Anger: Stage Two of the Banking Crisis
Today, senior bankers fronted up to a Select Committee to make their apologies. Shortly afterward, BBC ran a chat show and asked the public whether apologies were enough. The public had a lot to say and the BBC presenter was clearly testing the depth of our anger.
Anger is Stage Two in the FIVE stage process of receiving bad news: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
So what does acceptance look like and how do we get there?
David Whyte, corporate poet, tells a good story that helps us understand the beginning and end of the five stage process, what we have to do to move from start to finish, and why it is so difficult to take the first steps.
Whyte was trekking in Nepal. He had left his friends and came, alone, on a ravine with a rope bridge in poor state of repair. He was horrified. It was too dangerous to use the bridge and too late to turn back and rejoin his companions.
So many situations are similar. We are stuck. It is too dangerous to do what we want to do and we cannot immediately see a way out of our predicament. We are overcome by a mix of frustration, anxiety, shame and fear, and are in Stage One and Stage Two. We are ‘all emotion’, and reasonably so. After all, we are in trouble.
But in that funk, we cannot think clearly and cannot find a way out of our dilemma.
Tomorrow, I’ll break the situation into psychological terms and point out what we have to do if we are ever to move on.