In this video, the presenter addresses the common experience of feeling overwhelmed and offers practical strategies to restore personal energy. She first explains how external environments influence internal energy, referencing concepts like Feng Shui and the idea of “energy vampires.” She then introduces a two‑part activity. The first part is a decluttering exercise: viewers identify three items in their surroundings that trigger a “must‑do” feeling, commit to completing them, and schedule the task publicly or with an accountability partner to increase the likelihood of follow‑through. The second part is a structured to‑do‑list system. Viewers write every task on a page, then rate each on a 1‑5 scale for how much it drains their energy and how easy it is to accomplish. By prioritising high‑drain, low‑effort items first, they generate momentum, free up energy, and make tackling harder tasks easier. The presenter also discusses personal preferences for motivation—traditional check‑off to‑do lists versus “success lists” that record completed achievements—and suggests tailoring the approach to one’s own energy style. The video concludes with encouragement to implement the techniques, share results via email, and a preview of the final day of the course.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to Day 9. We're zipping through all of these techniques now, and today I'm going to jump straight in because today is about overwhelm. And I have yet to find anyone that hasn't experienced overwhelm at some point, if not much of the time. And we're jumping back into quantum physics to energy. Which we touched on in video 2, I think it was, where we spoke about people who tend to be abundant in energy. They tend to buzz, and it's lovely to spend time around them. And similarly, people who are really low on their energy that I often call energy vampires because they need energy from others and they tend to drain you if you spend time with them. So we all have this residual baseline that can go up and down, and we can nudge it up as we learnt through that technique. But today we're looking outside of us because the energy in the outer world also impacts on the energy in our inner world too. And this is a concept that principles such as Feng Shui— I'm always not quite sure how to say that, so apologies if I got it wrong— that Feng Shui works on. And by changing the external environment can change how you feel inside too. And there's 2 elements of what we're going to be touching on today in the activity that I'm going to be recommending that you do. The first thing is decluttering. Now, if you're anything like me, there are things around you that you just think, oh, I must do that, and you never actually get round to it. I've got one at the moment, so I don't have enough wardrobe space to fit in all of my clothes, and that's not to do with how many clothes I have, it's just a small wardrobe, promise you. And so end of summer, I pack all the summer clothes up and bring all the winter clothes out, and at the moment all of the winter clothes are just in the boxes sitting on my bedroom floor, and every day I'm kind of rooting through them trying to find the jumper that I want. And every day I'm thinking, oh, I must get round to swapping them over and sorting it out. And I've probably been saying that for at least 3 weeks. There are other bits and pieces. There's some clothes I've got hanging on the banisters that just need a little bit of mending, a bit of sewing done, and they've probably been there for a lot more than 3 weeks. And every time I come up the stairs, it's like, must do that. So your basic activity today is to find 3 things that give you that, ugh, I must do that feeling. It might be something really, really simple. It might be something that takes a little bit of more time. But by getting that thing done, you are going to improve the energy in the environment so that every time you walk past it, you don't get that, ugh, Which is a drain. And the only way you're gonna get that done is to commit to doing it and put it in the diary. So I will commit publicly on this video that this weekend I have allocated— probably gonna take me an hour, I've put 2 hours in my diary on Sunday afternoon— that I am going to pack away my summer clothes and put out my winter clothes. So come Sunday night, I can walk upstairs and go, Oh, this bedroom looks nice again. So you find your 3 things, commit to doing them, and whilst we're very good at letting ourselves down, if you commit to others that you're going to do it, you're much more likely to do it. So you may not have to go public on a video, but perhaps get your partner, get your children, get someone else to hold you accountable, to say, have you done it yet? Because that's going to make it much more likely that you will, because we hate letting other people down. So that's the first thing. The second element is our to-do lists. So again, if you're anything like me, your to-do list may be quite long, and there might be quite a few things on there that have also been on there for quite a while. So your extended activity today, and the one that's going to start making a longer-term difference, is I want you to write down everything that you need to do, and it may be work-related, it may be in the house, it may be just little things like, I need to remember to order some more dog food. Note to self. And when you write it down, write it down in the middle of a page, and you'll probably go over a page, you might even go through 2 pages. Just keep going. And even by writing it down, you may notice that your energy level just increases a little bit because what you've done is got things out of your head onto paper, and that process in itself can help again relieve the mental pressure of trying to keep everything in your head. So you've now got probably quite a long list. The