Overwhelm
Nearly every entrepreneur I talk to has spoken to the feeling of overwhelm at one time or another.
Overwhelm looks like this: you wake up feeling like there is just too much to do. Your to-do list stretches far past the hours in the day. Maybe you need to do a newsletter, you’ve got to follow up with a proposal, you need to clear your inbox, you need to create new content for a workshop…the list just goes on and on. You are just exhausted and you are carrying 20 things that you need to do and at the end of the day you’ve only cleared 3 of them.
Or, overwhelm might look like this: some people are telling you to make a video, some people are telling you to make a sales funnel, someone else is telling you to create a Facebook group, and you are confused and you don’t know what to do first, or what to do at all.
When you are in overwhelm, accidents can start to happen. Like you happen to fall into watching Netflix, and what you intended to just be 1 episode turns into 10. Or you have a red velvet cake accident. You were planning on having 1 moderate slice, but then all of a sudden you have eaten the whole cake. You can start to self-sabotage — showing up late, or skipping networking events because you are just tired and don’t want to leave the house.
The truth is we aren’t going to make overwhelm go away.
I tell my clients that overwhelm is a good thing, we should look forward to being overwhelmed — because the opposite of overwhelm is that there is no work, no clients, and ultimately no money coming in.
We need to start at looking at overwhelm in a new way.
Overwhelm means that you are busy. Overwhelm means that you have multiple opportunities on your plate. As a business owner I would much rather be busy than having nothing to do.
So, I am going to give you an acronym to help manage overwhelm. The acronym is C.O.O.L..
C — Choice
Sometimes we get into a place where we can start to wonder “Why is this happening to me?” and we can get into a victim mentality. We can start to resent the opportunities coming in. And we will start to put the message out there to the Universe that we don’t want those opportunities.
I just got back from a tour with 9 live speaking events, and I have people ask me, “Monica, how do you do it and not get overwhelmed?” The way that I do it is I remind myself that I chose this. I never let myself complain, not out loud and not in my mind. At times I get tired, sure, and at times I feel like I wish I had more space, but I remind myself that I chose this and at any time I can un-choose this and make a different decision.
So, if you are in overwhelm, take a deep breath, and feel gratitude for the work. Then, if you need to adjust your choices in the future or right now then you can pause and evaluate that. In some cases you might choose to not do them again.
Another way of looking at choice is to think about the positive outcomes to being in overwhelm. What are the positive aspects of your business that come with the choices that you are making? These choices might be hard right now, but when we see the bigger picture of why we are doing this, it helps you manage the moment.
O — Offload it
For most of us we carry our entire to-do lists in our bodies all the time — in our heads, our shoulders, our bellies, all day every day and into the weekend. This is not healthy. What we want to do every week is — write it all out. Every week I download from my head onto paper my entire to-do list into an EverNote notebook online.
O — Organize it
Take the list that you have just made and decide what you are doing to do with each thing: Delegate, Do it, Delete it, or Defer it. Are you going to delegate the task to someone else? Is this task something that you need to do this week? Is this a task that you can delete, meaning you aren’t going to do it this week or maybe ever? Or you can defer the task and accomplish it another week.
Keep in mind that another system that you can align yourself to when you are organizing is to look at your three quarterly goals and how these tasks help us accomplish our larger goals.
L — Lighten the load
This is so important because you can’t carry your entire to-do list in your head. You can only carry one thing at a time. If we continue trying to carry everything that we have to do in our heads we will not only be exhausted but we will also be robbed of the joy from each event, each experience that we have to live and do that day.
Focus on one thing at a time — keep your attention on what you are doing in this moment. Then when you are finished, go back to your to-do list and pick a new thing.
Know that you are not going to get it all done. Time management is a myth. Ultimately we will never get to the end of our to-do list. As someone who is a 7-figure business owner, I am here to tell you that there is more on my list now than there was at the start. So the key is prioritizing what needs to be done right now. Focus on one thing and let the rest go.
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