Where To Start? Moving Past Overwhelm

Sprout Sweater Episode 9 - Slicing the Smelly Cabbages of 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 how to manage ourselves through and beyond overwhelm. Have you ever experienced that sense of panic, freeze, anger, or inability to focus or get done what needs to be done? If so, listen to this episode where Dave shares an approach to help you tackle the most overwhelming demands, break them down and move forward.

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.

Episode 9 Show Notes

The following is a rough draft of the content (not a full transcript - more notes forming the basis of the podcast recording

Dealing with overwhelm by slicing the cabbage?

Welcome aboard Sprout1 I’m your host Dave Algeo chief sprout sweater. Buckle up and enjoy this show's journey into our inner world where we meld metaphor, meaning and the mind to achieve the greatest alchemy of them all, magnificent mind management.

Its episode 9 where to start moving past overwhelm. 

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 with deep and not so deep questions rattling around your head then hop on over to sproutsweater.com to sign up for the sleep checklist and my soon to be released free Operation Snooze Sleep Improvement program. Start getting your head back, your shit together so that you can enjoy life and get it back on your terms sproutsweater.com.

Have you ever been in overwhelm? You know when that stage where your head is just so, it's spinning so much there's a sense of panic or freeze or just focus is gone, it’s a word that’s meaningless to you in that moment. You might be staring at something for minutes and minutes and then realise that you’ve taken nothing in, or you have literally frozen, you can’t think, you can’t string a sentence together or make a decision. Now if you have ever been there you’ll know that it's an awful feeling. It's an awful experience and not very helpful, not very productive. So, as well as managing overwhelm in those moments what we need to do is work on how do we move beyond that especially if we find ourselves not just in momentary overwhelm but in periods in where we are feeling like, whether its days or weeks, where we are feeling life is just pushing us to that edge or we are in that edge of overwhelm all of the time or seemingly all of the time.

Now how do we manage it, well sometimes we need support, you know, whether it’s a colleague, a manager, a close friend, a loved one, a coach, a counsellor or therapist. That can really help us to get ourselves organized to get what’s in our head out and allow it to become organized so that we can prioritise and clear and get some coping strategies and all of those practical things. But what if we are simply procrastinating on something. Something big or we are being put on the spot by our boss to lay out how we’ll approach something and we find that our mind goes blank, again because we’re just tipping into that edge of overwhelm. Well, there are the practical things to manage our physiological state in the moment and I often talk about these in my workshops. It's just step away, remove yourself from the heat for a moment to give yourself some clearance to allow your emotional temperature if you like to drop and your rational brain to re-engage. You can use your breathing and breathing techniques include what I call a rescue breath which is breathe in for 2 hold your breath for 2, breathe out for 4. Nice and steady and slow. Those are momentary tactics or in the moment tactics that we can use to manage our state and bring ourselves back down and regain that rationale sense. But the challenge is that sometimes we do that and then we go back to the thing that has tipped us into overwhelm and we are back in overwhelm. Or we go back to it maybe with a little more composure but we find we still can’t pull it together; we can’t get that handle on it or that focus we just don’t know where to start. And I think that’s one of the challenges so what do we do, we end up either going back into overwhelm and finding ourselves perpetually on that cycle and or, we end up procrastinating and putting it off. Putting it off and off or kind of just cobbling it together and doing less than a quality job.

 So, this  is what I want to tackle today, how do we do that?

Well there’s a combination here of chunking the cabbage down and focusing on one slice at a time. Now if you listened to the previous episodes, particularly episode 7 where I talked about the Crackerjack analogy of carrying all these cabbages around. The cabbages are the demands and challenges of life, some of them are things we take on like ‘I wanna train and run a marathon’, that’s a cabbage. It’s something we have chosen to do; we need to slice it down into a training program and sweat the sprouts which is just the one step in front of another. But many of them are things that we wouldn’t chose to take on or we’ve found ourselves in a position where we have to deal with it because of circumstance whether our own personal circumstance or professional circumstance and those cabbages are what can really lead, those demands can really lead to us feeling overwhelmed. 

I want to share an example with you. 

