How to Shorten the Distance Between Chaos and Clarity
The Day That Pulled Me In
It was not my busiest day. In fact, on paper it looked quite normal. A few meetings, some planning, some conversations. Yet by late afternoon, when I walked into the gym, the word that came to mind was very specific.
Disgusting.
Not because of the workload. Not because of some catastrophic event. It was a quiet, internal disgust. The kind that comes when you realise you have been pulled into emotional mud and you stayed there longer than you should.
That evening, at 9.12 p.m., I took Loki out for a walk in the park and started talking out loud to myself. That has become one of my habits. When my dog walks, my mind walks too.
I had just completed my “duty” as a father and as a husband. Over the years I have learned that those are 2 different roles. Being a good father does not automatically make me a good husband. There is a connection, but they are not copies of each other. The same way being a CEO does not automatically make me a wise leader. Role and character are not the same thing.
Today reminded me of that.
It also reminded me of a quote that has stayed with me for many years:
“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.”
Most of us spend our energy hacking at the leaves. We react to the problems of the day and call that leadership. But the real work is to strike at the root. To ask, “What in me allowed this day to have this much power over me?”
That is where this story begins.
The Drive That Became a Date Night
Every Monday evening for the last 2 years, I have been the “Chinese tuition driver.” It is a simple routine. From home to the tuition centre takes 15 minutes. Class starts at 7, ends at 8.30. Four trips in total.
15 minutes to send them there. 15 minutes to drive home. Another 15 minutes to go back. Another 15 minutes to come home again. 60 minutes of driving around in circles.
For 1 whole year, that 1 hour drained me. It felt inefficient, like I was pouring time into a hole. On top of that, something else quietly grew inside me. A story.
“I am the one contributing. Does my wife even see this? Appreciate this?”
That is how resentment is born, not from big events but from small stories we tell ourselves and never challenge.
This year, I finally did something that now feels embarrassingly simple. Instead of going alone, I invited my wife. We began going together with the children. We dropped them off. Then for the next 90 minutes, we turned waiting time into a date.
My wife is simple in the best way. She enjoys food. Not luxury food. Just something special she has not tried before. So we would hunt for a small restaurant or a nearby café. 30 to 45 minutes for dinner. Then we would walk over to a small supermarket, not a hypermarket, and buy groceries.
By the time we finished, it was time to pick the children up and head home.
On the surface, it did 2 things. It reduced my travel time from 1 hour to half an hour, and it filled the “waiting time” with something meaningful.
But if I put it through the Life Wheel, it did much more.
- Home and Family: We were showing up for the children’s education.
- Love and Romance: It became our weekly date night.
- Play and Relaxation: We enjoyed discovering new food together.
- Community and Contribution: We often bought groceries with hosting in mind, so we could invite people over for dinner.
- God and Purpose: A healthy marriage is part of our obedience to God.
- Knowledge and Wisdom: Along the way, our conversations often touched on parenting, leadership, and decisions we were facing.
- Money and Finance: By combining errands and reducing trips, we saved time and some cost.
One simple change hit 7 life dimensions in one go.
There is an interesting parallel from relationship research. John Gottman, a leading marriage researcher, discovered that couples who thrive tend to maintain a ratio of about 5 positive interactions to 1 negative interaction. The same dynamic appears in healthy teams. When the positives consistently outnumber the negatives, trust grows quietly in the background.
That weekly tuition drive became one of those repeatable “positive interactions” for our marriage. A small ritual that compounds.
The irony is this. The exact same Monday slot that used to feel like a drag became one of the best parts of my week. The time was the same. The route was the same. The difference was how I chose to use it.
That contrast became very important later in the day, when everything else started to feel like mud.
The Day That Dragged Me into the Mud
The “disgusting” part of the day did not start with some big blow up. It started with my face.
I have what people would call a natural “serious face.” When I focus, I look fierce. That morning, a teacher walked into the shared office to meet our Group COO. I had not been informed of the meeting, so I stayed at my desk and continued my work.
No words. Just my focused face.
