Welcome to “Beyond Success”, the podcast for high-achievers seeking deeper meaning, fulfillment and purpose. Now, here's your host, world-renowned leadership coach and therapist, David Tian, PhD.
David: What if calm and inner peace aren't hiding in more structure, tighter schedules, or another color-coded plan, but in learning how to flow with the chaos? A lot of smart, driven people have been sold the idea that chaos is something to be conquered, that success means stacking up more control, more discipline, more frameworks, more predictability. But if you've lived long enough, you already know life doesn't give a damn about your plans.
The storm hits anyway. Relationships get messy. Businesses break. Governments screw things up. Emotions don't listen to spreadsheets. The real power isn't in eliminating chaos. It's in staying grounded while everything's moving, calm, stillness, clear, presence, right in the middle of what seems like chaos swirling around you. [01:08.0]
In this episode, I'm drawing on ancient Chinese philosophy, Buddhist psychology, modern depth therapy and decades of real world coaching with high-performing leaders to show you a path to peace that doesn't depend on controlling your life to ensure certainty. This isn't about giving up ambition or passion. It's about accessing a deeper kind of strength, the kind that doesn't need control to feel safe.
If you take this seriously, what's waiting on the other side is real—emotional stability, calm confidence, creative clarity, and the ability to lead yourself and others no matter what's going on around you. This is the core of fulfillment, love and true resilience, and even antifragility. [01:52.7]
If you ignore this, the cost is high. You end up living scared, always trying to force life into a box it was never meant to fit in. Anxiety becomes your baseline. Relationships start to feel flat or fragile. The spark dims. You're just surviving, not truly living, and most of the time, you won't even notice it until it's already too far gone. Let's talk about how to stop that slide before it starts.
I'm David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I've been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives, and in this episode, I've got three main points. The first point is that peace emerges from attunement to chaos, not its suppression.
Most people hear the word “peace” and assume it means something like silence or stillness or quietude, as if peace requires everything to settle down before it can arrive. But that's a trap, because if your peace depends on your life calming down, good luck, you'll be waiting forever. Peace doesn't come after the chaos. It meets the chaos. [02:59.3]
That's where Lao Tzu drops one of his most deceptively simple lines: “The soft overcomes the hard. The yielding overcomes the strong.” This isn't just poetry. It's strategy. For instance, water wears down rock, not by force, but by flow. It bends. It moves. It feels. It listens, so to speak, and in the long run, it shapes the world.
Now compare that to how most high-achievers have been taught to approach stress or uncertainty. They tense up. They dig in. They white-knuckle their way through it, and maybe that works for a while in the short term. Maybe it gets them some promotions or revenue or attention, but eventually, the tension becomes their default, and then they wonder why they can't relax, why their sleep sucks, why they can't connect with their partners, why joy feels so far away. Control might get you performance in the short term, but it doesn't get you peace. [04:02.5]
The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is built on this idea, and the I Ching isn't supposed to be some fortune-telling gimmick. It was originally a philosophical manual for dealing with a reality that never stops shifting. Nothing stays still. Patterns move. People change. Conditions evolve. The wisdom isn't in locking things down. It's in reading the shifts and adjusting with them. The moment you cling to how things were or how things should be, you're already fighting the flow of life, and eventually, that fight wears you down.
Ancient Chinese thinkers wrestled with this in different ways. Xunzi, for instance, believed that humans are chaotic by nature. He saw our impulses as dangerous, needing strict rules and structures to keep us in line, like ritual, discipline, hierarchy. By the way, this is a sort of caricature of Xunzi, but you get the point. [04:59.8]
There's definitely some value in this structure, especially when you're first learning. But Mengzi had a radically different view. He said our human nature is inherently good, that deep down we already want the right things, like connection, honesty, kindness, and purpose.
He used a metaphor of a sprout, delicate but full of promise. You don't shape a seedling by forcing it, by pulling the grass to make it grow. You protect it. You nurture it. You give it the right conditions, like sunlight and space, and water and care, and that's what allows it to grow straight and strong. In this context, stillness isn't some rigid, dead thing. It's living, breathing attunement. It's what happens when you're connected to the deeper rhythms of reality, not fighting them. [05:54.0]
This isn't just philosophy from 2,000 years ago. It plays out in everyday life, especially in relationships. Take parenting, for example. If you've got a toddler, you know the chaos I'm talking about, meltdowns, screaming, boogers, desperation. Trying to reason with a three-year-old in the middle of his tantrum is like trying to explain tax law to a drunk bear. You can't debate your way out of it. You can't impose control and expect calm. What actually helps in the moment is presence, grounding, compassion.
As psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy points out—by the way, I've devoted three full episodes to an analysis of her book, Good Inside—her view is that the child doesn't need a lecture. They need co-regulation. They need you to be calm so that they can find their way back to calm. The stillness has to come from the adult first. It has to be offered, and let's get real, most of us don't do this with our own inner chaos either. [06:58.2]
When anger hits or shame or grief, we immediately try to shut it down. We try to push it away. We distract ourselves. We numb ourselves. But that just sends the parts deeper underground that exiles them further, and they don't disappear. They actually get louder underneath it and they get sneakier in sabotaging.
Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS therapy, has a very powerful insight here. Stillness isn't the absence of parts. It's the presence of the true Self, the calm, compassionate, curious Self. When that's online, it can hold space for even the most extreme emotions without getting overwhelmed or hijacked. It doesn't resist the chaos. It witnesses it, understands it and works with it. [07:49.3]
Carl Jung knew this, too. His whole life's work was about navigating the unconscious, the Shadow, the archetypes, the wildness of the psyche, not by suppressing it, but by integrating it. He said, the Self isn't just the ego or the conscious mind. It's the totality of who you are, and to access that, you have to go through the chaos, not to suppress it or not to even sidestep it.
Whether it's parenting or business, or romance or your own inner world, peace comes when you stop needing control and you start offering presence, when you're willing to feel what's actually happening instead of trying to force what you wish were happening. It's counterintuitive. It takes practice, but it's the only thing that works in the long run. Once you taste that kind of inner peace, the kind that holds steady while the storm of chaos rages around you, then you stop needing to chase safety. You stop needing guarantees. You stop pretending life can be controlled and you start living from something much deeper. [08:57.4]
Now let's get into the second point, which is that chaos is the source of creation and innovation. Chaos gets a bad rap these days. People hear the word and immediately imagine destruction, mess, dysfunction, everything spinning out of control. But if you step back and really look at it, chaos isn't the enemy. It's the birthplace. Creativity, passion, intimacy, growth, they all come from chaos. Every single time I've worked with a client who finally broke through a plateau, whether in business relationships or purpose, it didn't happen during the smooth, controlled, predictable, comfortable phases. It happened to the messy ones in the midst of uncertainty and confusion. When they were uncertain, scared, when they felt lost, and the old tools stopped working, that's when something new can finally emerge. [09:49.7]
The Daoists understood this thousands of years ago. The Dao itself is formless, undefined. It gives rise to what they call the 10,000 things, not through logic or linearity, but through emergence from the yin of the yin–yang. The yin is the dark fluid, fertile, unknown, and from the yin comes new life.
The womb isn't some spreadsheet, and this shows up in the yin–yang symbol itself, that little dot of white in the black swirl and the black dot in the white swirl. This isn't just some decoration. It's an ancient symbolic representation of the truth of the reality of life. Within order is the seed of chaos. Within chaos is the seed of order. They aren't enemies. They dance. They feed each other. Try to cling to just one and you cut yourself off from half of life.
But that's exactly what high-achievers have been taught to do. They try to dominate uncertainty, eliminate mess, protect their systems and timelines and KPIs like some sacred relics, and then they wonder why they feel stuck, why they feel dry, why they keep repeating the same patterns with a new job title or a new partner—and here's the twist: the parts of your life where you feel stuck are usually the places where you're resisting chaos the most. [11:11.3]
Now, Wang Yangming, one of the greatest Chinese philosophers ever and my favorite, personal favorite Chinese philosopher, nailed this. He said, “To know and not to act is not truly to know.” Real wisdom happens in the doing, not in the theory, not in your color-coded Notion app, but in motion while things are still unclear. You can read about leadership all day, but you don't get it until you're in the room, heart racing, navigating conflict while trying to stay grounded and open. You don't get love by reading relationship books. You get it by being in it, mess and all.
The same thing in Buddhist philosophy. One of the biggest misconceptions about emptiness is that it means something like nothingness, but it's not nihilism. It's potential. When something is empty of fixed identity, when it's not clinging, then it can become anything. It's not locked into one shape. That's what makes it so powerful. [12:08.5]
So, when your plans fall apart or your expectations get shattered, or you hit that moment of “I have no idea what I'm doing,” that isn't necessarily failure. That’s emptiness. That’s space. That's the crack where something new can come through, if you stay present to it, if you don't immediately scramble to fill the gap with something just to feel in control again.
