6 easy steps to change from intolerable chaos to a reliable order
Do you live in chaos or order?
Which winds fill your sails? The winds of chaos or the winds of control. We live in a world of chaos where we’re overstimulated with ads, rules of behavior, misinformation, everyone telling us what to do and where to do it. But can change that you can live in a world of order. You have the means to move from chaos to order. It’s your mind, and you control how you think and make decisions.
in a chaotic world
The winds of your emotions blow you, demands put upon you by others, and the lack of a mind that clearly understands who you are, your values, and purpose.
First, let’s deal with the demands of others. They’re numerous, and because emotionally we want to please others and be liked, we don’t say “no” often enough. To deal with these demands, we must first understand what we want to do with our life and our time — our why. Say no to requests that are unrelated to our why. We teach our minds to be able to say no. Why say you can do something else on a day when your time is fully allocated? When there is no more time, there is no more time.
Then secondly, we take the rest of the chaotic requests. And divide them into two groups: the essential and the others. We control and add order to our lives if we focus first on the essential items and secondly on the others. Each area of our lives can be divided or ordered in this way—for example, our health, family, work, and finances. So, to move from chaos to order, we must control how we allocate our time and learn to define the essential from the nonessential.
And finally, we must learn to control our minds and from that our behavior. We weren’t born to please everyone. We weren’t born to be acceptable to everyone. However, we were born to learn how to control the reactions of our mind to the events around us, to learn that it’s not necessary to respond from our emotions, and to realize that our mind has to control us based on thinking and not from our biased, societal point of view. This is a lot to unpack, so let’s look further into an orderly world.
In an Orderly World
Controlling our minds is difficult. Marketing companies and advertisers play on our emotions to get us to buy many things we don’t really need. A new car every two years. A new computer and iPad every year. What’s wrong with the old ones that are still working just fine. To counteract these efforts, we need to learn how to think and make better decisions that remove most emotions from the process.
Our minds try to control our behavior but fight an ongoing battle with our biases, values, mental models, and the social environment we grew up in. We can reflect and examine each decision to see how we made it and change our future decisions to move in the direction we want to go. Examine your values and your actions to see what you need to change.
Confronting the mind junk caused by our emotions. Thinking someone is talking about us, laughing at us is just giving in to negative emotions. So what if they are, even though they probably aren’t? Laugh with them. We all make mistakes, look funny to others, and can only please everybody some of the time. Don’t create unnecessary stress for yourself. Instead, focus on being clearer about who you are or want to be, and tell your mind to help you get there.
moving from chaos to order
To move from chaos to order, follow these steps.
- Divide the things you or the world want you to do between the essential and nonessential. DO the essential first and let the rest take care of themselves. Will you do all the nonessential? Probably not, but they weren’t essential anyway?
- Learn to think clearly with as little emotion as possible. Make decisions that are in alignment with your why. Then, reflect on your decisions and learn what was driving that decision to be clearer in the future.
- Learn to control or modify your behavior by understanding your values, recognize when you react emotionally, and begin to respond rather than react.
- Focus and be present in the moment. If you aren’t paying attention, then you are more likely to react than respond. This is the study of mindfulness.
- Set aside time each day to reflect and consider your decisions and actions. Learn to change what needs to be changed.
- Develop a Personal Knowledge System to help you use your time efficiently.
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