Later, I found out that she had left with the impression that I was very angry. That bothered me. Because in her mind, she had just tasted something of my leadership, and it was not what I wanted to communicate. So I did what I knew I needed to do. I met her. I apologised. I owned it.
That was the first emotional weight.
Then came the session on the groundbreaking ceremony that will be combined with our graduation concert, less than a month away. The scale of the event is big. The gravity is real. In the meeting, I felt we were taking it too lightly, as if we could somehow “wing it” and it would turn out fine.
I was furious.
Part of me wanted to deliver a clear message on the spot, to demand answers, decisions, immediate action. And for a while, I did feel trapped inside that urgency.
Then, on top of that, came the news about a prestigious school from Singapore planning to visit us. Direction and focus began to feel blurry. The plans were not wrong, but they were shifting. I could feel myself being pulled between different priorities.
If a CEO can feel this torn, what more my team?
I saw myself caught between 2 roles. The classic Chief Executive Officer, who must decide, drive, and demand. And the Chief Empowering Officer, who must consider how the team will experience every decision and communication flow.
I carry both titles in my head. That is part of the tension.
And the day was not done with me yet. Campus planning issues surfaced. Internal staff movement and leadership concerns came in almost together. Each input carried weight. Each item had its own urgency. By the late afternoon, it felt like everything had arrived in one delivery.
There is a phrase in Chinese that describes this feeling. Gao wei gao wei. It is like saying, “This is very off, very disgusting.” A mix of discomfort, frustration, and a sense that something inside you has been polluted.
By about 5.30, when I went for my workout, I did a quick mental closure of the day and concluded, “Today is a disgusting day.” That was my label.
Here is where it gets interesting.
Neuroscience tells us that emotional states are contagious. One study from Harvard found that the mood of a leader can begin to affect a team’s emotional state within just 2 minutes. That means my internal disgust was not staying inside. Whether I intended it or not, it would leak out in my tone, my face, my body language.
Psychologists also talk about something called the emotional refractory period. After a strong emotional experience, most adults need 4–6 hours before they can fully think rationally about it. During that period, everything we see gets coloured by that emotion.
I did not know the term when I walked into the gym. But I was feeling the reality. I was inside that window. Everything looked worse than it really was.
The real danger was not the campus issue, or the event planning, or the leadership movement. The real danger was that I was letting these events pull me so deep into my feelings that I lost my objectivity, my sense of mission, my joy.
When a leader is swallowed by their day, everyone pays for it.
That was when my mentor came to mind. He leads a multi billion ringgit conglomerate, faces challenges that would send most people straight to the hospital, and yet he is able to end the day with a simple ritual. A game or 2 of basketball. Some sweat. Some laughter with his team. Then sleep.
Day after day he keeps his mission intact and his spirit grounded.
Looking at him, I had to ask a hard question.
Is the problem the size of the challenge I am facing, or is the problem the size of my inner container?
That question began to pull me upward.
The Four Hour Rule
Four hours before that night walk with Loki, I was still inside my emotional storm. By the time I was actually speaking this reflection out loud in the park, something had shifted.
What happened in between?
First, the gym. Lifting weights has become more than exercise for me. It is a way to channel aggression and tension into motion. Then, the pool. Something about the rhythm of swimming helps my brain to process in the background. Finally, the sauna. Heat. Stillness. Silence.
Those 3 moments have become a ritual. My wind down system.
There is science behind this. When we engage in rhythmic, physical activities like walking, swimming, or running, the brain’s default mode network becomes active, which allows us to process experiences and emotions more deeply. That is why ideas often appear in the shower or on a walk. The brain is resetting itself through rhythm.
Add to that the spiritual layer. For me, the gym, pool, and sauna are not just places to calm down. They are places where I meet myself honestly before God. Places where I replay the day and examine my reactions.
Somewhere in that 1 hour, a key phrase surfaced.
Circle of concern or circle of influence?
We had just completed a reading session with our leaders on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That concept was still fresh. When I placed my day on that framework, the picture became clear.
If I stay focused on my circle of concern, I grow my anxiety and shrink my influence. I end my day heavy, grumpy, and probably snapping at my children or blaming my wife. I might call it “processing,” but in reality I am just passing my pain to the people I love the most.
