How To Turn Life’s Chaos Into A Game

Two huge crocodiles inches from my face, underwater, in a glass enclosure and I’m laughing. That’s not a personality quirk; it’s a practice. And it points to the biggest misunderstanding I hear about resilience and surviving change: people assume the goal is to endure with grit while you white knuckle your way through chaos. Sometimes endurance is necessary, yes. But if endurance is your only gear, you’re missing the tool that makes uncertainty workable: curiosity.

I unpack why the unknown doesn’t have to be your enemy, and how fear tends to inflate the “3 a.m. version” of your situation. We talk about how anticipation is often worse than reality, why the story you build around your “crocodile” can become scarier than the thing itself, and how a curiosity mindset shifts your first question from “How do I make this stop?” to “What is this teaching me?” That single change can transform anxiety into information, and helplessness into options.

Then we get practical. Curiosity is not a thinking exercise, it’s an action. I challenge you to find the smallest version of the cage and get in the water: send the email you’ve avoided, have the conversation you keep rehearsing, show up to the meeting, pitch the idea, apply for the role. I also connect this to community resilience and civic empowerment because the people who thrive don’t just survive chaos, they study it and stay engaged.

If this helps, subscribe, share it with someone facing a hard change, and leave a review so more people can find Surviving Changes. What’s one small “crocodile” you’ll face this week?

Transcript

Giddy With Sharks And Crocodiles

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I want to tell you something about myself that might explain a lot. I've swum with sharks in Perth, Australia. I've wrestled alligators in Florida. And the most recent was when I was in living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I got into an underwater enclosure face to face with two very, very large, very prehistoric crocodiles. And every single time, every single time, the feeling I had was not fear, it was excitement. Now I can already hear some of you saying, um, Heidi, that's not normal. And to that I say, yeah, I I know, but that's kind of the whole point, right? Hey everybody. Welcome back to Surviving Changes. I'm Heidi, and this is the show where we get honest about what it actually takes to not just survive the chaos, but to dare I say it, enjoy the ride. And today I want to talk about something that I think gets misunderstood about this whole surviving changes thing. Because when people hear that phrase, they often picture someone white-knuckled, you know, all stressed through a crisis, someone gritting their teeth, getting um through some terrible stuff. You know,

Endurance Versus Curiosity About Change

SPEAKER_00 1:36

someone enduring. And look, I do honor that. I've had to do it. Real life brings real hard stuff, right? And sometimes enduring is exactly what is required. But that's not all that this is. And if that's the um only gear you've got, I want to offer you something today that might change how you think about change altogether, right? Because my relationship with chaos, with danger, with uncertainty, with the thing that's supposed to scare you has never been about endurance, it's been about curiosity. And I think that that one shift from endurance to curiosity is the thing that changes everything. So let's talk about those crocodiles for a little bit. Here's what actually happened when I got into the cage. I was giddy, like genuinely embarrassingly giddy. Uh, I had been wanting to do something like this for ages. I had swum with the sharks off um in the tank in Western Australia

