#263| The Ultimate Guide to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed (You Need This Episode)

If you're constantly rushing, saying yes to everyone, and ending every day exhausted, you're not alone. Most overwhelmed women try to solve stress by working harder or becoming more organized, only to feel even more burned out. In this episode, you'll discover a different approach: changing the thoughts that create overwhelm, intentionally doing less, and building habits that lead to lasting calm and confidence.

By listening, you will:

•  Discover the hidden mindset patterns that silently fuel overwhelm and keep you stuck in a cycle of stress. 
•  Learn a simple three-phase framework for setting boundaries, saying no without guilt, and reclaiming your time and energy. 
•  Understand how to create a calm, intentional life where overwhelm becomes an occasional challenge instead of your everyday reality. 
  
  

Press play to learn the three-step system that helps overwhelmed working women replace burnout with clarity, confidence, and lasting peace.

Wondering why you're overwhelmed? Take my "why am I overwhelmed" quiz to find out the source of your overwhelm, and what to do about it. 

Send Me a Message - Have a question, comment, or just want to say hi?  Message me here, I'd love to chat!  

Work With Me - Interested in working with me 1-on-1, taking a class, or joining one of my coaching groups? Message me here to get the scoop.   

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Life can be overwhelming, but on this podcast, you'll discover practical strategies to overcome overwhelm, imposter syndrome, and negative self-talk, manage time effectively, set boundaries, and stay productive in high-stress jobs—all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the Overwhelmed Worki...

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Promise

Michelle Gauthier 0:00

In this episode, you will learn the ultimate guide to stop feeling overwhelmed.

Michelle Gauthier 0:09

You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences. And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.

Michelle Gauthier 0:36

Hi, friend. Today you're gonna get the ultimate guide for how to stop feeling overwhelmed. And this is a sneak peek inside what I do in my one-on-one coaching. I have been coaching women who are overwhelmed for eight plus years. And over time, I have honed my methods, and it is truly three steps. There are three steps in the process to go from feeling overwhelmed and frantic to feeling calm and intentional most of the time. And today I'm gonna share that with you. I'm gonna tell you the system that I use and the three major steps along the way to that peaceful life that you might be dreaming of right now. So when you listen today, you're going to learn why do more and work harder has never actually solved anybody's overwhelm, what the real problem is, and then the three crucial steps that I take with every single one of my clients that allows them to stop feeling overwhelmed and create a calm and intentional life.

Why Working Harder Fails

Michelle Gauthier 1:32

Okay, before we jump into those three steps and exactly what they are, I want to tell you what happens usually right before someone comes to work with me. They have tried to solve their overwhelm. This is how I also tried to solve my overwhelm when I was completely drowning. What they do is they try to do more and work harder and be more disciplined. So for me, that looked like get up earlier, stay up later, work as many hours as possible, just do more. That was the only gear that I had. It was the only solution that I could come up with. Get a new planner, try a new time management system, just more, more, more. And what I've found over time, it did not work for me. And it really does not work for anyone. And the reason why is because when you're already overwhelmed and exhausted, doing more doesn't solve the problem. It just makes you even more exhausted. So what I've learned in eight plus years of coaching women in this exact position is this. I'm gonna give away the ending here and just tell you the three things that you absolutely need to do in order to stop feeling overwhelmed all day, every day. And these are the steps I take with each one of my clients. I'm gonna go into each one of these in detail. But number one, change your thinking, your mindset. Number two, do less. Do less. Just those two words in many ways. Do less of saying yes, do less work, do less caring about what other people think, do less. And then number three is take what you've learned from those first two steps and keep practicing until it becomes your new way of being, until your personality becomes calm and intentional. And if this sounds impossible or like what is she talking about? I'm about to give you more

