#21 - Overwhelm. What do you? How do you setup for handling overwhelm?

Welcome to Mike and Sam, right there. Uh, and so we are glad you are here with us today, and we're going to talk about something that, oh man, a lot of us are feeling nowadays, and that is that sense of overwhelm. And, you know, overwhelm can be in our lives at any time.

Mike, Mike, Mike, hold it. I don't know if I have time for this right now. I think that, uh, I, I just, I, I gotta go get some things done. Can we do this later? Would that be okay? I mean, really, let's do it at, let's Let's just do it later. I just, I'm too busy.

Well, would it— Sam, I totally get that. I want to honor that. Would it end up being more time and all if we reschedule and do this all or just get it done now?

Well, that's a good point. All right, well, let's get it done now, I guess. But you know, it's going to be hard to focus. It really is going to be hard to focus.

Yeah. Overwhelmed does that, doesn't it? Yeah.

So there's a good example. Overwhelmed.

Yes, we're overwhelmed. And Sam and I are personalities that get overwhelmed all the time because when we hear about something new, we like to learn about it.

And I like stopping you in your tracks like that too. You're like, what are you doing? Are you serious? We're live and you want to put it— why didn't you tell me 5 minutes ago we'll put this off till later?

Yes, and when you're somebody whose mind likes to fly, overwhelm can really happen because you get into something and suddenly you want all the information which your mind wasn't focused on before that. So it could be COVID-19, it could be I'm looking at a new computer system that allows us to do new things. It can be overwhelm of a purchase decision. It could be overwhelmed with your kids, and it could be overwhelmed with projects on the work— in your workspace.

Well, it's probably all that stuff, and your boss is overwhelming you, or the people that report to you are coming to you with 50,000 questions. And there's a way to eliminate that. That's a separate issue. But it's so easy to just get so much piled onto us, and we don't even know where to start. And then many times we just don't Yeah.

And I think the other extreme to the close down and withdraw is something we've mentioned once before, which is paralysis by analysis, which is you get so into the overwhelm, you don't make a decision because you just dive deeper into the overwhelm. You actually go deeper to try to hope if I go deeper, there'll be clarity instead of realizing I need to step out to find clarity. The more I dive in, the more overwhelming this is going to actually become. There's research that shows if you have more than 3 choices on a purchase, you don't buy. But if you have 3, you're good because you're not overwhelmed by the decisions.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's— there's just so much coming at us right now. So, the question is, can we eliminate what's coming at us? Can we reduce what's coming at us? And then, How do we deal with what's coming at us? And I think part of it in our organizations, those organizations that have really established what their values are and they're living their values, I mean, every decision is connected to a value. And where leadership has trained their people to live the values, those organizations I find are much more peaceful to work inside of because everyone knows how to make decisions. They don't have to go back upstream to someone and ask their opinion. They also know when their boss has their back that they're not going to get, they're not going to get stabbed in the back because something didn't work out. They made a decision based on a value. And when that autonomy and that power is pushed down, then that frees people to move forward. And that's one way to reduce overwhelming. It's one way to reduce overwhelming for the leader. It's also a way to reduce overwhelming for everyone else because they know they're just free to make a decision. They don't have that worry. They can make a decision, move on to the next issue.

Yeah. And the other big piece to this is, do you have a culture of respect where you're going to even be aware that you're overwhelming me, that you're giving me too much? Am I going to feel safe to tell you I'm overwhelmed? Look, if I'm safe to tell you this is going to overwhelm me, I'm way less likely to get overwhelmed because I can express that before it occurs. Also, when I do get overwhelmed, I don't feel double, triple stressed of what's going to happen, how you're going to react, because I know, OK, I am overwhelmed and they're going to understand. And so that can actually calm me in overwhelm versus stress me in overwhelm. So the culture we set in our organizations has a huge impact on whether we are safe to express overwhelm or even for it to be caught before it occurs.

Absolutely. I've got 2 books coming out where I dig into this concept actually, Mike. And it's, where do we choose to focus? And here's a key in overwhelming situations. Are we focusing on the things we can control or are we focusing on the things we can't control? If we get bogged down into focusing on those things that we cannot control, the stress, the pressure increases. That's when we start making excuses. That's when we start making stories, lies that we tell ourselves to sell ourselves and try to sell to others. When we focus on those things that we can control, then what happens is we start making decisions. And when we make decisions, we move forward. So, especially when there's so much coming at us these days, we need to be able to determine what is in our control. What are our options? Make the best choice you can and then move forward because Otherwise, it's just going to grow and build and fester, and then that's going to paralyze us.

Yeah. And I want to make sure everybody watching or listening has a toolset they can use in these moments. And I love the 10-10-10 rule, which is when you are in overwhelm and you think there's everything, all these things you have to do right now, take one moment and pause and just do the simple 10 months from now, which of these is going to be paramount that I got accomplished 10 months from now? All right. And then You look and you go, all right, 10 weeks from now, which of these are they going to need done? And then 10 hours from now, how am I going to view this 10 hours from now, 10 weeks from now, 10 months from now? And when you do that, it makes it much clearer what is the priority right now, because you recognize this one's going to impact us forever if we get it done on time, right?

Mm-hmm.

And which ones you can be late on if you have to be late on something. I think that's a problem with overwhelm. People think they can never be fallible. They can never be late. You might be late on a project or 2. Which one is what's important?

Yeah, and the other thing is this perfection, is this driving for perfection, which I've never met anybody that's able to achieve that. So the question is, how do we, how do we achieve excellence? And then how do we move on? But if we're waiting for the perfect moment, if we're waiting for the perfect result, if we're waiting for the perfect anything, it's going to never show up. And then again, That's gonna build and it's gonna create this anxiety that we have. And so I'm not saying settle for, for subpar. I'm not saying settle for less. I'm saying work as hard as you can to do something as good as you can possibly do it, but do not strive for perfection. Strive for excellence.

Yeah, they've shown that most of the greatest innovations that went out in the world went out at about 80 to 85% of Perfection. But they finally realized we just got to get that out there. By the way, that's the iPhone. That's other things too. They never went out perfect. They went out at like 80 to 85%. So you're sitting there going, this has to be perfect. It will never get out. Is it at 80 to 85 and we can fine-tune? All right, get it out. And that allows you to progress with it and get feedback.

Uh, this is not the same today as it was when we bought our first one, right?

And that's not even close.

Constant improvement. Not only is there improvement in technology that's going to come down the line, but there's just— we just— once it's out, once it's there, then we can perfect it. Then we can discover some of the things that we can improve. So, do a great job. Do your very best. Make a decision and then move on. But don't let things pile up.

Love that, Sam. Thanks. I think that's a great spot for us to end this episode so we're not overwhelming everybody with too much information.

There we go.

I want to make sure that you can all find us, youtube.com/samsilverstein, youtube.com/centerforrespect. Of course, you can also click on the bell there on YouTube because it'll let you know when we go live, which is really cool. And of course, find us on iTunes at Mike and Sam. Thank you, Sam, for an awesome discussion.

Thanks, Mike. See you guys next time.