We Know What To Do. Lead.

By Erica and Karen

The world never needed people like us more than it does now.

Actual hot wars are underway. People are at odds with each other. Young people are skeptical of their future opportunities. Older people are worried about how they will survive. And few people emerging as real leaders.

We Lustre Ladies have lived through plenty of crises—some personal, some professional, and some national or global. We have learned a few things about crises. The most important thing: leadership is essential.

We know the feeling of shock when the crisis first looms—and the panic when we see a horrifying series of events over which we have no control. We have felt the profound emotional and physical reactions that panic can induce. We dislike being forced to acknowledge that we have no control over key parts of our lives, and we fear what might happen when leadership is lacking.

We also know that at some point in every crisis a leader emerges to take charge. We learned that in 1962, when we were very young, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Erica huddled with her family in New York, in a makeshift bomb shelter stocked with cans of tuna and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Karen was living in England, where her mother said, as she sent her off to school: “I may never see you again.” We were scared.

But then we heard JFK on our small black and white TV sets. He was taking charge, he would come up with a plan despite the gravity of the situation Panic would not get us anywhere useful. Calm leadership would.

There were other crises. In the public sphere, assassinations, the Vietnam war, student protest, Kent State, 9/11, the economic collapse of 2008. Recently, of course, the pandemic. Climate. In our families, all kinds of dramas. Sometimes we could take charge, sometimes not. But we could always be calm and try to find a resolution.

In our professional lives, we learned that the only way to proceed was to keep calm, get the facts, come up with a plan, and execute that plan. We learned that part of our job was to take on the fears of those who were less experienced or less resilient. We learned to hide our fears and act assured. Sometimes fake it til you make it is the only way to go.

We’re in another maelstrom now. We need to lead again. We think the only way to handle conflict is to act calmly, with integrity and kindness. We hope others will see that those of us who have a few decades under our belts have been in places like this before. We know they will resolve if leaders act with calm and reason. Each of us, wherever we are, can bring that message to the worlds we live in.

Lustre Ladies are leaders. It’s our time. Again.