#153: Overcoming Analysis Paralysis and Over-Thinking with Shelley Row

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love finding for better clients. You can find details show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com episode 15 3. Those notes will include a summary of our discussion as well as links to the resources we mentioned during the show. Now, before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know about a new coaching initiative that I'm experimenting with and it involves coaching a small group of writers who already have paying clients. So if you're already earning an income as a writer, but you're not consistently earning $2,000 a month, we're going to work together to get you to that income level over the next six months. If you'd like to work with me on this, send an email to ed2b launcher.com put 2k in the subject line so numerical 2 in the letter K and then I'll reply to you with all the details. Now for this week's episode. I've been teaching and coaching writers on launching and growing their businesses for over 10 years, and one of the biggest challenges I see them struggle is analysis paralysis, often called overthinking or just basically mulling things over for much longer than they need to be considered, sometimes weeks and months because there's a fear of making the wrong decision. And it's not just with big decisions. I see this even with smaller decisions. These things often cause stress, they cause anxiety. That makes matters even worse. And I've also found that this happens at all experience levels. I see this at all levels of income, all levels of writing, copywriting experience, and it often becomes a big problem. And I'll say this, ignoring it is not going to make it go away. In fact, it makes it worse. In this episode, you're going to hear from Shelly Rowe. Shelly is a speaker and consultant who works with forward thinking managers and leaders who must make fast, insightful decisions in the face of uncertainty and rapid change. She's a recovering overthinker herself and her work is based on neuroscience research and 77 deep interviews that she conducted with executives which revealed that the secret to effective decision making involves a combination of information and intuition. Shelly's going to share some very practical advice for dealing with analysis paralysis when it comes to making both big and small decisions. If this is something you struggle with, I'm telling you, you need to give this episode a listen. It's really going to help. So with that, here is my conversation with Shelly Rowe. Enjoy. Hey, Shelley. So great to be talking with you today, Ed.

It's great to be with you today, and I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.

Well, this has been a topic that I've been asked about quite a bit, and I've been anxious to get you on the show because this is something I know it's near and dear to your heart. Before we get to the meat of the content here, why don't we start with some background? So you work with organizations and executives on this idea of insightful leadership and making better decisions as a leader. And you're very open about the fact that you're a recovering overthinker. So I'm curious, how did you get to this point and what led you to where you are today in your career, in your business?

Yeah, Ed, and I would say I am a recovering overthinker. Not recovered. So I still struggle with overthinking. And that's why I really enjoy this work because it helps me grow and share with others as well. You know, I got to this place in my career by what I call infotuition. It's the combination of information with intuition and using the two together in decision making. Because I'm a transportation engineer, so I've spent most of my career doing transportation engineering, most of it at the federal Government, at the U.S. department of Transportation. And what I found, Ed, is that I got to a certain point in my career and I've always been very logical, rational, organized, and I value those qualities. But the higher I went in my career, the more difficult the decisions became. And I would overthink them all. And I would literally just get stuck with analysis paralysis. And I couldn't make a decision. That's not a formula for success as a leadership role. And it was really career limiting for me. And it was through happenstance. I actually went to a therapist because I was having relationship issues, because those textbook perfect men, the ones that checked all the box, they just weren't working because they seemed like they. I thought that they were the right people, but they weren't. And what she said to me, she said, you know, I'm not interested in what you think. I want to know how you feel. And that was the aha moment. That's when I first began to be aware of a. That there were feelings And B, that there was actually useful information that they were bringing to me. And over time, I began to become more skilled at how to integrate with what I think, with how I feel. And it is the combination of the two that's allowed me to move past overthinking. It's allowed me to make some really big decisions, both in leadership and in life. And it's changed everything. And that's why I love doing this work, because I see the power in it. Wow.

I can absolutely see that. I think many of us are just so strong in one area and not another. We rely so much on those skills to the detriment of another very important, important one, don't we?

That's right. That's right. And we tend to lean toward the ones that we're most comfortable with. And one of the things I've done recently, Ed, is I've studied neuroscience because I discovered that the neuroscience validated a lot of what I experienced and what I heard from 77 executives that I interviewed on how they use intuition. And the neuroscience would tell us that we default to, to the thing that's most comfortable for us simply because it's the lowest energy thing for our brain to do. And so we tend to lean toward that and exclude the stuff that's hard for us to think about or feel about. And that's where we get into trouble, because we need to integrate the two.

