Overcoming Overwhelm: Strategies for Thriving in a Fast-Paced World | Meaningful Revolution Podcast

Hey everyone. Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I am your host and certified high performance coach, Sean Butner. This episode is all about how to handle overwhelm. And by the end of this episode you'll gain five habits and strategies to help you manage overwhelm so you can thrive in a hectic and fast paced world. Now we all experience overwhelm. As a coach I often get questions about how to better manage and just this past week I got a text from someone who had a new job as a manager and wanted to know how she could manage the overwhelm of this new job. As an introverted leader and as someone that is a card carrying introvert themselves, I really resonated with this question because sometimes if you're an introvert, it the world's not made for us to thrive, right? We have to get out of our shell, we have to engage with people. But overwhelm affects everyone, not just introverts. And what causes overwhelm? Overwhelm could be the your capacity to perform is less than the amount of work you're being asked to do. So if you are a new software engineer and you're asked to program a whole operating system and you don't have the experience to do that, that can help you or make you feel overwhelmed or as an imposter, or you're just not confident enough to be up to the task and so caught up in figuring out where do I start? Or overwhelm could be your self confidence is less than the belief that you can't perform. And this is if you are running for a marathon and you never run before. I don't know if I can actually do this. And if you don't believe that you can figure it out, that you are able to figure things out, that's when overwhelmed can creep bend. Or it could be you've been grinding, right? There's blood, there's sweat, there's tears, and you're not getting the breaks that you need to actually have the performance outcomes you need. So your rest and rejuvenation time is non existent. And if you've ever been on a doom project where you've been going in like 80 hours a week for three or four years, four months. I had a couple bad projects in my time as a software engineer that really impacts performance time and your will to live, quite frankly. So how do you overcome overwhelm in that type of scenario? The final thing that I've seen, and usually when people come to me with overwhelm is that they're just under resourced, right? You're capable, you know, you can figure it out. But there are hype or impossible deadlines or a really horrible estimation of the amount of effort it'll take to do something. And so it can feel like no matter what you do on the job or towards the project, there's no progress being made. And that can be frustrating and overwhelming at the same time. When we get into these different types of overwhelm, what are the strategies we can use to help manage or get out of that overwhelm? And these are things that I've shared with my coaching clients over time. The first thing, first and foremost is a high performance coach. I'm a little bit biased, but it's to increase our performance. And certified high performance coach is great for this. In it, we talk about blocking time or focusing on priorities or being okay if the number one thing causes other things to drop. But increasing our capacity to perform, our capabilities, our competency is one way to get the experience we need. To be like, oh, I can't handle this. I just. And maybe proving it for the first time and reason why a coach is really great for this is sometimes it's a little adjustment or a little insight or just shifting a couple of things around where you maybe your capacity is greater than you think. And a lot of the work that I do is helping people realize that for themselves. And I believe that for you too. For someone that is listening to a podcast called the Meaningful Revolution, you are someone that is capable of great things and is capable of taking on a lot more than you believe. And this is also just a side note, a message for myself, I am in this with you. I also deal with overwhelm a lot in running a business and trying to do my best for clients and remembering that I am capable of getting everything done is a reminder of myself. Second thing to remember and the second strategy to do is we need to increase our belief in ourselves, our self confidence. And this comes from a mindset of you can figure out anything with enough time and coffee. That's my favorite phrase. Marie Forleo has a great book called Everything is Figureoutable. And what this is really telling us to do is to get into action and get data, right? So if we don't think we're capable of rising to the occasion, really it's a fear, an untested fear, right? You won't actually know until you're in it and doing things. And then you'll get the learning to, to make the adjustments. So much of Self confidence is our past experience with handling hardship. And so those moments, we think back to the moments where you rose to the occasion where you showed up as your best self and was able to get through a tough project, a tough situation that is going to help you be like, oh, okay, maybe I got this. And reminding ourselves that we've had success adversity can help us get to that next level of performance or figure out that overwhelm. And something I love to do with clients is this self coaching exercise where if you're driving, don't do this, but if you're able to stand or sit nobly and close your eyes and imagine your future self five years in the future, that is 10 times more successful, 10 times more relaxed, 10 times more happy, 10 times more just together. Right. If you can picture that future version of yourself with your eyes closed, sitting or standing right next to you right now, what would that person tell you right now to get through the thing that's very overwhelming. And I love this exercise, self coaching, exercise as a coach, because a lot of times people know what they need from the world or they just need permission and this is a way for them to get out of their head a little bit. If you were advising a friend in the same situation as future best self, what would you advise your friend? These are a couple of different angles, but usually the insights to that, the answer to that question are very profound and unlocks a lot of things for people where they're like, oh, I, I can get this right. Oh, this is just part of the struggle. This is part of the process of growing. And I can figure this out. And so it's really great for building that self confidence and to get into the actions that we need to do to thrive. Okay. The third strategy is broadly called take care of your body. And so a lot of times when we're overwhelmed, we feel stressed. And if we don't handle that stress with exercise and movement or taking breaks, it can impact our sleep. And if you hit your sleep, that's usually the number one thing that makes people miserable. If you're not getting the average recommendation is seven hours for adults. If you're not hitting that seven hour mark each night, that would be the one thing to take care of first. And I, I promise you, even if you're someone who thinks that they can get on with one or two hours of sleep a night for the whole year, there are people maybe built that way, but the data shows that's very few people. And if you're feeling overwhelmed, try Getting more sleep as the number one thing. And I think just