Battling Overwhelm

I’ve been self employed one way or another for most of my life. I’ve always struggled with someone just telling me what to do as I need to understand the problem and be able to own the solution. That is why running my own solo business is the obvious choice for me. I love the freedom to choose what I work on and be able to decide which direction to go in. But with more freedom come more decisions and too many decisions can lead to overwhelm.

Overwhelm is a serious issue that can have a huge negative mental and physical impact and that can derail your plans at the worst possible times. If you’re a solo business owner the risks are even greater. If you’re so overwhelmed that you can’t work, then you don’t get paid. This post is about my history with overwhelm and some of the ideas and tools that i’ve found to help tackle it.

It’s not easy when it’s all on you

You need to be self-directed and set the destination that you want your business to go in. You need to constantly work on building the relationships with clients and collaborators that you need to make the business work. You need to do the paperwork, balance the books, sort the advertising, sort social media… the list of “you need tos” is endless.

Overwhelm kills productivity

Overwhelm is the biggest issue for me. With so many plates to keep spinning, it only takes a job overrunning or being sick for a couple of days for my plans to go out of the window and for the pressure to start building. The stress eats into my confidence and I start to feel a constant low level panic and worry. I can sense I’m in “fight or flight” mode all the time and my decision making isn’t as good as it needs to be. I find it harder to concentrate on any one thing and spend most of my time firefighting. At the very time I need to be at my best to deal with the workload, i’m getting progressively worse — and I know it. It’s a nightmare.

Over the first 6 months of 2017, I went through the darkest episode of overwhelm i’ve ever experienced. It lasted months and at the end, I felt wrung out, exhausted, drained of any enthusiasm and felt totally burnt out. My health was not great, I was miserable, my family said I was grumpy and remote. There just has to be a better way.

So what can we do to fix this?

After a bit of recovery time and much soul searching, I decided to try and find a way to tackle the problem. My mindset is very much based around finding practical solutions for problems so my instinct was to find out more about the issue itself. Then I might be able to figure out how to fix it. I read countless articles and books that helped me to understand where the problem stems from and discovered a whole bunch of exercises and tools for managing those issues. Jobs were coming in all the time so my constantly changing workload gave me a great opportunity to see what was effective and what was not.

There are many strands to it, which i’ll go into detail over a few posts, but the main points are:

Stop to go faster
This is hard to do when you’re under pressure, but you won’t regret doing it. Having a few ideas to hand to help convince you is really helpful.
See: Want to do more — then stop.

Get things out of your head
The human mind is amazing but it’s not designed for the onslaught of small things that we have to deal with. Getting things out of my head and into a form that the mind is designed to deal with got me halfway there to sorting this out. Powerful stuff!
See: Want to do more — then stop.

Prioritise like a machine (whilst remaining human)
It’s very easy for us to prioritize other people’s tasks, but harder to process our own, which is largely down to our emotions. We really need to take those emotions into account — they are extremely powerful and insightful, but we need to do it in the right way. With a few ideas you can take this from a chore that brings on nausea, to a joyous experience that makes you feel like a chess grandmaster.
See: Prioritise like a machine (whilst remaining human)

Design your perfect week
How many of us have ever sat down and worked out exactly how we want our worklife to be? It’s a real eye-opener. It’s so much easier to find something when you know what it looks like!

Make plans that don’t suck
This is fascinating stuff. I found out about “planning fallacy” and “distant elephants” which really helped me get a grip on why my plans were often drastically wrong and develop some techniques for making them better.

Figure out your natural rhythm
This has got a lot of press recently and is super important. We all have natural rhythms and change states throughout the day so when is important as what. By knowing when to do something, you can get stuff done better than ever and without nearly so much effort. It can even be fun!

Create your own overwhelm first aid kit
Overwhelm is coming for you, and usually when you could really do without it, so having a plan of action ready and waiting is a surefire way to stop it in its tracks. By doing this, you’ll not be able to stop it coming, but you’ll have the ninja skills to deal with it when it does.

So where next?

I’ve talked about this a great deal and it seems like i’m not alone in suffering like this. In-fact, it seems to be very common particularly amongst freelancers, entrepreneurs and other people who either work for themselves or work from home and have to manage their time.

When you’re self-directed you need tools and ideas to help you do it well.

Overwhelm is just horrible. If I can do something to help others not have to experience it so much, that would be a great thing. I don’t want to do this alone and so I want to share my ideas and start building a community with other people I can learn from. If we can all share our experiences and ideas, support each other and learn new approaches then we can develop strategies to help others to not fall into the same traps.

Collectively, we can find ways to improve things both for ourselves and for others. The self-directed are in the minority, but that’s changing fast so we need to find new ways of doing things that suit us better. I personally believe that the mental and physical problems that being self-directed can cause can all be mitigated through ideas, strategies and tools. We’re humans, we make things to do what we can’t — this is no different.

I’m calling it Helm. It seemed to fit as it was all about taking control, deciding where to go and working out how to get there, safe and well.

I love the metaphor of steering a ship towards a destination. It’s all about getting your bearings, dealing with change and correcting your course. Where you’re going remains the same, but the sea is always on the move so you need to keep correcting, adapting and changing.

Up until recently, I didn’t even notice that the word Helm is at the end of the word Overwhelm, which really made me laugh when someone pointed it out. Helm — the end of overwhelm???

OK — maybe not quite yet, but it’s a nice thought.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so busy I would have noticed that earlier…

I’ll be posting updates to this post and about Helm in general. If you would like to hear more, please sign up to the Helm mailing list here: https://www.getdrip.com/forms/441062528/submissions/new

Mike is a member of The Happy Startup School – a community of purpose-driven entrepreneurs and leaders – more info here