You know, as self employed professionals. And you're one yourself, right? You're out on your own. We struggle with decisions. We have to wear all the hats in our business. We typically don't have colleagues in the office and bosses that we can talk these things through, these challenges. And what I find is that can quickly lead to this kind of behavior, to overthinking analysis. Paralysis is another term that my people use a lot. And that's not always healthy. I'm curious, you know, why do we, why do we do this? You know, why don't we trust ourselves as much as we trust others?

It's a good question. And I certainly, as you said, I'm in that same sort of business. There's no office full of people here with me. It's just me in my office. And I think we can again look at some of what the neuroscience tells us about how we are designed to behave. And in that understanding, it opens up some new avenues for us to pursue. So, for example, we are naturally designed to do what's easiest and what we're most comfortable with. So if I'm trying to figure out who to call as a prospect today, I'm going to lean toward those ones that I'm most comfortable with, probably the people who are most like me. And I'm naturally going to gravitate toward that. If I'm trying to figure out what to do today, do I make marketing calls, do I do some work, do I try to do some professional development work? Again, I'm going to lean toward the thing that is most comfortable for me. And I think what's important to know about that is that that is the way that our brain is designed to behave. So we're doing what we're designed to do. It just doesn't serve us all the time. So where overthinking comes in, let's say that you are, you need to follow up with a particular client and you're trying to decide, well, do I email them or do I call them? And you think, wow, I think I'd just rather email them because I'm more comfortable with that. But there's this little voice in your head that says, well, we really ought to call them. We found that that's more effective. And then that sets up the argument. The other voice says, no, but I really would like to email them. And we start rationalizing all the reasons. Then they can open it when they want to open it. We can craft the words so we make sure it says exactly what they wanted to say. And we begin this debate in our head over email or call, email or. And we spend way too much time on the debate when we could have just done it. What I have discovered is a three step process to help break that cycle. And the first part of the process is to recognize when we're doing it right. If we're going to stop overthinking, we have to know when we're overthinking it.

And how do you do that? How do you, what are the signs? Because when I'm living in my own head, I don't see these things.

Yeah. And so there's some phrases that I've noticed when I work with people that come up repeatedly. So maybe you've heard yourself think, well, I'm making this harder than it has to be. Right. Have you ever said that to yourself? Right. Or this is just taking way too long, or wow, I have been over this again and again and again. You know, how long am I going to keep doing this? And when you hear yourself talking that way, either to yourself or to a colleague, that's an indicator that you've spent too much time on this based on the decision that need to be made. So you go, oh, you know what? I'm overthinking it. I'm stuck in analysis paralysis. And so that's step one. Step two is what I call notice and name the nagging feeling. Because, see, what you hear in those little voices in your head is there's something making you uncomfortable. And that's the key. What is it that makes you feel uncomfortable? So maybe in our little scenario here, you're saying, well, I'm just. I don't feel comfortable calling because I'm afraid I'll say the wrong thing or I won't know how to handle the conversation well. So when you can name it, well, now you can work with it. It gives you something tangible to hold on to, rather than just having some little voice in your head that's making you feel uncomfortable. So you need to notice that nagging feeling and then name it. And so that's the step two. And then step three is where the power comes in, is to dig in to the little feeling and unravel it. Because to stop overthinking, you have to resolve the nagging feeling. That's the end of the story. To solve overthinking, you have to resolve the nagging feeling. So in my case, in that example, I'm thinking, wow, I'm afraid of what I'm going to say that won't be able to handle that call correctly. Well, okay, well, but we know that it's going to be more effective if I place a call rather than email. So how can I work with myself to give myself some skill to talk myself into it? Because we don't want to make a decision out of fear. We want to make a decision because it's the right decision. Does that make sense?

It totally does. It totally does. And I think analyzing it that way, just breaking it down, can. I can see how it would really help. And I'm curious, you know, with the second part of what you said, the naming it, can you maybe tell me a little bit more about that? I mean, when you say name it, are we talking about identifying it or are we giving it an actual name? What would you suggest there?

