Three F's Of Mental Chaos In Leaders: And The Fifteen Minute Cure!

Fog – Fear – Fixation

Are you plagued with the distress of mental chaos? Do you feel like there is perpetual fog in your brain that you can’t seem to clear out? Are you afraid to fail? Do you feel trapped in your current environment, with no way out? If so, you are NORMAL! Seems ironic to mention normalcy and mental chaos in the same statement, doesn’t it? Not really.

In today’s world, multi-tasking is no longer a talent or a new way of thinking – it is a requirement and it is demanded of people in leadership roles – from stay at home parents to entrepreneurs to CEO’s of Fortune 100 Companies. With multi-tasking demands often comes mental chaos.

Does Your Brain Feel Foggy?

By definition, fog exists when clouds touch the ground and limit our visibility. Our minds are no different when too many thoughts collide. We can easily become foggy and lose sight of our direction. When our brains become foggy, we have to turn on our internal windshield wipers and FOCUS on our direction. That focus comes from within and is mandatory in order to drive toward the vision – toward the destination of success!

Are You Overwhelmed with Fear?

Are you afraid of being lost in the fog? Do you feel like you have no hope of reaching your destination? If you feel like you are driving in circles, you are not alone – we have all hit a point in our lives that we are driving forward and feel we are not making progress. Fear is caused by the lack of direction, the lack of progress and potential failure if we do not find our way – all as a result of the murkiness that has built up in our minds. Without a clear map, we have little hope of getting back on track!

Have You Become Fixated with the Status Quo?

When we have multiple priorities without a plan and still have the same expectations of ourselves, we often revert to our old habits and stop thinking. You are probably saying to yourself, “What do you mean I STOP thinking?” The fact is that under the pressures of seemingly insurmountable deadlines, we are afraid to think “out of the box”. We revert to ‘doing what we have always done’, when, in fact, the state of chaos is usually the BEST time to think creatively! If we do not force ourselves to think of innovative solutions, we become fixated in our current state. That fixation naturally closes our ears and minds to new ideas or different approaches. If often forces us into our comfort zone and results in completing tasks that are not necessarily the means to the end. Someone once said “If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always gotten.” How true. The definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results, so when your mind is in a state of chaos why perpetuate the insanity?

There are CURES to this mental anguish! Mental chaos does not have to be a continued state of mind. There are 3 CURES to the MENTAL CHAOS that leaders face!

FOCUS and CLEAR THE FOG!

The first cure to mental chaos is to focus on prioritizing your demands, organizing your thoughts and gaining clarity on the direction you are heading – or the direction that you NEED to be heading. If you left your house in the morning to drive to the airport to catch a flight and it was foggy outside, what would you do? You would get in your car, turn on the engine, turn on the lights, turn on the windshield wipers and drive very carefully toward the airport. You can’t afford to miss your flight but you have unplanned obstacles with the weather. The same principal applies when your mind is foggy. You need to reengineer your thinking and clear your mind. Before you entered a state of mental chaos, you had a destination – just as you would if you were driving to the airport in the fog. The pressure of catching the plane caused clarity of thinking and focus on the destination. The same thing occurs when you focus on clearing your mind in order to get back on the road to success.

For many people, the best way to clear your mind is to write down everything (in no particular order) that you need to accomplish – a virtual Brain Dump! That relieves you of the pressure of trying to juggle all of the priorities and the clouds of your mind start to thin. Once you have captured all of your tasks on paper, you can move to the next step on the road to the cure of mental chaos!

CREATE A ROADMAP!

You now have everything that you need to accomplish on paper and you should have a fresh outlook – you should be starting to see light through the clouds. You now need to create a roadmap so you don’t lose your way if you have a future detour. Make a PLAN! Take all of the things you listed and prioritize them – assign dates to them, whether real or arbitrary, to help organize what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. Now you are ON YOUR WAY to MENTAL CLARITY vs. MENTAL CHAOS!!!

TAKE ACTION!

The best way to fight the fixation is to DO SOMETHING! Now, here is where it all starts to come together – apply the same focus that you did to create your plan and begin to execute it! Follow your roadmap! Use the same focus you did in the Brain Dump to allow yourself to think of new, creative ways to approach your goals. Focus on breaking your paradigms! Don’t approach the plan and the tasks on the plan with the same methods you have used in the path. Remember the definition of insanity that leads to mental chaos? Don’t let history repeat itself!! Evaluate everything on your plan and FORCE yourself to come up with at least one alternative way of accomplishing the same thing in a different way than you have in the past. Once you have done this with the first 2 or 3 items, it will become more natural and you will start to see all of the possibilities that weren’t clear to you in your foggy state.

DON’T WAIT!! START NOW! Get a piece of paper and just start jotting down all of the things running through your mind that you need to do – bills you need to pay, calls you need to make, clients you need to meet with, reports you need to complete – whatever those tasks are, don’t be judgmental of them and don’t try to solve them – just WRITE THEM DOWN!!!

In FIFTEEN minutes or LESS, you will have completed the first step of curing your mental chaos!!!!!!