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)

Living With Chaos: The Touchy Feely Part

Time to read: 50 seconds

Custom charm bracelets!

Welcome to week 3 of Living with Chaos. If you are enjoying this series, please share it with your people. They can join here.

If you hate the f-word (feelings), keep reading. You need this.

Chaos breeds feelings. You get a new boss, you have feelings. Your child decides not to go to college, you have feelings. Your sister gets a scary test result, you have feelings.

The first strategy for living in chaos is to feel your feelings. This doesn't mean wallow forever or yell at other people. Feeling your emotions is for you, alone, to recognize and acknowledge your reaction to the chaos and how you feel.

Feelings are like weather. They move through 24/7. Sometimes emotions are sunny and warm and sometimes they are a thunderstorm. You are responsible to move your feelings through so they don't become stuck. If you don't, they come out sideways…flipping off someone in traffic or yelling at the barista, your child, or a co-worker. Then you have a mess to deal with which adds to the chaos.

So, take ownership of your feelings. Cry on the drive home. Take an evening to journal. Talk to a friend. Stomp around your basement. Do what works for you to allow your feelings to move through. That will help quiet the chaos.

Next week, another strategy for living with chaos.

Living With Chaos: You Have Agency

Time to read: 48 seconds. I timed it.

Welcome to week 2 of Living with Chaos. If you are enjoying this series, please share it with your people. They can join here.

The second part of the You Have No Control lecture is that you have agency, ownership and responsibility. For everything. Your health, relationships, career, attitude, feelings, choices. It looks like this:

• You don't control if your teen does her homework. You have agency over how you relate to your teen.
• You control aging (yours or someone else's). You have responsibility for how you care for yourself and your attitude as you age.
• You don't have control over a layoff. You have ownership over how you respond and what you do next.

So how does this relate to chaos? There is so much about national politics, your career, your family etc that you don't control. However, you have all the agency to decide what you will and won't do, how you speak to others, and the ways you do or don't give power to the chaos of human life.

For the next 3 weeks, I'll share one strategy a week for dealing with chaos. More to come!

Living With Chaos: Good News! You Have No Control

Time to read: 36 seconds

It's awesome vintage!

Welcome to week 1 of Living with Chaos. I'm going to keep this multi-week series brief, to the point, and immediately useful. Your life is full (cue the chaos) so I want the return-on-investment of your time to read this newsletter to be high. Please share it with your friends and family and anyone who experiences chaos and wants to thrive. They can join here.

And now we begin.

Anyone who comes within 2 feet of me gets this lecture.

You Have No Control.

None. Nada. Nope. No Control. Is that clear?

Consider this: aging, getting sick, people you love getting sick, death, layoffs, who your children turn out to be, the weather, other people's behavior, etc etc etc. Despite your best efforts, you have zero control over these things.

This is great news! Once you really get that you have no control, you are free! The weight comes off your shoulder. You can stop trying to force outcomes or make people respond the way you want. You save so much effort and energy to use for things that are actually fun.

Next week, I'll tell you what you do have. Stay tuned.

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

How To Live In Chaos: Control vs. Agency

Time to read: 16 seconds

Every photo will be vintage. It's pretty and fun.

You didn't hear from me this morning. I was planning and thinking and feeling about what to write when 11:00 CT came and went. Sometimes, it's hard to figure out what to say. I let it go until I knew what I wanted to say.

Clients have been telling me about chaos: changing leadership, health scares, challenges with children, corporate restructuring, and the impact of political decisions on their lives and businesses.

So, I am doing a series on chaos…How to think about it. How to live with it. How to thrive in it.

If you know anyone who is struggling in chaos…personal, professional, or political, please share it with them. They can sign up here.

We start next week.

Lessons I Live By #6

Time to read: 16 seconds

More vintage!

Today is short: Happiness is counter-cultural. Satisfaction is revolutionary.

Think for a moment of all the complaining you heard today. Perhaps your own complaining :-). People complain constantly about their jobs, the service, traffic, food, family, fill in the blank, and people complain about it.

What if instead, you found reasons to be satisfied? Grateful? Even happy?

Sometimes being fulfilled and happy feels like a salmon swimming upstream.

Try it. It feels good to swim upstream.

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

Lessons I Live By #5. Stop Overthinking!

Time to read: 47 seconds

Gorgeous copper MCM dish

Are you the person who spends hours perfecting a slide deck or obsesses over the wording in every email to get it Just Right? Today's lesson is for you.

Stop overthinking.

The way I think about it is develop an action-orientation. Move faster. Hit send. Pick up the phone.

(A caveat: some things require thoughtfulness and time. Writing most emails is not one of them. And if an email is that sensitive, then it's better to call.)

A couple of weeks ago, I used the word tenant instead of tenet in this newsletter. I so appreciate the emails I received to correct the mistake. And despite the mistake, the earth kept spinning. With his newsletter, I have a rule that I write, read/edit once and hit send. If it took me hours each week to produce this, I would stop from the stress and time suck.

If you're ruminating and overthinking, you probably already know what you want to do. You are just afraid to do it. (What if you make a mistake? What if someone is offended? What if your words come out wrong?)

Trust yourself. If something goes sideways, you have the skills to clean it up.

Just hit send.

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