Is it on your Mind?
Sprout Sweater Episode 7: What do Cabbages have to do with Overwhelm?
Join Dave Algeo aboard "Sprout 1" and take another journey into your inner world where mind, meaning and metaphor collide.
This episode Dave explores the concept of overwhelm from the perspective of 'what is on your mind - has your mind.' Dave shares his Crackerjack and Cabbages metaphor and an approach to dealing with 'cabbage overload' - feeling overwhelmed by all the demands of life and work - the stuff that is on your mind.
Dave Algeo is a writer, coach, trainer and speaker empowering others to live big, by identifying the small but significant things that can transform the life we are living. Join Dave on the good ship 'Sprout1' as we explore the inner galaxy of the human mind, and find the sprouts that make the biggest difference. These are the sprouts you are looking for.
Search for 'Sprout Sweater' in your favourite podcast feed. To find out more about the podcast, and episode show notes at Podcast — Stress(ed) Guru and more about his in person and online events at www.stressedguru.com. Drop Dave a line at dave@sproutsweater.com to ask questions, offer feedback or suggestions for future podcast content.
Show Notes
Episode 7 Show Notes
The following is a rough draft of the content (not a full transcript - more notes forming the basis of the podcast recording
Is it on your mind, cabbages and Crackerjack - what on earth Dave?!
Welcome aboard Sprout1. I’m your host Dave Algeo, Chief Sprout Sweater. Buckle up and enjoy this show journey into our inner world where the mind metaphor and meaning are meshed together in a bid to make more sense of our lives. It’s episode 7. Is it on your mind?
But as we lift off the pad and before we get into the episode don’t forget if you find that the demands of life and the meaning of it all is leading you to sleepless nights tossing and turning, deep and not deep questions rattling around your head them hop over to sproutsweater.com to sign up for my sleeps checklist and my soon to be released free operation snooze sleep improvement programme. Start getting your head back and shit together so you can start getting life back on your terms, Sproutsweater.com
Before I get into it, is it on your mind? I need to give you the foundation for this and I’m gonna go back to a childhood programme called Crackerjack. One of the things about Crackerjack was there was a game on there called Cabbages and Kings. I think it might have been called Double or Drop at one time. But you used to get kids on stage to win prizes and then be asked questions and if they got the question right, they got a prize, a toy, a fire engine, or something like that. If they got a question wrong, they get a cabbage. Three cabbages and you were out. Now that little game inspired for me as I was doing my research into stress, overwhelming, overloading, poor coping, this image of that child holding onto a bunch of toys and then being crowded out by cabbages and losing sight of the toys and being ground down. I have since over the last 10, must be longer than those years, I’ve used that time and again in lots of different sessions to illustrate very physically and viscerally almost, the impact of the cabbages, the demands of life and work. Often the negative demands, but sometimes the positives.
So, it’s that metaphor that then developed into how we then deal with the cabbages – well we slice them down. We chunk the slices into sprout sized chunks because our brain can only really handle the sprout sized things under stress, and this is where if you think about the foundation for the topic of this episode. So, if you keep that metaphor in mind, the cabbages can mount up and get on top of us. And if you imagine it your brain is juggling these cabbages, all of the demands and expectations of life and work. When it’s on your mind your brain is doing its best to simply juggle and it’s a rubbish cabbage storage device. And there is a phrase that I’ve kind of cobbled together, it’s a twist on a quote from David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done the Art of Stress-Free Productivity. His quote is “if you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention it’ll take more of your attention than it deserves”. Now I’ve kind of twisted that into my own little version of that quote “what is on your mind has your mind”. If you think about all those cabbages, all the demands, the projects, the sprout size little actions that we have to do all day every day just to keep the life admin going and the work admin going and to achieve things. It’s no wonder that we can feel overwhelmed and that whilst we are in that process of just juggling the cabbages, they are on your mind very much so and then they have your mind. They can distract you; you can get wrapped up and caught up in them. You can be unfocused, not be capable of making decisions. It only takes one sprout doesn’t it, to tip you over the edge when you’re carrying so much around in your head. Over the years I’ve found this to be true without exception generally almost without exception. In fact, I haven’t found an exception but I’m ruling the possibility out that what is on your mind has your mind. And this is critical because the so what in this is how, where do we start? Many of my clients, when we are just trying to tease things out and make a start on getting our head back, getting our shit together and life back on our terms the first step is get our head back because our head is not wearing it needs to be, it's juggling the cabbages. And in order to get our heads back we need to start getting those cabbages off our mind and this is a key part.
