5 Things You Can Do To Stay Focused in World Chaos
by
Beth Warren
May 21, 2021
In order to achieve anything meaningful, you must develop laser sharp focus. But what do you do when you don’t have the ideal conditions? The reality is many achievements come out of situations of chaos and extremely difficult challenges.
It’s critical to achieve what’s important to you by learning how to focus and innovate in the midst of chaos (trouble, toxicity, mayhem, havoc, drama).
1. Start with Awareness
Your task is to stop incessant thinking, get out of your mind and focus on your breathing, your body. Become aware of your state and how you are responding to and are affected by your thoughts.
Ask how your thinking is stopping you from being aware of what’s going on for you? How is it making you feel? How is it stopping you from moving forward?
Remove yourself from all that mind chatter. Visualize yourself stepping out of your own head and body and as a bigger version of you looking back at yourself and all that thinking and thinking. Extend compassion and forgiveness to the you who has been keeping herself small.
2. Recognize Truth and Possibility
You may see only chaos outside you. You may have overwhelming evidence that nothing much more than chaos is truly present. But you begin to see more evidence of truth and possibility when you hold the thought of your greatness, worthiness, intelligence, creativity, adaptability, resiliency, strength and wonder, and keep revisiting and spending time with the thought. Seeing truth and possibility is critical to moving forward.
3. Stop Staring at the Chaos
“Where attention goes, energy flows and results show” (T. Harv Eker).
Where are you putting thought, time and effort? If an environment, place, thing, person, or whatever, is in chaos or is disruptive, expending your energy focusing on it, thinking about, and trying to force it to change will prove ineffectual.
In fact, you might want to ask yourself, is focusing on such and such going to enable my goal or is it a distraction from something that is so much more meaningful to me? Often, focusing on the problem or problem area doesn’t help solve anything. But shifting your focus to what feels good and is good puts energy behind your focus.
4. Take a Step Back
The truth is that being in chaotic environments can be energy depleting, if not in some ways destructive to your health and well-being. I try to remind myself to see such situations as opportunities for learning, growth, resilience-building and a means to innovating. But in order to make such work we need to take a step back.
Taking a step back can serve several purposes: getting some clean air, renewing energy to focus even more sharply, and importantly, enjoying life’s precious moments.
5. Don’t Do It Alone
This is probably the most important thing you can do when surrounded by chaos. Unfortunately, many of us are in a culture in which we’ve learned to to compete, to compare, to excel, and excellence is an individual endeavor.
However, the highly successful will almost always divulge they had someone to rely on, who inspired them on the journey to their goal or their excellence — a mentor, a coach, a parent, a partner. Or, work with us at BWN. They never roughed it alone and could not have gotten through the thick without that critical care.
