As crazy as the world is right now, it is so important that YOUR world is not. How can you do this? By using what I call the Eye of the Storm tool. To tell you about this, I need to tell you a story first that made a huge impression on my own life.

When I was 8 years old, I lived in Connecticut very close to the beach. One of the worst hurricanes was heading directly to our town and we were forced to evacuate. We went to my relatives that lived on higher ground in a neighboring inland town. Their house was filled with windows so the only place we could be was in the hallway by the front entrance. So both of our families, with four young children, settled in for what was going to be a long night. As the winds reached 120 mph and shook the windows, it was very scary for the children, especially me as I was the youngest.

After several hours—what seemed like an eternity for me—all of a sudden the wind, rain, thunder all stopped. My uncle opened the front door and the sun was shining. So we all went outside and thought “OK, it’s over, it wasn’t THAT bad after all”. What we didn’t understand, was that it was only halfway through the storm. The center of the storm was passing over us as the sun shone down on us. But the air felt very electric and there was not one single sound from a bird or animal. It was eerily quiet. My parents said we were in the eye of the storm. I didn’t comprehend what that meant. But soon the sky grew dark and we were battened down again in the narrow hallway with the howling winds, rain, and massive storm.

It was years later when I looked at images of a hurricane that I recalled the eye of the storm and how we had experienced that. When I was living in one of the most chaotic turbulent times of my life, I remembered how calm I felt in the eye and learned to keep myself calm and actively work on having my own peace, even when there was so much uncertainty, chaos, and drama all around me. The lesson stayed and I was determined to be the calm in the storm.

Almost everywhere you look these days in our world, you can see drama, uncertainty and chaos. So how can you keep yourself calm? There are many ways, but these are just a few of my favorite….

• Gratitude – find things that you can appreciate and are grateful for in your life. Make it a game to rapidly come up with 10 things before you go to bed and as you wake up. It’s also a great trick to use when you fall into worry or fear—shift to gratitude and count those blessings!
• Zoom Out – there may be drama or chaos today but if we look in a year, or in a decade, or in a lifetime, it really is a small portion of our lives. Know that these things will pass, and better times will come again soon. When you can shift your focus either to a broader perspective or to another more positive area, you will feel better.
• Meditate Regularly – meditation can take many forms besides sitting and om’ing on a pillow. You can take a walk or a bike ride, sit in nature, work in the garden, look out over water, gaze at a candle flame, sit with your back to a tree, walk barefoot in the grass, or stare at the stars…whatever soothes you and connects you to nature or the rhythms of the earth are all good.
• Helping Others – it is in our human nature to want others to do well. When we are struggling, one of the best ways to change our own thoughts is to help someone in need. This will release oxytocin in our system and change our state of mind and being.
• Feel Good Music – or dance like no one is watching! Music that makes you feel good and/or dancing will put you into a peak state so that you can shift your thoughts. When you are feeling better physically, you can easily shift your state of mind to a more positive outlook.

If you can consciously bring peace into your own world that will positively impact those around us because of the mirror neurons that we have in our brains. So be a force for good…at home, in your work, and in your neighborhood. Together we can truly make a positive difference with others. The more of us that do this, the better our world will become!

I have a strong belief that 99.9999% of all the people on earth want the same four basic things: love, peace, joy, and abundance. If we can work towards this end goal together, then collectively we can truly shift our world.

Let’s take this chaos and turn it into something that can benefit ALL of humanity. The first step starts by being the eye of the storm in your own life.