This is where Tony Robbins' framing lands really well. He said many times the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with. He's also said your business success is directly related to your threshold of uncertainty to raise your threshold for uncertainty. If you've spent any time in business, you already know this is true. You can have the best five-year plan in the world and the market laughs at it. The leaders who grow aren't the ones who avoid risk. They're the ones who build the capacity to hold uncertainty without panic. They don't freeze. They stay connected. They adjust and adapt in real time. [13:13.0]
You can't plan your way into true mastery. You show up. You try. You get hit. You adapt. You respond, and that's the rhythm. That's how real leadership happens, this feedback loop with uncertainty and reality. The same goes for true love, real love. The strongest relationships aren't the most predictable. They're the ones where both people can hold space for emotional messiness, for imperfection, for change. If you demand clarity and consistency from your partner at all times, what you get might be polite, but it won't be passionate. Intimacy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability brings chaos, emotional, uncontrolled, honest. [14:02.3]
The irony is, when you try to force order onto love or creativity or your own growth, you don't get stability. You get boredom or burnout or resentment, because life needs room to breathe. People need room to breathe. You need room to breathe.
So, instead of asking, “How do I lock this down?” try asking, “How much can I stay open right now, without needing to fix this? How much of this moment, this uncertainty, this fear, this ambiguity, can I actually feel without numbing out or running away?” That's where the breakthroughs live. That's where the new chapters begin, not in the plan, but in the pause, in the presence, in the chaos you didn't run from. [14:56.6]
Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you've noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.
That's where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It's based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That's D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.
The third and final point is that peace is rooted in presence, the eye of the storm. Most people confuse stillness with silence or with checking out, or detaching or forcing themselves to be calm, and that kind of stillness is fake. It's brittle. It cracks the moment life stops cooperating. [16:10.0]
Real stillness isn't fragile like that. It's not about freezing or numbing. It's about presence, a grounded awareness that holds firm even while everything around it moves around, the kind of stillness that doesn't come from escaping chaos, but from standing firm in the chaos and not flinching.
Buddhist practice has a lot to say about this, not in some mystical way, but in a deeply practical one. Mindfulness isn't just sitting with your eyes closed, trying not to think. By the way, that is not meditation. It's not mindfulness. Mindfulness is about witnessing. It's about staying with what's real in the moment, even if it's uncomfortable, or especially if it's uncomfortable. You don't fight it. You don't judge it. You don't have to understand it right away. You just let it be what it is, spacious awareness with all of your senses open to it, and that space is the key. [17:07.8]
Most people don't leave enough space in their minds or their lives to let anything new emerge. They're constantly reacting or analyzing, or jumping ahead or running behind. They're doing more and more just to feel less lost. But that kind of motion doesn't always bring clarity. It often just covers up the anxiety. Lao Tzu, again, comes in with a line that cuts through it all. “To be still is to be steady in the midst of change.” Stillness isn't rigidity. It bends. It adjusts. It doesn't panic. It stays aware. It breathes.
This isn't just some ancient sage stuff. This shows up in therapy, too, especially in IFS, Internal Family Systems therapy. In IFS, you learn that your mind is made up of different parts and some of them react hard when things get chaotic. Maybe there's a part of you that lashes out or shuts down, or numbs out with food or porn or alcohol or hustle, but those parts aren't bad. They're trying to protect you, usually from something very old, something they've carried around for years. [18:16.8]
What they need isn't more control. They need to be seen, heard, understood, witnessed, held, and that only happens when your True Self shows up. Self energy feels different from your reactive parts. Your True Self is calm but alert. Your True Self is curious, compassionate. It doesn't need the situation to change before it can act. It just shows up and holds the space.
Carl Jung had a similar idea. He called it the Self, too, the totality of who you are, not just the conscious ego. To find that center, he believed, you had to walk through the chaos. You had to meet your Shadow, face the unknown, get your hands dirty in the dark. Individuation, in his view, wasn't about getting rid of the mess. It was about becoming whole inside it. [19:09.8]
That's what stillness really is, not a quiet room with candles, not a five-step system to eliminate stress. It's who you are when the storm hits and you don't run, when you can hold the intensity without shutting down, when you can stay grounded enough to actually respond, not just react.
Even Tony Robbins, who's no more for hype than stillness, even he talks about this. He calls it state management. When the people around you are all panicking when the deal is falling apart, when the pressure's on and everyone's looking at you, who do you become? That moment will define everything in your life. Stillness, in that context, isn't passivity. It's leadership, not through control, but through presence, presence that grounds everyone else around you, presence that can feel pain and not flinch, presence that doesn't need certainty before it moves. [20:09.0]
This is where the work becomes real, because you don't get that kind of presence by accident. You build it, practice it. Day by day, practice by practice, you sit with your own discomfort. You track your own reactions. You stay with yourself when you want to bail.
