We all know the typical ways to network: by attending industry mixers, business dinners, and conferences. But of course none of those have been possible over the past few months, with so much of the world in quarantine. And even as various regions start to open up, large gatherings will be slow to come back, and long-distance travel will be limited. How should you be making new professional connections during this time? And how can you strengthen relationships inside your company when many people are still working remotely?

As executive coaches who work with leaders across the globe, we’ve spent years helping clients learn to build relationships virtually. As in the past, it’s still useful to deepen existing relationships and cultivate new ones by engaging on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. But in this unique time, we’ve identified several other strategies you can use to create connections. Here are three to consider.

Turn canceled conferences into private networking opportunities.

Since the pandemic began, many conferences and other large gatherings have been canceled, but even in their absence, you can use them as a way to meet people. Take a look at the conferences scheduled for earlier in the year along with those that would have been coming up. Identify participants who were supposed to attend or speak or who came in prior years. (If you don’t have the list, you can often email conference organizers and ask for it.)

Choose five to 10 people you’d like to connect with, and find something you have in common that might make them interested in meeting you (for instance, you’re both involved in robotics research, or you’re alumni of the same university). You can email them or send a message on LinkedIn saying something like, “We were both planning to attend [conference] this year. I had been hoping to meet you there, because I saw that we’re both involved in robotics research and I thought it might be interesting to chat. Since the event was canceled and we’re all grounded for the moment, I thought I’d reach out virtually instead. Let me know if you’d like to meet for a coffee over Zoom.”

One of Alisa’s clients, the CEO of a media company, employed this strategy. After a major conference he was planning to attend got canceled, he reached out to some of the people he had wanted to meet there and convened a virtual cocktail party. He developed relationships with interesting new contacts and was invited to speak at a future event.

Rethink geographic boundaries.

Before the world went remote, most professionals’ standard networking impulse was to focus on the people around them. We experienced this ourselves as hosts of regular dinner gatherings in New York City. When creating guest lists, we’d think about local colleagues and would tell out-of-town contacts to “let us know when you’re going to be in New York.” Now those boundaries have receded, and as we’ve shifted to virtual cocktail gatherings, we’ve realized that we’re free to invite people from around the world with whom we wouldn’t have previously been able to connect. During one recent Zoom networking event we brought together colleagues from Boston, New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Austin.

We’ve noticed that our corporate coaching clients are applying the same principles and similarly taking a more expansive view. In the past, they might not have invited colleagues from different geographic regions to participate in a meeting if everyone else attending was in the same office. Now that so many of us are remote, they’re more comfortable inviting colleagues regardless of where they’re located.

Invite senior leaders to your online working group meetings.

The current crisis has raised a host of new issues for business leaders to consider, whether it’s the future of your industry, how your company is responding to particular challenges (from supply chain to marketing to employee engagement), or the future of global work. This presents a unique opportunity for you to proactively convene an informal working group to discuss these issues. In some corporate cultures, you can simply invite a few people and have it grow from there. In others, it may be important to check in with your manager first.

After gathering a group of peers a few times and establishing that the conversations are valuable, you can, where appropriate in your corporate culture, reach out to senior leaders and invite them to join a session, as either a participant or a guest speaker. A drop-by from a high-level leader may have been difficult, if not impossible, under normal circumstances — but with everyone working virtually (and the leader not traveling), a 15-minute appearance is often surprisingly easy to facilitate.

One of Alisa’s clients is the CHRO of the U.S. division of a Fortune 500 company. In the early days of the pandemic, she took the initiative to convene a regular call with her peers in other geographies. As the crisis has played out, she has invited multiple company leaders, including the global CEO, to take part. That got her onto his radar, and he now calls her personally to discuss how the various regions are doing.

Even though networking events have been canceled, there are many ways for you to build professional relationships. By employing these three strategies, you’ll emerge even stronger once in-person events start up again.

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When it comes to hiring diverse candidates, good intentions do not necessarily lead to good results. I once met a talent acquisition leader at a large global technology company who had changed the organization’s hiring process in multiple ways to bring in more diverse candidates but was frustrated by the lack of progress. Internal analyses showed that even though the company had interviewed a higher number of non-white candidates in preliminary rounds, their final hires were still overwhelmingly white.

I’ve seen this same situation play out in multiple organizations and industries and often it’s because well-intentioned hiring managers end up inadvertently weeding out qualified candidates from underestimated backgrounds because of unconscious bias.

Changes in process and diversity initiatives alone are not going to remedy the lack of equal representation in companies. Individual managers who are often making the final hiring decisions need to address their own bias.

