Crappy Chaos

Chaos happens. It happens to everyone. Some people live in a constant state of chaos. It may not serve them but they accept and react to it like it’s normal. Chaos is not normal. Chaos is a direct reflection of your beliefs and how you perceive a situation. In many cases, chaos is simply a perspective. In order to get out of a chaotic situation or environment, you must step outside the energy field. When you feel like your work is chaos it can swallow you up into a black hole of dysfunction. One of my colleagues calls this way of living "crappy chaos". She much prefers the happy dance. We all should never settle for anything that feels even close to chaos. It is true, that once you can identify chaos, you’re now better equipped to create solutions so that it goes away. But like I mentioned earlier, sometimes it’s the way we react to situations that creates chaos where there was actually none before that moment. How to move from crappy chaos to happy dance: Objectively decide if chaos is happening around you or inside of you. If the chaos is outside of you, you will walk away and decide what you need to do to get things moving forward cohesively. You may delegate the project or task to someone else who isn’t emotionally involved. Or you may need to simply get into a take charge attitude. Is the chaos about an overwhelming amount of tasks? Then this chaos is handled easily (no yeah butt’s on this one, people!) by creating boundaries, communicating with others that you will have to push off some of the tasks or they’ll take longer, and creating more space and focus for each thing on the to-do list. Another way of dealing with overwhelm is shift your perspective from guilt, pressure, and responsibility to getting it all done now, to one thing at a time. You can’t make everything matter so much. I’ve worked with people successfully to transform pressure on deadlines or issues that could’ve caused heart attacks if they continued to sit in chaos. Make decisions. Chaos is allowed to happen when something small is allowed to keep going on for too long. It builds momentum and then blows up. Finally you wake up and realize what’s happened. You can now either sit in it or do something about it. You have to step into a decent amount of courage and not give a rip what other people think to get order back into your life. Remember that crappy chaos and happy dance are only a decision apart. Don’t make the chaos worse than it is by rendering yourself helpless to it.