5 Tips to Carpe the Chaos and Thrive
NAFE, the National Association of Female Executives asked me to write a “Five Tips” article for their latest newsletter.
I chose to write about 5 tips for using chaos as opportunity, or as I’ve put it in No Excuses power tool #5: Carpe the Chaos. I recently spoke on this topic to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Women’s Roundtable and the International Museum of Women. In my experience as a leader, it’s a useful concept that got me through tough times when many people thought there was no way to succeed.
There IS always a way, and it really helps to see the opportunity when others see only negativity in change and chaos! Here’s the post:
Gloria Feldt’s No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power has stood near the top of Amazon’s leadership booklist since it was published last October. A teen mom who became CEO of the world’s largest reproductive health provider and advocacy organization, Gloria learned leadership on the job. Now she’s a sought-after speaker, author, and consultant. Here are her tips on how to turn chaos into opportunity:
INTENTIONING
Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women
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The new book from Gloria Feldt about the future, taking the leadership lessons learned from this disruption and creating a better world for all through the power of intention.
1. Think positive. Be like Monty Python: Always look at the bright side of life. You might as well. Chaos is inevitable because change is inevitable. And whoever is most comfortable with the ambiguity change creates is most likely to thrive, not just survive.
2. Seize your moment: Paradigm shifts don’t happen in moments of stability. Wars, depressions, diseases like HIV/AIDS, social justice movements—these all cause social turbulence. “Normal” patterns are interrupted by technological innovations—television, the pill, cell phones, Twitter. When there’s a mess to clean up, they always bring in the women, right? If a woman can offer a solution and it works, they no longer care whether you have a higher-pitched voice and don’t follow football scores. Seize the advantage when boundaries are hazy because the world is open to new solutions.
3. Take the lead. A leader is anyone who gets something done. When I was leaving my first CEO position, a board member asked me what I thought the chief qualification for the job was. I blurted out “raw courage.” Courage to act even in the midst of chaos is the core of leadership: to own responsibility when you don’t have total authority, to make decisions when you know none of the options is perfect, to lead even when you’re quaking in your boots.
4. See through other eyes. Learn from others even if their views might differ from yours. Sarah Palin seized chaos during McCain’s 2008 faltering presidential race. She took the opportunity offered to join the ticket. After the election, Palin sensed that the aggrieved base of the party was eager for her brand of rhetoric, and seized it.
5. See the potential. Since innovation usually comes from people not regarded as the norm—like a dorky teenaged Bill Gates creating Microsoft in his garage—we often don’t see it coming. Our instinct is to seek stability. That squanders the incredible potential of disruptive change to create new channels of opportunity, more inclusive vocabularies, and better technologies. Chaos means boundaries are fluid so you can accomplish things you might not have been able to do otherwise. Carpe [Latin for “to pick or pluck”] the chaos.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Gloria–Your writing is so brilliant, I can never get enough of it. I think I would write more but I am so intimidated by you and how great your writing is!
With this piece, you have confirmed what I am trying to do. I just had my seventh–yes seventh–cancer surgery. So guess what I’ve come up with? A keynote address on “The Seven Things I Learned from Having Cancer Seven Times–and how they can apply to your personal and business lives.”
Mary to say you are amazing is a gross understatement.
In addition to using the power tool “carpe the chaos”, your new speech also exemplifies “use what you’ve got.” It must be a very power-full speech.
Thanks so much for your comment!
Gloria, thank you for all your work over the years. I would like to add here that chaos and creativity are bedfellows and one of the reasons we so dread chaos and seek stability is because our original organization, the family is wired for status quo, for homeostasis.
It is in the family that we first learned about loyatlty, which often meant staying the same and not making waves. The boys were programmed to go out and hunt for new possibilites while the girls were required to be closer to home.
Your work urges us to look at boundary breaking in healthy and positive ways, it is in fact loyalty to the future rather than the past.
Sylvia Lafair author, “Don’t Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success”
Sylvia, thank you for that interesting (and plausible) take on resistance to chaos, creativity, and change.