But how? In my experience, there are several things managers can do.

Before taking any steps, however, it’s important to accept that no one is pre-loaded with inclusive behavior; we are, in fact, biologically hardwired to align with people like us and reject those whom we consider different.

Undoing these behaviors requires moving from a fixed mindset — the belief that we’re already doing the best we possibly can to build diverse teams — to one of openness and growth, where we can deeply understand, challenge, and confront our personal biases.

Here are the specific strategies I recommend.

Accept that you have biases, especially affinity bias

Even if you head up your organization’s diversity committee, even if you are from an underrepresented community, you have biases that impact your professional decisions, especially hiring. Affinity bias — having a more favorable opinion of someone like us — is one of the most common. In hiring this often means referring or selecting a candidate who shares our same race or gender, or who went to the same school, speaks the same language, or reminds us of our younger selves.

Microsoft’s head of global talent acquisition, Chuck Edward, told me that affinity bias is widespread in hiring and often leads people to seek out, and hire, candidates who “look, act, and operate” like them. He admits falling into this trap himself. “I’ve had to be very careful to address it head on,” he says.

Create a personal learning list

Spend time reading and learning about the experience of underrepresented communities at work. Among the books I recommend are So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and What Works by Iris Bohnet, which was recommended to me by Michelle Gadsen-Williams, a managing director and the North America lead for inclusion and diversity at Accenture. I’ve found Harvard Business Review’s “Women at Work” podcast to be an excellent resource as well.

Seek out resources that you wouldn’t normally come across and look for books and articles from underrepresented communities. In the U.S., that might include books that include the perspectives of immigrants, people with disabilities, and native American and indigenous communities.

Not only will it help you uncover the biases you’re bringing to hiring decisions, it will also equip you with the framework and language to recognize, and possibly call out, bias in your company’s processes.

Ask: “Where is, or could, bias show up in this decision?”

One team I work with had hiring managers who would often flippantly say phrases like: “We should hire this person. I could easily see myself having beers with them after work.” Or “This candidate is qualified, but really isn’t a cultural fit.”

These comments, laden with unconscious bias, would go unchecked. When the leadership team, which was entirely male and white, asked for my help in creating guidelines to reduce bias in the hiring processes, I suggested they start candidate debrief meetings by asking, “Where could unconscious bias show up in our decisions today?” This intervention, along with other process changes, led the team to hire two women leaders.

By explicitly acknowledging that we all have unconscious biases and creating a space to call them out, there’s an opportunity to hold ourselves and each other accountable.

Reduce the influence of your peers’ opinions on your hiring decisions

In the past, Microsoft would allow hiring managers to see each other’s feedback on a candidate, before it was their turn to interview them. “Everybody on the interview loop could see what others were saying — the words that were used, what was said about a candidate — before interviewing them,” says Edward. “It’s real clear how that could lead to biases and being influenced by someone else’s views.”

Recently, Microsoft made the feedback loop private — a hiring manager can’t log in to the tool and see their colleagues’ feedback until they’ve entered their own assessment of a candidate first. Edward says that the change has allowed people the freedom to form their own opinions, without being influenced by their peers – or their bosses.

Even if you don’t use a software tool for hiring loops, refrain from comparing notes verbally until you have formed your own point of view on a candidate. I recommend writing down your feedback on the candidate and whether you’re inclined to hire them, before you debrief with your colleagues. Again, ask yourself as you’re writing: “How could bias have impacted my assessment and recommendation?”

Use a “flip it to test” approach

In 2017, Fortune 500 executive Kristen Pressner gave a brave TEDx talk, where she admitted to harboring gender bias against women leaders, despite identifying as a woman herself. Pressner developed a technique to disrupt bias — ask yourself, if you were to swap out the candidate from an underrepresented background with one of your more typical hires, would you have the same reaction? For example, if a woman of color candidate speaks passionately, and you’re less inclined to hire her because you think of her as “angry,” would you use the same word if a white man spoke the same way?

“Flip it to test it” is a relatively easy way to call out bias as it happens. In a recent hiring decision that I was part of, a highly qualified woman of color was approached to apply formally for a role she was already informally performing the duties for. Since the organization was already familiar with her work and performance, the hiring manager saw no harm in having her skip the early parts of the hiring process. But some colleagues expressed concern about “bending the rules” for her. During the discussion, I flipped the concern by asking two questions: Would we have the same reservations if we were circumventing the traditional hiring process for a white person? In the past, when all the candidates we were considering where white men, did we focus extensively on the fairness of the hiring process? In both cases, the hiring committee unanimously answered: no. We were able to recognize our bias and eventually made an offer to the candidate.

