How to Find Peace in Times of Chaos as Conscious Business Leader?
Humanity is at a tipping point in the transition from the digital information age to the transformation impact age.
Are you feeling trapped in the rat race at work or the hustle and grind of business? Do you feel like a machine trying to work harder and smarter yet still exhausted?
Consider what worked two years ago, let alone last year, is now becoming obsolete.
How do you navigate the noise, the chaos, of the day-to-day?
Defining Chaos
Chaos has many forms.
On a personal level, chaos might look like dealing with separation from loved ones, an unexpected diagnosis, or a sudden job loss.
On a day to day level, chaos might look like trying to get on zoom to present while your child suddenly throws a temper tantrum or is joyfully making loud bizarre noises. Or texting 2 people at once while cooking a meal, listening to a podcast. Or scrolling through your social media feeds, being triggered by the news, reactions, or comments.
Chaos can also be internal. Chronic headaches or body pain, feeling underlying anxiety, or the mind that never shuts up right before bed.
Sometimes the chaos can be good things in life. Like the growth in your business you can’t keep up with, so many passion projects you’re overcommitted to, or being addicted to achievement fulfilling vision board after vision board, yet still missing peace of mind.
On a personal level, chaos might look like dealing with separation from loved ones, an unexpected diagnosis, or a sudden job loss.
On a day to day level, chaos might look like trying to get on zoom to present while your child suddenly throws a temper tantrum or is joyfully making loud bizarre noises. Or texting 2 people at once while cooking a meal, listening to a podcast. Or scrolling through your social media feeds, being triggered by the news, reactions, or comments.
Chaos can also be internal. Chronic headaches or body pain, feeling underlying anxiety, or the mind that never shuts up right before bed.
Sometimes the chaos can be good things in life. Like the growth in your business you can’t keep up with, so many passion projects you’re overcommitted to, or being addicted to achievement fulfilling vision board after vision board, yet still missing peace of mind.
What if you could create moments of peace in your day to day chaos?
I became obsessed with this question, pouring over every and peace training, becoming a taekwondo student, yoga instructor, Energy Master, and business coach helping high achieving conscious entrepreneurs and business leaders in burnout focus their energy as they grow their business.
I’ve gleaned and distilled down all these energy practices into a few I want to share with you to easily access peace in your chaos.
You’ll get to practice and experience these interactive exercises, directly together, right there in your chair.
I’ve gleaned and distilled down all these energy practices into a few I want to share with you to easily access peace in your chaos.
You’ll get to practice and experience these interactive exercises, directly together, right there in your chair.
Before doing so, first, you have to accept the chaos.
What is your relationship to chaos?
Are you someone who:
Accepting chaos means surrendering the illusion of control–that life has always been uncertain and always will be.
Once you accept the chaos, you can allow the chaos. This looks like facing fears, pain, or other unwanted emotions like anger, loneliness, disappointment, or embarrassment.
When you don’t face your fears, there’s an impact to your body. Suppressed or overly active emotions can impact your organs’ ability to function. For example, if you get angry, it floods your body with stress hormones, increases your blood pressure, which makes your liver work harder to filter higher volumes of blood.
Are you someone who:
- Analyzes or figures out why the chaos is even there;
- Tries to fix the chaos;
- Is determined to overcome the chaos;
- Avoids the chaos by looking the other way or saying “not my problem”, or
- Resists the chaos by any combination of the above?
Accepting chaos means surrendering the illusion of control–that life has always been uncertain and always will be.
Once you accept the chaos, you can allow the chaos. This looks like facing fears, pain, or other unwanted emotions like anger, loneliness, disappointment, or embarrassment.
When you don’t face your fears, there’s an impact to your body. Suppressed or overly active emotions can impact your organs’ ability to function. For example, if you get angry, it floods your body with stress hormones, increases your blood pressure, which makes your liver work harder to filter higher volumes of blood.
Practice One: Allowing the chaos
Now, let’s directly practice allowing chaos by facing unwanted emotions or physical pain using a method introduced to me by a Mind-Body Coach Uma Sangvhi, and former Stanford neuroscience researcher.
Ready?
I invite you to close your eyes, scan your body from your head to your toes.
1. Where do you notice tension, pain, or unwanted emotions?
2. Ask yourself, where is that pain located? What color? What shape? What texture? What movement?
3. Now go to another part of your body that feels good or neutral, or you can imagine one of your happiest memories. How does it feel? Warm, tingly?
4. Saturate every cell in your body with that energy of that feeling.
5. Now go back to the pain. Ask yourself, what color is the pain? What shape? What texture? What movement?
6. Repeat this exercise going between what feels good in your body and letting that feeling wash through your body and noticing your fear or pain observing it’s shape, texture, and movement.