next thing that I would like you to do is to go down on the left-hand side of your column of to-do things. Give each item a score out of 5 of how much it drains you. So 1 is it's just a little bit niggly, not a big deal. 5 is one of those, ugh, big moments. So go all the way down and on the left-hand side of your— of all your list, Give a number for each item of 1 to 5. Then, on the right-hand side of your column of to-do activities, I want you to give another score out of 5 of how easy these things will be to do. So, for sorting out my clothes, it's a big drain, 4, maybe even a 5. But it's going to take me an hour, maximum 2. It's relatively easy. I'd give that a 2. So again, go down the other side of your list and give a score out of 5 for ease, 1 being really easy, you can notch it off quickly, 5 being this is going to take a bit more time, probably needs diarising. Okay? So you've now got a long list with 2 scores out of 5. And now we're going to prioritise, and this is the important bit in terms of reducing overwhelm. What I would like you to do is to prioritise the activities that have a high score, the ones on the left-hand side. So look at all the ones that you've given a 5, and then Second filter is the ones that have a low number on the right-hand, so they're big drains but they're easy to do, and then start knocking those easy ones off because what you're then doing is fuelling the energy of motivation. When you see things coming off your list, you're more likely To do more. You'll have the energy that you freed up to start tackling those things that are number 3 or 4 or even— excuse me— or even 5 in terms of their difficulty. And what this does is really working with energy. By knocking off the ones that are 5 in terms of your drain factor, You're blocking— you're freeing up the drain. You're stopping that energy pouring out, which means you have more energy. And funny old thing, you then have more energy to do the things that are harder to do. And this is how you will get through your to-do list much better. The natural instinct is to do the easy things, which is why those things that are difficult stay on there for longer. So this is flipping it the other way and really addressing the things that are the biggest drains, but using that reverse psychology— do the easy ones first because then it will make it easier to do the harder ones. And this is something I also apply on a day-to-day basis. There are things most days that I get up and I think, oof, I really don't want to do that very much. It might be a phone call. I've been making some quite difficult phone calls in terms of contacting journalists and things that I find quite difficult to do. So I procrastinate, I put it off, and funny old thing, it's still there the next morning, and I wake up and go, oh, still got to do that. So I do my best now, and I'm not perfect, work in progress, to every day look at my to-do list for that day. What's the one I want to do least? You know, I think the phrase is eat the frog. Do that activity because as soon as that's off the list, you think, oh, okay, the others seem easier, and your motivation then starts rolling. So, quick summary: list of everything that you want to— that's on your to-do list that you need to do. Give it a score out of 5 for the drain factor, 5 being a big drain on your energy. And then a score out of 5 for its ease, 5 being it's more difficult. Then prioritize the ones that have a 5 for the drain factor and a 1 for the ease factor, and then keep working down. Once you've done all your 5s, go to 4s, 4s for 1s, through to 4s to 5s, 3s, and so on. And yep, other ones are going to come on the list, but when you prioritize in this way, I promise you that you will get through that list much more quickly and reduce that environmental drain and increase your motivation, resulting in less overwhelm. And a very tiny end of, end of video tip: recognise whether you are the sort of person that likes to have to-do lists because you can cross things off and that makes you feel good. My husband is perfect example of this. He will actually write a to-do list and put on it things that he's already done so that he can cross it off before he's even started. That motivates him to see things being crossed off. Whereas I've got clients that I work with that find having a success list is far more motivational. So they have a sheet of paper on the fridge, and every time they've achieved something, they write it on the list. Because then, then they walk past like, I've done all of this today, and actually it gives them a real reward— reward, I don't know how that sounded— at the end of the day to say, I've done all of this. And it's almost like our inner child. I don't know if you've got children, but perhaps you had sticker charts or star lists when they were little, and they got so many stars and they got a treat. Do you know, if our inner child still needs that and it works for you, Pamper them. So success lists tend to work for me, and I love at the end of the day looking at it and saying, yeah, I've done that, that, and that. It leaves me feeling good. So again, just being aware of your own energy. Is it a to-do list? Cross it off. Or is it better for you to have a success list so that you can add things on that you want to do? So this is another one of the techniques that really helps at this time of year where there's a natural drain on our energy. But when you nail this one and reduce the overwhelm that we can experience at any time of the year, it's going to make you mentally more resilient anyway. So, good luck with that one. Let me know how it's going for you. I love getting emails back, and for those of you that have done it already, thank you so much. And tomorrow it's the last one, and I look forward to sharing that with you then. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye for now.
