50: Post-Election Pivot Point: Find Order in Chaos

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. Before we jump in to talk about this epic Pivot Point that we find ourselves at as a country post presidential election, I wanted to share that there are some really exciting workshops coming up in Momentum, my private community for side hustlers and solopreneurs. This is a really awesome time of year to start doing some personal reflection and planning for 2017, so I would love for any of you who are interested to join us. We have 10 non sleazy steps to marketing coming up with Melanie Dizon, one of the Pivot coaches. Plan your 2017 pivot and I'll be doing scalable streams of solopreneur income in the new year. I also do a bi weekly Q and A call over the phone. You can call in live or listen to the recording and ask me anything you want to about anything at all. Whatever you need to feel supported in pursuing your Pivots in progress. And we have a private Facebook group where a really generous, awesome creative community of side hustlers and solopreneurs come together. We do brilliance, barter, give and receive feedback, share resources. So it's a perfect time of year to join. Momentum is just 97 a quarter and if you sign up and mention to Marisol after you enroll that you heard this on the podcast, we will send you $15 off. So that makes the next three months just $75 thereabouts. And again a really perfect time. So we would absolutely love to have you. If you're interested, head on over to pivotmethod.com Momentum.

Now onto this crazy wild week that we find ourselves in. This is gonna be a nonpartisan podcast. I'm looking at the macro view Here. I know that for half of our country, this was a great week, and for the other half, it was a very intense process of grieving, and probably a lot of people are still in shock. I had three speaking engagements this week, two of them on Wednesday, the day after the election. And I remember waking up myself feeling very disoriented and so shocked and surprised, feeling like this is the worst possible day for a speaking engagement, let alone two with one the next night. What on earth am I going to say? I didn't want to be political. I didn't want to pick sides again. I want to be respectful. I know that half of our country chose our new president, and the other half feels like they didn't. Like they got pivoted. And I ended up coming to realize that maybe it's the perfect time to give a speech and to talk about pivot and the principles in the book, which is truly that, as I say, if change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. And that anything can happen at any time. I can't think of any bigger message for that than what happened this week. Anything can happen at any time. We put so much pressure on ourselves when pivoting and looking at work and career change to plan the future with perfect specificity, when the reality is that we can't do that anymore. And even if we could plan in the past, those days are gone. I'm not saying this to be alarmist, but I am saying it to bring our collective attention to this current landscape that we're in. Every single pollster got it wrong. Even the brightest minds in the country. And I used to work at a political polling startup. That was the job I had before Google. No matter all the advancements that we've had in polling and research, everybody got this wrong. There is a collective sense of shock and chaos and unpredictability about what happened with these election results. So the opportunity is once again for us to remain agile, for us to accept the fact that change is afoot and that really the future is too hard to predict. If all these pollsters can't predict it, why are we putting the pressure on ourselves to do the same?

One of the sections of the book, as many of you who have been longtime listeners and readers know, that I actually cut out, is called Surf the Void. That when we have expectations and they don't come to fruition, or similarly, we're coming out of a pivot, there is often this void that opens up. And if we reject the void, if we reject the chaos if we reject the change process, we're miserable. We feel untethered, anxious, and like we can't see straight.

I've been reading a lot of Byron Katie recently, and she's all about loving. What is? That's the title of one of her books, Loving Reality Just as It Is. But if this is reality, it must be what I need right now. It must be what we all need right now. I want to read you an excerpt from A Thousand Names for Joy. This is by Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell. And it just really struck me that it's appropriate for every area of our lives where we feel a little bit untethered, a little bit surprised, a little bit chaotic. She says reality unfolds without desire, bringing with it more beauty, more luxury, more exquisite surprises than the imagination could ever devise. The mind, as it lives through its desires, demands that the body follow after it. How else can it mirror back original cause anger, sadness or frustration lets us know that we're at war with the way of it. Even when we get what we wanted, we want it to last. And it doesn't. It can't. And because life is projected and mind is so full of confusion, there is no peace. When you allow life to flow like water, you become that water. And you watch life lived to the ultimate, always giving you more than you need.

I love that line. When you allow life to flow like water, you become that water.

