Fire drills in your business are going to be unavoidable, but you get to choose how you react to them. A few weeks ago while getting my son ready for school, my husband thought that he may have a fever and decided to not send him in. I knew that it was most likely just from being under a ton of blankets all night, and sure enough throughout the day he was fine. Naturally, this got me to thinking about how you are going to experience these types of “fire drills” or potential emergencies in your business. Whether they’re your own or fire drills created by clients or your team, the way that you react to them is important.

I am by no means perfect at this, and I’m guilty of overreacting just as much as the next person. It’s been something that I have learned to work on so that I can remain cool, calm, and collected in the face of an emergency. We have fire drills that come up in business a lot and sometimes I react to them, sometimes I don’t. The more or less that we react to them, the easier and faster we’re going to be able to recover and grow from them to reach our goals. Rather than placing yourself in reactive mode when these things happen, take a step back and really make sure that your reaction is appropriate and is keeping you calm about the situation.

With all of that said, for me, when I look at all of this stuff, I start to feel like, “Wow, how many times did I have a negative reaction to a fire drill that wasn't really anything of any importance?”. I know that I’m guilty of this. I share this with you because I always want to be real and transparent with you about this. I want you to think about the things that you are reacting to and that are giving you headaches in your business and causing fire drills. Are those the things that you should be focusing on? If not, try to step away from the situation the next time this happens and really assess before moving forward with any action.