How to Stay Calm Amid Chaos

Emotion is different than feeling. Emotions come up, they're automatic, they're impulsive, they're often unconscious, they just happen. But feeling over a period of time, hours, days, weeks, that's driven by how we image it, how we think about it, how we label it, how we replay it, how we define its very meaning. And the good news is you have a lot of control over those things. Today's personal development topic for you is being calm amid the chaos. How relevant of a topic is that these days? You know, so often we get pulled into drama, uncertainty, fear, all other people's issues, the world's turmoil, and we lose our center. So what can be done? You know, the truth is that life is one great personal development journey. But if you stop the personal development learning or inspiration or touch points, the journey continues, but it continues beyond you. You know, you have to be learning even more than the pace of change in life, right? You want to be learning and growing just a little bit ahead of the pace of change of life. That's not always possible, but I bet you'll notice the times that you didn't focus on that and you fell behind in your own learning. That means your self awareness, your habits that made you better, your skilling up, your development of your own self mastery and higher consciousness. When those things took a back burner, you became more reactive, you learned less and life started pacing and front of you. You are really in the chaos, baby. And so I just want to say the fact that you are here, even if you don't know why you are here, I deeply believe that there is a reason and that your ears are hearing this voice and this message at this exact time today. And I congratulate you for following that impulse because you can change, you can grow, you can get better and you can live a more vibrant, connected and meaningful life. And that is what we are doing here. And so let's get at it. The topic of staying calm amid the chaos. Five thoughts today. Number one. Calm is a choice. It is a proactive choice. It is a decision that you make today, is a commitment that you make today, that you have the intention of being a person who can stay steady and centered and remember to breathe and remember, be kind and remember, be thoughtful in times of difficulty and chaos and uncertainty and fear. It is a choice of character in advance of the situations of life. You determine who you are going to be before the thing you know. I've had the blessing as a high performance coach of working with some of the world's most extraordinary athletes and Olympians and CEOs, you know, new moms, people from all walks of life that you could imagine. And one of my favorite situations is when I'm put into play by a professional sporting team. And one situation that always I enjoy so much is talking before a team, before they go out into the arena or onto the field. And what's very important and something that always resonates with people is having the athletes determine who they're going to be before they get on the field. That intention of what kind of person, player or team are we, we make that decision now before we're in the battle. We make that decision now before we're posted up against somebody else. We make the decision well in advance. It is a choice and it is an intention and it is a commitment that is enacted in your brain about yourself. Before any situation ever comes up. You can say to yourself, before that fight with my spouse, I am going to remind myself that I am this kind of person in that fight or that argument with that person. I'm going to remind myself I'm this kind of person. I plan to stay in integrity of who I am. And this is who I am clarifying who you are in advance. This is why one of my fundamental works with coaching clients, and you probably read about this in high performance habits as well, is having people identify three words that define who they are, the best of who they are. I also have people set three words for who they want to be socially around other people. You see, there's a difference who I want to be. You know, one of the words I might describe myself as is bold. I want to remind myself to be bold in my decision making. But me being bold socially isn't important to me. So I have three different words over there. Anyway, the idea is those intention words empower me and condition my brain to be that more often in the situations of life that are difficult. So when you're in chaos, how are you going to show up? I remember at the very beginning of the pandemic, I knew it was going to be a very challenging time for our audience. And I knew it was going to be one of the greatest disruptions in history because I had the blessing of reading a lot of history, and I was very aware of how pandemics worked throughout history and how they affected history. I wasn't in any way a scientist in the matter, but I just understand how major disruptions in the world affect people. Obviously, I focus on that. I'm in the human behavior change business. But one thing that I knew and you can, by the way, go watch my entire teachings and trainings on YouTube during the months of the pandemic, or go back to my podcast and go look at those first one, two, three months of the pandemic. And you'll hear this message over and over and over and over again of choosing how we are going to face this situation of uncertainty. It's a choice. The second big idea