From Overwhelm Into Calm: The Path to Peaceful Productivity

Being super busy isn’t the only path to success!

Are you ready to ditch frenetic energy and step into your vibrant, purpose-filled life? In this episode, I explore a powerful approach to productivity that’s not about hustle, multi-tasking or overwhelm, but rather about alignment, intention, and true self-awareness. Let’s all make decisions from a place of peace and love for our future selves. 

Here are 3 key takeaways:

Self-awareness is the foundation.
Understanding where your energy and time are going, and making intentional choices, changes everything. Take a pause, breathe, and notice what truly drives your decisions.

Aligned actions matter more than volume of actions.
Not every “yes” serves your best energy or purpose. Focus on what feels intentional, and allow yourself to say no when needed. 

Design your environment and routines for peace.
Whether it’s calming music, meaningful colors, or grounding rituals, the cues around you influence your productivity and your sense of calm. Implement small, repeated practices that genuinely serve your energy.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbitts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Today we are going to talk about how to be productive from a place of peace. Sometimes go past our capacity and don't stay in that aligned energy of peace and can end up frenetic and overwhelmed. Today we want to take a breath. One of the best ways to regulate our nervous system is when we close our eyes, we're blocking everything else out. We're able to really connect to ourselves. And when you take a breath in and then hold it. Then breathe out slowly or with a sigh, whichever feels right for you. You do that a few times, you're going to find yourself able to feel that sense of calm, that sense of peace. And so in our next few sessions together, we're going to talk about creating those really important results. From a place of peace. And so if at any time you're finding yourself feeling overwhelmed, you can always just check back in, put your hand on your heart, take a few deep cleansing breaths and get back to whatever energy is aligned for you. For many people. Peaceful productivity feels aligned. So that's what we're going to talk about today. How can I be productive and peaceful and make that my way of life? So without intention, we can accidentally put more activity. Into a day, an hour, a week, then we have the energy for, we end up serving past our capacity, and we do that on repeat. And because there's not enough time or energy or resources for all the things we've said yes to, we find ourselves rushing and multitasking. And multitasking can be rewarded by other people. And we don't realize what we're doing is just shifting from A to B, to A to B to A to B, and then we're not paying attention. Balls get dropped, and often we don't actually get more done, but almost always, if we're rushing and multitasking, we're going to find ourselves exhausted, overwhelmed, depleted. So from a place of love for your future self, we're going to create the plan that allows us to be peacefully productive. And so if you're noticing yourself dropping balls, juggling different resources, making mistakes and feeling burnt out, it's time for us to decide. We're not going to keep doing what we've been doing. We're going to pause and redirect and do the next season of life from a place of peaceful productivity. Here's our first question. As you look for the next few months, are you aware of the time and the energy you have for activities that people may invite you into? I did this myself a few months ago. I said yes to something in December, assuming I would have the time and energy in February, because when I opened my calendar, there was lots of white space two months out. I hadn't taken the time to actually put in all of the responsibilities that I do on repeat, and then the week came and I didn't actually feel like I had the time and the energy for what I had said yes to. Now the good news is it was actually an activity that filled me, and so I'm so glad that I said yes to it. But even knowing all that I know sometimes I say yes to things that I don't actually have the time and the energy for. That's our first step to creating peaceful productivity. Do you know where your energy is actually going? Do you know how much time is allocated to the responsibilities and the relationships that are important to you? Do you know where your white space is? And are you going to make a decision today that could serve you? I want to live with peaceful productivity. I want to make sure that the actions I say yes to are aligned. That I'm not just saying yes to every single thing, because I realize that both my time, my energy, and all the resources of my life have a limit. So our first step right now is to make our decision. What is your power thought going forward? Would you like a healthy mindset? Would you like to be intentional and choose to no longer live in a frenetic energy, but to live in a place of peaceful productivity? Making that decision is actually the first step. What's hard to make that decision is the thoughts that we're not noticing. See if any of these thoughts are floating around in the background. Thoughts that you've had on repeat without noticing them. Do you ever think: I don't have the time to slow down? Fast is better. Low and slow sounds kind of boring. I won't be successful if I'm not staying busy. I won't be able to keep up if I ever stop and pause. How can I get anything done if I keep slowing down? I'll slow down when I'm on vacation. If any of those sentences are something that you are noticing, let's take a moment and decide they may not be serving you. A more intentional power thought might be for the season ahead. I'm going to choose peaceful productivity. To do that, we need to know what our aligned values are. This is where you would, join me with a piece of paper and maybe your notes app if you don't have something. But let's take a few of those breaths again. I'd love for you to notice what are some words that would describe your peaceful, productive vibe? It might be a word like slow. It might be a word, like careful, intentional, on purpose. Can you think of any words that would be aligned values for you? This is why I want to be peacefully productive? Sometimes it's easiest to start with what we don't want. I don't want to feel