When I coach teenagers in soccer, a part of my job is to use my experience as a lifelong player to help them manage through often chaotic situations. On the sidelines during games, they’ll most often hear me say, “Relax. Relax with the ball.”

Never is the game more chaotic than when the ball enters the penalty box, the area closest to the goal. Defenders are frantically trying to clear the ball out to relieve the pressure, and the opposing team’s attacking players are trying just as feverishly to put the ball in the net. Even top professional goal scorers struggle to overcome the anxiety of these moments of the game, often making bad decisions and rushing shots that go way off target.

I try to coach my players to behave in this more hectic section of the field as they would any other; take your time to control the ball, get your head up to see the field and make a good decision. I tell them to find “a moment of calm.”

Now that COVID-19 has emptied everything from airports to stadiums to schools to offices, the world outside my home is different. A glaring indication is the general absence of airplanes that normally fly over us at a steady pace on their descent to O’Hare International Airport. I would call it an eerie quiet.

But compared with the chaos of the buzzing media blitz, the conspiracy theories and falsehoods spreading in a viral game of telephone, and the panicked Black Friday-style grocery shopping, to me it’s more of a welcome respite.

COVID-19 has presented all manner of opportunism. There’s the financial: time to cash in on Purell and Clorox, on home-office video conference technologies and on grocery delivery systems. There’s the political: a timely weapon to use to try and persuade voters in an election season. There’s the confrontational: the quick propensity to focus anger and point fingers. There’s the social: the self-anointed experts pontificating on Facebook, and people joining the herd at grocery stores.

Now that there’s a retreat to the home, there’s a more important opportunity — to take a step back and consider what really matters. Above all is ensuring the health and safety of your family, your coworkers and community. It takes consideration and planning, an adherence to common-sense best practices, and cooperation among people. More fundamentally, it takes caring about people.

At the most basic level, the meat industry does so by feeding people all over the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for the meat industry to fine-tune and showcase the advanced biosecurity, food safety and supply chain systems it uses to fulfill that noble function.

Moreover, it’s an opportunity to highlight the engine that makes it all run — people — and the need for a healthy and reliable workforce. Yes, illnesses and resulting absences threaten to compound existing labor constraints, and it’s an opportunity to push for long-term federal relief.

But first, executives and managers, take a moment … to get control, to see what’s immediately in front of you, and to make the best decisions to help you execute in the midst of this chaos. Think: In what ways are we taking care of the people we already have on staff? In what ways are we prioritizing their health and safety above all else? In what ways are we helping to make them whole?

Think of my colleague, who recently saw the last two rolls of toilet paper on a local store shelf but left them and walked away, having thought, “Someone will need these more than I do.”

He found a moment of calm.

Editor's note: This blog is adapted from an editorial published in the April issue of Meatingplace magazine.

A moment of calm

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