How Your Values Help When Chaos Strikes

Forty eight hours. That is how long it took me to get home from a trip to see my mother in law, and somewhere between the canceled flight, the surprise rerouting through World Cup chaos, and the night my kids spent sleeping on airport benches, I relearned something I think every physician needs to hear.

You cannot plan your way out of chaos. But you can know your way through it.

Here is what happened. Our flight got bumped. We rerouted through a different city, one that happened to be hosting World Cup weekend, which meant every hotel and every seat on every plane was gone. A storm rolled through on top of it. We sat on the tarmac for two hours before getting pulled back to the gate, and then the flight was canceled outright. No rebooking. No rooms. Nothing to do but figure out how to get through the night.

If you work in medicine, you know this feeling even if you have never set foot in an airport during a crisis. The quiet shift that suddenly is not quiet anymore. The board that fills up in an instant. The moment your brain has to stop planning and start triaging. That is exactly where I landed, except this time the patient was my own family, and the emergency was entirely out of my hands.

What got me through it was not a strategy I built in that moment. It was something I had done just hours earlier, almost by accident. I had been reading Parents Who Lead by Stew Friedman and Alyssa Westring, a book that takes leadership principles and applies them to parenting, and I had sat down to actually write out what matters most to me right now. Not the values I had in residency. Not the ones I think I am supposed to have. The real ones, as my life actually looks today. 

When everything fell apart, I did not spend my energy trying to force a solution that was not coming. I asked myself a different question. What do I actually want right now? The answer was clear. I wanted my kids to feel safe. I wanted to stay connected to my family instead of getting swept into the anger and chaos happening around the gate. I wanted to make things a little easier, even without control over the bigger picture.

That clarity changed how I spent the next several hours. I found blankets. I got dinner sorted. I asked family members for help from a distance. I let go of the fights that were not winnable, the endless attempts to rebook a flight that did not exist, and put my energy into the ones that actually mattered.

Most of us do not do this kind of values work until we are already in crisis, and by then we are too depleted to think clearly. We spend our energy building elaborate plans, the five AM wake up call, the total diet overhaul, the perfectly organized system for finishing notes on time, and the second something knocks us off course, the whole thing collapses because it was never built on clarity in the first place.

You already have the skill for this. You use it every time your day goes sideways at work. The move is learning to turn that same clarity inward, before the crisis hits, so that when it does, you are not spinning. You are acting.

If you want to start, it does not require a retreat or a five step framework. It requires twenty honest minutes with yourself and a willingness to ask what actually matters to you right now, not who you used to be or who you think you should be.

If you want support doing that work with someone who understands exactly what your days look like, I would love to talk with you. You can schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call

Life really is better on the other side.