The subject of this post is about turning adverse situations into breakthroughs.
What happens when things get out of control? How do we deal with chaos? In the fear and confusion that accompany chaos, people tend to blame each other and a scapegoat is found. It has to be someone’s fault that things didn’t go as planned. The breakdown that comes from chaos often diverts our attention into an unproductive line of inquiry that focus’s on who’s at fault. But, in truth, there’s only one productive line of inquiry in a crisis: What can we learn? What needs to be done? Shifting the focus to learning and doing always changes a breakdown into a breakthrough.
Here are some beneficial questions and things to consider during times of chaos:
- What do we know is true? Spend some time separating out what you know for sure is true and what’s imagination based on fear.
- What can you control and what’s not in your control? Look to a core stoic principle: you possess power over you own mind, thoughts, and reactions, but not over external events or other people’s actions.
- True strength and inner peace come from accepting what you cannot change and focusing entirely on your own internal response, virtue, and capabilities.
- Try not to make decisions from fear. Taking a pro-active approach to chaos helps you to see where the opportunities lie in what’s happening. Fear tends to make us withdraw from others and try to solve the problem on our own. Seeing the opportunities in the chaos often helps us reach out to others in exploring possible solutions.
Finally, take this advice from Tom Peters:
“The winners of tomorrow will deal proactively with chaos, will look at the chaos per se as the source of market advantage, not as a problem to be gotten around.”
Kathleen