Christine Corcoran walks through a five-step system for overwhelm: pinpoint your biggest stressor, carve out 10-20 minutes to fix it or delegate it, pick your three core priorities for the week, set explicit criteria for what you say yes to, and batch your smaller tasks in scheduled "power hours" with your phone away.
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Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk to you about what to do and how to handle it with when you feel like you're being pulled in all different directions. I feel like I've been helping clients of this recently and also I've been experiencing it recently as well. And I want to share with you the strategies that I put in place when I notice that my energy is being pulled in different directions or where it literally just feels like everybody's coming for you and wanting all the answers, needing everything from you, and you're like, oh my God, how do I even stay on track with what the hell I'm doing and how do I keep some type of equilibrium and piece in the process of working on my business? So one of the first things I try to do is identify what is the root cause of the biggest overwhelm. So what's causing the most overwhelming my business and what clarity can I get there? Because majority of the time there's usually one to two things that are causing the majority of overwhelm in your mind or your the story that you're telling yourself is that it's either causing overwhelm or that you just need to spend some dedicated time on those specific projects in order for you to create the progress that you need to create or to reduce the overwhelm. So they're the first things that I would do is just really identify where am I most overwhelmed right now? Where do I feel like I'm being pulled in these different directions? Because it's usually because our focus is being pulled and we're like, you know, everyone's trying to get a little piece of us. And so I always try to just identify what is the biggest thing that's causing the most overwhelm right now. If I can reduce that and get that off my plate. And usually I try to look at like, can I just spend a good 10 to 20 minutes working on that specific thing? Do I need help with making a decision? Because sometimes it's a decision that's causing the overwhelm. Do I need to get back to people that are waiting on something from me? Or do I just need to switch everything off, put my phone away, and just have some dedicated time on something that is feeling like. It's like holding weight over me. So usually I go and do that. So I literally just put my phone in another room. I close down all the other tabs and just have one specific focus to feel like I've made progress or at least to get that off my plate or actually, last thing I would do is delegate it. So I identify, like, do I need to, like, stop trying to figure it out myself, ask for help, or delegate it off my plate altogether? You need to reclaim your control over your focus in order for you to be able to not feel like you're being pulled in different directions. So the first thing I would always do in this situation is go, what's my priorities right now? Because sometimes if you don't have your own priorities, then you get called and pulled into other people's priorities. All right, So a simple framework just to cut through this noise is just allowing yourself to be like, okay, what's really important for me this week? What are my priorities this week? Do I need to focus on? Right? And I did this with a client recently and asked her, like, what are the core three priorities this week? And if you were to drill it down just to one, what would it be? And it helped her just gain so much clarity, and it also allowed her to be able to say no to other things because she identified that her priorities were so important that she was like, if I say yes to this other thing, or if I keep getting pulled in this direction because this person wants this from me, but really, I actually just want to say no to that, because I know that this other thing is a real high priority for me. So it gave her the clarity to be able to say no, refocus her attention on what was really important. Now, the next thing that we did, because she identified that this actually happens quite a lot, right? So we identified that she felt like she was being pulled in so many different directions because she was, like, getting asked and all these opportunities and everything was coming her way, which is an amazing problem to have, but it was causing her so much overwhelm. So what we did is we sat down and went, okay, what is the criteria to you saying yes? And so we worked out the exact criteria that would have to happen for her to be able to say yes to something that came her way that would be worthy of taking her away from her main priorities. And so she identified what that was that gave her so much peace, to be like, oh, okay, I can just keep saying no to all these other things because I got to come back to my main core priority here. And it allowed her to be able to double down in the area that was most important to her and feel confident in her saying no and not feel guilty about it because she was identifying that by me being pulled in all these different directions or saying yes to these things. I'm not giving my all to this other area that's really, really important to me. And so that gave her such beautiful clarity to not feel like she's been having to be pulled in different directions because she was willing to say no and set that clear boundary. Then what we did is took that criteria and added it to an email, her email signature, and added it to her out of office. So we set some clear boundaries with her emails because what she was finding is that she was getting pulled in so many different directions because she kept getting asked and have feeling like she had to respond to emails all the time. And so what we did is we put in an out of office that was on all the time that was literally a responder that would be like communicating. If you are this person, if you are this specific looking for this specific thing, if you require this from me, then expect a response from me within the next 24 hours. If you are needing these things, then here's a link or here's the next step for you to take in whatever it is that you need. Um, otherwise, expect a response from me by the end of next week because I'm currently in a deep work session in working on really exciting projects. And I'll get back to you as soon as I can. So it gave her the freedom to be able just to focus on what was really important and know that her email responder would deal with anything that came her way. But also know that she could just go back and check her emails once a day and. And then to stay focused on what was important. That gave her so much freedom that she was like, oh, my God, I feel like I've got peace in my life now. And this is where when you feel like you're being pulled in different directions, it's most likely either you don't have your clear priorities mapped out, or you don't have boundaries in place in order to support yourself, to keep yourself focused on your priorities. The other thing that I will add here that I love to do is have a dump list of things that come to mind that will be a distraction for you. So I always have a paper to do list, and I have different categories. So it reduces the overwhelm categories of different areas, areas I need to work on. But then I have a little dump list in the right hand side that anything that pops into my mind of like, oh, I've got to update that insurance, or I've got to pay that invoice or whatever it might be that I know that has to happen that week, I will add it to the dump list. And then I have two separate hours mapped out in my calendar, which are my CEO hours, they're my power hours. And what I do in that time, when that time rolls around, I put my any distractions away, close out any other tabs, put my phone in another room if need be, and I go through that. That dump list and get as many of those things ticked off at once. This, I find, helps so much because you can be in the middle of writing an email, or you could be in the middle of working on a project and have either an email come across or have something come to mind that you're like, oh, yeah, I've got to do that. And it then distracts you. So you either try to go and do that and distracts you, and then you get, you know, trying to multitask and do all the things which then actually costs you more time. Whereas if I have it on my dump list, I know that tomorrow or the next day, because it's usually twice a week, so it's either on a Tuesday or a Thursday. I know that at that point, at that time, I've got that time set aside exactly to work on that thing. And so it removes the overwhelm, removes the distraction, allows me to go back to working on the projects that I'm working on. So I hope this helps for you. And I hope that if you're feeling pulled in different directions, get clear in your priorities and understand where any other leaks are coming through and gain back control over your focus.