It sounds easier than it is actually than it can be in practice but there are some practical things. So, here’s a question - have you ever found yourself so wound up or lost and it’s a seemingly never-ending list of demands. It can affect us in so many different ways, but this seems to be a very unusual feeling of panic that can arise. One that’s distressing but also compelling in a strange sort of way. I don’t know about you but I sometimes experience that panic in kind of, it almost feels like excitement in a very extreme way but it also robs us of our sense of control; we can feel crushed, we can drive us to that panic and what we can often do is just keep going, keep doing what we are doing and keep moving forward because that’s our only way really of maintaining or keeping our sense of control. And there is a phrase in the world of anxiety management which is action alleviate anxiety. Now that’s a very powerful phrase and I do like it. And when we are forced into that position, it being a mobile frozen in panic then action is often the best first thing we can do. But when we are in the other converse of that we are just doing, doing, doing, doing then action can in one sense give us a sense of control. Alleviate the anxiety, but it doesn’t necessarily, it isn’t necessarily the most productive thing in that moment. It can give us that sense of control when actually we need to stop and step back. So, the question here is what action? Action alleviates anxiety, what are we are doing, what action, what action is best to take, a good place to start. In fact, the best place to start is to get things off your mind.
When we feel overwhelmed or crushed by the demands of life and work, we can feel like we have very little control over them. If you go back to that analogy of the cabbages, if those cabbages are on your mind all of those things that are on your mind, then your mind it has your mind. It has the best facilities of your mind being employed to simply juggle those cabbages. So, we need to free our mind up to bring back those most powerful faculties of our brain and use them more appropriately. I want you to reflect on actually how much is on your mind. Chances are there are a lot of things. Chances are there may be one thing that really, really is chewing away at you or as I call it, it’s a practically smelly cabbage, it’s the one that’s really going rotten. It’s really starting to taint the whole pile of cabbages if you like. Because if you put one rotten cabbage in with a bunch of other cabbages it’s going to turn them all rotten. It might be that one thing that you’re actively avoiding or confronting ‘I can’t face that’ and ‘don’t have time or energy to face that’.
Ok so here’s what I suggest you do. Whether there is one thing that’s on your mind, that particularly smelly cabbage, that thing you’ve avoided for a lot of time, or just don’t feel as if you the emotional energy to deal with or you don’t feel if there is enough time to put aside to deal with it or there’s lots of cabbages or both. What I want you to do is just take some time out. It doesn’t need to be a lot. It can be less than you think you need because all we are talking about is getting started and it’s about getting stuff off your mind. Get it into something concrete. A task list, a journal, type it or write it. Whatever the key is to get it out of your mind. There’s one caveat here, wherever you put this into a to do list, a journal, or something paper or electronic it needs to be reliable. You need to be able to trust that you won’t lose it and it’s something you will come back to. Think about where you have those random post it notes, those lists all over the place and collect them all into one place. It could be a physical thing like an in tray with pieces of paper as David Allen in Getting Things Done would say or it could be just a simple word document for example. But get it into one place and label, file it so you don’t lose it because your brain needs to trust that device. It needs to know that the cabbages that you’re taking off its mind, because it feels that they are life threatening, that you won’t lose them. So put it into a device that’s trustworthy and there are many things that I’m not going to get nerdy on you now because I love my apps and devices and I’ve nerded out on this over the years. I’ve spent probably far more time and sometimes on trying to save myself time, than the time I’ve actually saved so I’ve gone down those rabbit holes. My suggestion is to keep it simple so here’s my tips for this week.