Now you can open your eyes…
When I do this exercise with clients, many people often experience shifting the shape or color, sometimes disappearing it all together. Some are even able to transmute the painful body sensation or unwanted emotion into a healing energy.
The result of getting rid of that energy is less important than you being able to practice observing or watching your fears rather than react to them.
Don’t focus on the result. Focus on simply being with what is.
Ready?
I invite you to close your eyes, scan your body from your head to your toes.
1. Where do you notice tension, pain, or unwanted emotions?
2. Ask yourself, where is that pain located? What color? What shape? What texture? What movement?
3. Now go to another part of your body that feels good or neutral, or you can imagine one of your happiest memories. How does it feel? Warm, tingly?
4. Saturate every cell in your body with that energy of that feeling.
5. Now go back to the pain. Ask yourself, what color is the pain? What shape? What texture? What movement?
6. Repeat this exercise going between what feels good in your body and letting that feeling wash through your body and noticing your fear or pain observing it’s shape, texture, and movement.
Now you can open your eyes…
When I do this exercise with clients, many people often experience shifting the shape or color, sometimes disappearing it all together. Some are even able to transmute the painful body sensation or unwanted emotion into a healing energy.
The result of getting rid of that energy is less important than you being able to practice observing or watching your fears rather than react to them.
Don’t focus on the result. Focus on simply being with what is.
Practice Two: Moving Meditations
Now that you’ve accepted the chaos allowed the chaos, now you can move through the chaos.
The moving meditations are based on the work of Ilchi Lee. He met with the UN Ambassador of El Salvador, a small Central American nation plagued by civil war, poverty, and gang violence.
Ilchi Lee took that training into schools, training teachers to share these moving meditations with their students. There was such success in kids creating peace in extremely chaotic situations–it spread to other schools that seven years later, one four four schools from El Salvador’s entire education system uses these moving meditations.
Inspired, I created a local scholarship fund through our local Kitsap Community Foundation, providing this training to teachers to lead these one-minute meditations in class with students.
Imagine our next generation of leaders learning to access peace in any chaos–transforming communities one school at a time!
Let’s experience a couple of these one-minute moving meditations now.
The moving meditations are based on the work of Ilchi Lee. He met with the UN Ambassador of El Salvador, a small Central American nation plagued by civil war, poverty, and gang violence.
Ilchi Lee took that training into schools, training teachers to share these moving meditations with their students. There was such success in kids creating peace in extremely chaotic situations–it spread to other schools that seven years later, one four four schools from El Salvador’s entire education system uses these moving meditations.
Inspired, I created a local scholarship fund through our local Kitsap Community Foundation, providing this training to teachers to lead these one-minute meditations in class with students.
Imagine our next generation of leaders learning to access peace in any chaos–transforming communities one school at a time!
Let’s experience a couple of these one-minute moving meditations now.
One Minute Exercises
Take out both hands as fists, knuckles facing out. Take out your thumb pointing outside on the one hand. And pinky, on the other hand. Now switch. Your brain’s right and left lobes are integrating, relaxing your brain, helping you focus. This is a favorite for kids before taking tests and can be used anytime you face chaos.
Now, we’re going to exercise our intestines! Place both thumbs on your belly button, palms flat on your belly, just resting. Then suck your belly button towards your spine like a sit-up crunch. Breathe normally.
This exercise is called intestine exercises because it’s literally exercising your intestinal organ. We often exercise our muscles, how often do we exercise our organs?
*Your gut is called your second brain because it operates independently from your brain and spinal cord, containing 3-5x more neurons than in your brain. Over 90% of the serotonin, often dubbed the “happiness hormone,” is created in your gut while only 3% is produced in your brain.
The water up fire down principle is about creating a balanced energy circulation. Often we have hot heads from thinking a lot (fire energy) while our guts are stiff and cold (water energy). By bringing “the fire” energy in your head down to your core and bringing cool “water-energy” up to have a calm, cool head-this allows for proper energy flow and circulation that can support your immune system as you raise your internal temperature by 1 degree.
You can do this in a check out line, driving, or sitting at your desk anytime. Can you feel the heat?
Great work–now you can rest.
Moving Meditations throughout your day brings your awareness from outside yourself into your body to generate peace in the chaos.
Now that you’ve accepted allowed, moved, your body is now primed to receive and listen within.
Now, we’re going to exercise our intestines! Place both thumbs on your belly button, palms flat on your belly, just resting. Then suck your belly button towards your spine like a sit-up crunch. Breathe normally.
This exercise is called intestine exercises because it’s literally exercising your intestinal organ. We often exercise our muscles, how often do we exercise our organs?
