way
3. Model critical thinking

Problem-Solve Openly. Once Northern Italy went into quarantine, I felt we were running out of class time to talk about our likely future with more seriousness. Initially, I just wanted to air some of the anxiety I suspected students were beginning to feel as more and more alarming news stories circulated.

In early March, we started having regular chats about what was happening. In fact, most of the lecture time after March 6 was spent answering questions, batting down urban legends, formulating plans, and just generally trying to be clear about what was likely to happen next. Students wanted to be able to understand the thought process behind the decisions others were making. They wanted to share their perspective, hear whether various rumors were true, and work through the kinds of changes that made sense to them.

I encourage you to open up your own problem-solving and preparations with the people in your lives. We often think that if we “show our work” people will lose confidence in us. Sometimes that is true, but this crisis has shown us the perils of confidently blasting plans and communications at people only to have to change them a day or even an hour later.

A Little Old-Fashioned Talking Goes a Long Way. After the first coronavirus class session, students told me that no one was telling them anything about the situation and appreciated someone actually speaking out loud about it.

Now, they were receiving most of the same emails and had access to all the news stories and analyses that I had, but all those words on a screen and pontificating videos overwhelmed them. My own Inbox is pretty hilarious now that every business that somehow got my email address is sending me their “COVID-19 Response.” Communications strategists are undoubtedly advising clients to “stay in touch with your customers.”

Again, sometimes that is true, but when I’m trying to find out whether my aged relatives can make it to their physical therapy or surgical appointments, I don’t need to hear how companies that sell me chocolate, running shoes, socks, or mulch are “responding.” A crisis is actually a great opportunity to tone it down, be intentional with communication, and use more personal strategies to get the key information to those who need it.

While we are keeping our distance, the challenges around communication increase, but I would encourage you to resist the temptation of relying on email blasts, and instead hold virtual town halls, live chat discussions, or even recorded video messages to restore some element of human, two-way communication.

Email blasts are not the same thing as communication. My students still did not know what to do, did not know what was expected of them, did not know how to plan for spring break, did not know if they would get severely sick, and on and on. Somehow, they felt that talking with me was more helpful than all the emails and news stories they’d received from the experts. I know very little about viruses, infectious diseases, epidemiology, medicine, or even hand washing. So why was it helpful to engage in a little old-fashioned talking?

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Model Critical Thinking. I may not be an expert in much, but I’m good at being authentic and vulnerable, and that serves me well when I work through problems with people. What really opened the door for my students was when I started on an authentic complaint about my university’s first major policy enactment in response to the virus. All non-essential international travel was banned. This announcement was a huge disappointment to me and many others. Just in my own little world, this decision was quite costly financially to me and those who were hosting me for talks abroad. But once it was out of my hands, I was able to move past that disappointment and start working toward contingency plans with my hosts.

What I really struggled to let go of, however, was a logical inconsistency. At the time of the travel ban, there were more Coronavirus/COVID-19 cases in my home state of Colorado than there were in many entire countries, despite the practically nonexistent testing in the US at the time. If fear of spreading the virus was so heightened that I was prevented from traveling to a country with very few cases, why was it OK to for me and my 100 beloved, but demonstrably grubby-handed, students to gather in tight quarters in a room that sees perhaps 700 grubby-handed students pile in and out during a typical day? Why was domestic travel to states with even higher numbers of confirmed cases OK? Or the converse, why was it OK for me to travel from a relatively high-case state to states that had few or now cases?

It made no logical sense to me. And, perhaps to their initial alarm, I opened up to my students.

I didn’t talk about how excited I had been to take my first trip to Brazil, or how I had worked for weeks on a retreat I had planned to lead in Bali. Those things mattered to me, but were irrelevant to how we should have been making decisions about the pandemic. What really mattered was using rational thought to make sense of the information we had.

Standing awkwardly in front of the class, trying to remember not to touch my face or move around the room like I normally do, I openly worked through the implications of the travel suspension. Either it was a silly overreaction to an innocuous threat (a position supported by the fact that we were all sitting together in tight quarters discussing this), or it was an inadequate response to a serious threat (a position supported by the stated concern about containing the spread of the virus). Together, we used additional information, such as the containment efforts in Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and China, and the unabated spread of the virus to decide that we were facing a serious threat. I speculated that the university would need to prioritize health and safety above all else and would want to avoid encouraging a spread of illness it was not equipped to handle.

Therefore, when I shared my hunch that we would not be meeting again after spring break, they were able to follow, and evaluate, my logic. We talked about the symptom set and why some groups seemed to be at heightened risk of complications and potentially death. We talked about how a roomful of young people had a vital role to play in protecting those vulnerable groups. We discussed information from our university and various state governments and health organizations to estimate the odds that any of us in the room would die if we didn’t belong to a vulnerable group. Students discussed how they might prepare for upcoming disruptions, how they might help their parents and grandparents. They were receptive and seemed to get it. Most importantly, they really understood what I knew as a fact, versus what I guessed as a hypothesis, and they understood my reasoning and could do reasoning of their own.

I moved my exams online on March 11 and bade a frankly emotional farewell to my students. Teaching my positive psychology course is one of the true highlights of my job, and we form close bonds.

I told them I thought there was a 0% that one of them would die from the virus, but that there was a 95% chance that we would not be seeing each other again.

They didn’t act shocked, they didn’t panic. They said thanks and we all wished each other a safe few months ahead.

No one actually knows what is coming next. This pandemic is both better and worse than we could have imagined. The true costs to communities, professions, and families will be borne out over months and years, not days and weeks, and it is unclear what kind of world we will create when it is all behind us.

One of the things that most irritates normal, well-adjusted people when they talk to scientists is how we (as a psychology researcher, I’m generously including myself among the scientists) tend to speak about probabilities, trends, models, and support for hypotheses rather than what will happen, what we must do, and what will fix this problem once and for all. I think it is worth the investment, though, in processing what we know openly, directly, and with our powers of critical thinking. There will be no magic wands or reset buttons. We may need to change course in subtle ways many times. We will need to find ways to create a shared understanding with each other to survive. But if we do so, we may not only survive this pandemic but craft a better future.

In Part 3, I will focus on how we can prepare for what comes after the pandemic. I don’t mean investing in beaten-down value stocks or figuring out how to liquidate 800 cans of hoarded refried beans for a profit. I mean preparing for meaning and purpose during and after the pandemic crisis.