Understand how reducing bias could personally benefit you 

Diversity in our workplace makes us smarter, more innovative, and promotes better critical thinking. It’s not only the organization that benefits, we personally have a lot to gain by working with people from all different backgrounds. By recognizing how we benefit from reducing our own bias — rather than focusing on the ROI for the company — we’re likely to be more motivated to take action.

As Gadsen-Williams told me, “A culture of equality is a multiplier. We can’t achieve a culture of equality if personal unconscious bias is not addressed first and foremost.”

“I’m feeling deeply unsettled,” my client we’ll call Keller, the CEO of an investment firm, said to me.

“Of course,” I could reply, “we’re in unsettling times. Especially for you, a CEO whose organization is disrupted. You’re worried about cash and operational continuity. And you’re in the investment community. How can you not be unsettled in the face of such dramatic and unpredictable market swings? I totally get it.”

That would have been the most obvious thing for me to say. It would reflect my empathy, my understanding, my connection, my own knowledge and expertise. We’d both feel good about the exchange. But it would have been a mistake.

A mistake because, especially in this very new, very unique moment, there’s a response that’s even more powerful when someone expresses their vulnerability. A response that’s important and necessary before empathy. And that’s curiosity.

Because the truth is, I don’t know what’s going on for Keller. In fact, Keller hardly knows what’s going on for Keller. We’re on new ground here. And while everything I could have said could have been true, I don’t actually know what is true. Which means that before demonstrating my understanding, I have to develop it. I need to ask questions and be open and listen and learn. Which takes humility. Humility is not knowing. And that, eventually and almost always, leads to empathy which leads to compassion.

So when Keller told me he was feeling deeply unsettled, I asked him to tell me more. I’m glad I did.

See, Keller didn’t talk to me about his role as CEO, his operational challenges or his investments. He’s a solid leader, and like so many other solid leaders I know, he’s sure-footed and capable in times of crisis. No, Keller wasn’t struggling as a leader. He was struggling as a human being. Keller talked about feeling scared and lonely and sad and a little lost. He’s feeling the weight of these times, of the uncertainty in human life. He’s feeling the challenges of his family and the psychological shift of being alone in his house versus in an office.

One of the effects of social distancing and working from home is that we are left, much more than usual, with ourselves. Who are we when we are no longer reflected in the faces of the people around us? Who are we without all the external recognition? No fancy clothes and cars to project an image. No praise or even rejection. No feedback at all to define us. This can leave us feeling lost. Or, as Keller put it, unsettled. Maybe you’re feeling a little of that?

I know I am. In a day, I feel everything, often inexplicably. Joy and sadness. Thrill and anger. Frustration and ease. And, of course, fear. But also, of course, excitement and connection. To feel it all requires courage. Emotional courage. Which is why, as important and difficult as it is to stay curious about others, there’s something equally important — and far more difficult — to do: We need to stay curious about ourselves.

That is what is required of us now, in this new moment. A moment that is not simple, clear, or expected. Being curious about ourselves is how we begin to know — really know — who we are. That can be scary. But also, possibly, exciting and freeing. The hardest part? Slowing down enough to actually feel. Do you have the courage to slow down?

You need courage because slowing down will, by its very nature, bring up unfamiliar and unsettling feelings. And, to avoid feeling, we typically move. Over the past few weeks I have often felt lost, surrounded by people scrambling to move. They are making plans, pivoting their businesses, voicing opinions, networking, setting direction, filling their schedules with Zoom calls. I’m on some of those Zoom calls and when, after listening to how everyone else is pivoting, people ask me how I’m pivoting, my answer is, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know what to do. I am not driven to act. And that scares me. What if I’m left behind? And then it occurs to me that avoiding the fear of being left behind is one of the reasons I act. But it is the wrong reason to act. So I tap into my courage and I don’t act. And when I don’t act, I am, literally, left behind. All I’m left with is me.

And then it occurs to me that, maybe, painfully, this is part of what this moment is about: I am learning about myself. More importantly, I am learning to tolerate myself, to stay with myself, even in my fears, even in my insecurities. And when I see that I am capable of staying with myself in my fears and insecurities, I no longer have to act to avoid them. Which leads to a new confidence, an irrepressible power, and a profound freedom to act — not out of fear and insecurity — but out of purpose and connection and strength and longing and love.