I think it is giving it an actual name. You're trying to get it out of the subconscious from that little knot in your gut into something that you can understand intellectually and cognitively. So let me give you another example. When I was earlier in my career, I had to fire somebody and I overthought it like crazy. And perhaps even as an entrepreneur now I still have people who work with me as virtual assistants, and I have to fire them too, sometimes. And I overthought it like crazy in this example. And I went back and back, back and forth in my head trying to figure it out, and. And I finally said, why am I making this so hard? And it was my mom's voice that came to me. She always said, shelly, you be nice. And there was this little part in my brain that was saying, well, if you fire that person, you're not being nice. And it set up a conflict inside me, and that's what was causing me to overthink. Well, once I understood that, then I was able to say, well, you know what? She meant that for a third grade birthday party. She did not mean it for the workplace. And being nice has a whole different connotation in the workplace. And I would still argue that the nicest thing I did for everybody was to fire that person. But I had to understand it and reframe it and name it before I could ever get there.

That makes perfect sense. And I'm curious, is there a question that you ask yourself to maybe dig deeper and to find that source?

Yes. Yes. And that's good. Everyone needs to find their own question. Sometimes I ask myself, what's bugging me about this? Why am I making this so hard? What's not sitting right? What's bothering me about this decision? Any question like that where you're kind of quizzing your own brain for the feeling because you hear all of that is pulling out a feeling. What's bothering me, what's not sitting right, what's agitating. All of those are feeling words. And you're trying to get your brain to name what. What's going on that makes you uncomfortable.

And. Okay, so that. That makes sense. Now let's move to that third step, just to clarify something. This resolving to. To solve the problem that. That nagging feeling. It seems like there is a point there where you still have to kind of cross that chasm. You still have to do something that's really uncomfortable. Maybe at this point you now understand the source, and maybe it's not as scary. But is there anything you do to maybe push yourself so that you actually take the necessary action?

Yes. And what I have found is that once I can understand that that nagging feeling is coming from fear. Now, it doesn't always come from fear, but let's work with that one because it's the most common. So in the example that I used in both examples that I shared, one about my mother or the one about being afraid to make a phone call. Both of those are fear based. Once I understand that my brain is in that fight or flight response and is activating fear in my brain, that helps me go, well, geez, that's not productive. That doesn't help me to make a fear based decision. And so sometimes just recognizing it is enough to release it. Other times I need to dig in a little bit more to understand why I feel that way. And then in the example about making the phone call, that's a case of once I know it, then I can surround myself with some additional skill. I can script the phone call, I can write down my main points, I can do some things to prop myself up, to give me some reassurance to be able to handle the situation now that I know what the real situation is. Now you are correct. I still have to force myself to make that phone call. But I have a better sense of it now that I understand why I'm feeling so hesitant. And I can do some things to mitigate it.

Yeah, before that was in the dark. Now you have a flashlight and you're pointing at what's in front of you. Now you see it.

That's a good analogy. Yes.

Right. So before you didn't know there were snakes there. Now you see that there are no snakes. There are some spiders, but that's okay, we can do.

Yeah, it's that proverbial shadow in the night, you know, and then you turn the light on and discover it's the cat. You know, it's that same sort of a thing. Once you shine a light on it, then it, it tends to dissipate. Might not all go away, but it certainly dissipates and becomes more manageable.

Have you found that it gets a little easier with practice? Because I've noticed in my own life and in my own business how far I've come. I mean, I was for so long, everything that I did, every decision I made, every action I took was based on fear. And you know, I still struggle with these things that you're just talking to us about. But I find that I've really come a long way and I wonder my personality necessarily hasn't changed, but I wonder if just the practice of, you know what, I just got to do it, I have no choice if that has really stretched the boundaries of my comfort zone over time.

I agree. And what we know about the brain is that it continues to learn and it continues to change. We don't get hardwired, as we used to say, and so you can work with yourself over time with intentional practice. And it does need to be intentional practice to create some skills that will mitigate some of that other behavior that we tend to fall into. The other thing, too, that I talk about in the work I do are stuck stories. When you begin to dig into overthinking repeatedly, you will find that you always come back to just a few stuck stories, stories that we tell ourselves over and over, and they play out in a lot of different ways. So for me, the be nice story was very powerful, and I didn't know it was influencing so many of the decisions that I would make. I would go out of my way to not make a decision that was going to obsess somebody because I needed to be nice, and I was afraid to not be nice once I unravel that. And it kept coming up, overthinking again and again. Then now I recognize it more quickly, and I'm able to say, oh, that might be nice thing. It's not relevant here. Or it's relevant, but in a different way. And so I'm much more quickly able to move through the overthinking and into a more of a productive conversation with myself.

Are there some personality types that tend to struggle with analysis paralysis more than others? And if so, why?

