There is a great article from Geoff Ramsey-CEO, Co-Founder of eMarketer on how it’s important to stay balanced during these difficult times. In it he mentions five key ways to keep on track and avoid seeing every article or news report as additional evidence that we are heading towards an inescapable catastrophe.

1. Understand Your Locus of Control
2. Tighten the Spigot
3. Focus on the Opportunities
4. Leverage Data to Construct Opportunistic Experiments
5. Invest in the Future

What is interesting is that these five ways pretty much mirror in sequence how people deal with other stressful situations in their lives. I believe we are still in the early part of this sequence as business owners and consumers try to make sense of all the statistics and negative news which bombards them every day.

But the critical element in this sequence is moving beyond the paralyzing fear which has gripped the markets and realizing that this will turn around and everyone out there has an opportunity to creatively reshape how we do business. I was at a great talk at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of business last night and the speaker Geoffrey Helt reiterated that we are in a transformation right now and as painful as this is at the moment (especially with everything else going on in the economy) will result in new models and ways of conducting business.

We can help to get past this by decreasing the flow of negative news (#2) and promoting the opportunities (#3) inherent in this shift. Turning down the volume allows you to refocus that energy and hear emergent trends in the marketplace.

Finally leveraging data and investing in the future gives you a starting point for investigating how to move ahead. Just remember to balance what is coming in with a grounded sense that standing still won’t work for long; the agile competitors are already looking at opportunities and trying things to carve out a path to new revenue sources and better customer experiences.