Your life doesn't have to be total chaos

This message is for you if you’re chronically behind on things, behind on life, where life feels like it is passing by and you haven’t even gotten the chance to really live it yet because you’re constantly just trying to cope with it.

Here is the message:

1) You can get out of chaos, 2) You can get into a place of control 3) It’s not a matter of applying more effort, 4) It is a matter of approaching your life a little differently.

I’ll take you through each of these four statements and not just explain why they’re true, but also what to do about them to start realizing this in your own life as quickly as possible. You don’t need to spend the rest of your life like this. You’re meant for more and there’s nothing fundamentally stopping you from moving beyond this stage in your life.

I guarantee that if you take a moment to read this article carefully, you’ll come out of this with a new awareness that you can use, immediately, to your great profit.

Let’s go.

4 Crucial Awarenesses

1) You can get out of chaos.

You have more things to do than there is time to do them.

You are on a hamster-wheel of activity, making no progress.

You start things and never follow through on them.

This is a state of chaos - no organization, no leadership, just bouncing between tasks and frantically putting out fires.

Do you tell yourself that this is just the way you are, that this is just the way life is? Do you tell yourself that you thrive in this kind of environment? That to leave things to the last minute is how you motivate yourself?

These are all falsehoods that are responsible for the chaos. At best, they’re partial-truths. Maybe you DO get motivated when something is left to the last minute, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to be motivated.

If you believe that this is just how it is, this is just how things are, and this is just how you are... then you’ll be stuck. There’s no moving forward.

So all you need to do now is accept that there is another way and then we can proceed.

There is another way!

2) You can get into control.

A few weeks ago I released a short guide on the 6 sources of chaos and how to convert them into control. I strongly suggest checking it out if what we’re doing here resonates with you so far.

For now it’s enough to tell you that getting in control is something that you can do now.

When we say getting in control this is not the same as saying “controlling” something. I’m not saying that you can control your life, someone else, or yourself. I am saying that you can be in control. To be in control means that you are centered, organized, poised, ready, awake, healthy, on point. You know who you are, what you’re doing, what’s going on. You’re in the driver’s seat. You’re in the zone.

Imagine what it would be like to live your life this way going forward! You could actually move into a new chapter of your life. You could actually get to the fun stuff that you’ve imagined you could. This is not a remote fantasy, it’s a real possibility.

3) It’s not a matter of applying more effort,

What’s key for you to realize is that this is not a matter of trying harder, or even “working smarter”, whatever that means. It’s not about being really, really determined.

When you try really, really hard it usually just means that you’re increasing the speed on the treadmill. It often makes it worse because you’re still not getting anywhere, but now you’re even more tired.

4) It is a matter of approaching your life a little differently.

The difference is in your approach.

Here is the correct approach is to operate from your center.

So stop now and notice how it feels when you think about your life in general. How does it feel in your body, for example, when you think about your work? Does it feel light and inspired, or does it feel sort of dreadful and obligatory? This is where the problem lies.

We’re used to thinking that the work itself is actually dreadful and mind-numbing, that focusing on our work for long periods of time is a basically painful process. But the real problem is that our approach is painful.

Here’s what it means to operate from your center:

You’re not behindYou’re exactly where you need to be. Behindness and aheadness are just judgements.

You’re not in a rush

To be in a rush is to be off-center. It means you “need to get there before time runs out”. It puts you in a fearful state. You are overly narrow in your focus. You can’t think creatively.

You’re not missing anything

You’re not missing any essential knowledge or insight. You know what you’re doing. You can trust that you know what you’re doing. You know how to live your life. You always did.

You can let go of unnecessary “open loops”

“Open loops” refer to anything that you’ve ever begun that hangs around in your mind as something that needs to get done. Anything from the smallest to the largest task. It’s possible that you have many open loops in the back of your mind, and many of them are not even necessary to do!

If you want to change your whole life, then you can try writing out a master list of all of your open loops, and just look at it. It’s always longer than you think. And select even just one task to get rid of without completing it. Once you get a taste of that, there’s no going back.

You trust deeply in the flow of life

No matter what your life looks like now – and no matter how disappointed you might be with it so far – your experience of life will always just be you and the task that’s here for you to do in this moment. It’s no good to wonder if you’re supposed to be doing something else. Nor is it any good to try to fast-forward through this moment of your life to get to the next. If THIS moment isn’t good enough for you, then it never will be.

To trust in the flow of life means you’re taking just one step at a time with the obvious knowledge that there’s no other way than to go about it one step at a time.

Productivity is linked with courage

Productivity, or “getting shit done”, is unrelated to how hard you work. It’s related to how trusting you are. Productivity can sometimes take the form of slowing down, or even stopping. Productivity is a good night’s rest and disengaging from your work at 5pm.

Productivity’s question is: “What am I not doing that clearly feels like the right move?”

And productivity’s exhortation is to do it.

If you take away only one message, let it be this:

The deeper you are in chaos, the more life seems like a stream that you have to swim against. But this is precisely the wrong approach. The key is not to go faster or harder, the key is to return to your center position within yourself. This is where your power is!

To be hurried is to be off your center. Don’t let yourself be taken off of center.

Stay here and operate from here. Trust yourself.

This is the way into control.

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Brent Huras is a Productivity & Actualization Coach who posts original work on YouTube, Tiktok, and this blog. Check back for regular musings and theory on how to become a more fully-expressed version of yourself.

Brent Huras writes his own material and will never claim AI-generated content (text or video) as his own.