You’re Creating Your Chaos

We moved to a new house (only a few miles away) two weeks ago. The week before we moved, we traveled to my daughter’s volleyball game in Missouri, I spent a few days with some girlfriends in New York City seeing some shows on Broadway (not the best timing but this trip was planned WAY before I knew we were moving), and I had a full work schedule until the day before we moved.

My assistant Tricia sees all of this up close and personal and she was working in my office surrounded by a growing pile of boxes in the days before we moved. In an exasperated voice, she sputtered to me, “I mean…you really DO this stuff you teach all the time! It’s unbelievable. Like a few weeks ago, you said you were going to just pack 5 boxes a day and that should cover about everything and then for the past few weeks, you just PACKED 5 BOXES A DAY! Every freaking day! And you’re leaving and you’ve got all this work to do and you’re not even stressed or overwhelmed!”

After I stopped laughing, I shrugged and said, “Yes, I do.”

I remember exactly when I decided that I wasn’t going to be frantic and overwhelmed anymore. I was building a successful business in direct sales, and the financial year ended on June 30. Every June, the resounding dialogue in that world is about how “crazy” June is and how you can’t schedule vacations and how you have to work non-stop that whole month to really finish strong. It’s sort of like right now how the small talk is always about how “crazy busy” the holidays are!

One June, I planned a dream vacation for my 40 birthday to South America to hike the Incan Trails to Machu Picchu. June that year was also a month filled with little league games, travel baseball tournaments and important family gatherings. I simply DECIDED that year that June was no longer going to be CRAZY for me for work. I DECIDED that I would instead work all year long consistently so that I could achieve the level of sales I wanted and not have to jam in tons of hours all in at the end. I DECIDED to create a new experience and to behind the expectation of chaos.
And guess what? I did. We had a fantastic business year AND we hiked the Incan Trail and I went to all the games and the graduation parties and tournaments. And I never looked back.

So much of the “busy” and the frantic and the swirling of our lives is self-created. We think things should be crazy or we hear other people saying they are crazy and so we make them that way. We create the chaos so we can complain about it.

Particularly in this holiday season, I’m here to tell you that you can choose differently. And I can help you.
Your first step? Take the Habit Finder and let’s discover the thought habits that are most disruptive. Then together, we can work to change them.