How to find your whelm in 2022

Hands down 2021 was one of the most overwhelming years of my life.

Hands up if you agree?

This article is about how to move from feeling overwhelmed to finding your whelm, a.k.a. flow, the zone, your peak state.

Despite the comedic references in the youtube clip below, whelm is a real thing and my hope is this article helps you find it.

“Why were you overwhelmed this year Rich?” I hear you ask.

You might think starting a business during the first wave of the pandemic had something to do with it, but not in the way you might think.

Much of the credit (or blame if you subscribe to that tactic) relates to my New Year’s Evolution for 2021.

You see at the start of every year I choose a phrase that becomes my intention for the year ahead.

I call it a New Year’s Evolution as it acts as a guide for how one chooses to respond to the world around us to be a better, more evolved, version of ourselves.

I have done this for the last seven years and every year it has made a remarkable difference.

But be warned… choose carefully. Be careful what you wish for!

Afterall,

"we see the world not as it is but as we are,"

and if your intention is strong enough you might get more than you bargained for.

Before going any further rest assured that although this concept may sound a little ‘woo woo’, there is a whole bunch of science behind it you can read about?here .

My point today however is to encourage you to choose a New Year’s Evolution that is both transformational, and very importantly, sustainable.

"NY’s Evolution examples please Rich" I hear you say.

Ok here are mine from the last seven years.

• 2015 -?'turn around'?(believe me I needed to)
• 2016 - 'positive change' (yep that totally worked)
• 2017 - 'step up ' (not the dance movies)?
• 2018 - 'take the shot' (missed many but landed some three pointers)?
• 2019 - 'living exponentially ' (that was a hard one)
• In 2020 it was 'generosity & generativity ' (#thegiftisinthegiving )
• This year was ‘level up ’ (almost burnt myself out!).

As many of you know I trained as an organisational psychologist and did further studies in positive psychology.

Both fields are focused on understanding humanity at its best.

On this basis I should have known better when setting my 2021 NY’s Evolution because in my efforts to ‘level up’ in everything I did I ended up feeling overwhelmed on an all too frequent basis.

Don’t get me wrong, 2021 was remarkable with so many high points, despite or maybe even in part because of COVID lockdowns, remote working, and having to digitize our entire business.

I am incredibly grateful and proud of what our team of Tenfolders (pictured above) achieved in really adverse circumstances. Everyday we got to connect, learn from and/or develop some of the most influential and successful multinational business-, not-for-profit- and thought-leaders on the planet.

However, in my effort to ‘level up’ in my career, my family and myself I found myself all too often feeling majorly stretched and stressed.

It turned out I was not alone. A number of my CEO and c-level clients reported feeling the same way. Whether leveling up was a conscious choice or simply due to the extraordinary dynamics related to the pandemic, overwhelm appeared to be everywhere in 2021.

This launched me on a quest to help myself and others 'find more whelm', which is my 2022 New Year's Evolution.

Below are ten tips for finding more whelm in your life that have helped me and others.

I’d love to hear your top tips in comments section below.

1. Let’s get physical – before anything else how is your physical trifecta going, i.e. sleeping – eating – exercise? A clinical psychologist friend of mine says that many of her patients presenting with mild depression and/or anxiety can ameliorate their symptoms by simply sorting out these three variables, with sleep being the most critical of all. For more on sleep go here .

2. Time boxing – Indistractability author Nir Eyal introduced us to the concept of ‘timeboxing’ this year as a way to stay focused, avoiding the pings and dings all around us, to get more done in less time. Timeboxing is a great strategy to reduce overwhelm too.

Ironically by creating time constraints in your calendar to get things done we actually can include a time at end of day to catch up so you know you won’t fall behind. To read more about timeboxing go here & here .

3. Embrace the 85% rule – As the graph below reveals your optimal performance doesn’t occur at 100% arousal levels. Quite the opposite infact. Over-arousal leads to distress and overwhelm as per Yerkes Dodson research revealed many moons ago (see diagram below). Much more recently Hugh Jackman shared on a Tim Ferris podcast that he and many other elite performers are at their best when operating at around 85% arousal or capacity (listen here ).

“Do less to achieve more.”

On a related note a growing number of companies including Unilever in NZ and Inventium in Australia are embracing four day working weeks (click here for more ). Cutting back to 80% of the working week has actually increased their productivity, not to mention engagement, retention, creativity and many other key variables. We will hear more about this when Inventium founder Dr Amantha Imber joins us in 2022.

Remember the 3Ds to embrace the 85% rule, i.e. don’t do it (say no), delegate it (find someone better positioned to do it), or do it later (at a timeboxed moment that you determine).

4. Progress trumps perfection – Putting off decisions leads to overwhelm. As GE legend Jack Welsch reportedly said

“don’t wait to make the right decision, make a decision then make it right”.

Indecision takes up a huge amount of our brains' processing power as we toss up all the inputs, the alternatives, the consequences. The reality is we can never collect enough data to make the perfect decision, and even if we could by the time we did that the market will have moved on.

