4 Steps to Avoiding Overwhelm

Welcome to the charged life. This is Brendan Burchard. How do you avoid becoming overwhelmed too often? Now, as I teach you this one, I got four big ideas for you here, but I want to first clarify. There's a little bit of difference between overwhelm and burnout, right? Overwhelm. In the moment, you feel kind of flooded with obligation in that moment where you feel like you just can't handle everything. Burnout is you've been handling everything for too long and now you're just wasted away, exhausted. Sometimes it's both. But I want to let you know, I've got another episode on how to avoid burnout, and that's gonna be a little different than today. How to over avoid, overwhelm. That in the moment sense that you can't handle it. All right, so hopefully we can make sure you avoided burnout. And now we're in the moment. Now it's like, okay, there's a lot coming at you today. How do you go through the day without feeling completely overwhelmed by all the obligations that you got on your plate? I hope first and foremost that you've been saying no, you've been, you know, keeping your boundaries set, that you're only taking on things that you really want to take on, that you're managing your own life's agenda. If any of that sounds foreign to you, please read my book, the motivation Manifesto. Get your life back. Okay, Begin there. Get life back. Then let's talk about the overwhelming, the moment first. I love to share that it's necessary to start your day organized. A lot of overwhelm comes because all of a sudden you're distracted or you're reacting to everybody. So in the moment you feel like, I gotta write this email, I gotta take this call. I'm doing these three projects. I don't know when I'm gonna do them today. So everything feels like, eh. If you block your time out well during the day, and most importantly, you begin that day knowing what the day is about, that will help you minimize daily overwhelm. Like, get up in the day. I like to get up in the day and I do my morning routines where I stretch or work out. I get lots of water, I write down everything I want to work through that day following my one page productivity sheet. If you haven't seen that, just go online and type in onepage productivity sheet with my name. It'll pop up. And, you know, I organize my day so much. It doesn't mean that sometimes that day doesn't get blown out of the water by Some emergency, but that's very rare because I saw most of those emergency come because I'm planning ahead. But starting the day on a place of just security, a place of certainty, a place of this is what I want this day to be about. That will automatically help you deal with those moments of overwhelm, because you'll know what's next. That you'll know what's coming next in terms of your obligations or that next hour of block time to get things done. Trust me, start the day organized. You'll be so happy that you did that. Also to manage day by day overwhelm, here's what I want you to do between your major projects or the major times of, you know, that you blocked out to do things in between transition. Well, if you're going from project A to Project B during the day, let's say project A was. You're replying to all your emails now. Project B is you have to create a presentation in between those. Give yourself a time to reset. It's very important. Give yourself a time to reset. If you go into one project into another one and you're smashing all your projects together during the day, you're just gonna be like, your brain's not having its time to break from one to start the other. And your brain needs that silence in between those projects to bring full focus and creativity. Otherwise your mind starts wandering between all the projects and you get overwhelmed. Make sense? So having a break in between projects helps. For me personally, I do a 10, 10 to 15 minute meditation between my major projects. So for example, if we finished this video and I had to go create a PowerPoint or a keynote presentation, I'd finish this video, I'd go and I'd sit, close my eyes, I'd do a 15 minute release meditation technique and then I'd begin. If you haven't studied my work on that, I've been blessed to train a million people on meditation. Now just type in my name and release meditation technique. You can learn how to do that on YouTube. Very, very simple technique for you. It might be take a quick nap or take a walk around the block or around the office, but give yourself a mental break between projects and that overlapping overwhelm will start to go away. I think next, you know, it's about giving yourself the ability to catch up at the end of the day. I know if during the day there's so many things going on, I'm freaking out. I don't worry about it because I'm going to give myself a block of Time. At the end of the day, I just call catch up time. It's every day before dinner for me. No matter what, before my dinner, I take 30 minutes to sit down and catch up. I literally sit down and go, okay, what do I need to make sure I catch up on? I only have 30 minutes. What do I need to catch up on? Is it replying to three or four emails specifically? Is it finishing those last three slides of the presentation? Is it making those two quick phone calls? I give myself that time and I know it's there every day. It's like my safety zone. At the end of the day, right before dinner, doesn't matter. I'm going to take 30 minutes to catch up. So even if I feel overwhelmed in the moment, I go, it's okay, I got the safety time tonight. I'll catch up on that. So before I start to cook dinner or before we go out to dinner, I just take that 30 minutes and it's like a religion for me. It's like just that time. And it makes me, throughout the day, so much more fluid and able to know that I will catch up. And here's the last one. Maybe it's not so strategic or routine based as these other ones, but it's very simple. You need to, at some point, as a mature adult, someone who wants to reach that next level of consciousness and your life, you need to decide to bring a little bit more emotional peace, mindfulness, conscious will about the emotions you're experiencing each day. If you're constantly finding yourself in a panic or freaking out about other things, it's like you need to decide that you want a character that's stronger than that. You know, it used to be a part of the conversation and character development. You know, you look back in the centuries of philosophy or human development, and people took pride in learning to be stoic or being calm amid the storm, to be the leader when everything's going chaotic, that someone would stand strong and be there and purposely decide to deal with all the chaos. From a good place. Now, it's like our culture celebrates victimhood or our culture celebrates the person who is is the drama queen who freaks out about every little thing because it's fun to watch on reality tv. But in real life, make it a goal to have character development to meet the demands of the time, the demands of the moment, from a place of peace or strength or joy, from a good place, an emotional state that's going to serve in the situation that you have chosen versus being that person who just gets overwhelmed oh my God, I think the world is so full of so many people trying to be drama queens to get attention versus people trying to be role models, say, look, we can handle this. And that old, sort of old ethic that came from stoicism, or that old ethic that came from, you know, just mastering your own mind, mastering your own attitude, we've lost a lot of that conversation. So I'm always having that in these charge life episodes with you, you are the commander of your own attitude. You get to choose the energy that you feel and bring into moments. You don't have happiness, you don't have joy, you choose to generate those things. And the more you generate the emotional energy you need in a moment to serve or deal with the complications, the difficulties, the overwhelm, the more that you are the person who stands true and solid and purposeful in the moments that matter. Not only do more people look to you to lead, not only more people look to you. They look at you at a place of like, respect. But you start to respect yourself. You say, I got this, I can handle this. And the more you say that, the less you feel overwhelmed and the more you experience the charged life. Hey, it's Brendan again. Did you notice something in today's episode? Yep. No ads, no sponsors, just a positive message to improve your day. How do I do it? How is it that you listen to all those other podcasts and they have minutes and minutes worth of lame ads for underwear or other websites they're promoting? Hey, I don't judge them, but I choose to focus on you in this podcast. And personally, when I listen to other shows, I just skip those long winded sponsor pitches. And anyway, I can only do this because you share my podcast with so many other people and enough folks end up looking me up online and buying my books or taking my online courses that I can self fund this entire effort. And you know how hard it is to do all this and that's why I appreciate you guys so much. I heard that you even helped me break a record too. The longest running top 10 self help show without a single sponsor or product pitch or ad. So if you like this podcast ad free and sponsor free, do me a favor, tell a friend today, you know, you should listen to the Charged Life, Brendon Burchard's podcast. Just help spread the word, share why you like my show or tell people to go to podcast.brendon.com it would sure help and I'd appreciate it. And I'm sure our community would too. I look forward to talking with you again soon, my friend. And for watching. Thanks. Until then, go out there every single day of your life. Live fully, love openly, and make your difference today.