Overcoming Overwhelm and Taking Action

Do you have any overwhelming tasks you’ve been procrastinating on and you’d like to get them done?

In today’s article I will be sharing two strategies you can use for overcoming overwhelm and properly ‘whelm’ yourself to free yourself from the unnecessary vitality draining state of overwhelm and take action.

To Plan or Not to Plan

One of the things that I find prevents people from overcoming overwhelm is the need to have a clear plan before taking action.

There is a problem with this strategy when it comes to overwhelming projects… if you are finding a particular project overwhelming you probably don’t have enough information or experience yet to see it clearly in your mind and develop a plan.

Rather than trying to gain clarity in your mind before taking action, the solution is actually to take action before having clarity in your mind.

And if your default pattern is to understand before taking action this solution will feel like the exact opposite of what you think you need to do but nonetheless.. the key is just to start somewhere.

It doesn’t have to be the right place, the perfect place, the best place. Just get started right away.

It is through getting the hands-on experience of starting and taking action that the patterns will start to emerge and make sense. The action moves you towards the clarity rather than the other way around.

Chunk it Down

There is an interesting thing about tasks…. Tasks themselves can’t overwhelm us as human beings.

For any and every task that overwhelms you, there are thousands of people who don’t get overwhelmed by that exact same task. How can that be?

Tasks can’t overwhelm us as human beings, however we can overwhelm ourselves with tasks.

How does one overwhelm themselves? (If you’ve read this far you are probably somewhat skilled at this pattern.)

One of the ways we overwhelm ourselves is by trying to solve too big of a task in one bite.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! (And with a LOT of sriracha.)

The solution? Break it down smaller!

Some great questions you can ask yourself when feeling overwhelmed:

• If this project was on a timeline, how could I break it down into phases/stages?
• What would be the first stage?
• What is my next step?
• Does the next step overwhelm me at all?
• If yes, how can I break down that step into smaller steps?

Essentially the goal is to continue unking down the activity until the piece you are focusing on doesn’t overwhelm you at all. Chunk it down small enough and the overwhelm disappears like magic!

If you don’t know what the first steps could be then the first step to write down the first couple of steps you could take to move this project forward…

Find one action item that could move this project forward and then take action, in spite of not yet being ‘clear’.

Through taking consistent action on small properly ‘whelmed’ tasks over time, more clarity will emerge with each step of forward progress. Not only will this make the accomplishment of your big tasks inevitable but it makes the journey more enjoyable along the way.