A survey released today showed that the UK public has very little confidence in the information that it is receiving about the CV-19 crisis. Surprisingly, to some, the Government came out as well as the more reputable media, and the only beacon of light was the health service itself.
So how do we cope mentally with the amounts of news, information, social media that we are being inundated with, and successfully looking after our families in the lockdown and, meanwhile search for plan B?
This week, I was interviewed by two journalists for an industry-specific publication. They explained that their industry was expected to suffer badly as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Potentially it won’t recover…
Three tips;
- News unfolds on a daily basis – there is a natural cycle to this. So you DO NOT need to know anything more than once a day. Stop checking it!
- Keep to text-based media rather than audio-visual. The AV is geared to excite and provide minimal insight. Ignore this. Concentrate on the informed, in-depth analysis. And choose a channel that you trust. So many news channels are highly biased and not at all independent – find one that suits your world view, by all means, but make sure that it is independent and informed.
- Bookmark the rest of the news! The media have been so keen to spread doom and gloom that they have pushed almost everything else onto other pages of their websites. Yet, life IS going on elsewhere. Find the “rest of the news page” and put a quick link (aka bookmark) on your browser home page to it – this way you get the real news and not the hype.
Dr Graham Wilson is an executive confidant and leader of the University of Oxford’s Coaching Programmes. He was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship of the IOD in 1993.
This is one of a series of items appearing on the IOD Global blog (blog.iodglobal.com)
