Trusting Our Female Intuition: or, as I prefer to say, our observation skills

How do we learn to listen to our Brunos?

Joan Didion famously wrote that ‘life changes in the instant’, but that’s not always true. In the days, weeks, months, even years before a disaster hits, there are usually warning signs. Lucy Easthope is an emergency planner who supports communities in the aftermath of crises, and advises about warding off catastrophe and planning ahead for how to manage. In her eye-opening and insightful new book, Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis, she talks about how planners use a ‘disaster recovery graph’ which maps the emotional peaks and troughs that individuals and communities typically experience over the timeline of a crisis. That timeline doesn’t begin in the instant of the catastrophe taking place, but before it, in the run-up, when the crisis is incubating and there are hidden cues, cut corners and near misses. In some cases, if these warning signs had been recognised and acted upon, disaster could have been averted. In others, the tragedy could never have been st…