that level of rest of physic, physically feeling like you are good or great can change that feeling overwhelmed quite dramatically. The fourth thing to do if you're feeling overwhelmed is to get help, right? And that could be delegating some tasks that you don't really need to do. If it's not your life's work or not the things that are really driving value in the projects or business endeavors or market things that you're doing, if it's not something that you have to do to drive those things, get a teammate to help or delegate to a family member or whatever your situation is. But if you don't have anyone to delegate to or it's all super important things, you might need help redefining the project triangle. If you've done any project management, you know what this is. If you haven't. There's generally three areas that you can shift on a project. It's the quality of it or the. Let me take that back. It's the scope of the project or what it's going to accomplish. So that could be going to be this amount of code, it could be this marketing report, it could be this set of meetings that are set up for a giant conference. So what are you actually going to deliver? It's going to be cost. Are you going to need to hire a hundred million people to get it done or just five or that's one of the areas of a project. Or are you going to mess with the time? Right. It's okay maybe if you have to deliver a lot with a small team, if you have three years to deliver on the project. But if time is a driving factor, where there's a deadline, you need this done in a week and it's just you. Maybe adding people onto the project can help. And so if you're in an organization with a project manager, it's clarifying what's going to get dropped or what's going to get moved to make sure that the project's getting managed properly. If you're a solopreneur or business owner yourself, it could just be resetting your expectations and really thinking through, do I have enough time allocated to this based on the resource level or things that I'm trying to accomplish? And sometimes just being like, oh, like all of these things are jammed. I have a million things to do, it's only me and I need it done next week. Like something has to give. Just thinking through it in that way can be very helpful and just like, oh, it's going to take three times the amount of time because I can't change what it delivers, I can't change that. It's only me working. It makes sense. So getting help, either by redefining that project triangle or finding people to delegate or to eliminate things off of your task list is really going to help with that. Feeling overwhelmed. And then finally, the fifth thing to tie it all together is to create thoughtful systems. You know, so many, some people call this discipline, some people call it consistency. I think methodically having a rhythm, a daily rhythm, a weekly rhythm and a monthly rhythm to manage information, to manage your productive outputs, those meaningful pursuits that you do. Your health and building your confidence is essential. And what do I mean by that? It could be like your daily routine is you wake up, you have a certain couple of things you do to get your body ready in the morning. Maybe you go for a run, maybe you eat a great, eat breakfast, maybe journal or maybe read a little bit or something of that nature. Then when you get to work, maybe you identify the one thing that needs to get done that week and then one thing you have to do today. And so you spend the first hour of your workday working on that. And then after that you do any reach out you need to do and then you have the last half of the day to fight fires or do anything else is required, right? So that would be like a daily rhythm. Like you wake up, you do your morning routine, you get into your first part of your day routine, you have the rest of your day routine, you have the routine when you get home and then before bed. And that's your daily rhythm for that your weekly rhythm might be on, you might say on Monday. It's all reaching out to people on important projects or clients or doing more social communication. The second day, maybe it's planning the third day, maybe it's building all the things that you need to or create or focusing on your creative or important outputs. Maybe Thursday and Friday are all meetings and servicing clients. And this is roughly how my week works, which is why talking that out loud. So what are your weekly habits? So what is the focus of each day during the week? Maybe on Saturdays it's your long run day, right? And then when Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday is just your like normal run days, right? What are those weekly habits for your health, for your career, for your relationship and for your, well, beings and thinking through that and getting it on a calendar can be very empowering. And just having things a bit organized. Monthly habits, right? So maybe it's the first week of the month is all planning. What you're doing is you are comparing your project plans and making sure that you're saying no to the right things or you're adjusting. Course could be the monthly reports you send to your clients or your management or to yourself to manage what's going on. And that's what I mean by thoughtful systems. It's these daily, weekly and monthly rhythms and habits that help you perform and help you manage all the information. Okay, so pretty cool right? I'd love if you are have any questions or comments, you can sign up on our newsletter which is linked below. You get an email from me saying hey, welcome to the newsletter and you get updates on episodes like this every week and you can also ask questions. So if you hit reply to any of those emails, if you have a question on this episode or any others, I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can and I'd love to hear from you. Right. So please do that. If you like this episode, share it with two or three people who you think need help. Help with Overwhelm. And then the third thing to really think about today is if you need that extra amount of help. If you're feeling overwhelmed, the quickest way to feel more in control, more proactive, or more on top of everything is to talk to a Certified High Performance coach. And lucky for you, I'm a certified High Performance coach and I'd love to help. So you can apply for a free one hour strategy session at themeaningfulrevolution.com backslash coach. That link is below the show notes also. And what that'll do is you'll go through a quick questionnaire about 15 minutes if you're thoughtful about it and to help you think through your performance, help you get into the high performance mindset. And then we schedule a call after you fill that out. On that call we build a personalized plan that'll help you with whatever you're focused on in life right now. Family, work, health or well being and whatever, wherever you're feeling overwhelmed and we'll sit together, build you a plan with high performance habits custom to your life. And people love this call. I'd love to help you in that way. I'd love to be your high performance coach someday too. So take me up on that call. If not, just keep sharing this with people that might need to hear about the meaningful revolution and if you find it helpful, I'd love to hear from you. So with that said guys, go forth and live into your purposeful pursuit. And we'll see you next week on the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Sa.