When I find myself in periods of confusion and anxiety, uncertainty, all of those things that we often leap to reject, I double down on meditation and contemplative practices, journaling, creating extra space and quiet in my day. And lately haikus have been dropping in my mind. So one that came to me on this subject of water is mind like water. Drop down into that place where all is quiet, serene.

During particularly stressful times, or just active even when we're in a real hustle, period. Sometimes the mind feels to me like a beehive. A bunch of bees buzzing around and so chaotic and thoughts are going every which.

And so now when I'm meditating, I've been practicing. Mind like water. Drop down into that place where all is quiet, serene. And I imagine a serene lake, a body of water down at my heart center. You can even try this right now, if you close your eyes, relax all the tiny muscles around your eyes, your face, your jaw.

Maybe even take a big inhale.

And a releasing exhale, shaking out your hands again, releasing all the tiny muscles of your face.

From that beehive, that active mind. Just picture mind like water, drop Feel into your body, into your heart center.

Drop into that place where all is quiet, serene.

I talked about this on the Pivot podcast I did called How Meditation Rewired My Brain and five Ways to Make the Habit Stick. I love the phrase mind like water. That part of it's a Zen saying. That partly reminds me it's okay to have ripples. It's okay to have a shocking event and feel the after effects of it. But when a rock hits a lake, the ripples are in proportion to the size of that rock and they don't keep rippling on and on and on and on, the way that we sometimes torture ourselves with our thoughts, either reflecting on the past and obsessing or worrying about the future. So if we can allow shocking events to land in that lake like a rock, maybe it's a huge boulder. We can allow the ripples to exist and then release them and come back to reality and come back to that place where we can say, what is the opportunity here? When I did those speaking events this week, I asked everybody, how did you feel when you woke up on Wednesday morning? And what is opportunity here? Either for you personally, for the communities you serve, and for our country as a whole?

One of my favorite coaching exercises is if you were the main character in a movie, what is this moment in your life asking you to do differently? So, especially if you're at a challenging pivot point yourself, how is this moment the perfect lesson for you? Why is this the perfect event at the perfect time with the perfect people? What is it calling you forth to do? How is it asking you to learn and grow and do things differently? And what's possible for you on the other side?

The key, the opportunity that we have is to not just accept change, to not just accept unpredictability, to not just accept even chaos, but to look forward to it.

To drop the need to predict. Because that's not an option for us anymore. I've been noodling recently on a model by David Snowden, no relation to Edward Snowden, called the Cinnifon model. And it's this 2x2 grid. So imagine a 2 by 2 block of squares in the lower right hand corner is simple. Then you move up to complicated, then in the upper left hand quadrant complex and in the lower left hand quadrant chaotic. Well, maybe in the past we had a simple economy, then complicated. Maybe simple is the factory line. Complicated is some of the more let's call it white collar work complex. They give the example in the book Team of Teams of even the ISIS terrorist network. It's no longer hierarchical, it's networked, it's complex. It's spread out all over. There are different factions of it. You can't really pinpoint one leader the way you could with, say, Osama bin Laden. It's very complex. It requires a different set of tools to tackle. And then you move down into chaotic. So the simple and complicated on the right hand side is ordered, predictable. And on the left, when you get from complex down into chaotic, it's disordered and unpredictable. So, again, if we look back at our presidential election, if we look at the campaigns alone, we could see how Donald Trump really upended everything we knew to be true, that he took presidential campaigning from complex into chaotic. He could say anything, he could do anything, and still he would have the support. The media didn't know what to do with him. There was no predicting what he was ever going to say or do. And that was very disorienting for a lot of people. And so he, he threw out all the old rules of the past. What would have been a gaffe, a campaign ending gaffe for any other candidate only seemed to help him, was really fascinating. And now we're entering a phase where Trump is our president and a lot of people are again, you know, half the country rejoice and half feels deep confusion. But either way, no matter what side you're on, we really have no clue what Trump's policies are going to look like. He was very light on sharing what his plans were. And so whether you support him or not, we're entering a phase where we're moving. I really believe our economy is moving from complex to chaotic. And I saw this when I was working on pivot as well. I cite the statistic that the average employee tenure in America is four to five years. That is not what I'm seeing when talking to people out doing speeches and interacting with pivoters and people who've read the book and listened to this podcast. When I interviewed people for the book to a year and a half later, when I went to fact check, almost every single person had changed by choice and by circumstance.

