Three First Steps You Can Take in a Time of Rapid Change

Posted on Jan 29, 2025

The executive orders issued over the past week are having profound effects on people, communities, and organizations. While we can’t yet quantify the impact on our field, it’s clear that many museums and museum workers are tracking the news and trying to figure out how the various EOs and directives apply to them. Besides the strain of responding to such disruptions, uncertainty about what may happen in coming weeks can be a significant source of stress. In the coming year, AAM will continue to provide the field with tools, research, and information to make the case for museums as trusted, valued community assets and critical educational, cultural, and scientific institutions in our society. (Our most recent Advocacy Alert addresses the impact of executive orders and pause on disbursement of federal funds.) Today I’m sharing some quick thoughts on how to maintain your well-being, and manage your time and attention, in the face of rapid and profound change.

Step 1: Start from a Stable Base

I want to start by emphasizing the need to care for yourself and those around you. Fostering mental, emotional, and physical health not only minimizes harm, but sets the stage for effective response. If you, or members of your family, participate in sports, you may be familiar with the precept “start from a stable base”—a strong and balanced core. It’s not possible to respond effectively to challenges when you are off balance, or, as the idiom goes, “caught on the back foot.” While self-care may seem out of reach right now, it may be a useful practice to deploy when circumstances permit. With that in mind, here are some resources you might draw upon:

From TrendsWatch, Take Care: Building resilience and sustainable practice addresses the history and importance of the self-care movement, its implications for museum workers, and steps museums can take to care for their staff and community.
Several resources from the estimable Seema Rao of Brilliant Idea Studio:
- An essay on how to set aside time and space for a self-care plan in the workplace.
- Objective Lessons: Self-Care for Museum Workers, 196 pp., digital edition available from Amazon.
- An episode of the MuseoPunks podcast, in which host Jeff Inscho and Suse Anderson interview Seema and Beck Tench to create an Ode to Self-Care.
- A webinar in which Seema joined me to discuss how museum workers can employ self-care to sustain physical and mental health, and how museums can foster self-care in the workplace and create a less stressful work environment.
The Hidden Brain podcast recently aired an episode titled Wellness 2.0: When it’s all too much, in which researcher Sarah Jaquette Ray talks about how we can reclaim our sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of big, systemic problems.

Step 2: Identify Credible, Manageable Sources of Information

The sheer volume of news and commentary about the impact of current events is, frankly, counterproductive. It can be more useful, and healthier, to identify a few credible, useful sources of information to monitor on a regular basis. Here are a few sources that I am using to stay informed:

The National Council of Nonprofits has created a summary, updated daily, of Executive Orders Affecting Charitable Nonprofits, including a list of related actions and capsule analysis of nonprofit impact.
Patrick Reis, senior politics and policy editor at Vox, has created The Logoff newsletter to provide a daily synopsis of political news that allows you to “log off and get back to the rest of your life.” Each entry summarizes what’s going on in the White House, provides some historical perspective, comments on the impact, and offers some thoughts on what may come next.
The weekly NPR Politics Newsletter is also a good source of “political news without the noise.”

Step 3: Organize Your Mental Inbox

I’ve written in the past about the importance of establishing healthy filters for consuming content. That is more important than ever, given the pace of change under the new administration. How can you ensure you stay informed of things you need to know without becoming overwhelmed? Consider creating categories to organize the information pouring into your feeds. As you sort through the headlines, identify whether a piece of news:

Has immediate impact, for your organization, your family, yourself. For example, might your museum need to remove material from its website, reassign staff, or cancel government-funded events or contracts? This is your priority basket, for your attention even if all else gets filtered out.
May potentially have impact, depending on how things play out. Some of the recent executive directives can be challenged in court, require legislative approval, or must go through additional processes before they can take effect. To help identify what you might flag as having potential impact, it may help to review this explanation from National Public Radio on the difference between presidential orders, memorandums, and proclamations.
Is of concern, but is not something you have the responsibility, or even the ability, to cope with yourself. To paraphrase something Dr. Ray says in the Hidden Brain interview (above), the mental suffering we inflict on ourselves does not, itself, make the world a better place.
Is noise you can, and should, ignore. Some of the issues raised in press and commentary are speculative at this moment—worrying about what might happen but hasn’t happened yet. Learn to filter: is it something you could prepare for? Does it increase stress without providing useful, actionable information? Scrolling social media feeds, be alert to memes, AI generated fakes, and misinformation that may just make things worse. (Though if a little bit of meme humor makes you feel better, then consume as needed.)

As always, I will do the best I can to search, filter, analyze, summarize and share news that can help you respond to current events and plan for the immediate future.

Warmest regards,