Identify a reliable storage device. Perhaps you could buy yourself a nice new journal and don’t get me started on that because I’m a notebook nerd. I love fancy notebooks. Yes, my handwriting is appalling but I do love the notebooks themselves. It could be electronic but maybe a low-tech option is a good way to go for this initial dumping of the stuff out of your head.
Here’s how I suggest you go about doing it. Again, as rough and ready as approach that you can get away with. Use the front of your journal, your book, for generally dumping any thoughts or ideas down and perhaps even starting to make sense of them as you write. Use the back for listing any actions and things you need to do and put them in one place. The reason that I suggest that you separate them out is because you may find that as you write a lot in the front of the book, to do's will pop and what you don’t want to do is to stress out about ‘where was it?’, ‘which page was that writing on?’ if you have a lot of paper, a lot pages complete. So, take any actions and put them at the back of the book so they’re easy to reach. Your brain will thank you for that.
Keep this to hand or have some other way to capture those things that crop up as you live your day-to-day life. This is the thing; this is not just a one-off process. No doubt you’ve had that experience where you’ve been walking along, or you’ve been sitting nice and calm in your living room and suddenly something has popped in your head, and you’ve thought ‘shit I need to do that!’ Chances are you’ve maybe sat and plagued yourself until you’ve either, a) got up and done it or b) or you’ve forgotten it again. And I don’t know about you, forgetting it again is often worse than the remembering it in the first place because then you spend a lot of stress and time thinking about ‘what was that thing?’ ‘Aw no, aw no I knew I’d...’ and you spend all those moments or hours thinking and beating yourself up for having such a useless memory and being useless for not doing it in the first place. You need something to keep with you to capture those things as they arise. Remember that phrase ‘what is on your mind has your mind’ and we need to get it off our minds as soon as possible. We have a number of options with that and I’ll come onto that shortly but have a device, it could be an app – I love Brain Toss, it’s a great little app about three quid android or iOS where if you think of something you can go into the app type it order your recorder or take a picture of something and it wings it straight into your email inbox and then it’s off your mind. Brilliant. That kind of capture device can be really useful as you go along.
Get into the habit of checking back on those actions. In the back of the journal or wherever you choose to capture them and make enough time to allow yourself to triage those actions. And what I mean that in other words at that point is decide - do I ditch this? I had an idea but nah it’s no good. Is it delegate - can I delegate to somebody else, do I defer it to later i.e It's a big task, it's gonna take me more than 2 minutes - I’ll do it later. Decide when to do it. Or direct it elsewhere it might be that it’s something just for future reference. Get it out of the to do list and put it into a reference folder. Or do I do it? General rule of thumb, David Allen and Gertie Kentings do insist on two minutes or less. I tend to think 60 seconds or less do it now, if not, do it later. That helps you then triage the tasks.
Talking about identifying reliable storage devices like a journal start dumping things in the front, actions in the back have the capture device handy with you at all times and then get into the habit of checking back on it so your brain can learn to trust it. It might sound like a lot, and it also might sound like it's rough and ready, but the aim is not perfect at the moment. You can tweak, you can enhance, you can evolve the systems later. The key is to start the process of offloading what is on your mind into something else and developing the habit.
As our craft to sprout 1 begins the landing process allowing you to return to your fellow humans and acknowledge the power of your mind to juggle all the stuff of life. Recognise just how far more powerful and peaceful it would be if you had a clear out of that stuff and free it up to do what you so desperately wanted to do. To be here now, think clearly, be focused, be creative and enjoy the moment.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your flight aboard Sprout1. For show notes and information on how to get the podcast free direct to your apple podcast, Spotify, or other favourite podcast feed visit sproutsweater.com and touchdown.
Quote:
"If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it’ll take more of your attention than it deserves”.
Reference: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
Episode 8 Teaser:
Get the podcast delivered to your favourite podcast player and don't miss an episode. In the next episode, Dave interviews, Triathlon & 'High Performance Human' Coach Simon Ward and learns how to get started with exercise after years of inactivity, amongst other things.