So what we're all experiencing now is this sense of untetheredness. And I do think that there's a collective anxiety that is emerging, kind of like on election day. It's as if the whole country took a deep inhale, what's going to happen? Held our breath all day. And then some people got to exhale on Wednesday morning with relief and others with grief.

But in that, there was also A coming together here in New York. People were very open with each other, very vulnerable, very caring, very connected. I don't know if you found that to be true, where you were, but that part of this chaotic feeling is also an opportunity to connect. As the Byron Katie quote references. It's an opportunity to accept reality just as it is.

One of the concepts that I've been sharing with the Momentum community on our bi weekly calls is the idea that agitation is an invitation to freedom. Anytime you are agitated, it is an invitation to inquire and to understand. What is this teaching me? Again, just like that movie character, how am I being called to learn and grow and do things differently? What is the freedom on the other side of this agitation? Whether your agitation is anxiety, nervousness, sadness, anger, annoyed. You know, little things can agitate us all throughout the day. And then certainly bigger things, bigger worries in our career, in our relationships. But if you look at agitation as an invitation, then every day becomes a learning ground, a learning opportunity. And the more we can dissolve those and dissolve our expectations about how things should be and lean into the reality of what's here now and what's our one next move, we can take the pressure off of ourselves to try and plan and create order in a world that has shifted, has fundamentally shifted. So just by not taking our pivots personally and not taking our inability to plan or predict the future personally, we can release some of the anxiety. And I know that's weird to say, but it's almost. If you remember going on roller coasters as a kid.

Maybe the first time you rode a certain ride, you were gripping the edges of your seat so tightly and you just felt like, if I don't hang onto this thing for dear life, I'm gonna be catapulted right out of this roller coaster chair and I'm gonna die. I mean, that is what makes them so exciting, right? Is that just fear and that terror that they seem to inspire in our visceral body?

But then once you ride the ride again, maybe you feel a little more calm. And then a third time, maybe you even experiment with lifting up your arms and you get to that point where you say, you know what this rod is going, whether I'm gripping so tightly or not?

Going back to the mine. Like water metaphor. I picture these times where a void opens up either before or after a pivot. It's almost like waves are crashing on the shore. And maybe we're under the water, we're disoriented, we can't really see which end is up. But these waves are depositing gems for us. When the tide rolls out, there's going to be shells and insights and information and all this rich data that we can mine from the shore that has washed up. So if we can accept reality just as it is and let the waves crash upon us and let the ripples ripple out and feel them and then know that they are delivering so much insight and information that we can then apply to our own lives and that we know what we need to know right when we need to know it, to trust in the greater sense of flow and order. And really, you know, I've read many, many self help books. There's this notion of self compassion and for some reason, you know, I get it, I can see why that's helpful. But what helps me more when I'm pivoting or going through challenging times is, is a sense of self trust.

Although I can't predict how things are going to turn out, I can start to turn toward. I trust myself to figure things out. I trust myself to pick up on the information that I need in any given moment and then work with it. I trust myself to be resourceful.

How can you look back at your life so far? Look at the ways in which you can rely on yourself. Look how you came through some of the most challenging times in your life. I'm reading a book at the moment called Emotional Agility by Susan David and a really powerful line stuck out to me, which is that when times are good, when we're happy, we're kind of bouncing through life. Happy, go lucky, really carefree, we're not that concerned. And then when we're sad or in a low period, we're actually quite observant. We're picking up so many clues about the reality around us and so many insights. And so the opportunity here from a pivot perspective is to embrace the building, the hustle and flow mode and the receiving and the retreat and the rest and surrender.

So no matter how you're feeling about this election week, I encourage all of you to look at the opportunities available to you here and really reflect on what is calling you. What are your soul goals at the moment? And what's your one next move? If you took the pressure off of yourself to plan many, many moves out, what's the one next thing that your soul is calling you to do? And if that sends you into your panic zone, cut it in half. Find something in your stretch zone that feels stretchy and edgy, but exciting and rich with possibility.

Thank you all so much for being here and for listening once again. If you want to join us in Momentum to wrap up the year and kick off 2017 with a bang, you can learn more@pivotmethod.com Momentum wishing you all a wonderful start to your holiday season and I will see you again in a week.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com pivot podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny Blake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.