Welcome back.
Now our next silent killer is overwhelm.
I'm sure you can identify from time to time with this guy here in our picture.
Now whether it's here Tass piling up you know or maybe you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to manage
it all.
Or even if you're a mother or a father that's trying to balance work with your family life.
We all seem to be stressed further and further these days.
Now here's the thing.
When your brain gets overwhelmed it's kind of like a breaker being shut off your brain just completely
shuts down.
Now I hear this from my clients and my students all the time.
They're overwhelmed and they don't even know where to start.
And in many cases when this happens they freeze it paralyzes them and they're just stuck in the mud.
But the problem is those tasks Don't go away.
That only makes the problem worse.
I do have some good news for you however it doesn't have to be this way.
You see overwhelm really is subjective.
It's much more of an emotion than it is a reality with the right system or structure in place you can
manage just about anything that comes your way.
Please don't leave this lecture without really internalizing this fact with the right system or structure
in place.
You can manage just about anything that comes your way.
Now in this course I'm going to show you multiple systems and strategies.
But as an individual you're unique you've got different strengths and weaknesses and preferences than
your neighbor or your coworker.
In the end it's up to you to try on a few of our strategies and decide what works best for you in your
personal situation and style.
Now these strategies are coming up later.
But I don't want to leave you completely hanging until then.
I want to give you a couple of quick suggestions.
Right now one major source of overwhelm I know for most of us is caused by that open loop that happens
in your head your brain thinks it's doing you a favor by continuing to remind you and remind you and
remind you of all those open tasks and to do's you have in your To Do list but many times it chooses
to remind us at the most inopportune time.
You know perhaps when we're laying down to go to sleep at night and will continue to bombard us with
all our open tasks the first thing you've got to do when you get overwhelmed is to get all those thoughts
out of your head.
You've got to break out a piece of paper and a pen and perform a brain dump.
Just give it all out.
I mean everything from there once you've got it all out on paper you can prioritize it and break it
into bite sized pieces you can break out the urgent from the not so urgent and you can remove those
tasks altogether that really aren't priority then you can delegate or hand some of those tasks off to
someone else.
But the key is get it all out of your head onto paper and once you have it on that paper it's going
to help your brain understand that everything's accounted for and it will help to reduce that continual
open loop and once you've got it on paper you can then start to organize it and create a plan.
Now the other major source of overwhelm is due to complexity if we deem a project too large or too complex
it can freeze us in our tracks just like before.
You've got to break out a pen and hash things out on paper.
For example let's say you've got a presentation do for a client.
Now that can be a very big task and one that can overwhelm you just by the size of it.
Now we're going to use this as an actual example.
So let's say on your To Do list you've got you know something written down like most of us might do
and you just put you know presentation or create presentation.
Now that itself is a pretty big task.
And as that staring you in the face it can be overwhelming.
So what I'm going to suggest for you is instead break that down into many smaller pieces and make them
as small as you possibly can.
So for example you know maybe your first task is you know call boss for suggestions.
OK.
So that could be a simple first step.
Second step could be you know start outline
maybe a third step would be to you know research
evidence for whatever your presentation is going to be on maybe another step would be to create your
PowerPoint slides.
Then after that maybe we're going to create notes free slide
then we'll practice our overall pitch.
In our presentation and then perhaps we put something down like you know time our presentation.
Now again this is just an example of what she might use.
But the key is to come and break these down into further steps and make them as small as possible because
once you start to break these chunks down it becomes a lot less overwhelming.
Instead of having this huge you know create presentation task staring you in the face you know it's
easy just to pick up the phone call your boss ask for some suggestions and then boom you can come down
here you can cross this off our list and then you can come to the next step and start your outline.
Now depending upon how overwhelmed you are moreover you overwhelmed your the smaller you need to break
down each task the smaller you break down each task the quicker your overwhelms going to go away and
you can start knocking these off.
One of the time as we get to later lectures we're going to go into more detail on how you can combat
overwhelm.
But for now what I courage you to do is look for times when you get overwhelmed as a trigger for your
procrastination and start to jot down all your tasks and everything that's in your head on paper.
And if it's a complexity issue and if something is too large break it down into smaller chunks.