Phase One Find The Hidden Thought

Michelle Gauthier 3:08

details. Let's talk about phase one, the very first step that we take when I am helping a woman on her journey to stop feeling overwhelmed. Here's what I see happen over and over. Let's imagine a client, the average client who comes to me. Usually she has been feeling completely stressed and overwhelmed, often for years. Sometimes it's months, sometimes it's years in a row. She's snappy with the people she loves. She's basically going through life on autopilot. She feels disconnected from her body. She's completely lost touch with what she actually wants or even enjoys. They're usually an overachiever type person. They're very successful at their jobs. And what they want to know is what do I need to do in order to stop feeling this overwhelm? I'm going to tell you right now the first step that I have them do, we're starting with mindset. We're not trying to add more systems or manage your time better. We're not trying to make you more capable. Instead, we are going to help you see something. We're going to help you see the hidden thought or thoughts that are truly driving your overwhelm. A perfect example of this is my former client, Jenny. She is a foster parent to three teenage girls. She founded and runs a nonprofit theater. She directs and performs and writes, and her days and evenings and weekends were always busy, beyond busy. And she had a constant to-do list that just went on forever. She just kept adding to it all the time. When she came to me, she felt like she was stuck in two modes. One was either go, go, go mode, where she was frantically running around trying to accomplish things, or just frozen and completely shut down. And she'd been living this way for like three years at this point. So during phase one of her one-on-one coaching, our first move was to understand her thoughts before we started working on her making any changes about what she was doing. In her sessions, we discovered that her thought was, I should be able to handle all of this. So let's see how that thought, by the way, the thought she didn't even know she was having it was an unconscious thought, but let's look at the cycle that that created. I should be able to handle this, was the thought that her brain was continually suggesting, and it would create a feeling of panic, which was making her freeze. So she was making no progress. And she ended up, A, not getting as many things done as she wanted to, and B, in shame because she was telling herself that she should be able to handle all this. And understanding this cycle, the way that you're thinking and what that causes in terms of the way that you feel and the actions you take and the results that you get from that is the first step into figuring out how to get out of overwhelm. And at this point, we're not even necessarily trying to fix it. We're just simply working on understanding what her mindset is doing. When you can notice that you're having a thought like that, if you have a thought exactly the same as Jenny's or different than Jenny's, you realize that you have control over your mind. And that clarity gives you the ability to change everything. So phase one, where we're finding this thought and understanding your mindset about overwhelm, it's not the full transformation. It's the beginning, it's the opening. Because without that clarity, you wouldn't have the mental freedom to actually do less, which is phase two. You'd be still trapped thinking, I should be able to handle all this. And no amount of action will free you. Once you see that thought and you understand what that cycle is costing you, you're finally clear enough to take real action. And here's what I notice: women who don't question a thought like I should handle all this or even know that they're having it, end up stuck in the overwhelm cycle forever. They keep hitting the same wall because they're not changing their fundamental thinking. So that cycle of not getting anything done and feeling frantic is created over and over again. And if you stay stuck in this cycle three years, five years, what happens is you'll experience burnout, like a physical, emotional, complete exhaustion burnout. By the time you finish your work week on Friday, you just pass out on the couch with no energy left to even decide what to have for dinner, much less have a real conversation with your spouse. You find yourself losing it on your kids at random times and then feel guilty about it after and just forget about friends or hobbies. There's no time to consider doing anything fun when you're in a super overwhelmed state. And most likely you'll probably have trouble sleeping and have physical pain somewhere, like in your lower back. All in all, it's just not a great place to be. Trust me, I've been there. So this is why phase one matters. It matters to open the door of understanding to the true root of overwhelm so that you can move on to phase two, which is to do less.