If I choose to focus on my circle of influence, something else happens. I ask, “What can I actually do about this right now? What is mine to carry, and what is not?” That shrinks the circle of concern and slowly enlarges the circle of influence again.
There is research to back this up too. When people deliberately shift their attention from uncontrollable events to concrete actions they can take, stress hormone levels begin to drop. In some studies, cortisol levels reduced by around 20% within 30 minutes when people made that mental shift.
I felt that inside my own body. As I moved from, “Why is this all happening?” to, “What can I own, and what will I release?” the disgust started to lose its grip.
By the time I reached home, I had a choice to make. Will tonight’s dinner with my wife be hijacked by my internal drama? Will my children feel the storm that I refuse to calm inside myself?
I chose no.
We had a surprisingly joyful dinner. We did our usual grocery run. The kids enjoyed some light supper. We laughed. We talked. My wife and I enjoyed each other. None of the evening was wasted. None of it was poisoned by what happened earlier in the day.
The same man who felt “disgusted” at 5.30 was able to enjoy his family by 9.
That is when another insight came.
Four hours.
It took 4 hours to fully climb out of the mud. That became my new self measurement. My “4 hour rule.”
Right now, it takes me 4 hours from emotional collapse back to full clarity. Can I make it 3, next time? Then 2? Then 1?
If maturity in leadership is the ability to return to purpose quickly after being shaken, then reducing that window becomes a core growth target.
Most people measure their maturity by how rarely they fall. Maybe we should also measure it by how quickly we rise.
The Reverse That Redefines It All: From Disgust to Discipline
As I walked Loki that night in the park, breathing in the cooler air after the sauna heat, I noticed something important.
The day had not changed. The issues were still there. The planning still needed work. The leadership conversations still needed to happen. The campus problems were still real.
The only thing that had changed was me.
Earlier that afternoon, I believed the day was disgusting because of what happened. By night, I knew the real issue was how much I had allowed those events to own my attention and emotions.
Leadership is rarely about controlling the day. It is about mastering our response to it.
John C. Maxwell talks about the Law of the Lid. A leader’s effectiveness is capped by their leadership ability. We usually interpret that as skills, strategy, and decision making. But days like this reveal another dimension. Our emotional lid.
If my emotional lid is low, I can have all the strategy in the world and still sabotage my impact with 1 bad afternoon of uncontrolled reaction. My circle of concern will swallow my circle of influence.
If my emotional lid rises, I can face the same problems without drowning inside them. I shrink the concern and expand the influence. I keep showing up for the people and purposes that matter most.
There is another layer to this. Emotion spreads. When a leader spirals, the team follows. When a leader recenters, the team stabilises. Whether we like it or not, our emotional metabolism becomes the climate of the people we lead.
That is why I keep returning to Thoreau’s line.
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.
The leaves of this day were the emails, the complaints, the planning issues, the miscommunications, the campus problems, the leadership shifts. I could spend all my energy hacking at those leaves and still end the day exhausted, bitter, and empty.
The root was simpler. Where was my attention? Where was my heart?
Was I living out of my circle of concern, or my circle of influence? Was I passing my unresolved emotions to my family, or was I using reflection, movement, and prayer to process them before they touched the people I love?
The opposite of leadership is not failure. Failure is part of growth.
The opposite of leadership is self preservation. It is the posture that says, “I had a disgusting day, so everyone around me must pay the price for it.”
That is not leadership. That is emotional laziness dressed up as honesty.
True leadership is when I can have a disgusting day, own my reaction, process it with God and my own soul, and still show up at the dinner table with love, at the office with clarity, and in my inner world with peace.
So here is the paradox.
A “disgusting” day can become one of the most important days in your leadership journey if you are willing to let it train your recovery.
Let it train you to:
- Notice when you have fallen into the mud.
- Name it honestly.
- Use rituals and reflection to climb out.
- Shorten the distance between chaos and clarity.
Because in the end, the day is not the real story.
The real story is how quickly you return to who you were called to be.