The Unknown Is Not The Enemy

SPEAKER_00 2:37

in Perth, and then also off the coast when I was swimming in the ocean. Which, if you've never been to Western Australia, just know the sharks there um did not get the same memo about being afraid of humans. Even in the shark tank in Perth, you can pay to get in the shark tank in Perth, it's insane. Um, but I was more scared of the manta. There was mantas that were unclipped, so those were the ones that I was mostly scared of. Um, but I was still giddy. But so I did that, and then um before that I had done the wrestling the gators in Florida, and that's a fun story, but it's a long story, so I'll tell you about that at some other point. But those were fun for me. So when I found out that I could get underwater and go face to face with the crocodiles, I wasn't walking into the enclosure, I was um skipping. And uh here's what I want you to notice about that. The crocodiles were the same, the glass was the same, the situation by any objective measure was identical to what would make most people's palms sweat and their stomach drop. The only thing that was different was what I brought to it. I brought curiosity instead of dread. I brought excitement instead of fear. I brought a what can I learn from this and how do I get out of this if I ever need to. And that is the whole game right there. Make it a game. Lesson one is your relationship with the unknown, and your relationship with that is a choice, it's a choice that you make. Now I want to be really careful though, because I'm not gonna stand here and tell everybody that being fearless is like some kind of virtue. Because it's not. Fear is smart, fear is ancient, fear has kept um human beings alive for a very, very long time. And I have faced fear. I will tell you when I faced fear, it just wasn't in these situations. Um, but I do think a lot of us have been taught by life and by experience, by people who meant well, that the unknown is inherently something to brace against, something to protect yourself from, something that by default is out to get you. And what if that's just not true? What if the unknown is just unknown? What if it's neutral? What if it's waiting to see what you make of it? I got in a cage with crocodiles not because I'm reckless, not because I don't have a functioning survival instinct. I got in because I've spent years, yes, years, deliberately practicing a different relationship with the things that are supposed to scare me. And here's what that practice has taught me. The thing that you're most afraid of almost never matches the reality of it. The anticipation is almost always worse than the experience. The crocodile in your imagination, the one you've been avoiding, the one you've been building a story around for months or years, that crocodile is way scarier than the actual one. The actual one is just a crocodile. A fascinating, ancient, completely uninterested in your personal narrative about it. Crocodile. Change is the same way. The job loss, the divorce, the diagnosis, the election result, the policy that upended your community. These things are real and they're hard. I'm not minimizing that at all. But the version of them that lives in your mind at 3 a.m., that version has been fed by fear and it's much bigger than the reality that you're looking at. Curiosity is the antidote to that 3 a.m. version. When you approach the unknown with curiosity, when your first question is, what is this teaching me? instead of how do I make this stop, you change the entire equation. The people who thrive are students of chaos. They love chaos. And here's something I've noticed, both in my own life and in the work that I do around civic empowerment and community resilience. The people who not only survive change but come out the other side with something useful, they are always students of it. They're always paying attention, they're always asking questions, taking notes, looking for the patterns. When I'm face to face with the crocodile, I genuinely study that animal. I'm watching how it moves, I'm noticing how it responds to the environment. I'm completely present because I find it endlessly fascinating and because I have to be. Right? What would it look like to bring that same energy to the changes in your life? What if instead of trying to fast forward through the hard part, you got curious about it? What if you asked, what is the situation trying to show me about myself? About my community, about the systems I'm living inside of? About what actually I need versus what I thought I needed. You know, I wrote the fourth branch because I got curious about what happens when communities stop engaging with their own civic power. I didn't write it from a place of despair. I wrote it from a place of genuine fascination with the question, what happens when people actually show up? What is possible that we haven't even tried yet? Now that's a curiosity question. And curiosity questions lead to much more interesting answers than fear questions. Fear asks, how do I protect what I have? Curiosity asks, what could this become? Fear asks, how do I get back to normal? Curiosity asks, what if the new thing is better than normal ever was? Those are different directions entirely, and they lead to completely different destinations. Lesson three. You have to actually get in the water to do these things. Okay? Now I want to come back to something practical because I can feel some of you doing uh the thing where you're kind of nodding along, relating to this intellectually, and they're going to close uh this podcast

Get In The Water With One Small Step

SPEAKER_00 8:54

and go right back to avoiding your particular crocodile. Now I see you, I love you, and I'm calling it out. Curiosity is not a thinking exercise, it's an action. I did not become someone who gets excited in the cage with crocodiles by sitting on the bridge reading books about crocodiles. I became that person by getting in the water repeatedly with different animals in different places with different levels of stakes, by building up a body of evidence that the unknown was survivable. No, more than survivable. It was actually the most interesting place to be. And you build that same body of evidence in your own life in the same way by doing the thing. The smaller version of it at first, sure. But doing it, have the conversation you've been avoiding. Apply for the thing you're not sure you're qualified for. Show up to the meeting where you don't know what's going to happen. Start the business, write the first chapter, make the call, run for the seat, get in the water. Because here's the secret, and I mean this is someone who has been in the water with some genuinely tooty animals. Once you're in, uh it's almost never as bad as you thought. And sometimes, yes, sometimes, it's the most alive that you've ever felt. I was giddy in that enclosure. Two crocodiles inches from my face. I was laughing. That's not a personality type, that's a practice. And it's available to everyone, each one of you. So, adapt don't crap. Let me bring this home with the thing you guys uh know I will always come back to. I'm doing this the right way now. You're gonna notice a big change, folks. I'm I'm gonna do this reasonably professionally, like I said. But anyway, so that adapt

Adapt Don’t Crap And Final Challenge

SPEAKER_00 10:43

don't crap, Julie. You're gonna hear a lot. When most people hear that, they imagine it's advice from someone who's scared. It's like a pep talk uh for someone who's white knuckling it. But I want you to hear it differently when I start saying it. Because it comes from me, and I wasn't scared of the crocodile. Adapt don't crap is not just about getting through the hard thing, it's about choosing consciously, deliberately, every single time to engage with your life instead of brace against it. To meet the change with your whole self instead of your most defended self. To be in the experience, curious and present, instead of trying to manage it from a safe distance on the bridge. The crocodile is gonna be there whether you get in or out of the water. Change is coming, whether you're ready for it or not. The question is, it's literally the only question that has ever actually mattered, is what are you going to do when you are face to face with it? Me, I'm gonna look it dead in the eye. I'm gonna be fascinated by it, I'm gonna learn everything it has to teach me, and then I'll come back here and tell you guys all about it. Right? Alright, before I let you go, uh your one takeaway from today, find your smaller version of the cage, not the sharks in Australia. Start with the thing you've been putting off for two weeks. The email you haven't sent, the conversation you've been rehearsing in your head, the idea you haven't pitched yet. Get curious about it. Don't be afraid of it. Ask what might I find on the other side of this? What might I learn? And then, and this is the most important part of all get in the water. I promise the crocodile is more interesting up close than it is from the bridge. All the links and resources from today are at survivingchanges.com. Books, free courses, all of it. Come find me there. I'm Heidi. This is Surviving Changes. Adapt. Do not crap.