Today I participated in a conversation among successful entrepreneurs in a variety of industries about COVID-19’s impact on businesses. COVID-19 is bringing crisis to most companies.

As we talked, I reflected on a perfect storm in my past. Macro political changes were negatively affecting my business, a member of my immediate family had an unexpected life-threatening medical situation, and I was facing personal headwinds with the potential to upend my private life. It was not a fun time. The stakes were incredibly high across the board. One bad decision and life could spiral out of control quickly. I was stressed, to say the least.

I learned things then that I shared today:

• 80-year-old’s lens – Fifty years from now, when I’m in a rocking chair telling my story, what will matter most? Relationships, not accolades or wealth. I needed to align my current actions with this future perspective.
• Priorities – I’m only human. My time and energy are limited, and I can’t be effective in every domain at once. Viewing things through the lens of my elderly self, I prioritized the headwinds pushing at me and put family first. I got comfortable with the idea that other balls would drop and things would get ugly before they would get better.
• Communication – I couldn’t immediately focus on lower-priority headwinds, and there were people I cared about who would be affected by that. I clearly explained my thoughts to them. Some agreed with my priorities and appreciated my honesty. Others were extremely upset. I made sure they all knew what my top priority was, how I would be allocating my energy, and how I came to that decision.
• Focus on the light – I focused on the light at the end of the tunnel, not the darkness of the tunnel I was in. I figured that once I was out of the tunnel, I’d have plenty of time to reflect on why I’d been in it.
• Experienced advisors – I pulled together an informal group of people I respected who had experience in areas in which I was inexperienced (I even sought out and paid one person). I asked them to share their experiences with me and incorporated them into my decision making.
• Emotional control – Emotionally, I was riding a rollercoaster. But I was purposeful and made sure my emotions didn’t dictate my decision-making, my actions, or my words. I took time to talk through my decisions with people I trusted and asked them about my blind spots before I took action.

Did everything turn out perfect? No. Was the process painful? Yup. Could I have done some things better? Absolutely.

In the end, it all worked out. It took a while, but looking back, I’m happy I addressed each headwind separately. The passage of time with no action on some of these problems made them worse in the short-term. But what I would have gained from trying to solve them all simultaneously would have been outweighed by the toll it would have taken on me and the people around me. I don’t think this approach would work for everyone or every situation, but it worked for me in that perfect storm.

If you find yourself buffeted by a perfect storm (and you will if you’re an entrepreneur long enough), take time to think. Navigate it your way—not someone else’s way—consistently with your ethics and morals.