It Was a Typical Remote Workday as a Leadership Coach in Spain. Until the Power Went Out – Across the Country.

Before the day’s strange twist, it was a typical and uneventful Monday.

I dropped our two kids off at the local school in our small village north of Barcelona and then returned back to our farm and my home office. I’m a career and leadership coach, and largely work remotely, with clients in my native U.S.A., as well as across Europe and other parts of the world. I had a quiet morning ahead of me, to work on a proposal. 

At noon, I took a break to run an errand in town, and it was a little after 12:30 p.m. when I arrived home and discovered that there was no electricity. I went to the circuit board and flipped the breaker switch, and nothing happened. So I picked up my phone to send my husband a WhatsApp and ask him if anyone in our neighborhood group had reported a power outage at their house too.

Then, I noticed the message wasn’t sending.

I fiddled around with my phone for a bit and then gave up. That was odd. No electricity and no phone data. I couldn’t quite square it up, so I’d wait for my husband to get home for lunch and ask him then. 

In the meantime, I warmed up leftover soup, thankful that we had a gas stove, and made a tuna sandwich.

When he still hadn’t arrived about an hour later, I decided to walk to our neighbor’s house, about five minutes away, to see if she had any news. On my way there, I found her headed down the drive toward me, her little black and white terrier at her side. 

“Nope, we don’t have power either,” she said, “so I thought I might as well take the dog for a walk.” Her husband had just been at the doctor’s office, and had narrowly avoided being trapped in the elevator. There they had learned that the outage was across Spain, and Portugal too. Nobody knew what had caused it, so there was plenty of speculation. 

I felt the sensation of my small, individual experience suddenly expanding into a collective national emergency, a specific sensation I’d felt only a few times before in my life, like on the subway commute under the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 when people began boarding covered in white dust and saying they’d just seen a commercial airliner crash into the tower. I had seen smoke from the towers before getting on the train, but I hadn’t until then known how big its significance could possibly be.

It was a scary sensation, and one connected to many disturbing memories, but I reminded myself that I was safe, especially at this moment, standing in the dappled sunlight filtering down through the trees that line our drive.

My set of afternoon meetings were approaching quickly, the first with a group with people in the U.S., Europe and Africa. I felt a strange new impotence of being unable to communicate anything to them. 

My husband pulled up in the car soon after. I was standing in the middle of the drive, my phone still in my hand, hanging uselessly at my side. He stopped to say hello, window open and radio blaring. The local radio personalities were going full tilt on the situation in Catalan. 

I could have turned on the radio in the car, I realized. 

My husband explained that he stopped first at his parents’ house, about a mile away, to check on them and our children. In line with Spain’s big lunch and siesta tradition, the school has a terrifically long lunch break from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., and children have the option of going home to eat. Our children eat a homecooked meal at their grandparents’ every Monday, and forgo siesta for a stream of cartoons that leaves them in a similarly zombie-like state. 

Unless they didn’t have electricity. So instead, my husband found them eating “pa tomàquet” – bread rubbed with tomato – and cold cuts, and playing hide-and-seek on the terrace. 

In other words, all were fine, and now that my husband was home, his next priority was to lug the generator out of its storage space and get it running.

He got the generator going just in time for me to connect to the internet, start my meeting and make someone else the Zoom host … and then we ran out of gasoline. I drove around to various gas stations in the nearby city of 20,000 people, but none of the pumps worked (apparently they use electricity and none of the stations had generators).

My husband and I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to live updates via the radio in his truck – the only way to get any information – and trying to figure out how to siphon gas from the car. (This is when I realized that I was too reliant on YouTube and Reddit for problem solving). Through old-school means (trial and error), we learned that our Honda’s gas tank has excellent anti-theft protections.

It wasn’t until my father-in-law rolled up in his Jeep with our two children (who didn’t go back to school in the afternoon) that we were back in business. My husband siphoned off enough gas from his tank to power the house through dinner, and in exchange, we let my father-in-law make a Spanish tortilla on our gas stove to take home. (The in-laws have an electric range.)

As a family, we’d all been pretty upbeat by this point about making do. I thought my husband and I were doing a pretty good job of masking any of our worries that, you know, this was the beginning of the apocalypse. (The thought did occur to me at some point during the day that perhaps I should be spending more time in the vegetable garden instead of trying to figure out how AI will impact coaches like me in the near future and how to build a handy app for my clients.)

But we weren’t the only ones feeling worried. As I laid down next to my six-year-old son to read him a story by the light of a headlamp, he confessed, “Mama, I hoped that the electricity would stay off so we don’t have to go to school tomorrow, but now I think I’d like it to go back on.”

I did too. We had had an easy day of it, compared to many other people across Spain or Portugal, many who had been stranded or trapped due to the outage. Yet, I think both my husband and I were starting to look into the next day and the next set of days and imagine them without electricity and saw how difficult things could get.

Just then, my husband called from the kitchen, “The electricity is back on! You can turn on the light!”

And it was over.

The refrigerator sounded its alarm that it was way below its regular temperature. We finished our bedtime story and turned out the lights. My husband started the dishwasher and it started its familiar chug toward a set of clean dishes in the morning.

I felt weariness wash over me, as if the accumulation of so much uncertainty and so much resonance with the pandemic and other emergencies I’ve lived through, hit me at once. It was time to get some rest. I set my phone to charge and gratefully went to read a paperback book, lit by my bedside lamp. 

A friend in NYC checks on me.

By the next day power had been restored to almost all of Spain and Portugal. Authorities as of yet don’t have many answers for what caused it, though they continue to say it doesn't seem to have been a cyberattack.

And now I’m sitting with the feeling of not wanting to just leap into what I was doing before this happened — but to take a moment to reflect and to share some initial thoughts.

The best thing I’ve learned from these years of being a coach is the importance of taking time to reflect on experiences, to draw out the lessons and then decide what to do next with that learning. That’s essentially what coaching is.

I know I need more time to reflect, but here are two initial takeaways, one small, tangible and practical and one bigger and more conceptual:

1 – 📻 Buy a small transistor radio. These, along with batteries, were flying like hotcakes in Barcelona yesterday according to local reports. The radio was the only way to stay informed of what was going on. I used to have one in Portland that was wind-up, designed for emergencies … I wonder what happened to that?

2 – 👷🏻‍♀️ You can’t prepare for everything. Our world is getting so complex and there are endless demands on our time and attention. I think one of the most important abilities for success in our times is the ability to focus. To clarify. To prioritize. To basically ask:

Of all the things that are possible for my life, what do I really want?

Of all the things I have (or could have), which are the ones I most value?

Of all the things that could shape my future, which are the most important for me to prepare for?

Of all the things I can do with my time, what do I want to prioritize?

On Monday, in particular, I was grateful for the two hardworking, steady and resourceful problem-solvers – that is, the farmers – in my life, my husband and father-in-law. And for this peaceful rural place we live and the ways we’ve built some protection and self-sufficiency into our life already.

Today, in particular, I am grateful for the refrigerator, microwave, washing machine, water heater, hair dryer and blender, which were all in play this morning as part of our usual routine.

Now at work, I’m grateful for my computer and wifi so I could have a great conversation with a favorite colleague who is 4,000 miles east of me; and then do so many catch up emails and texts to clients, friends and family; and then to write and post this missive to you.