Yes. In my research, as I mentioned, I interviewed 77 executives about how or if they use intuition in their leadership. All but one said it was absolutely essential. Almost all. Almost all of them overthought things. So we should take some comfort in that. The people that I heard most frequently struggling with it were those of us like myself, who are taught to value logic and rational thinking above everything. So engineers, lawyers, accountants, all those people who tend to work in very logically constructed environments where that's a valued skill. What we learn, like what I learned, is to dismiss feeling. And what those leaders had to do is to relearn that it was important to feel they needed that intuition. They needed to pay attention to what their gut was telling them in a wise way. They're not dismissing logic or data or analysis. They're just combining it with gut feel in a skillful way in order to make those tough decisions.

That they have to make perfect sense makes perfect sense. All right, so let's move into some more of the solutions. You've shared some ideas with us, but wondering if there's anything else you can provide that might help listeners make some progress here. What can we do to think less without shortchanging ourselves? Can you give us some more practical strategies and Actions we can take to keep this overthinking at bay.

Ed, I will share with you what one of the executives said to me. We were talking about the importance of using intuition in decision making. The importance of getting all the information together and making the decision at the right time. Because every decision kind of has its time said. He thinks of it like soup. Is it soup yet? And what I heard from those executives works really well with the soup idea. Like making soup, we have to gather all of the ingredients. So the leaders I interviewed, they would go get all the data they could reasonably get in the timeframe available. Now, the people listening here, you're probably all working on timelines, so you're gathering factual information, so you get as much as you can in the time frame that's available. So that's part of the ingredients. What the leaders also told me is that they would talk to people. So even though in our world, yours and mine, we work by ourselves, we still have a network of people. So if we're struggling with something, it was very important to go gather information from other people, particularly those with a different point of view. So that's more ingredients to put into our soup. Then the third part of the ingredients is to talk to yourself and say, what's bothering me about this decision? What's on my mind? What doesn't sit right? Why am I uncomfortable? It's more data. So I just think about it like another ingredient into the soup. So we have facts and figures, we have information from others, and we have information about our own feelings about the decision. Put it all into the soup and let it simmer. So some soups need a little more time to let all the flavors melt. Others are ready pretty quickly. So that's an art form. What I've learned from myself and from others is that for key decisions, ones that are pretty high risk, you've got a lot riding on it. Maybe it's a big, big important client. You might want to take a step away, sleep on it, go for a walk, go for a run. Anything that allows your brain to calm down, because that's when all of the ingredients meld together in the brain. And the brain is actually able to come to its most creative and wisest decision. And that's when it's soup. And now you're ready to make that decision, to move on.

I love that analogy because, you know, one of the things that I struggle with, I used to struggle a lot with overthinking. I still have. We all do to a certain extent. Sometimes I have the Opposite problem is I move too fast on some ideas because they just sound good. And it sounds like I have the opposite problem. I, you know, the, the vegetables and everything in the soup. Soup, they haven't simmered enough yet. So here we are eating the soup and everything's crunchy.

What I advocate is that people know their natural tendency. So some people are natural deciders, and they tend to make a decision very quickly. Other people are what I call discussors, whether you're discussing with somebody else or you're with yourself, and you tend to want to discuss it to death before you make a decision in either case, you need to know which side of that you fall on and then make yourself a little bit uncomfortable. Ed, in your case, you're a decider. So for a big decision, you might want to force yourself to slow it down a little bit, sleep on it another night and then make the decision. And it puts you just because you're doing what's easy for you, and you might want to slow it down a little bit and benefit from that. For people like me, who tend to overthink things and we want to continually get more and more data and more and more information, I'm going to force myself to be a little uncomfortable and make myself decide a little quicker than I typically would. And then we're probably both getting it about right if we're just a little bit uncomfortable.

But I like your idea of, you're right, so not just sleeping on it, but also talking it through with others. So get that other input because so I have a team of people in there on the other side, which is great. We balance each other out appropriately. And I think it's from years also, just being on my own without a team, where I was making decisions quickly, maybe from just a place of gosh, if I don't decide this now, if I don't make a decision on this now, I'm going to forget about it and I just need to get it off my list. So let's go ahead and make a decision. Right? And many times it's not the best decision, especially like you said, if it's a big one, there's much more at stake. So it's worth just kind of getting all the other inputs.

