What's Your Crazy?
Just yesterday I was talking to another business owner. And they were telling me how overwhelmed they were. And they were looking for techniques or some kind of trick that I might have to help them get over overwhelm.
In fact, they were so overwhelmed, they were telling me they were gonna sell their business. They were just gonna give up, throw it all away. And they’ve been working at this for over two years. Blood, sweat, tears, the whole nine.
And what I told them is what I’m gonna tell you. Is, when you’re overwhelmed, really what’s showing up for you is fear. Now that can be fear of failure, that could be fear that you’re out of control, which it was for this person.
It could be fear of a lot of things. Are people gonna leave you, is your product not good enough. Now, you don’t have to be a business owner to experience overwhelm, right? We all experience it. But what’s really happening is you’re really scared about something. And that’s why you’re overwhelmed.
You’re scared you might not be doing it right. You’re scared you might have too much on your plate. You’re scared that people are gonna think something bad about you, right? All these things contribute to that feeling of being overwhelmed.
So what I want you to do right now is grab your journal. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or if you felt overwhelmed recently. And then ask yourself this question, right? What am I afraid of? Now if you’re in a state of overwhelm right now, you’re listening to this, you’re just like Doug, I’m overwhelmed right now. You don’t even know.
What I want you to do is take 10 diaphramic breaths, right? In through the nose, relax, let it out. Or do box breathing, which we’ve talked about previously in Daily Growth Hacks. But do it at least 10 times. This’ll help reset you.
Then, grab your journal, and write down exactly what you’re feeling overwhelmed about. This person was saying they’re feeling overwhelmed about their business, and managing people, and all these things. And, they were gonna throw it all away.
But once you get that down, what is it you’re actually afraid of? That is the question. And then, once you list what you’re afraid of, if you want bonus points, list out the worst case scenario, right? What’s the worst thing that could happen?
And then how can you mitigate that? Can you live with that? And yes you can is the answer. You see, once we look at the fear, we all know that fear is false evidence appearing real, or false evidence about reality, whichever acronym you like, but it’s false.
Fear is false. And so, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, and you know it’s fear, and you figured out what that fear is, and you know that fear isn’t true, you can now take a breath. You can relax a little bit more, and dive in consciously to solve the issues at hand.
That’s it for me today. As always, go to authorofyourownstory.com where you can get the latest tips, tricks, and techniques delivered right to your inbox each and every day. And make sure you share this with three people that you feel would benefit from this message, and that you can have conversations that matter with.
That’s it. I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember, go out and be the author of your own story.