Feeling Overwhelmed? Here's Exactly What to Do

Episode 38: Overwhelm is one of the most common things that keeps women stuck when they are thinking about changing careers. In this episode, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens gives you a practical tool to reach for the next time overwhelm starts to take hold. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Why overwhelm is a feeling and not a permanent state, and what that means for how you work with it
• The wave analogy and why making an intentional choice about how to meet overwhelm matters more than just pushing through
• A practical method to help you manage overwhelm
• The specific flavour of career change overwhelm and why a structured process is designed to reduce it rather than add to it

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/
Free Coaching Consultation: https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free clarity call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today, I want to talk about overwhelm. You know, it's that feeling you get when everything feels equally urgent, but nothing feels possible at all, and it all feels like too much. That list of things you have to deal with is so long and maybe tangled up and you don't even know where to begin. So typically you don't. You freeze, not because you're lazy or incapable, but because the weight of it all just feels too much. Sometimes it looks like just shutting down completely. Or it might be that you're trying to buffer and do other things like just scrolling on Instagram or watching Netflix instead of doing the things you want to be doing. Other times it can feel like you're just keeping things together by a thread, in survival mode, doing the bare minimum and feeling guilty about it. Other times it looks like pushing through, but feeling awful the whole time, wired and exhausted, like you're running on adrenaline and tread. And sometimes it looks like being busy, incredibly busy, but not actually getting anything that's important to you done because your brain is so stretched across the many things and nothing gets real attention. Now, for a lot of women I work with, they might already be dealing with overwhelm in other areas of their life. And then on top of that, if they're thinking about changing careers, that can cause even more feelings of overwhelm and make it feel completely out of reach. You might know that something needs to change, but every time you try to turn your attention to it, another wave of everything else crashes in and the career change question gets pushed back down the list again. And you end up thinking, I'll just deal with that when things calm down, when life feels easier, which of course it doesn't always do. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, I want to give you something really practical and useful that you can use to help manage that overwhelm. It's not just about reassuring you that it will pass, even though it will, but a practical technique that you can reach for the next time overwhelm starts to take hold of you. And it's something I call the ACT method, ACT, the ACT method. And I'm going to walk you through how it works in a moment. But the first thing I want to say is that overwhelm is a feeling. Now that's important because it's not a situation, a permanent fact about your life. It's actually a feeling. And the reason that's important is because that one of the things that happens when we feel overwhelmed is that we start to experience it as this permanent state. We start to feel like this is just how things are. As if this is who you are now. Someone who can't cope, someone who's always drowning, someone for whom everything is always too much. But that is the feeling talking, right? That's not the truth of the situation. And feelings are temporary, they move through us. Even the heaviest ones, the ones that feel like they've settled in for good, they don't actually stay the same. The intensity changes, they shift, they ease, they pass. And the other really useful thing that I want you to know as a mindset coach and someone that focuses on thought work to help you take action is that our feelings are always created by our thoughts. Not by our circumstances directly, but by the thoughts we're having about our circumstances. And this means that the feeling of overwhelm, however real and heavy it feels, is being generated by something specific that you are thinking. And that's good news, right? Because thoughts can be examined and changed by you. Some of the most common thoughts that cause overwhelm, cause that feeling of overwhelm, they sound like this. I can't do this. This is too much. I can't handle this. I'm never going to get through this. I'm not capable. This is all beyond me. Now, if any of those sound familiar, it's because those thoughts are generating a feeling of overwhelm. And the thing is, the thoughts feel like accurate descriptions of the reality when you're in the middle of it. But they are interpretations, not facts. And once you can start to see them as thoughts rather than truths, you have something tangible that you can work with. But I also just want to say something at this point that is always important when we're talking about thought work, because this is not just about positive thinking, right? When we're doing any thought work, changing any thoughts, which is something I help my clients do all the time, it's not about just telling yourself everything is fine when it genuinely isn't. That's not going to help you, right? The overwhelm is usually arriving because there is genuinely a lot going on, or something new has landed, or your circumstances have shifted, and you're being called on to handle more than you were before. That's real, and we do need to address the real as well as the thinking. But your thinking can be changed to accommodate what is real. It can be more constructive. I'm going to go more into that in a moment. And this is where the ACT method comes in. And before I walk