Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that chaos shows impact on two levels. First, it has a cumulative effect that can define that path we stay on. Second, it’s a sizable influence on our own self-image, with a degrading impact on our discernment with emotions and their reliable place in a given situation.
If we chose to be unaware, the impact is akin to being buried alive with spoonfuls of dirt.
You’re living life, but one day you realize something has to change or else you’ll reach a point of no return. Conversely, once you’re aware, the choice comes in accountability, reflection, growth and application.
That growing sense of accountability turns our ability to spot psychologically unsafe environments, their markers, and their influences into an impactful skillset applicable across any aspect of our life.
How?
Researchers have actually put a number on the size of that blind spot. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that nearly 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, but only 10 to 15% of us actually meet the bar when tested.
That gap is the distance between feeling like you’re paying attention to your life and actually being equipped to notice when something in it has gone quietly wrong. Most of us aren’t avoiding the truth on purpose, we just haven’t been given a reason, or a reflection, sharp enough to make us look.
Even in the space where we carry unprocessed emotion and a lack of understanding of the things that happened to us, we’ve learned skills in the place of what we know not to do.
I’ve come to realize that much of my own personal beliefs and professional philosophy are aligned with a moral center that is representative of the things one shouldn’t do.
Whether it’s navigating, negotiating and ultimately releasing the responsibility of growing up in a tumultuous environment dictated by one’s refusal to take accountability, or learning from and leading in an environment that is limited by a vision and structure that ultimately shows what not to do, there is always an opportunity to take what doesn’t work, learn from it, and make it your own.
The human experience is vast, but being a person who values seeing more than what a person gives in a moment, and staying curious as to why, will always be the great equalizer.
It took me many years of both friends and love lost that the character of who you are isn’t enough. It’s how we take the time to own those character traits that make us valued, and use them to look further inward to befriend the things that disappoint others.
The old adage that we can control our own actions, and not how people respond, is true. Our own actions are seeded in the world of what we already know and think, but also by the things that once protected us from the world while not being consciously recognized in our adult selves.
These characteristics aren’t bad, but if left unchecked, they’ll slowly impact that space between you and other people just like they once did for yourself. This is why self-protection and preservation are only great when aligned to our actions and interactions with the outside world.
None of this is abstract. The CDC has found that three in four high school students report experiencing at least one adverse childhood experience, and one in five report four or more.
Left unaddressed, that exposure doesn’t stay contained to childhood. It follows people into unstable relationships, unstable work histories, depression, and it gets handed down to the next generation.
That’s what a refusal to take accountability actually creates, the tumultuous environment I keep coming back to, not an excuse for it, but a reminder of how far it travels.
My drum corps career started by marching an organization whose on-field performance and aura matched what I sensed and felt inside myself. Energy, power, force, jazz and an attitude that was undeniable. My first summer was a good mix of learning about the activity, what it means to connect with others in a creative space, and understanding the ideals of transaction.
Effort in equals results out.
My second year was met with a leadership position. The elevation was met with a dive into the space between organizational dynamics and member experience. I quickly learned that the limitations and dysfunctions present in the organizational structure trickled down through the performance leadership to impact member experience.
Solidified in the years following, I realized just how much that tension taught me about ambiguity fueling chaos throughout a hierarchy.
Gallup’s research puts real weight behind what I felt in that ecosystem. Across studies covering 27 million employees, they found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, and that companies fail to identify genuinely talented leaders in roughly 82% of their hiring decisions.
Dysfunction at the top doesn’t get diluted on its way down to the people actually doing the work. It gets amplified. This wasn’t only a personal reaction to bad leadership, but the predictable result of structure and vision that had never learned to agree.
Whatever route chaos takes, whether it’s in intrapersonal relationships, the decision-making of one who refuses to take accountability or the structure of a relationship being stunted by decision makers who don’t value risk centered in dysfunction, there is a moment to learn.
Look inward, take pride in finding how to make the things that don’t work your own, navigate and negotiate the space for growth with curiosity and grace centered in vulnerability, and realize the only currency that has an exponential return on investment is how we make people feel.
It’s the true differentiator between accepting chaos as the definer and repurposing its byproduct for growth and organizational stability.