Embracing Chaos.
5 Ways to Overcome Fear and Achieve Your Potential.
Change is everywhere; it’s fundamental to our state of being; from the moment we are born, we never stop changing. So why is it so hard? In business, $2.3 trillion is spent on transformation every year, yet 73% of those projects fail. It’s a wonder that the money keeps on coming.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Unknown (often misattributed to Einstein)
No such metrics exist for personal change; the people who discuss personal change are usually the ones who succeeded. But I’d be willing to bet there’s a silent majority who weren’t so lucky.
So why do we fail?
Chaos.
Chaos is the status quo reduced to the primordial soup of pure potential. It’s only from this soup can you create a new status quo. It’s scary, it’s unwieldy, and it’s easy to give up the minute it rears it’s ugly head. But it’s also a crucial stage to ultimate success.
Imagine you’re building an extension to your house, at some point your home is going to be a building site. It will be messy, walls removed, debris everywhere, it’s going to be uncomfortable. It would be the most natural thing in the world to panic and tell the builders to leave. But where does that leave you? With half a house, no extension and no value from your investment.
The bigger the extension, the messier your house/building site will be. The longer and more excruciating the wait will be, and the stronger your belief in the finished result will have to be.
So whether you’re talking about individuals or businesses, if you want to change, you have to expect chaos.
The Process of Change.
Luckily I’m not the first to make this connection, Virginia Satir, a pioneer of family therapy, noticed this long before I did.
She developed a model of how individuals experience change. In my experience, this also relates to the processes businesses undergo when transforming themselves.
It consists of 6 phases:
- Late Status Quo: This is the part that most of us love. It’s comfortable there are no surprises. No one questions the status quo. But this comfort cannot last forever.
- Foreign Element: Eventually, something in the environment will change, making the status quo unworkable. It could be falling sales; it could be a hack; it could be a pandemic. Whatever the catalyst is, from this point, you are already changing.
- Chaos: From the moment the foreign element enters the system, the descent into chaos begins. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of it occurring or not. Chaos will reign until you take control.
- Transforming Idea: This is where chaos begins to turn to order, you’ve been firefighting up to now, but a spark of inspiration puts it all into context.
- Practice and Integration: From that inspiration, you create a plan, then act on it, you can finally see the light. You’ll slowly refine it until you’re comfortable with the new way of doing things.
- New Status Quo: The new process is embedded, everyone is comfortable, and thanks to the catalyst, your performance has increased and stabilised.
Chaos is an inevitable part of change, no matter how you boil it down the best you can do is manage it. The more connected and integrated our world becomes, the higher the likelihood of a foreign element entering the system. The more we must be aware of the chaos that can ensue.
There are, however, some ways we can limit the impact chaos has on our lives.
1. Confronting the Chaos.
Something as simple as being consciously aware of the process you’re going through can have a massive impact on how you respond. Knowing and understanding what you’re going to be undertaking can significantly reduce the amount of stress that it incurs. Mentally rehearsing fear-inducing events helps prepare you for when they inevitably occur.
For businesses, this means confronting the need for change head-on. It means outlining what the positive and the negative impacts of this change could be. Finally, it means outlining some of the things employees can expect to happen.
Being frank and honest with yourself (and your staff) sets a baseline of trust from which to overcome the chaos.
2. Your Vision is Your Anchor.
Going through a period of change is stressful, times will be tough. What helps you persevere through those times is your vision. Why are you even putting yourself through this? Make sure it’s quantifiable, genuine and specific. In business, it’s become a running joke that companies strategies don’t hold any content. Simon Wardley has created a strategy as a service app which outlines how nonsensical most strategies are.
Noone can get behind a vision that’s not specific, it’s not personal, and it’s not grounded in reality. When times get hard, your vision is what will pull you through, spending the time on getting it right is going to pay dividends.
But how do you create a vision if you don’t know what you want?
Knowing what you want is probably one of the hardest things to do. Remember to dream big; make sure it’s something that’s just past the edge of what you think is achievable. “I want a McDonalds” just isn’t going to cut it.
If you fall short of “I want to be a millionaire” then you’ll still likely end up with a lot of cash.
Most importantly, it has to resonate with you.
If you’re stuck; one trick which helped me find the things that resonated was using the 100–1 method.
Write down 100 possible visions for the future, everything that possibly resonates with you. It may take some time, and some you will mentally dismiss immediately.
Next, refine that list to 50, cut out the half that resonates the least.
Then reduce it again to 10.
Finally, choose the vision that most resonates with you. This is your vision.
This vision will now act as the anchor that every other decision hangs on, every choice you make, think to yourself does it get me closer to my vision.
Feel free to repeat this process, whenever the way forward gets foggy.
3. What Goes In = What Comes Out.
Once you’ve got your vision, it’s time to become an information sponge — research everything and anything that relates. Don’t worry too much about being able to regurgitate that information, though. Your subconscious is far bigger than your conscious brain. All you want to do is to feed your subconscious. Stuff goes in; stuff comes out. You can only truly control what goes in, so make sure it’s useful.
Remember, no one is an island, and neither is any company. There will always be someone doing something better than you. So why not learn from it?
Research and understand everyone who’s been where you are now, and how they dug themselves out of it. Information is power, and for what’s coming next, you want to have an array of tools to be able to achieve success.
Don’t get bogged down in specifics though. Yes, being an expert in your field is essential to success. Researching philosophy, psychology, biology, history and anything else that takes your fancy, inform your decision making on a much deeper level.
Go even further, research anything that feels good, no matter how irrelevant it may seem. Learn about yourself, your own patterns of behaviour.
With your vision as your anchor, you’ve handed over control to your subconscious, listen to it.
It is what’s going to make your decisions genuinely groundbreaking.
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
Fill your brain with interesting stuff and interesting stuff will undoubtedly come out. It will allow you to make decisions fast and increase your confidence in those decisions.
4. Do.
Planning is important, but doing is more important. Once you’ve got your anchor, just keep going no matter what comes your way.
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Prussian general, born October 26, 1800.
Things will change, chaos will take over, but having a goal and continually moving forward is the thing that’s going to get you there. Setting goals is essential, but building momentum is more so.
Most transformations fail because executives balk at the point of chaos. This is true for personal changes in our lives too. The comfort zone is a real thing, and most of us avoid making substantial changes because of the anxiety and stress stepping outside of it can cause.
But if you genuinely believe in your vision, this will be easy to do.
The most important thing is to keep doing. Breaking down your big goals into smaller ones can have an incredible impact on your ability to achieve your objective.
5. Trust Your Brain and Embrace the Chaos.
Finally, if you have a strong anchor and you’ve filled your brain with interesting stuff, all that’s left is to trust your brain. It’s bigger and more powerful than any of us can comprehend. If something feels wrong, listen. If nothing in the world can stop you doing something, do it.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book on intuition Blink, he uses the term “rapid cognition”. This describes intuition as a decision being made by your subconscious much faster than any conscious thought could have.
The more you learn, the more you listen to your subconscious, the more confidently you can trust your intuition.
The more confident you are in your intuition, the faster you’ll make decisions and the more successful you’ll be.
Chaos is a fundamental part of change, but being able to accept and embrace it will not only lower your anxiety. It will also increase your confidence.
When you’ve done it once, the second time will be easier, soon you’ll find that managing chaos has become part of the status quo.
Once you’re there, the world is your oyster.