There is a way in which this pandemic may be calling us to slow down and listen. What if we resist the urge to act — to just do something — and, instead, stop doing? Just be present. What you discover may surprise you. When Keller slowed down enough to feel, his ultimate experience wasn’t depression. It was optimism. “A journey of self-discovery and radical acceptance,” he told me, “an atonement with the soul.”

So, I ask you, in this moment, can you stop everything for a beat, take a breath, and be curious? What are you feeling?

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As my class began on Thursday (March 10^th), I looked around at my undergraduate and graduate students. Their faces were somber. I asked how they were doing, but I already knew. Harvard and Princeton had, days earlier, announced that they were closing in response and as a precaution to the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife, a professor at Holy Cross, told me the night before that her students were informed they would have a week to pack up and leave their dorms.

My students were waiting to get an email from Christina Paxon, the president of Brown University. It was rumored that Brown may be closing for the rest of the semester and the announcement was scheduled to go out early that morning. But here we were, at 9am, sitting in a technology-free seminar without access to our phones or computers.

Even though their devices were off, my students’ phones were burning holes in their pockets. My tech-free policy was blocking them from receiving vital information. Did the email go out yet? What was it going to say? Their slumped shoulders told me that they were in no mood for debate. They needed to know what was going to happen to them today. This email was going to affect their lives in significant ways — particularly my seniors’, some of who were holding back tears. Their “senior spring” was destined to go down in the record books as the most memorable, and not in a good way.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this pandemic is the uncertainty we are all facing. Uncertainty about how contagious and deadly Coronavirus is. Uncertainty about the travel that we have planned. Uncertainty about the economy. Uncertainty about our jobs.

Yet, uncertainty can be compared to a virus itself, one that is only adding fuel to the anxious fires burning in many of us. This is because uncertainty triggers the fear centers in our brains. Knowing how this process works, however, can help us take proper countermeasures and develop better mental hygiene.

First, it’s important to understand that fear is a basic human mechanism. It helps us survive. When something scares us, we are triggered, and through fear, we learn to practice behaviors that will help us avoid that danger in the future. When we successfully avoid that danger, we then feel rewarded. We inherited this three-step mental process from our ancient ancestors: see saber-toothed tiger (trigger), run away (behavior), live to tell our kids to avoid that part of the savanna (reward).

While fear helps us survive, when mixed with uncertainty, it can lead to something quite bad for our mental health: anxiety. And when anxiety is spread by social contagion — defined as the spread of affect from one person to another — it can lead to something even more problematic: panic. Just like walking into a party and suddenly feeling like you’re in a “social mood” when you hadn’t been moments before, fear and anxiety are two emotions that spread easily from one person to another.

Worse, thanks to social media, you don’t need to be in physical contact with people to catch an “emotional infection.” While many people on social media have good intentions and intend to share useful information about Coronavirus with the masses, as they report supply shortages and speculate on how bad things might get, they may be inadvertently doing the opposite. Constantly scrolling through the latest news on your phone or desktop is like walking by people who are sneezing fear. The more you read, the more you are likely to take on their worry, and spread it. The problem is that these emotions keep us from being able to think straight, and when overdone, they no longer protect us from dangers. Rather, they become the danger.

There are ways to combat this. Perhaps one that may be really effective, according to my research and that of others, is mindfulness.

The class I was teaching at Brown on Thursday morning serves as a case in point. In that particular seminar, my students are taught about the various scientific methods that are used to study the process and outcomes of mindfulness training. That day, we were scheduled to explore the relative benefits and detriments of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a tool for measuring the neural correlates of mindfulness. Put plainly, we were examining whether peering into someone’s brain as they meditate is an effective way to gather accurate information and move the scientific field of mindfulness, which is still very novel, forward. The students had been assigned to read some early studies that my lab published on the effects of mindfulness back in 2011. I was particularly interested in hearing how they digested the research. But I needed to help them calm their anxieties before we could move forward.

We spent the first fifteen minutes of class meditating, the same way we had begun each class this semester. (It is hard to measure how mindfulness works if you don’t first have a sense of what it is.) I led them in a type of meditation called “loving kindness.” This practice is aimed at awakening and fostering our inherent capacity for kindness and connection. It is a type of mindfulness that my lab has studied for years. We’ve found that loving kindness decreases activity in the very same brain regions that get fired up when people are anxious.

More recently, we’ve found that even simple, app-based mindfulness training, which teaches people how to use a number of in-the-moment exercises, significantly reduces anxiety in healthcare workers. We found a 57% reduction in clinically-validated measures of anxiety in stressed physicians. This kind of training also reduces anxiety in people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. We found a 63% reduction in anxiety in our NIH-funded randomized controlled trial.

