215. 4 Stages and Watertight Doors To Go from Chaos to Peace (getting organized)

If you're drowning in chaos in your physical, digital and financial spaces and you have tried to get organized before but slid back into chaos eventually. 

This is because you either skipped one of these stages or you didn't make sure that the doors were watertight behind you after you entered a new stage. 

I share with you the journey I take my clients on to go from Chaos to Foundation to Expansion and then to Blossom. I also elaborate why you can't rush it or skip a stage. 

From Chaos to Peace Consulting Inc - https://connygraf.com

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Transcript

Conny Graf: 0:01

Welcome to the Chaos to Peace with Conny podcast. I am Conny Graf, your host. I am here to explore with you how a few minutes a day can keep the chaos away, and with chaos I'm talking about the physical, digital, social, financial, mental, emotional and spiritual clutter that can accumulate in our life and business and our finances. Clutter is so much more than you think. I created this podcast to inspire you to do something about it. It's my deep desire to help you understand that you, too, can create and maintain an organized and supportive environment spending only a few minutes a day. Thanks for being here and enjoy the episode. Well, hello, my friend, welcome to the podcast, and thank you so much for allowing me back into your ears. In this short episode, I want to talk about a concept called watertight doors, and it is from the book Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss, and I want to talk about how this concept of watertight doors also applies to how I help my clients to go from chaos to peace. Okay, but first, what are watertight doors? Chaos to peace? Okay, but first, what are watertight doors? Well, the author, alan Weiss, a very accomplished business consultant that wrote many and I'm talking about many books, in case you don't know him. So Alan talks about this concept of watertight doors in his book as stages in business. So when we start a business we go through several stages and he explains these stages as follows. The first stage is survival, and he calls this the equivalent to the basic needs in Maslow's famous hierarchy when we begin our careers and businesses, often by taking any business available or possible, so we accept any client, we do every job that comes our way right and we hustle and scramble to stay afloat, to survive. Hence that's why he calls this stage survive. And then eventually we go to the second stage, which he calls alive, and at this stage we have an established business with clients and we're not a startup anymore and we can sustain ourselves. But we're still hustling and scrambling. But what is important is we have to keep going and keep doing it. We have to kind of close the watertight doors behind us, right, and not take on every business. We have to start switching. We have to start looking into who are these people that I love working with and what is it actually that I'm doing? What jobs or what projects am I accepting, right, and then closing the watertight doors behind us and not accepting everything and anybody, and then that's what he calls alive and anybody, and then that's what he calls alive.

Conny Graf: 3:30

And then we're moving on to the third level, or the third stage that he talks about in his book, which is where we arrive. And we don't just work with anyone anymore. We identify intentionally our ideal client and attract the kind of business that best suits us and our passion. So in stage two we have an established business, but we are not 100% clear yet. But now in stage three, we actually arrived. Basically we know and can clearly articulate with whom we're working and what projects we're taking on, and we're not doing anything else anymore. And we're also starting to establish reserves, like financial reserves but possibly also time reserves in our calendar. We're not just hustling and bustling and scrambling anymore. Again, we're kind of closing the doors. We make them watertight behind us to really establish ourselves in this stage, in the arrive stage.

Conny Graf: 4:36

And then he calls the last stage, he calls thrive, and in this stage he says we're now the thought leader and we're someone who's being seeked out. So we no longer have to go out and say to other people oh, I'd love to work with you, I can help you. Let me show you how I can help you and everything. In this stage, in the thrive stage, we're actually in the comfortable position that prospects are coming to us and say how can I work with you? And so this frees up even more. And again we're starting to shut the doors behind us and we were stopping with certain behaviors and certain routines and processes that we had before to acquire business and move more to a position where we accept the people to come to us, including referrals, of course. So that's kind of like a short overview of how Alan Weiss talks about watertight doors.

Conny Graf: 5:59

Alan Wise talks about watertight doors. He says, as we go through these stages scarcity and to be not a thought leader and not somebody established in the marketplace right, okay, so this is basically the overview of his watertight doors concept and, just to be clear, his book Million Dollar Consult is really an awesome book when you start your business and he makes so many great points. It's just this one really spoke to me because it's so similar to how I help people to get organized, to get organized in their environment, in their physical environment, in their processes and in their systems and also in their finances, and a lot of times people want to skip stages right, and it doesn't work because the doors in between, what Alan Weiss calls the watertight doors, they are not watertight. In that case, if you're going too fast or if you're not solid in your stage yet, then the risk is really that you slide back. And so let me quickly talk about how I look at these levels and how I call them.