you through how the method works and how you can use it in your daily, weekly, monthly life, I want to share an image that I find really helps when you start to think about overwhelm and how it actually appears and shows up in your life. I like to think of overwhelm like a wave in the sea, right? Not a gentle wave, but a proper one, building, maybe a British wave, right? A proper one that builds and swells and heads towards you. And when you're facing a wave like that, there are a few things you can do. If you just freeze and stare at it, it crashes into you. It can pick you up and churn you around in the swell, it can leave you disorientated, sort of coming up, spluttering and coughing, and maybe with sand in places that it really shouldn't be. But that's what happens when overwhelm hits without any response from you. It can just swamp you. But you do have options. You can look up, you can see it coming, and you can take action. You can jump, right? You can get yourself up over the top of it if it's that type of wave. You could time it and dive through it, coming out clean on the other side. Or you can move yourself to shallower water so that when it hits, it doesn't knock you off your feet. The point in all three cases is the same. You look up, you see what's coming, and you make an intentional choice about how to meet it rather than just letting it hit you. You act. And this is what the ACT method is. It's the looking up, it's the intentional choice. It's what you do instead of freezing or pushing through blindly. ACT is an acronym, right? A C T. The A stands for audit, the C stands for choose, and the T stands for think differently. And here is how each step works. The A is for audit, and this is gonna be the first thing you want to do when overwhelm starts to build up. That's to pause and do what I like to call an overwhelm audit. Not to fix anything yet, just to look at what is actually there. Ideally, you want to write it down, all of it, every single thing that is taking up space in your head, every responsibility or deadline or thought or circumstance that's making you feel like there's too much going on, or things that you feel you should be doing or haven't done yet. Get it out of your head and onto paper. And this really matters because your brain is not a reliable narrator when it comes to how much you have to do. It tends to exaggerate, create big sweeping narratives, lumping everything together into one enormous undifferentiated mass of too muchness. And when you write it down, you can actually see what is really there. And often it's more manageable than it feels like inside your head. Not always, but often just this step can be super helpful. And while you're doing your audit, ask yourself what has changed or shifted recently? What sparked this swell of overwhelm for you? Is there something new that has arrived? A work project, a family situation, a health thing, a change in your circumstance, a need or desire to change careers now that's creating some urgency for you. And then you can ask yourself, how long is this new thing, this new thought, this new feeling, this new circumstance, likely to last? Because sometimes just knowing that, knowing that something is temporary or that it has an end date to it can be helpful. Maybe this project ends in three weeks. This difficult period has a shape to it, but that can take the edge off significantly. So that's the A, the audit. Get it out of your head and onto paper so you can actually see what you're dealing with. And the C in Act is choose. Now that you have that list in front of you, the second step is to choose. To choose not to do everything. If you look at that list and genuinely think it's not doable, then go through the list and ask yourself some honest questions. What absolutely has to happen? What is genuinely non-negotiable right now? Circle those things. Then look at everything else. What can wait? Not forever, but just for now. What can you put on pause for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks without real consequences? What can you delegate to someone else? Who could help you with this if you just asked? What if you outsourced something, paid for some help, bought something in instead of making it? Where can you lower your standards for now? Maybe because some areas being good enough will be good enough just for this period. And what can you take off the list entirely? Because if you're honest with yourself, it does not need to happen right now. Now, this step is actually harder than it sounds for a lot of people because so many of the women I work with have very high standards and a strong sense that everything on their list matters and must be done properly. But that's the very thinking that can be part of what creates the overwhelm. If you notice that your thought that's creating your feeling of overwhelm is, I have to do this all on my own, check in with that. Is that really true? The act of consciously deciding what matters most right now and giving yourself permission to let other things wait is one of the most important things you can do when you're in this state. So if you're thinking about changing careers, but it feels like too much on top of everything else you're dealing with, what could you temporarily pause on, let go on, ask for help with so that you can figure this out if this is really important to you. So the C in ACT is choose. Choose your priorities, choose what gets your attention, choose what can wait, choose to ask for help. And finally, the T in ACT, A C T is think differently. This step is where the mindset work, the thought work comes in. And like I said earlier, this is not about trying to force yourself to think positively. It's not about telling yourself everything's fine when it's not, that's not useful, and your brain won't believe it anyway. What we're looking for is a thought that is both more helpful and more accurate than the thought that's been creating overwhelm. So instead of I can't do this, something like