How do you deal with overwhelm?

If you sometimes find yourself struggling to find your motivation, or perhaps even worrying that you’ve fallen out of love with your business…before you tie yourself up in knots or make a drastic decision, please – grab a coffee and spend just four or five minutes with me.

And from both those perspectives I know it’s very likely that the key to those struggles you’re experiencing right now is simply this: dealing with overwhelm.

You see, overwhelm isn’t just a matter of being busy. In its extreme, it’s more accurate to describe it as ‘feeling paralysed’. Overwhelm makes it so hard to take positive action, which in turn means you don’t make progress. And when you don’t make progress, you start to doubt yourself and question your very business. I’m sad to say I’ve seen too many really good business ideas buckle under the weight of overwhelm – and that’s not just devastating for the business owners. It’s also heartbreaking, because overwhelm is absolutely solvable.

Overwhelm’s a huge topic and can mean many different things. The good news is that there are lots of things you can to reduce and even remove overwhelm, but please make sure you’re addressing the real problem. If you try to fix the wrong problem, you could actually add more overwhelm to your overwhelm!

The first thing you need to do is just take a step back. What you do really mean when you say you feel overwhelmed?

For example, are you overwhelmed because of a belief or a mindset? Lots of women struggle with imposter syndrome or fear visibility, or they start something and then their inner critic talks them out of it. They start to doubt themselves which makes their goals feel like they’re out of reach, and even the simple tasks seem overwhelming.

Or perhaps your overwhelm is what we might call structural – in other words, your business systems aren’t helping you. They might even be hindering you! The most successful business owners are the ones who invest some time and effort into maximising their business systems…evaluating what their business needs, to work with ease and efficiency and to move to the next level…perhaps tools and technology, or perhaps automation and delegating work.

The third really common cause of overwhelm is around prioritisation. Again, there’s a real trend here among successful business owners…they don’t prioritise their time and effort based on the volume of their work, but also on the value of their tasks. They don’t just look at the urgency of the items on their to-do list, but also the importance of each of those things. Above all else, they know that if they want to be the CEO of their business, they can’t spend all their time doing the intern’s work.

So you can already see that if you want to properly address your overwhelm – and when I say ‘properly’, I mean getting you unstuck and KEEPING you unstuck – you first have to do some fairly hefty evaluation. Don’t just throw rocks at the problem, whether those rocks are your time, your money or more worryingly your anxiety. Pause, invest, consider what you really need. That will pay back whatever resources you put into that work…a thousand times over.

Because when you have identified and fixed the cause of your overwhelm – again, whether that’s about your mindset, your systems, or your productivity – some really amazing are going to happen.

– You’re going to get more done – and you’ll feel less stress doing them.

– You’re going to do more of the right things – and the value of those is going to move you forward.

– You’re going to really shift the way you run your business – and that will really shift your outcomes.

And to link back to the start of this video – all those things are going to make you love your business again, and they’re going to help you generate the results you need for the life you want.

Don’t risk all that just because you’re stuck in overwhelm!

Of course, understanding and fixing your overwhelm can be incredibly hard to do when you’re…well…overwhelmed. You’re human, and it can be very hard to see the wood for the trees, especially when you’re trying to juggle all the balls of day-to-day business life.

So if you’d like to know more about how good coaching and mentoring can help you break out from overwhelm to growth, from paralysis to flow let’s chat!