And sleeping on is a balancing act. And so I do advocate just being a little bit uncomfortable. And I found myself, Ed, doing similar things in my business. I just need to get it done. It's been on my to do list for two weeks. You know, it's time for it to be done. And so I'll force myself to make the decision when instead it might have been nice to talk to others in my industry and get. And I'll find out that they solve this a different way. And if I'd talked to them a little bit more, I would have had some more data points and some other options available to me. So it is a bit of an art form. But I think it's important to get the facts and the figures, get input from other people, get input from inside yourself. And all of those are ingredients that go into the soup. It's just we tend to shortchange the feeling side of it and just go with either what we're comfortable doing or the, the fact based method. And that works in some cases if it's pretty simple. But most things that we deal with aren't, aren't that simple.

They're not, they're not in. You know, one of the challenges that I know we all face today is that we have unlimited access to data, right? It's the work in front of our computers. We have access to just about anything you could ever find. I wonder how that's impacted this issue because before you had a limited amount of information, so it was there in front of you and you have to make a decision now. There's more you can keep searching on, there's more you can read, there are more inputs. Any ideas or tips on how you can maybe close that window and keep it under control?

I think a timeframe is important. All the data we can reasonably collect in the timeframe available and we're all working on deadlines, so there's only a finite amount of time that we really can take to gather information. I think what we see today in a very data heavy world where data analytics is becoming such a big part of the world, that's great. From my perspective as an engineer, what that means to me is that I have more data and I don't need raw data, I need analyzed data, something that's giving me information from it. I can get more trend information because of the data analytics very easily. So I have more of that kind of information readily accessible than I would have had 10 years ago. But still I want to be careful in curating where I'm getting information so that I have a fairly balanced perspective because we tend to see information from our perspective. In fact, the research shows that as I'm curating the data that I'm pulling in, I'm going to notice information that adheres to my frame of reference more so than others. So I need to be very careful and recognize other points of view. And that's why it's important to talk to people who come from different backgrounds, have different views on the world. They will see things differently. And I would never have seen it had I not asked them.

So give yourself a deadline and make sure you're not just gathering more information on your own biases, but you're getting a more diverse set of information so you can make a better decision.

That's correct. And today we live in a world where it's very easy to only get information that agrees with us. We follow the Twitter feeds that are in agreement. We follow Facebook friends who are in agreement. We follow LinkedIn groups who are in agreement. So we've created a world designed to give us what we want to hear and to be in alignment with our belief system. And that can be very dangerous. And particularly for your listeners who are trying to write balanced pieces and create things that are reflective of a balanced point of view, it's something to be very cognizant of so that we do get information coming from a lot of different sources.

I'm curious about something, and this is a bit of a personal question, but if you could call yourself back when you were, let's say, 30 years old, so earlier in your career, and you could do this on the phone, but you only have 30 seconds to say something to your younger self, I'm curious, what advice would you give yourself regarding overthinking?

I would say that it's great that you are so skilled with being rational and logical. That's going to serve you well. And you need to listen more to how you feel and recognize that that too is important data and wisdom. And if you can learn sooner to combine both the thinking and the feeling, both how you feel and how others feel, it's going to make all the difference, both in your leadership and in your life.

Wow, that's great. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that? Just give me a 30 second call, please.

Yeah, it would have made a lot of difference much earlier.

No kidding. And then you wonder if your younger self would have said, well, wait a minute, how could she have gotten a hold of me? Who is this? What does she mean?

And what is Facebook?

What is Facebook? What do you mean she's calling me from her iPhone?

Yes.

Oh, man, this has been great. I want to make sure that folks know where to check out your work and if they wanted to connect with you, where they can learn more about you and what you're doing. So tell us a little bit about your speaking consulting business and where people can learn more about what you're doing.

Yes, thank you. You can find out more about me at my website, which is www.shelleyrowe.com and that's S H E L L E Y-R-O-W.com and you might be interested in my book. It's called Think Less Live Lessons from a Recovering Overthinker and it is available at Amazon both in paperback and Kindle versions. You can also reach me on Twitter Ellie Roe and you can email me@shelleyshellyroe.com and I would welcome connections on Facebook. I have a Facebook page, Shelly Rowe Associates, and it's called Insightful Leadership. And I would welcome any connections with listening and learning any tips that they have about how we can all become recovering overthinkers.

Shelly, this has been fantastic and this is a very hot topic in my tribe and I just really appreciate you coming to the show today and just sharing these ideas. I know this is going to go over very well and it's going to make a big, big difference with my audience. Thank you.

You are welcome. And thank you for the opportunity. Ed.

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