overwhelmed, frustrated, resentful. I want to make sure I have capacity. For the things that I say yes to. I want to do the important things, not just the urgent things. See if you can come up with a few words that describe why you want to stay in peaceful, productive energy. Once you've written a few of those words, if it's safe to do so, you can close your eyes. I'd love for you to picture a room where you do peaceful, productive work. I had the opportunity to go with my husband for two weeks to North Carolina, and when we walked into the space we were staying in, we were overwhelmed. The wall of the living room was all glass and looked out at the ocean. It was all my favorite shades of blue. And I could sit there and read or do my work and watch the ocean waves, watch the sunrise, watch the clouds move through. So some of my colors might be different shades of blue, and some of the images might be the ocean or the clouds or a bird flying By one of the mornings I got up to watch the sunrise and dolphins. Swam by me and I got to see them up close. So a dolphin will now be an image for me of peaceful productivity. See if you can name any colors or images that bring your body a sense of peace, of alignment. For me, alignment looks like loving presence. What images bring me back to loving presence. Which colors. How about music? Is there a type of music that brings you back to a sense of peace? If you have Spotify, I have a Spotify playlist called Fill Your Soul with Sunshine, and it's full of music that fill me with Peace. On vacation in North Carolina, I would do my stretching to this beautiful version of,"Here Comes The Sun" What songs for you are aligned, calming, connected energy type song. We need different music for different activities. When you're getting something clean that might not be the same music you play, that gets you into a space where you can sit down and think about what you're doing for the next few weeks and allocating your time and energy resources. If you took a few moments to think about which words are helping you stay aligned, the images you want to be thinking about, the music you want to be listening to, you may start to notice a power thought that moves you forward. For me, a lot of my power thoughts come from scripture. And I think of a scripture like be still and know that I am God. Sometimes I can get very overwhelmed thinking about all the things that I should be doing, and if I can get back to a place where I'm still. And I notice what is mine to do and allow the things that are not mine to do, to not take up all my mental energy and emotional energy, I can get back to a place where I make the correct decisions. So do you have a power thought that's driving your decisions? You might want to write it down, you might want to take a picture and add some text to it. I even saw somebody say that the word of the year that drives their values, they get a candle every year with that word on it, and every day when they start their quiet time, they light the candle and look at their word of the year and helps them remember what it is that's important to them. So do you have a power thought? You might want to write it down. And if you can't come up with one, I think that's a good place for social media. You could go out and ask your friends what power thought helps you stay in aligned, peaceful, productive energy, and maybe they could share one with you. Next, we want to talk about which feelings we want driving our decisions. So our thoughts are spinning in our head, tens of thousands of them a day. We don't notice most of them, but our thoughts are creating feelings and some of the feelings that we feel move us exactly in the direction we want to go. Those feelings might be committed, determined, resilient. Some of the feelings like overwhelmed, confused, frustrated, are moving us away from the actions that serve us. What feelings would you like to feel? As a peacefully productive person, fully loved, a hundred percent loved, a hundred percent valuable. What do you want to be feeling? I don't think anyone wants to feel unheard, unloved. What do you want to feel? And then finally, if you know that feeling your loved you are needed, your actions matter. Now, from that committed, determined energy, what do you want to say yes to? What do you want to say no to? One of the things we talk about a lot in my coaching program is the fact that not every season is the same. What I can do as someone who lives in North America in June is very different from what I can do at the end of January. The end of January up here is dark and cold in their snow. I have less energy than I do in the middle of June. So it's best for me to decide maybe three or four blocks of energy of determined committed activity in the winter, or maybe I might have five or six blocks of energy in the middle of summer. Are you noticing any practices or activities that you want to have on repeat? One of the most interesting things I discovered in this two week mini sabbatical that I took is that my desired morning practice list was way too long. I wasn't working. Um, and yet I could not do every single thing I wanted to do. I wanted to get up and go for a walk and meditate and journal, and have my vitamins and stretch, and it was almost an unrealistic list, and I had to decide not everything, every day. So maybe that's what you're deciding. Some practices are for three days a week. Some practices are for Saturday morning, but we want to notice them, decide they're important, and then put them on our schedule in a way that serves us. So for this week, the first step is just to decide that you want to be peacefully productive. The next step is to notice what do you want with the words that you think about the things that you put around you. Maybe you decided today, I love the color green and I want more plants in my life, or I love lots of colors and I'm going to buy myself a bouquet of roses every week. Whatever you're noticing, it's important. Let's make sure that it happens. Decide when you're going to do it, and gift yourself space to not do everything every day. But if we can live as people who have chosen peaceful productivity over frenetic, overwhelmed, exhausted energy, I think that's the very best gift we give ourselves and give the world. Thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly tibbits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com. I look forward to connecting again soon.