Conny Graf: 7:17

So what he calls survival, so where we scramble and hustle, and he says it's the first hierarchy of Maslow's, it's the first level of Maslow's hierarchy where we just barely make it. So this is where I often meet my clients. This is where you're making it. I mean, you have a business and you kind of survive, you're scrambling through your chaos, but it needs so much energy and it needs so much time and effort to keep everything going and running and you're constantly at your last leg or maybe overdue with projects or late with payments, late with taxes and all this. It's not a nice place to be at, it's very stressful, but that's where then people look at me and say, oh, I want to be organized.

Conny Graf: 8:20

And they maybe take a whole weekend and try to get organized and organize everything in their office, and then Monday morning comes along and their goal and intention is to actually stay organized, because they just worked all weekend on it instead of relaxing, right? But then the whole busy week goes on and things come in and like emails come in, phone calls come in, everything comes and showers them again. And because they have tried to skip a stage, because they have tried to, because they're still trying to work with their original processes and habits and systems they haven't changed any of all this they're just sliding back into the chaos and back into scrambling and hustling and at the end of the week, possibly, their office looks just as chaotic as it looked before they organized it all and their inbox is overflowing again. And they're at wit's end and they're thinking it's their mistake and they just can't be organized. They're just not born to be organized, and that's not true. It's just you skipped, you tried to skip a step, and so what I'm saying is from where you are.

Conny Graf: 9:47

If you're scrambling and you are in the the deep, dark end of the chaos, then what we need to go is into the alive stage. Well, alan Wise calls it the alive stage, I call it the seedling stage, or the starting, foundation stage, and at this stage we have to start to establish habits and processes for all this daily stuff, and this is not something that you just take for granted. I don't know a day or the whole week to establish processes. You have to analyze what you're doing now and then tweaking and organizing these processes and habits and systems so that they actually produce a more organized environment rather than a chaotic environment. And then, instead of going and trying to put your existing clutter, let's say like that, or your existing chaos, through these new processes, what you actually need to do is test these new processes, systems and habits on the daily stuff that is coming in new and habits on the daily stuff that is coming in new.

Conny Graf: 11:14

You have to be able and have the courage to leave the chaos to the side for now not forever, but for now and test these processes as systems and habits on the daily business, on the everyday, and you have to see whether all your new ideas are actually working out, not backwards to the past, but with whatever is coming in new, whatever is coming in now. You have to create a organization, a filing system, a financial system, a, a system how you are set up and how you're working in every day, every minute of your day, with whatever comes in. So you basically have to start with the waterfall that comes towards you and you have to start dealing with that and not with the huge lake of all the stuff you have, if the water image helps, maybe. So again, I call it the seedling stage. It is starting to establish a foundation stage, which you actually have to do, not with what you have already, but with what comes in fresh, everything that comes in. And you constantly tweak and look how can I like every day, you, until you have this process in place, you have to tweak it and reflect every evening real quick did this work? No, this doesn't work. What do I do tomorrow differently with all this stuff that is coming in?

Conny Graf: 12:42

It's a, it's an active creation of these processes, systems and habits that you want to implement in your business and that you want to live in the future. Right, but first you have to find them and they have to be aligned with how you tick and how you work. They can't just be okay, that's how you do it, and then you kind of try to do it that way and then life gets hectic and it doesn't work that way. So that is the alive stage. Um, well, alan weiss calls it the alive stage.

Conny Graf: 13:14

To me this is the seedling stage, the foundation stage, the building stage, and only when you're kind of have your daily waterfall of stuff coming at you under control and you can actually process those things in a, in a matter that is not hustling and and and scrambling. But I mean, you might still be very busy and it might be a hard day, but you, you, you have it's almost like you start feeling how you have a foundation in place and how, okay, this goes here, this goes here. I do this that way. That's getting into the calendar. This is going to be deleted, I don't need this. This is going to be put in the to-do list and this piece is going to be put back or this item is going to be put back because it has a home right here and not being left out on the desk and cluttering up my space. So you're starting to have this more organized daily routine with the things that get thrown at you on a daily basis. Right, and only when you are kind of like in a good place there and when you're pretty sure like 80 to 90% sure that you can handle it, even when it gets really hectic, and you're not sliding back and the watertight doors are literally watertight and shut, and you're not sliding back into the chaos, then we can move on to stage three, which Alan Wise calls arrive, and I call it expansion. That is when we expand our system to the old stuff, when we expand and start to take the stuff that is still in need of getting organized, is still in need to be fed through our new process in order for us to be really clutter free and organized, order for us to be really clutter-free and organized. That's when we can start tackling that and that's why I'm calling it expansion. It's kind of like we're going we don't need to build processes and habits and systems anymore. We have them in place. They're working like clockwork, I would say, or like there you know exactly how they work and the daily things are getting put through it and you have a little bit of pocket here and there that you can actually take a little chunk let's say like that, whether that's a virtual chunk or a literal paper, a little chunk of paper that you have piled up somewhere and actually feed it through your process and starting to get more like expand your piece within the chaos, basically because peace is at the middle. That's where we want to end up, right, and so you have already expanded a little bit.