for you today is you've got to understand your conditioning. See, you've been taught and trained by other people throughout your life about how to deal with chaos. If the house was in disorder and everything was crazy, if that was normal in your family, then you might deal with it one way. If that really angered somebody in your family, you might be quick to anger. We grow up modeling other people's behaviors and specifically their behaviors of response. See, most of our conditioning is actually learning how other people react to things. And that becomes our mode of reaction because our mirror neurons fired. We saw them do it, we think we should do it, and that's how we do it. We're too young sometimes to differentiate conscious and unconscious behavior, especially when we're growing up, especially when we watch our parents or our caregivers. So sometimes you got to open up your journal, and you might even do that right now. Take a journal note on how did the people, your parents or your caregivers when you were young deal with chaos? If I was journaling, I would write, my mother dealt with chaos in this way. My father dealt with chaos in this way. My siblings dealt with chaos this way. My uncle dealt with chaos this way. My first boss dealt with chaos this way. And each of those I will see formed the recipe of my response. Behavior doesn't mean they were the major or highest ingredient, but somewhere they're dashed in that bowl of pepper, you know what I'm saying? Once I understand that, I can recognize that sometimes my responses in chaos isn't really my own. It wasn't consciously chosen. I just learned to do it that way. And I never had better role models to do it different way. I never engaged in personal development deeply enough to realize that there were other options. And so I just did what I thought was me, but what was me was really a recipe of other people's responses. Understanding your conditioning can change your life. Number three, you got to have calm routines. Calm routines. You've got to teach yourself to deal with stress, anxiety, upset, the difficult range of emotions that include, you know, anger, frustration, hurt, selfishness, sadness, vulnerability, shame. You have to know that those things will come up. And so just like we choose in advance who we will be, we've got to learn to calm ourselves down during all those situations. The best routines, of course, are proactive. This is why great practices and habits like meditation, exercise, diet, sleep supplementation, good relationships, great morning routines and making sure that we move, making sure that we journal, making sure that we have clear goals, making sure that we have routines of communicating what we're up to to our family so it doesn't feel feel like chaos to everybody. All of those things are things we do to mitigate chaos in advance. These are proactive, calm routines.

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Example for myself before I have like a major event online, before I turn on the camera and I'm gonna talk to 300,000 people, I'll go in the other room, I'll stand in place, I'll bounce in place while taking 10 deep breaths through my nose. I'll quiet my mind. I'll repeat a mantra like the release meditation technique. Just repeating the word release to myself. You can look that up on YouTube. The release Meditation technique. I'll do that over and over. You know, 10 deep breaths and I'll just keep bouncing in place lightly, not jumping up and down, just bouncing lightly in place to move the lymph around my body to take in some deep breaths. And I'll maybe do 1, 2, 3 rounds of that if I need to. I'll incorporate some qigong. I might jump down, do a couple Vinyasa flows, whatever I have to do just to get my mind centered before I go online in a particular high stakes place. Same thing, you know, before I go talk to those sports teams in the arena, I'll tell you what, in a private room somewhere there in the arena or out in the car, before I walk in, I'm proactively calming and centering myself so I can find myself in flow. I want to make a distinction here for you, and this is important. This is why people hire me as a high performance coach. There's a big distinction between being calm and centered and also having performance edge, meaning a lot of people think anxiety is separate than calm or edge, or being keyed up or being in flow. And all those things in truth can be a very similar range of emotional experience physically. So, for example, when I'm in performance edge, if someone else felt that exact same thing, they'd say, oh, I feel anxious or I feel stressed. But it is the interpretation of my mind about that energy. For example, backstage, I probably feel what most people feel backstage, but instead of interpreting that energy as terror, I interpret it as my body saying, be ready. And so we get to define the meaning of things as well. And that is a big part of having a calm routine. When I feel the chaos coming on and any stress or anxiety, I immediately go to, how am I defining this? That's a routine I have asking myself, how am I defining this? Right off the bat, as soon as I feel that stress or anxiety, what's happening? What am I feeling? How am I defining this? Let me bounce in place, take a 10 deep breaths and find my center. Those are routines of response that I have chosen and I know work for myself. Fourth, no catastrophizing. Don't blow up little issues into big