Living With Chaos: Who Are You?

Time to read: 24 seconds

More carnival glass!

Welcome to week 10 of Living with Chaos. Our final week! It's been fun romping through chaos with you. The romping is fun. The chaos, not fun.

Chaos shows you who you are. If you love the way you show up when stuff gets real, great. Keep going. If you don't, think about who you want to be and how to get there.

Maybe you hide. Or flail about like a headless chicken. Or become hard and controlling. All of these seem like natural responses to chaos. Without judgment, ask yourself: Is the way I am responding useful? to me? to others? to the situation?

If it's not, time to do some work. Nothing like chaos to show you who you really are.

If you have unanswered questions about living with chaos, I always love to hear from you. Email me. I enjoy a good challenge and will gladly turn your questions into future newsletters.

Thanks for being part of this merry little band of corporate rebels.

P.P.S. If you love this newsletter, please share it with your colleagues. They can sign up here.

Living With Chaos: Opportunity!

Time to read: 41 seconds

Carnival glass. So pretty.

Welcome to week 9 of Living with Chaos. Invite your friends to join here.

We're heading into the homestretch of this series about Living with Chaos. Next week is our last one.

Today: there is an opportunity in chaos. Those opportunities might look like this:

1. In a corporate restructuring, people leave and move around. Positions open, informal opportunities to mentor become obvious, new projects become available.
2. When someone is in the hospital, you have the opportunity to spend time with them or find ways to show you care that weren't obvious in daily life.
3. When things are hard for any number of reasons, it's an opportunity to grow your resilience, see help you didn't notice before, become humble (my favorite), or learn to quiet your mind and tend to your emotions.

If you keep your lens wide, you will see places to step in, or you will head down an unexpected path. Exciting things can happen in those unexpected places.

Living With Chaos: Awesome!

Time to read: 26 seconds

Made this for a woman who was a music teacher

Welcome to week 8 of Living with Chaos. Invite your friends to join here.

Today is nice and short.

One of my clients was worrying about something that hadn't happened. (Like all worries.) Anyway, I said to her, "Instead of worrying about the awful future that hasn't happened, what if you just let things be awesome now?"

Today's message: let it be awesome.

Look around your life for the things that are working. When you're living in chaos, the temptation is to focus only on the things that feel broken, out of control, and painful. You lose your job, and your kids are hilarious. You hate your boss, and daffodils are coming up. A parent is sick, and you love walking your dog.

The point here isn't to ignore the hard things. It's to balance them with awesome so that you are able to LIVE in chaos.

I hope this helps.

P.S. If you want a custom charm bracelet, email me here.

I LOVE making them for people. They make great gifts!

Living With Chaos: Use Your Gifts

Time to read: 43 seconds

Sticking with the charm bracelets cuz I love them so!

Welcome to week 7 of Living with Chaos. Invite your friends to join sign up here.

I promised I would share how to live, especially when it feels like things are falling apart.

The first step is to focus on your corner of the universe. You can't boil the ocean. Consider people like Paul Farmer, Martin Luther King, and Marie Curie. These are ordinary people, doing their work, pursuing things that matter to them, and using their gifts in the world.

I used famous examples to make the point. Most of us are never going to be world famous, and never underestimate your power. You can make a huge difference in your world by changing the stressed-out tone at work, volunteering your time and talent, cleaning up the stream near your house, or getting involved in a location organization. I could go on and on with ideas. It's easy to get bogged down in questions like "where to start?" or "it's all too much."

You know your world and who needs you. You know your gifts and how to bring them out. Go do that.

Remember, it's your life. Getting out there with your gifts is one great way to LIVE.

P.S. Email me here if you want a custom charm bracelet. I LOVE making them for people. They make great gifts!

Living With Chaos: This Is YOUR ONE LIFE

Time to read: 28 seconds

I love a charm bracelet! I made this one. :-)

Welcome to week 6 of Living with Chaos. Invite your friends to join here.

Today is going to get a little existential.

My husband gets this creepy daily message reminding him that he's going to die. We've also had a few friends die unexpectedly and way too soon. I bet you have, too.

Life is fragile. Let that fragility be a reminder to LIVE. This is your one life, and you get to craft it. Life is too short to be unfulfilled or bored. You don't have to change your job…just find the parts of it you love and focus on those. Do things you enjoy. Spend time with people you love (circling back to love again). Make the things you do and the ways you spend your time as pleasant as possible.

This doesn't mean being happy all the time (hello toxic positivity). It does mean in the midst of chaos, your life is still yours. Make your choices accordingly.

Next week, I'll share more strategies about how to do that.

P.S. Email me here if you want a custom charm bracelet. I LOVE making them for people. They make great gifts!

Living With Chaos: Love vs. Fear

Time to read: 50 seconds

Did your grandparents have these?

Welcome to week 5 of Living with Chaos. Invite your friends to join here.

For the past four weeks, we've established that you have agency, acceptance is key, and feeling your feelings helps you move through chaos.

Now that you have ownership and are back in power in your life, today's strategy is about a fundamental choice.

Choose love, not fear. Every.single.time. That means love for yourself. Love for others. Love for strangers, and people you don't understand.

Fear seems so easy. Love requires you to be vulnerable. To perhaps look foolish. To admit that you don't know everything. To step into the unknown. Love is a stance you take toward the world and other people.

Here's an example: You get laid off. Love yourself enough to feel your feelings. Love yourself enough to give yourself time. Be confident in your future, however murky it looks. Love life enough to believe that this layoff might end up being the best thing that ever happened to you. Open your eyes and love the world so new opportunities come to you.

Fear looks like clinging to one vision of your future. Wallowing in your house for weeks. Fighting the decision. Rushing to anything else.

Love might be hard in the short term. It is definitely easier in the long term. And a much healthier way to live with chaos.

Living With Chaos: Do This!

Time to read:

Cuz I love making them so much, here's another custom charm bracelet I made for a 10-year-old's birthday.

Welcome to week 4 of Living with Chaos. Anyone who wants practical advice for living with chaos can join here.

Remember week one…You Have No Control?

To find peace and live with chaos, you must accept it. Acceptance is not support, acquiesce, being a doormat, or powerlessness. In fact, acceptance is a powerful choice because it puts ownership back in your hands.

Here is another of my favorite sayings: Circumstances do not cause your suffering.Your resistance to your circumstances causes your suffering. Let me be clear. Losing your job is painful. A death is painful. Instability of any kind hurts. Getting cancer sucks.

The first step to having agency in situations like those is to accept them. When you resist reality, you give your power to the layoff, death, instability, or cancer. You want to pull your power back to you because you're gonna need it to feel your feelings, care for yourself, and make decisions.

Acceptance can hurt because often the things you have to accept are things you do not like. Buddhists say, "more pain, less suffering."

Check it out, we're circling back to feel your feelings. All these strategies are connected! (smily face)