Conny Graf: 16:27

In stage two. You have already some organization in your daily life, but in the back of your mind, you know, you still have all this old stuff that still needs to be processed, that is still weighing heavy on your shoulders, right? So we're starting to expand that and we're starting to implement that into our daily routine. Every day, we do a few minutes where we clean up some physical stuff and put it into our like you found a home for it, so you put it away. Or you take papers that need to be filing, or emails that need to be filed, or finances that need to be looked at and taken care of. All this back stuff. Not this, not the new stuff, but all this back stuff. That's where we expand and we're truly creating, to truly creating a clutter-free environment, right? So?

Conny Graf: 17:27

And again, it's not about being perfect, of being, and we don't strive for that. We don't strive for perfection. We strive for effective, supportive environments, whether that's physical, digital or financial environments, right? So clearing your clutter is self-love. It's about making sure, even when days get busy, you know exactly what to do. You're staying on top of things and you can stay organized and you don't slide back and these doors are watertight.

Conny Graf: 18:01

And then this is where you're very close to what Alan calls the thrive stage, which I call the blossom stage. That is when this has gone over into your bones. Basically it's when everything became just who you are right, so it became, and this takes a bit of time. We can't change overnight and we can't force ourselves to change. You have to figure out how you tick and how this works for you. So this will take a bit. So level four is not something that you achieve in I would even say in three months. This is something that you achieve further down the road. What we want to do is we want to get to level three fairly quickly.

Conny Graf: 18:56

But then level four, the blossom that is when you have no backlog, everything is cleaned up, everything is organized, nothing sits heavy on you, you're on time with everything. You don't scramble anymore to do things. So it's almost like you are a day ahead, how my guest that I had on once, blaine Ullkers, was calling it. If you want to check out that episode, let me check. It's episode 137 called Stress Less and Do More with Blaine Ullkers and he said that he wants to work in a way that he is a day ahead. And that is actually level four, blossom level, or what Alan Weiss calls a thrive level.

Conny Graf: 19:48

That is when you're so, when your foundation is so solid and everything runs so smoothly that you're always ahead of it. You're not behind, you're not scrambling to make deadlines, but you're ahead of time. You're always prepared before time. You have your taxes in before the due date, you have your bills paid before the due date. You are organized. It doesn't even get chaotic anymore. Right and so, and that doesn't mean never right.

Conny Graf: 20:19

So in my office sometimes, when I come in in the morning and and I notice right away oops, yesterday, last night, I didn't have time to do the five minute cleanup I can see it right away. But it's a five minute cleanup, right, so it's no big deal. It's not like a huge chaos that throws me back. So the doors are watertight. So that is the whole point and we can't rush through this, we can't push ourselves, we have to be gentle with ourselves and it will click. And then everything works out all of a sudden and it flows and it makes it so much easier, and then we're effortlessly organized and you can be too. You just have to go through the steps the right way and not trying to rush it and not trying to skip steps or levels. And that's what I help my clients achieve, and that's often where they are surprised how they can be, how they too can be organized right and yeah. So here is a quick summary of the steps.

Conny Graf: 21:27

So what Alan Weiss calls survival, I actually call in the dark of the chaos. The second level is where you have your systems and your processes kind of in place, but you're still tweaking, but you're working on your daily stuff. I call this the seedling stage or the building foundation stage. Then we have the third level. I call it expansion. That's when we start to expand our systems and our new processes, our foundation, to the rest of the chaos, to the past chaos.

Conny Graf: 22:08

And then level four. I call it blossom, and that's when you work actually from a clean, organized, supportive environment all the time and you are a day ahead or you are ahead, you're ahead of the chaos and the doors are completely watertight. There is no way that you slide back because you have your systems and processes in place, that whenever life gets busy and you can't keep up with your daily thing right away. You have all these little systems and processes in place that helps you catch up and get you back to level four, to the blossom level, right. So that is what I help my clients with. That's where you could end up, too, if you go on a journey from chaos to peace with me. Yeah, I hope I could encourage you to start this process and believe in yourself that you too can be organized and you too can get out of the chaos and into the peaceful, supportive environment, whether that's physical, digital or financial.

Conny Graf: 23:28

Okay, my friend, that's it for today. Thanks so much for listening all the way to the end and have a beautiful week. Talk to you next time. Take good care and spread peace. You can bring your chaos to me. Use the link in the show notes and sign up for a complimentary 30-minute chaos to peace jumpstart call, where we will address your most pressing pain point around clutter and chaos and how to solve it in a few minutes a day. And, if you're ready, we can also discuss options for moving forward together and how I can help you out on your journey from chaos to peace. You find the links to sign up in the show notes.