Phase Two Do Less On Purpose

Michelle Gauthier 7:43

At this point, you've had the aha about your mindset and you're working on changing your thoughts. So that thought of I should be able to handle this, maybe you're working on changing that thought to, I know the top two things I need to work on today, or something that makes you feel less overwhelmed so that your mind can open up to doing things, to making changes. Because at this point, you're still saying yes to everything, you're still hosting all the family dinners, you're still the person everyone calls to vent to, even though you're super busy all the time. You're noticing and working on changing your mindset, but you're still stuck in overwhelm at the beginning of this phase two during coaching. This is where action comes in. Phase two is the part where we start taking different actions. And you cannot skip to phase two without doing phase one. We don't do generic coaching. I don't give you a one size fits all program. Instead, we talk about your situation and exactly what you need, and then we match it up to the right tool for your specific situation. We start small with one targeted experiment, one tool at a time, not just dumping all the frameworks on you at once. But here's what really matters during phase two, things start coming off your plate because you're taking them off your plate. We use tools that you might have heard about on the podcast, like the love and fit test, to decide if you allow something to get on your calendar and if you want to say no, how to do that without feeling guilty. We talk through setting boundaries, the three steps to setting boundaries. And maybe you practice doing a small boundary. We keep working on the pause practice where you notice the way that you're thinking and you pause before you react to things. And as you start working on doing less, what it looks like in real life is saying no to things without guilt, removing entire projects or commitments from your plate, delegating or lowering standards on non-essential things, outsourcing stuff in your home, setting real boundaries around your time and energy, reducing your workload to match your actual capacities. If you've got 80 hours of work to do every week and you try to work 40 hours, you've got to reduce that. It's about removing and taking away and learning to do less. And we do it one small step at a time. For example, you practice saying your first no and watch the world not end, and you're shocked, like that was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. In fact, that didn't feel bad at all. Or you remove one thing from your calendar and you feel the lightness immediately and start to believe, okay, this is actually working. I am feeling less overwhelmed. You have a boundary conversation with somebody and you survive it and your confidence grows and you have evidence that you can set boundaries. People accept your no better than you expected. And these quick wins, they build belief because now you're not just understanding intellectually, you're experiencing the results. So you've got the phase one mindset change and you've got the phase two of taking action change. I want to tell you another client story about a different client, Stacy. Her whole family lived near her and they all assumed one thing, and that was that Stacy would be in charge of everything. If you're shaking your head, you know what this feels like. Every family event, she was the one who'd host it. If anybody needed a babysitter for their kids, they'd call her. Someone who wanted to vent for an hour about their problems, they'd call her while she was on her way to work, completely ignoring the fact that she was working overtime full-time and really didn't have a desire to try to solve everybody's problems. She was definitely the whole family's emotional dumping ground. And the same thing happened at work too. She was that person who made sure everybody was okay and everybody came to her when they had problems. In phase one, when we were working on the mindset piece, Stacy realized she'd had a thought like, it's my job to make sure everyone is okay. And in phase two, when she realized that that was causing a lot of overwhelm for her, she decided to do less. She didn't have a big confrontational conversation or send an angry email or explain or justify herself. She just stopped. She stopped answering their calls when they call on the way to work to complain. Instead, she just listened to a podcast, something that she enjoyed. When the next holiday came around, she just simply didn't volunteer to host it. And that was really uncomfortable for her to do that. When her sister texted and asked what she was planning, Stacy just responded, I don't have plans. The great thing about this was Stacy was terrified to do this because she thought her family was going to be mad at her and they'd think she was selfish and mean, and she'd feel guilty for letting them down and it would damage their relationships and maybe they'd feel abandoned. And that's what she was afraid of, and what her brain said would happen. But what actually happened is someone else stepped up to host and the family figured it out. Not a catastrophe, not even all that dramatic. When Stacy was able to do this and take this action where she stopped doing the things that she didn't want to do anymore, she started feeling totally relieved. She was super proud of herself. She was kind of in happy shock that it wasn't as bad as she thought. And she started feeling her energy coming back. She had time back for herself. And it really helped her relationships with her family too, because she wasn't feeling resentful toward them anymore. And she had energy for things that she actually wanted to do. So you can see that overwhelm didn't shrink because she did more. It shrunk because she did less. She removed herself from the pattern. And that's the magic of phase two. So in phase one, you open your mind, you start to understand the thoughts that are creating your overwhelm and you get clarity. And in phase two, you start changing your life one small step at a time. And as you're doing it with a time, you have to start practicing living differently. You have to remove things. You have to actually say no. You have to trust that the world won't end when you do that. And when you take the action and you see the result, you believe it. You can't deny it. You're like, okay, I actually feel better. A lot of times women who don't actually remove things from their plate stay overwhelmed no matter how much they understand. It's one thing to understand the mindset piece, but if you don't start saying no, setting boundaries, those kinds of things, you can't get rid of the overwhelm. You have to have phase one and phase two. And they have to go in that order, and you can't have one without the other.

