Just the other day I was coaching one of my clients and she let me know that she had an idea of where she wanted to go, but felt stuck because it seemed SO overwhelming. Perhaps you have been there. You know you want to change, have done the work I shared before on the three things that need to change before you can change..,but you are overwhelmed with the sheer size of the task. So you don’t move forward.
I get it. I’ve been there and find myself there still.
How do you fight this overwhelm?
First, you acknowledge it. It’s okay. Go ahead and say the words with me: “I am overwhelmed.”
Doesn’t that feel at least a little better?
You see the power of overwhelm stays when it stays in between our ears. It’s a form of chaos. By simply pulling it out of your mind and saying it with your words, you are bringing it in to the open where you can not only acknowledge but begin to deal with it. There is a lot of power with saying, “There gusts of winds” rather than believing you are in the middle of a tornado.
When I was a kid growing up in rural Kentucky, we would have tornado drills. They were scary at first—having just moved to the area from less-tonado-prone Ohio. But after the first year, and the eighth drill, I became less anxious because I felt more accustomed and more trained as to what to do.
So it is in our own overwhelm.
Just say it out loud…and over time you will know that it’s normal and can determine what level of emotional energy you ought to give it.
Second, get a pen and paper. Write down what the big goal is. For this client, a stay-at-home mom, she wanted to be more organized. This is a very ambiguous and very big goal. So I had her write down what being organized meant. Write. Down. The Big Goal at the top of the page. “ORGANIZED”. Then list out every single thing that comes to mind when you think of the word “organized”.
Most times when I get overwhelmed everything that stands in my way gets a 10 response, when it actually deserves a 3 or 4.
Third, you need to Categorize every characteristic and put in a box. I know it sounds trite, but putting a box around the categories is VERY important. It gives a sense of boundary to them and cognitively helps you separate them. Granted. The boundaries may be arbitrary for some things…it’s still important to draw the boundaries for your mind. Chaos happens when things blend into them, like a tie-dye solution.
In this client’s case, they fell under headings of Cleaning, Kitchen, Exercise. We tackled Cleaning and I asked her, “What does a “clean” house look like?” She listed off several things and we came up with a plan for what days she was going to do certain things. For example, Vacuum on Mondays. Laundry on Tuesdays. Baseboards once a month. And then her taks was to make a weekly and monthly schedule to follow.
If this helped you, let me know! You can send questions or topics or problems you need help with. Email me at Matthew @ MatthewWireman.com