A client of mine came to me after experiencing what most of us would describe as that psychological and emotional burnout. That fear where they’d reached a crescendo of anxiety, that point where they had just been building and building, the demands had been building in their life and work. They had been taking on more and finding themselves slowly crushed and continuing to work and continuing to plough and battle through as that was one of the key coping strategies and isn’t that the case for many of us. But what they did was they got to that point and it obviously all came crashing down as can often happen as we reach that burnout. Now this client had after a conversation, had approached and received some therapeutic support, some intervention, some cognitive behavioral therapy which is a really powerful therapeutic approach because that can tackle some of the underlying issues that may have led to that initial crescendo of anxiety. What we started to do once that was well underway and they were in a better place to then start to think practically about what they can do with, we started to look at practical things about how can you move forward. And one of the things that they wanted to do was discuss ‘how do I get myself back to work?’. This client was a personal trainer who was working at a gym, classed herself employed but had responsibilities towards the gym in meeting the needs of some of their clients, had built up their own client list and both had to satisfy the expectations of the gym but also the demands of their clients for whom my client cared a lot about. So, when their manager at the gym in question had asked them to lay out your return to work because there was a period of sickness absence - what would be your ideal week, how would you like to lay out the week you work? I know your hard worker, how would you like to lay this out so that we can make this more manageable for yourself going forward. I don’t know about you but that manager sounds like a great manager for starters. A caring supporting manager. Having said that because of the place that my client was in they found that question overwhelming ‘I don’t know what my week is’, ‘where do I start?’, ‘I’ve got so many things I need to fit into that week, I’ve got outside activities, I’ve got other commitments and I’ve got my clients who I care a lot about’. So that was the challenge that came to because they were overwhelmed by that one so seemingly simple question: how do you lay out your ideal week? And this is where if we identify that question as the cabbage we then started to slice it down and my question to my client, which is a question you can often ask yourself and I thinks it’s a useful place to start is ok this is a smelly cabbage, this is a cabbage that’s really rotten and we are maybe procrastinating we don’t want to confront it but need to otherwise it will continue to rot the rest of the pile of cabbages the other demands in life. So where do we start? Let's slice it down. Let’s break this down and pick the smelliest part of the cabbage, the most rotten bit. So how we did this was, we said OK, so let’s take your typical week Monday to Friday just to keep things simple. What is the worst day, what is the most challenging day for you? So, we picked that worst slice, that worst cabbage and we sliced it down into day sized slices if you like. And you could do this in different formats with any challenge but as an example this is what we did. And we talked about ok so that’s your worst day, that’s your most challenging day let's put the rest of the week aside and let’s look at that. What makes it challenging and we go there, we confront the worry and the challenge because that’s often what we shy away from. What makes it challenging? Well it's because what I’ve found myself doing is I’m running four back to back sessions then I’m grabbing a quick toilet break, jumping in my car going home and running a zoom session for a client who is shielding because I’m recording this now we are coming of covid times but they are continuing to shield and I just feel like by the end of the day I’m totally wiped out because of all the cramming in of stuff. I’m giving everything to the clients but I’ve got nothing for myself at the end and then I’ve got to practice for my other sessions. I’ve got to do my own training. So, it was a day from hell in their words albeit they were doing things that they actually enjoyed. This is where we said, ok that’s the worst, so if we were to make that better what would it look like. What would work for you as a more manageable and sustainable approach to that. So, then we started to tease that cabbage out into sprout sized chunks. Ok the decision came out well I can probably run two back-to-back sessions and then I’ll take a 15-minute break. We are already taking that slice and breaking it down into smaller chunks and that’s the power of this because once we do that we can start to see that it becomes more manageable. Yes we then have to decide right, how do we make that happen, what conversations do we need to have, who do we need to connect with and communicate with, all of those things. But here’s the thing that I think many of us forget to do when we start to get a grip of those slices and those things is, we might agree right that’s what I’ll do and then go off and we might even repeat that for the other days of the week and map it out, which is the idea. But have we set this in stone, have we formed a policy for ourselves and by that I mean something you can make a decision against in the future when the challenges or the requests come in, could you just fit something in, or your own temptation to be driving yourself hard gets you thinking ‘I could just fit another one in’. So we need to not just make a decision about the ideal week, we need to turn that into a policy. We need something against which we will make our decisions in the future because we got into this position because of circumstance perhaps having no decision-making criteria against which to work and being driven by our own drives our desires or allowing ourselves to be pressured by external influences like a manager or client need. What we need to do is have a policy against which we weigh that decision. No more than two back-to-back clients, I will take a 15-minute break and then I will allow that space enough travel time if I was to do a home zoom. 

My question to you is, if you take the smelliest cabbage, the thing that is creating overwhelm and I’m sure there may be more than one thing, but what’s the smelliest, what's the most challenging. It can be scary to confront that, it can be scary to turn and look at it in the face, not that cabbages have faces but that demand is often the thing that is psychologically over weighted because of the fear around it, your perception that it’s too difficult that its and too hard to manage and I can’t cope with it. But identify that cabbage and if a cabbage is something, a demand or a problem that you know you're procrastinating on that you know to be an overwhelm is springing to mind now, grab a pen and jot it down. Write it down and look at that and then think about how do I slice it down because if it’s too big as a cabbage we need to start somewhere and the challenge is not to do it all. So, the example in there was what does your week look like, that was too big. Right, ok, so pick the worst day, what’s the hardest day, why is that hard and how could you make it easier. Same for any other problem, it could be a workload issue, a project, it could be a financial issue or a relationship issue. It's about picking where we start. And speaking of starting, if the whole idea of picking the smelliest cabbage is overwhelming in itself and it's something that perhaps your skills at confronting and slicing and dicing and chunking are not quite there, they are not quite honed then remember that this is a skill in itself and it will take practice. So don’t necessarily dive into that smelliest cabbage of them all, pick something small, pick something that you can have a small win on. So it might be something that is not as big or as problematic but you can still apply the same approach  - identify it, label it, identify what makes it so challenging and troubling and then look at how you can turn that around and make it less of a problem. Identify some key actions and then turn that if you can into a policy so that if and when this situation or similar situations arise you have something against which you can decide. And sometimes we just need a bit of support, we need a conversation with a loved one or a colleague or a friend to help us talk through this or to just be there as we manage that sense of anxiety. So don’t be afraid to ask for help and support even if it is just a conversation  or if it’s something particularly intense it may need therapy. It may need approaching your GP to access some of the great therapeutic support that can be there to help you with those bigger issues.

So as we prepare Sprout1 for landing and you prepare yourself to return to the human race remember overwhelm may well be one smelly cabbage away but if we grab that cabbage, slice it down, chunk it into sprout sized actions and form policies for future challenges you will be well on your way to getting your head back from stress to be able to start to get your shit together and life back on your terms. Happy sprout sweating.

I  hope you’ve enjoyed your flight aboard sprout1 for show notes and information on how to get the podcast feed direct to your apple podcast, Spotify or other favourite podcasts feed visit sproutsweater.com and touch down.

Episode 10 Teaser:

Building upon Episode 9, Dave shares how we can use our goals more effectively by understanding how they fit into the bigger picture and by setting better goals.