Dave Kashen answers a question about managing overwhelm when the world feels chaotic. He recommends three practices: make space to feel your emotions, separate facts from the stories you tell yourself, and focus only on what you can actually control.
So the question from Anonymous is, when things are heating up in the world and it feels really intense, what are a couple practices you recommend focusing on as we get really overwhelmed?
Okay, this is a great question, and I'm hearing this from so many clients right now. So two things I'm going to recommend. One is there's a lot of feelings happening for people as they're hearing about all kinds of different things happening in the world. People are scared, people are sad, heartbroken, people are angry and frustrated. More than ever, we need space to feel our feelings. This is an important one. Sometimes teams are even taking time to just say, how's everybody feeling about what's going on both in the organization and outside of the organization? And that helps people move that energy so they can get back to presence and be able to be engaged at work. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is it's so important. Right now we are all in a lot of unknown. And when we're in the unknown, minds like to try to make sense of everything. And we like to make up stories about what's actually happening as facts to the best of your ability. It's going to be important to recognize what are the facts and what are my stories about the facts and separate those out and then be willing to question any of my stories, especially the ones that seem to be causing me some upset, and see how the opposite could be at least as true so that I learn to relax the nervous system, stay open and curious, and be willing to not try to predict anything. And so those are a couple of things. And let me just give you one more. I think I want to do number three, which is it's important for people to recognize there are so many things we do not get to control, and that's really hard. And so to be able to say what is in my control and what is not in my control and stop trying to control anything that's not in your control and stay focused on what is. So those are my three shift moves that I think are particularly important in a volatile world.