With this context, loving kindness meditation seemed like  the perfect Purell for my students’ minds that morning.

I asked my students to close their eyes and take a deep breath. I told them to bring to mind dear friends or family pets, and ground themselves in feelings of love that arise when they picture those images. I told them to repeat silently to themselves simple heartfelt phrases of kindness (e.g. “May you be happy.”) as anchors to keep them in the present moment. The practice is as simple as this: bring to mind a family member, a pet, a loved one, and silently offer them a phrase of well-wishing that feels authentic to you. Use the image and repeat the phrases at your own pace to help you stay anchored in the present moment. If your mind wanders, simply bring back to mind the image and begin repeating the phrase again.

After we finished the meditation, they were visibly more relaxed, but still not ready to engage with the day’s discussion. With the hope that they were more armed with some calm and present-centered awareness, I broke my technology-free classroom rule, and let my students check their phones for the anticipated email from President Paxon. I could tell by their eyes that it had arrived. They were glued to their screens.

I asked one student to read the email aloud to the class. Brown was moving to online learning for the rest of the semester. Classes were cancelled for the following week, and students were expected to vacate their dorms as soon as possible. They were also expected not to return to campus after spring break the following week. Though President Paxon tried to convey a hopeful note, writing that Brown was working to ensure that seniors and alumni could return to campus for graduation and reunions, I could see many of my students were defeated.

We spent the next fifteen minutes discussing how to utilize the very mindfulness training practices that we were dissecting in the course (breath awareness, loving kindness, etc.) to help them prevent the spread of social contagion, and maintain healthy mental hygiene. I encouraged them to begin as soon as they walked out of class. Beyond loving kindness, here is what we discussed. If you find yourself experiencing similar anxieties, I recommend you try them too:

1) Run a code. In medical school, when I learned how to “run a code” — our code for resuscitating someone who’s heart had just stopped — I was taught to first stop and take my own pulse. This reminded me to pause and take a deep breath (or three) before proceeding. Taking a mindful pause works by keeping the thinking parts of our brains “online” so we can help rather than hinder. Taking a moment to pause in stressful situations, whether that means you take three deep breaths or simply pay attention to the feeling in not-anxious parts of your body (like your feet or your hands), helps ground you in calmer emotions. Especially for people who haven’t practiced mindfulness before, focusing on the parts of your body where you typically feel anxiety, such as your chest or stomach, only heightens your awareness of the negative feeling, and often makes it worse. That’s why grounding yourself in more neutral areas can help you stay connected to yourself in the present moment without triggering more anxiety. Another way to do this is to anchor your awareness in an external object (e.g. look out a window at trees or nature, or listen to the sounds around you). These are simple, ten second practices that anyone can do. Practice them when you feel your heart beginning to race as a sign of a social sniffle, so that you don’t sneeze and spread social contagion.

2) Get in touch with your “calm.” On top of simple mindfulness practices, you can also take a moment to pause and notice what it feels like when you are calm among the storm of people unknowingly spreading social contagion. When you do, you will notice that calm feels a lot better than anxiety. Use this to hack your brains’ reward centers. When given a choice, our brains will learn to perform the action that is most rewarding. Calm is the obvious, more rewarding choice when compared to anxiety. The more you practice it, the more it will become your norm rather than your exception. You can also look around to see if your calm catches. It might not be as contagious as fear, but done over and over, it can go a surprisingly long way to not only disinfect your brain, but spread that natural immunity that comes when you step back and see that we are all in this together.

3) Take it one day at a time. Our brains are hardwired to plan for the future. We don’t have enough information right now about how this pandemic is going to play out to plan 6 months down the road. If/when you notice that your brain is starting to spin out into future thinking and worry, take a mindful pause and remind yourself to take it one day at a time. Do what needs to get done today, and then take care of tomorrow, when it comes: tomorrow. When it comes to information, the closer to now you stay, the more clearly you will be able to think. For example, you can check in with yourself right now to see if you are hungry or thirsty. Based on that information, you can decide whether you need to eat or drink something. You cannot only remind yourself to take it one day at a time, but if needed, to help you stay calm, use an even smaller timescale. Ask: What do I need to do this hour? Take on the day hour by hour, minute by minute, and even moment by moment if thats what it takes to stay grounded in the present moment.

Knowing that uncertainty can spread social contagion through the viral vector of anxiety and coupling this with some simple mindfulness practices can help us all stay mentally connected and spread calm instead of germs. In moments of doubt, use the above practices to calm your mind, to stay present, and move forward.