Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Management with EmilyJane Zahreddine

Being ready for unexpected situations can make the difference between life and death. Our world is full of potential crises, from natural disasters to catastrophic accidents. Ignoring these risks and hoping for the best is not a viable strategy. However, by prioritizing emergency preparedness, you can reap numerous benefits and increase your chances of survival in a crisis. In this episode, Golden Hour Preparedness CEO & Founder Emily Jane Zahreddine joins us to talk about emergency preparedness. We dive deep into the importance of emergency preparedness and crisis management, not just from a physical standpoint but also for mental health. EmilyJane shares valuable insights and practical tips on how to respond and keep yourself and your family safe in the face of disasters. Listen to this episode to understand the significance of emergency preparedness and help us share this episode with friends and family. --- Listen to the podcast here: Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Management with EmilyJane Zahreddine Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about emergency preparedness and this is something that a lot of people, especially if you’re really excited about your idea, you’re really excited about what you’re pursuing, don’t necessarily want to talk about, don’t want to think about but it is something that’s really important because it can make the difference between something that becomes a minor hiccup and something that kind of ruins you. There are times when we have to cover our bases and sometimes we have to cover what happens when something unfavorable happens in so many aspects of our lives, businesses and all of our pursuits. My guest today, EmilyJane Zahreddine, is the founder of Golden Hour Preparedness, an emergency preparedness company. --- Emily, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Let’s start by talking about emergency preparedness. What does it mean? If someone hears the phrase “emergency preparedness,” a lot of times you’ll think about, if you live in California, an earthquake, if you live in St. Louis, a tornado, if you live in New York, a hurricane, but there’s probably a lot more to it than just that natural disaster that’s most prevalent in your region. Absolutely. So, I like to think of a really close to home example. So I’m married and I have an eight-month-old son so if my son had a medical emergency and needed to go to the hospital and be there for several days and be treated, my life would change dramatically from the way that it is today. I would take time off of work, I would cancel my dog grooming appointment and cancel my nail appointment, make sure only essential things that I need to keep myself, my husband, and my son going are happening and that’s what emergency preparedness is. It’s making sure you know what those things are so you can keep going and keep focusing just on the essentials when things get tough. When you don’t have all of your normal bandwidth and you’ve got to reduce what you’re able to do because an emergency or disaster takes up some of your capability, you need to have a plan, a strategy to fall back on that makes sense for you and your lifestyle for you and your family, for you and your business, that makes sense for you to implement and execute so you can keep things rolling in the way they need to to stay in business, to keep your family together, to support people who are going through a hard time in your life. So it sounds like it’s less about even identifying a list of these are the possible emergencies and this is the relative likelihood of it happening and more about understanding what those essentials are. Absolutely. So, every individual has different essentials and FEMA is coming out, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is coming out with a new way to define emergency preparedness. So, historically, it has been build a kit, so you need to build your emergency kit, you need your three gallons of water a day, you need your protein bars, you need your snack, stuff like that, but we are working to redefine what emergency preparedness is I think across the emergency management field and so I identify emergency preparedness now as being prepared as an individual for what you individually need. If you’re an individual who is lower income, who might not be able to put three meals on the table every day, FEMA has been telling you, “Oh, you need emergency food supplies,” but if you can’t achieve that on a daily basis, you can’t have food in stock and in reserve for yourself so that doesn’t work. So, what we’re saying now is you need to understand what community resources you have. So you might not have cash in the bank or cash in your wallet but you have a neighbor who you help out and who helps you out and you can go to them and you have a relationship that is symbiotic. You have community organizations you can go to to get the help that you need. It’s not just about having the three gallons of water and the protein bars. There’s a lot more about it and it’s so much based on your individual situation. So, everyone has a different situation that combines what you need and I just think about even specific examples, say, someone that’s type 1 diabetic and their needs might include their insulin or some sort of a quick source of sugar at all times, which is different than someone who doesn’t have that disease or someone who has a different type of mental situation as well as the resources that you have available based on your specific circumstances and what operations you need to keep going. Absolutely. And so one of the things that is really important to keep people going and that’s really customized as well is comfort items. We can’t all just be happy and successful and thrive if we just have our protein bars and our three gallons of water. We need more than that as humans and so we need to make sure that’s reflected in our preparedness kits. So, in my preparedness kit, I have a lavender eye mask. It’s luxurious. It was very fancy, I got it in a spa. It’s luxurious but it makes me feel calm and comfortable and so if I’m in a disaster or an emergency, when it is my time to rest, I need to take advantage of that and so that’s why I have sort of a more personal item in my care kit that really helps me get back to my Zen space. And can these emergency preparedness kits, when you talk about comfort, go a little bit too far? Is there a point where you have too much frivolous stuff and people claiming, “Well, I need this for my comfort, I need that for my comfort,” and it can be a little bit where you have to say, okay, you might have to pick and choose a little bit here? Yeah, there certainly is a fine line and what you want to keep in mind is is this stuff that if you have to leave your house, you can bring with you conveniently. That’s a really hard part about disasters and emergencies but the reality is the impacts of disasters and emergencies impact our homes and people have to leave their homes and, sometimes, they have to do that really urgently, like you see in wildfires, you see it in flash flooding, even regional flooding after major rainstorms, like you see it all across the Midwest and it’s a really hard and severe thing and, unfortunately, it’s something that we need to come to terms with a little bit more is understanding what are those essential items that if I were to lose my house, I want to bring with me. And this is such a grim topic and I hate to be the person who’s a real bummer but, at the same time, I’d prefer you to have that half-hour conversation where you say, “Okay, the wedding photo book, my jewelry that’s in my bedroom, and my favorite boots,” or whatever it is, “those are the three things I need to grab,” I’d prefer you to have that uncomfortable conversation right now than have evacuated your home and not have your wedding photo album. I’d prefer that to happen to you is for you to have that uncomfortable conversation to think through it than for you to have the worst-case scenario happen to you. And that’s the value proposition that I offer in my work and in my mission space of educating people to navigate disasters and emergencies. It’s so important to be able to have those difficult conversations. And then when it comes to people who operate businesses out of their homes, how does that work? Because there’s certain other things that are literally going to destroy operations or there’s some emergencies where people just need to accept that, well, your business is going to not be operational if your home suddenly gets flooded. Right. Yeah, that’s a really hard part of this is that as lives have changed after COVID and like our homes are more of our entire world than just where we spend the evenings and night times, it has changed a lot. And so that is something people absolutely need to be aware of. The use of cloud storage is such a game changer and it’s so cheap now compared to what it used to be, you can have Google Drive for free and you can put a ton of stuff there and making sure that you have all of your backups, all of your paperwork, all of your insurance information backed up is so important. But I want to take it a step beyond that because I’ve talked to a lot of companies that say, “Well, we don’t need this kind of work. We don’t need to be proactive about emergencies. We’ll just go out of business,” or, “We’ll just have insurance write us a check.” Yeah. Okay, so, I mean, if you want to go out of business, I don’t know if I can help you. But if you’re saying insurance is going to write us a check and then we’ll be fine, I want you to have a strategic plan so you understand what you’re going to spend that money on rather than just being overwhelmed and complet