*Your gut is called your second brain because it operates independently from your brain and spinal cord, containing 3-5x more neurons than in your brain. Over 90% of the serotonin, often dubbed the “happiness hormone,” is created in your gut while only 3% is produced in your brain.
The water up fire down principle is about creating a balanced energy circulation. Often we have hot heads from thinking a lot (fire energy) while our guts are stiff and cold (water energy). By bringing “the fire” energy in your head down to your core and bringing cool “water-energy” up to have a calm, cool head-this allows for proper energy flow and circulation that can support your immune system as you raise your internal temperature by 1 degree.
You can do this in a check out line, driving, or sitting at your desk anytime. Can you feel the heat?
Great work–now you can rest.
Moving Meditations throughout your day brings your awareness from outside yourself into your body to generate peace in the chaos.
Now that you’ve accepted allowed, moved, your body is now primed to receive and listen within.
Listen Within
Listening within your body’s wisdom requires being aware of and feeling energy.
Energy comes in the form of light, sound, and vibration. Energy comprises the building blocks of all matter, from the stars to the oceans and mountains, to your body, to microscopic atoms invisible to the naked eye. Energy includes your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations.
Now let’s experience how energy feels.
Shake your hands like you’re screwing a light bulb in. Great! Now clap 10x. Rub your hands together to create friction and heat. Now slap your hands up and down like this.
Pause and feel the sensation of your hands. Do you feel a tingly sensation or heat or magnetic sense? That’s energy.
Imagine a big bright energy ball between your hands. Focus your awareness on the space between your hands. Where your mind goes, energy flows. Don’t forget to breathe.
As you inhale [breathe in] expand your energy ball bigger, as you exhale, contract the ball imagine the ball growing brighter. Inhale…and exhale….take a last big inhale…and on the exhale
Bring the energy ball into your heart. Imagine and feel that energy permeating to the rest of your body.
Now ask your heart: What is my message today?
Listen within. Whatever message you get is perfect. You can now open your eyes.
And you can let that message ground you for your day in any chaos.
You can give that energy ball anywhere -your brain, core, or to someone else.
You can ask yourself, “What’s my message for today” to not just your heart; you can ask any organ, or pain, and listen within to generate peace anytime in any chaos.
In conclusion
So far you’ve accepted the chaos, allowed it, moved with it, which has set the foundation to be able to more easily listen within and generate peace -accessing an abundant, limitless source of peace no matter what chaos hits.
If you forget all those principles, just smile–that’s the shortcut to generate peace! [There’s lots of science behind the benefits of smiling.]
A colleague of mine is a Neurologist Physician working in the ICU, who is often present at the time of passing for patients in his line of work. When asked…” What have you learned during this time?” he said, “Well, there are good deaths and bad deaths . . .
Bad deaths are when a family refuses to speak to each other and burdens the staff with having to communicate separately with 3 family members for updates. At the time of passing, the family misses the final moments of their loved one’s life.
On the other hand, good deaths are when the final moment is approaching; I’m holding up the phone on speaker with the patient and their loved one on the phone. The family often says the same kinds of final words, “I love you. Don’t worry; we’ve taken care of that thing for you. You know- that one thing you always wanted me to do? I did it. Thank you, I love you.
At the time of passing, there’s so much love, so the entire staff feels it. And it ripples out to the rest of the whole hospital. At that moment of death, there is so much peace.”
Death is likely one of the biggest types of chaos a human will face.
If you were to create peace in the chaos of death, who would you be right now?
As humans, before our precious time on planet earth passes, each moment, you have an opportunity to shine your light as bright as possible, unleashing your brilliance.
Our chaotic world could use some more peace.
You’ve now experienced choosing to generate peace in any chaos.
When you choose to become a source of peace for our world, world peace is possible.
What will you choose?
Watch the full TEDxSIL talk HERE on Finding Peace in Times of Chaos and let me know in the YouTube comments what opens up for you.
***
Anna S. Choi helps growing, six-figure earning, overachieving, conscious business leaders–who are exhausted meeting the demands of their day–prevent burnout as they scale their impact. They want to build habits for staying happy, energized, and focused to perform at their optimum given the demands, complexities, and uncontrollable environments that suck up their energy. Learn more at www.annasunchoi.com.***
If you are on a path of making a better version of yourself, you can also read other blog posts that I have published HERE. Or you can contact me, and I will be glad to talk to you and discuss how we can improve your situation.
Resource: *Microbes Help Produce Serotonin in Gut, April 09, 2015, <https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/microbes-help-produce-serotonin-gut-46495#:~:text=Although%20serotonin%20is%20well%20known,made%20in%20the%20digestive%20tract.>