things. Chaos, uncertainty is normal. It'll be here next week, next month, 10 years from now. The chaos that you felt during the last two years, it will return many times throughout your lifetime. It might not be in the form of a pandemic or crazy political experiences or whatever other issue that got you fired up in these last couple years. You can't blow each of them up into a life altering forever. Going to be different. Everything is awful, everything is terrible. Problems aren't always permanent. Problems aren't always about you. And problems aren't always something that you have to feel victim to. You might rewind it and listen to that again. The idea here is psychologists have learned about the issue of learned helplessness. This is the work of Marty Seligman. And often when we define problems as too big or too personal as examples, we feel more helpless. And often when we take an issue and we pretend it's going to ruin our lives, and this is, by the way, what most people do with chaos and dramatic uncertainty. This is going to ruin us. This is going to ruin my life. And they get into ruin thinking and when you are in ruin, thinking the chaos will eat you alive, because you are seeing always the worst case scenario. You are generalizing catastrophe and you are playing right into the hand of victimhood. And the more that you do that, the less likely you are to adapt, to choose a conscious character, to develop a routine, to face things. Well, don't catastrophize. Fifth. And this is probably the hallmark of my teaching during the pandemic for everybody. You go watch my YouTube during those months. It was right off the bat. The first training I did is we must adopt the role model mindset. We must adopt the role model mindset. The role model mindset says people are watching how we deal with this chaos. People are watching how we deal with this chaos. Let me say it again. People are watching how we deal with this chaos. Why do I repeat this over and over and over again? Because we tend to get selfish, we tend to get myopic, we tend to think about ourselves and we forget that. Just like I shared with you how you developed a unconditional or a, I'm sorry, a unconscious sometimes response to chaos based on the conditioning around you, you're conditioning everybody else based off your response, your energy. And one of the main reasons I got over the idea of being a stressed out or anxious person was because I realized the first time I had a team that that energy affected them. It didn't make them feel good, it didn't build a nice culture, it wasn't fun to be around. It didn't improve our performance. In fact, it just created more drama, more politics, more helplessness, more division. How you show up energetically in the moments of chaos matter. Now, don't worry, I'm not oblivious to the objections have been rising throughout this entire thing. Sure enough, easy enough for you, Brendan? Or don't you understand the situation or you're not allowing people to feel their emotions? No, I get those. I understand those objections. And I don't pretend anything I said was easy. I just know that it's required for a good life. It's required to serve at your best. It's required to find your flow in the difficult moments. It's required to lead. It's just required. Yes, it's okay that you feel stress and anxiety. It's okay to locate those, breathe through those, recognize those things. That's part of your calm routine, right? Becoming aware of it, kind of like I was sharing, I focus on breath or movement or I make sure that I ask, how am I defining this? These types of questions are part of the routine. It's acknowledging being aware, accepting that this has happened. But it's also saying, okay, now how do I find myself into a better place? How does that calm and centeredness come back after I've been flushed with emotion? Because, as you've heard me teach over and over, emotion is different than feeling. Emotions come up. They're automatic, they're impulsive, they're often unconscious. They just happen. But feeling over a period of time, hours, days, weeks, that's driven by how we image it, how we think about it, how we label it, how we replay it, how we define its very meaning. And the good news is, you have a lot of control over those things. So next time you find yourself in a struggle, maybe remember your notes today. Think about making a conscious choice of your character. Think through your conditioning to see why you're acting that way or feeling that way, or behaving or responding that way. Set up some proactive, calm routines. Make sure you don't catastrophize things because you're stronger than you think and the future holds better things than you can imagine. And always adopt that role model mindset. People are watching and you have an opportunity to rise out of your own insecurities, worries and fears and inspire other people by how you handle life. When we can do these things, I think we have a better shot at experiencing more calmness, more centeredness, even as the world will continue forever being uncertain and certainly chaotic. By doing this work, we're not just improving ourselves, we ultimately improve society. If we want a more calm and centered world, we're all going to have to skill up, learn more tools of awareness and self mastery, decide to be role models. That's why I love that you were here today, because we just proved that every day is a great day to grow together.