this is temporary and I can ask for help. Instead of this is too much, something like I can let go of some things to focus on what matters most right now. Instead of I'm never going to get through this, something like I can actually handle the things that are genuinely important to me for the next few weeks. Notice that none of these are fake positivity. They're just more accurate than the overwhelm thought. They acknowledge the difficulty while also being honest about your actual capacity. You can also try turning the thought into a question, which can help when nothing feels true enough to say as a statement, or you're struggling to get to a new thought, a new statement. So instead of I can't do this, try asking how can I do this? What skills do I have that could help me here? What would I need to handle just this one next thing? What can I actually manage in the short term? Questions open the mind rather than closing it down. And an open mind is what you want when you're trying to move through overwhelm rather than being stuck inside it. And if you struggle with shifting thoughts, opening up your mind, that type of thought work is what I teach my clients how to do in my career change coaching. We talk about constructive thought cycles, and I teach you how to start changing your mind, changing your thoughts to be more constructive. And finally, once you've done the audit, made your choices and shifted your thinking, ask yourself just one more little thing. What is the smallest step I can take right now to get started? Not the whole list, not the solution to everything. Just one small manageable action. What is the smallest step I can take right now to get started? One thing that means you're moving rather than frozen. Because movement, even tiny movement, starts to change the feeling. It generates a little bit of evidence that things are possible, and that evidence starts to loosen the grip of the overwhelm. So try the ACT method, ACT. Audit, choose, think differently, and then take one small step. And before I finish, I just want to add something actually about asking for help because it comes up so often, so it's probably worth me saying something about it. So many of the women I work with are carrying an enormous amount. Responsibility at work, responsibility at home, responsibility for children, parents, partners, communities, even, and they're holding so much, and they're often doing it largely alone because somewhere along the way they absorb the idea that asking for help is a sign of weakness or that they should be able to manage, or that other people are too busy to bother. But you are allowed to ask for help. You deserve to ask for help. And more often than you might expect, people are genuinely willing to help when they know what you need. They just can't read your mind, okay? So sometimes you have to tell them. So when you do your audit and you look at the list and you ask who could help me with this, take that question seriously. Who in your life could take something off your plate right now, even temporarily? Who could you ask? And is the reason you haven't asked them a practical reason, or just a story you've been telling yourself about not wanting to be a burden, or that you should be doing it all yourself? Right? You're a person doing a lot, and sometimes the most important thing you can do and put on your priority list is asking for the support that you actually need. It's a sign of strength, not weakness, to ask and get the help that you need and deserve. So I'm just going to finish by coming back to something I mentioned right at the start about career change, right? Because career change overwhelm can often have its own specific flavor. And that's where structure and a clear process can help make those things feel manageable, right? Because sometimes when you're trying to think about the future when your present is already maxed out, just feels like one thing too many. And the career change question gets pushed back again and again until thinking about it stops feeling like the possibility and starts feeling like pressure. But the main reason most people need to change careers in the first place is what they're doing now is draining them, and that drain is not going to fix itself, it will not suddenly get easier. The overwhelm you're experiencing right now is often a symptom of being in the wrong fit, and staying there longer isn't going to reduce it. It usually compounds it, makes it worse. Which is why one of the things I do with my clients in the early stages of coaching is I can help you get your overwhelm to a manageable level first, so that you have the headspace to actually work on what comes next. Not adding the career change process on edit, not adding the career change process on top of everything else as one more enormous thing to carry, but making space for it deliberately in a way that's been designed not to overwhelm you. And honestly, that is why I have designed such a structured process for my career change coaching so that you don't have to hold the whole journey in your head at once. I do all of that. All you have to do is just focus on one hour a week. Focus on the one thing I'm asking you to think about, knowing that it's part of the process and all of it's going to keep carrying you forward. It's going to help you make a decision about what you want to do next. It's going to help you make a plan and then take the steps to secure that new job. Right? And I will be with you every step of the way. So if you're feeling overwhelmed by the idea of changing careers, I know where you can start. I have a structured process which is not overwhelming. So if you want support to work through that, come and book a free consultation with me. The link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this has been helpful. If it has, let me know. I'd love to know how you've used the tool. I'd love to hear more. You can just come and say hello on Instagram or email me, and I'll see you next week. Bye for now.