Photo Credit: U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Ryan DeBooy

Military Life Lessons: How to make the right decisions in a crisis

A step by step guide

Pete Williams
The Drill Instructor
8 min readMay 1, 2020

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We’re living in unprecedented times. Half the world is in lockdown, not even allowed to leave their homes, while elsewhere others walk around and gather in public recklessly, despite repeated warnings. Hospitals can’t cope because no one could predict something of this magnitude, and initial reports that young people handled the COVID19 well have been blown apart by many cases in the news of them suddenly dying before the test could even come back positive. For the average person, it’s terrifying.

So what do you do?

Step one: don’t panic

It seems so easy to say, doesn’t it? I can tell you from my time in the army though, that the number one enemy to making good decisions is panic. Thankfully, this isn’t a case where you have a moment’s notice that a company of enemy combatants is cresting the hill in front and you’ll have to fight for your life. You have time, and time is the greatest ally you have against panic.

The first step to not panicking is to focus only on what you can control here and now, and what the foreseeable outcomes of those decisions will be. Look too far into the future and you have too many variables. Too many variables is a cause for anxiety, because now things…

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