So, try this the next time things feel like they're spinning out. Pause just for, let's say, three minutes. Take a deep breath in through your nose, holding at the top, long breath out through your mouth, and just keep taking deep breaths like that, scanning your body from the top of your head slowly down through, until you get to the bottom of your feet, taking your time. Notice where the tension is. Ask yourself, “Which part of me is activated right now?” Then ask, “What’s this part trying to protect me from?” Don't try to fix it. Just be with it. Let your Higher Self come forward and listen to it. You might be surprised by what happens when you stop running from the chaos and start relating to it differently. [21:19.4]
This has ripple effects everywhere. In creative work, for example, the person who can hold the unknown without jumping to answers too fast, that person brings real value. They create the space where something new can actually be born. Premature conclusions kill innovation. Stillness keeps the space open.
In conflict, the one who doesn't escalate, who doesn't shut down, who holds steady, that person shifts the whole dynamic and that's real leadership, that’s presence. That's true stillness, not because they had it all figured out, but because they didn't need to. They just stayed connected in the middle of the chaos without losing themselves. That's what this work points to and it's the foundation of every kind of success that actually feels good once you have it. [22:11.4]
One of my clients, a co-founder in the FinTech space, came to me burned out and locked up. On paper, everything seemed fine, fast growth, tons of credibility, but he was exhausted. His team was walking on eggshells around him. His marriage was cold, and underneath all of it, he carried this low-grade panic that if he let go for even a second, it would all just fall apart.
He kept trying to fix it with more control, tighter systems, more discipline, more strategy, but none of that touched what was actually happening inside. What he couldn't see at first was that he wasn't dealing with a business problem. He was facing a crisis of presence. His nervous system was stuck in hypervigilance. He'd built a whole life that depended on being five steps ahead of disaster. There was no room for stillness, because he didn't trust what would happen if he stopped pushing. [23:05.1]
In one of our sessions, I asked him to pause and notice what was coming up in his body as he described his latest board meeting, and his throat tightened. His chest clamped down. His jaw locked. These weren't just reactions. They were memories, old emotional imprints, so we followed them down. He found a part of himself from childhood, around 10 or 11 years old, terrified of letting anyone see him drop the ball, a part of him that believed love and safety depended on performance. That part had been running the show for decades, and this part was really tired.
When he finally turned toward that part, not with judgment, not with analysis, but starting with grounded curiosity, it was a huge paradigm shift, not in a flashy way. It was quiet, like an internal exhale that he hadn't allowed himself in years. That was the start of stillness, right there in the chaos of his own body. [24:06.2]
The storm didn't stop. His work was still intense. His marriage still needed healing, but he stopped being tossed around by it all. He stopped being scared of it. He found his footing, not by controlling more, but by anchoring deeper into himself. Stillness isn't hiding from the storm. It's standing firm and aware in the eye of it, not by force, but by knowing you're already whole amidst the swirl.
This kind of stillness changes how you lead, how you show up in conflict, how you relate to your own ambition, not by dampening your drive, but by freeing it from the fear that keeps it brittle. You don't have to white-knuckle your way through life to win. You don't have to pretend you've got it all together to be strong. There's a deeper power in being fully present with whatever is happening, without needing to escape it or fix it right away. [25:06.3]
To wrap this up, first, peace doesn't come from control. It comes from learning how to move with the chaos, instead of fighting it. When you stop clinging, you start flowing. Second, chaos isn't the problem. It's the raw material of growth, creativity, love, leadership. All of it lives in uncertainty. The more you can stay open in the mess, the more access you have to what really matters.
Third, stillness isn't about silence or retreat. Peace is about presence. It's about being able to hold your ground while the storm swirls around you, not by shutting down, but by staying connected to yourself. That's where your real power lives, in the pause, in the awareness, in the space where you don't need to force anything. [25:52.4]
As we close, here are a few questions you might want to reflect on:
“Where am I resisting chaos that might actually be an invitation to grow?”
“What am I trying to control right now, and what would happen if I loosened my grip even just a little?”
“In what area of life am I craving certainty, and what could shift if I allowed a little more space instead?”
Finally, “What might peace look like for me today, not as control, but as grounded openness?”
You don't have to answer all these questions right now. Just sit with them, let them work on you in the background a bit, because this isn't just a paradigm shift or a mindset shift. It's a new way of being, and once you find it, you won't want to go back.
Thank you so much for listening. If you like this, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you're listening to this on. If this has helped you in any way, please send it and share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I'd love to hear it. Leave a comment or send me a message. I'd love to get your feedback.
I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [27:00.4]
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