Phase Three Pro Status Freedom

Michelle Gauthier 13:50

Okay, so now you're working on phase one and phase two. You're continually practicing them, you're going back and forth between changing mindset, taking action. And in phase three, we reach pro status. At this point, you've practiced, you've taken action, you've set boundaries, you've said no, you removed things from your plate and it worked, and the overwhelm decreased and your calendar opened up and your energy started coming back. But at this point, when you start phase three, it still feels like work. It feels like something you're doing, like a practice you have to remember. And if you stop paying attention, you'll slip back into overwhelm. So when a situation comes up, for example, I was talking about Stacey and we did a lot of work around her family. But then when a new situation came up at work and she could use these same tools that she had already learned, she felt a little panicked about it and she didn't know which tool to use and she wasn't sure what approach to take. So when we're in this third phase, you take everything you learn and you start applying it everywhere in your life because the ultimate goal is that you don't need me anymore, that you really reach pro status with this, knowing how to do all of these things and where this practice of mindset plus doing less becomes just who you are. In phase three, you take the same tools you've been practicing and apply them to new situations that you haven't been coached through yet. So you go deeper and you integrate them more fully. This is the point where you really start trusting your own judgment. And a lot of times my clients say, I hear your voice in my head. Like my voice becomes your voice in your head, and you become your own coach. Let's go back and let's look at Jenny and Stacey, and I'll tell you about what happened with them in phase three. Jenny went through the full journey. Phase one, she saw her hidden thought. Phase two, she implemented strategies. She worked on all kinds of time management, productivity stuff, saying no, setting better agendas, really planning her week. And in phase three, something really shifted. She went from three years of constant overwhelm. Those are her own words. You can listen to her whole story on episode 207 if you want to, to occasionally slipping into overwhelm. And when she did, she'd know exactly how to get back out. But that's not the real story. The story is that her brain felt free. This is exactly what she said. These are her words. I was constantly thinking, I don't have time for this, or I have to get that thing done. But now that I'm not doing that, now that I'm not thinking that way, I find myself having more ideas. I find myself being inspired more. It's like your brain opens up in this most amazing way. And in Jenny's job, where she's running this women's theater collective, she's giving opportunities to female artists, featuring women on stage. She's managing logistics and books and insurance and payroll and fundraising, and she's performing and directing and she's thinking creatively about the next show. She's handling unexpected situations on the fly. And in order to do that without feeling overwhelmed, Jenny needed to feel space in her brain and she needed to feel calm. And now she can handle all those things from a place of calm, clarity, and mastery. She can do all of that. She can handle all the complexity in her life. And that's phase three. It's not perfect. You still get occasionally overwhelmed, but you are free and capable to figure out how to handle that on your own. Let's talk about Stacy in phase three. Stacy was the client who set the boundary with her family and stopped answering their endless calls and hosting family events. She stayed with it and the boundary stuck and the resentment went away, and her family adapted and found other solutions. And what I think is amazing as she got to this phase three is that her relationships with her family actually got better because she wasn't bitter with them anymore. She had energy and she was different. So now she has energy and time for things she loves, and she's modeling a different way for her four kids, showing them what it's like to have boundaries, how to say no, not to absorb everyone else's problems. She's reached the pinnacle, which I refer to as I take zero shit anywhere in my life mode. Every one of my clients get to this. Jenny got to this too. She does not with her family, with her work colleagues. She just doesn't. And that's pro status and that's mastery and that is freedom. So what phase three actually delivers is for you to become an expert on your own mind and not need me anymore. Not because something went wrong, but because something went super right. You've internalized the framework, you trust yourself, and you handle life from a place of calm clarity. And that's the gift of phase three. True freedom. You're your own best coach now. Phase three is super important because you don't want to stay dependent on a coach forever. You don't want to slide back into old patterns if you're not talking to your coach every week. And you miss the part of getting true freedom where you can be this new person any place you want to be.

Recap And Free Consult Invite

Michelle Gauthier 18:40

Okay, so now you know that is my secret sauce. That is what every single client who I work with one-on-one goes through. And the results that I talked about for those two clients are extremely typical. Everybody's story is different, but everybody comes out once they have figured out their mindset in phase one, started to do less across many areas of their life in phase two, and then in phase three, reached pro status. It's like their new personality. And when they get to that point, they have freedom in their life that they get to keep forever because you'll definitely get overwhelmed again. But no matter what comes up, you know how to handle it. If this is the kind of freedom that you are looking for, I would absolutely love to talk to you. Click the link in the show notes to set up a free consultation with me and let's figure out how you can get through phases one, two, and three and reach pro status on how to be calm, intentional, and actually enjoy your life. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com. See you next week.