The foundation of leadership, presence, and innovation is a regulated brain in a dysregulated world.
In some ways I feel like I’ve been spinning like a top and learning how to make it work for me, for almost seven decades. The irony is that you can always be waiting for a break, for things to get less busy, to wake up to good news, and so on, before the spinning ever stops.
When chaos swirls around you—deadlines looming, demands stacking up, and emotions flaring—your nervous system involuntarily lights up like a storm warning. You become like a racehorse just before the gates open, with an accelerated heart rate, shallow breathing, and all your muscles tense. This is your Warrior mode, when all your brain’s resources go online to move you into fight or flight. Thoughts race through your mind like wind-whipped branches, with no concern for pauses or solutions. In those instances, you move from steering the ship to becoming a part of the storm. Your power goes out the proverbial window.
But what if you trained yourself to become the eye of the storm? It may seem counterintuitive, but the eye of the storm is the calm, grounded center where there are usually light winds, clear skies, and even sunshine, surrounded by intense storms and raging winds. The air pressure drops dramatically inside the eye, so that it isn’t pulled by the swirl. It anchors it. What if, through a deeper understanding of how your brain and body operate under pressure, you could move from reactivity to receptivity? In a shorter and shorter time, until it becomes second nature?