The exception to this is what they refer to at Amazon as ‘one way door’ decisions, i.e. decisions you can’t back out from. Such decisions require deeper analysis but the vast majority of decisions we make are of the ‘two way door’ variety, i.e. if we get it wrong or need to amend it we can go back out the door (decision) we entered thru. Even one way door decisions can often be broken down into a number of smaller two way door ones. To read more on this click here .

5. Recovery – This has to be one of the easiest yet overlooked tactics for finding your whelm. It is especially critical when working remotely given our tendency to spend all day in back- to-back online meetings. The hack here is to build in recovery time between meetings or activities to give your brain and body time to destress and reboot.

Renowned performance psychologist Dr Jim Loehr shared this with us recently providing the example of how tennis players reset between points, going thru a consistent ritual that helps them let go of the previous point and focus on their next one. Corporate athletes can develop such rituals too, such as walking around the block between calls or if pushed for time doing some stretching and deep breathing exercises.

On a related not Jim talks about the importance of building in ‘oscillations’ to your day. Changing your physical environment happens naturally when we are working in an office but when working at home we need to be more intentional by changing how and where we do our work throughout the day. Remember...

“if you want to change your headspace, change your physical space.”

6. Reconnect with your purpose – All too often when we feel overwhelmed it is the result of overly focusing on the inputs and forgetting about the outcome we are working towards. We know that to build muscle requires significant effort over time involving a reasonable amount of pain. These inputs of themselves are not appealing. However the outcome of a stronger, healthier body is.

At work we can get very input focused, and forget why we are doing it. Whether the outcome is to simply pay the bills right thru to your work being your life’s calling, remembering the why behind the what you are doing can shift you from overwhelm to find your whelm. As my friend and mentor Dr Peter Fuda says

“it’s impossible to feel purposeful and fearful at the same time.”

I believe the same is true of feeling purposeful and overwhelmed. For more click the clip below.

7. Mindfulness – So much has previously been written on this by people with far more expertise than me, but I will share with you a new mindfulness tactic I’m using that I think is realistic and beneficial for busy people like you and me. I call it my “take a minute” exercise.

Here’s how it works. Every hour I take a minute to STOP and notice five things I can touch, four things I can see, three things I can hear, two things I can smell and one thing I can taste. With the time I have left I focus on my breathing. So simple, but an easy way to build some oscillation into my day. ?

8. Response-ability – One of my old mentors used to say “we are not always responsible for what happens to us but we always have a choice about how we respond to what happens to us”. This is what he called ‘response-ability’, our ability to selectively respond to what life throws at us. The alternative is blame, justification, making excuses etc.

As another mentor of mine Carolyn Taylor says we often have “reasonable reasons” for blaming external factors for our situation. The problem is in blaming the reasonable reasons we give away our power to do something to fix it.

Overwhelm can be a sign that we are focused on the external factors or ‘reasonable reasons’ beyond our control causing us stress, as opposed to the focusing on what we can do to address the situation.

“If we want to be part of the solution, we need to see our contribution to the problem.”

9. Gratitude – This tactic may sound a little unrealistic but there is a lot to be grateful for when feeling overwhelmed. For starters overwhelm is a powerful strategy that has evolved over millions of years to keep you alive. It is there to indicate when you are pushing yourself, and possibly those around you, too hard. Like it’s close relative ‘anxiety’, the feeling of being overwhelmed can kick in too early and too often given the reality of the super low risk environments we now live in, however it still plays a role today to help us moderate our efforts for sustainable growth.

Beyond this however overwhelm can be a fantastic teacher. It acts as a sign post that something needs to change, like when one of the tyres on your car gets out of alignment. Listening and learning when you are overwhelmed helps build your self awareness as well as developing your self regulation of emotions by using tactics like those above. The key is ensuring that your overwhelm is serving you, not the other way around. Remember…

“Overwhelm can be a powerful servant, but is always a terrible master.”

10. The easy question – My final tip is gratefully borrowed from Tim Ferris. If all else above fails you in finding your whelm then ask the following…

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

Write down as many answers as you can, without filtering or hesitation. To take it to the next level do this activity with another person or even a group.?Put all your answers down on a piece of paper and then select the best option and give it a go. What do you have to lose, besides the feeling of overwhelm?

It may cost you a little money or time or control but if it helps you find your whelm then what are you waiting for. For more on this from Tim click clip below.

As Einstein said the definition of

“insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Let’s put the insanity of 2021 behind us and embrace new and better results in 2022 by finding our whelm.

All my best to you for an incredible new year.

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I am the ceo & founder of tenfold australia.

Our company name reflects our purpose to tenfold Australia’s impact for a better world. We will primarily do this by scaling the success of global companies with operations in Australia and New Zealand via their participation in an annual curriculum of executive development.

For more information please go to www.tenfoldaustralia.com or?www.richhirst.com ?or contact me via email on [email protected].

Please click here to read more of my articles and search for #tenfoldtips for short daily reads to keep you on purpose, positive and performing well.