Overwhelm is Optional: Reading an extract to you with Rosie, Nutmeg and Kangarooby

This week I invite you to settle back and enjoy being read to from my book Overwhelm is Optional - with my Cavalier spaniels, Rosie, Nutmeg and Kanagarooby.

Feel seen and understood because it's not just you.

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The podcast for high earning, big-hearted, driven professionals  and business owners who want to break free from overwhelm and experience more clarity, ease and joy.

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Overwhelm Is Optional

Speaker 1 0:00

Hello , welcome to this week's episode . It's a little bit of a different one , because what I did was record part of my book with the dogs and put it on YouTube , because I'm really aware that the dogs have quite a soothing effect on people and I just thought please hop over to my YouTube channel where you can get the extracts without the intro and the outro . However , if you just you're here already , don't worry about it . Just settle back and enjoy having part of my book read to you and just imagine that the dogs are there with you . In fact , you won't need to imagine that much , because I have to stop and talk to them every now and again . And if you just heard that beeping in the background , that is the puppy kangaroo bee messing around with one of her toys . So enjoy this week's episode . I hope that it does what's intended to do , which is the following being read to can be incredibly soothing . Having the dogs there just makes it like being at home with me in some kind of nice way , I hope . But most importantly , the words from my book are designed to make you feel seen , seen , so you know it's not just you , and hopefully that relief will allow your nervous system to reset . Allow you to have more self compassion , get to know yourself more , get to love yourself more , get to accept yourself more . It is not just you . Overwhelm has an incredibly damaging effect on so many of us who are highly driven , big hearted , want to live full lives . So I'm sharing these words with you . If you want to buy the book , just hop over to Amazon . Overwhelm is optional . Heidi , mark , I'd be really grateful if you would buy it and share it , because I know the words within it , which were very carefully chosen . I've removed anything superfluous . There's a lot of space created by reading it and being with it . I know that those words , when they resonate , are very powerful , because feeling seen and not alone is such a relief . Enjoy , welcome to the Gentle Rebellion where overwhelm is optional .

Speaker 1 2:33

From my book Overwhelm is Optional , Part 1 . It's not you . It's not you , it's overwhelm . You are perfect and a work in progress . The work is to let go of the belief that there's anything fundamentally wrong with you . You are not a self-improvement project . You are not a problem to be solved . You do not need to overwork , pushing yourself through the heavy , life-crushing fog of overwhelm into exhaustion , to have what you want . You do not want too much and there is no secretly written deal with the universe that , to have the life you want , you have to put up with overwhelm . It's not you , it's overwhelm . Your struggle to think straight , your frustration with never getting around to doing the things you really want to do , the aches and pains in your body , even though you've hardly moved it today . Settle down , sweetie . Good girl , just reading . Good girl , good girl .

Speaker 1 3:41

You're stuck in your head overthinking everything . You're overwhelmed by shoulds and oughts . You've been rehearsing the same conversation for days or nights . You're awake at 4am being thought-bombed by fake emergencies . You know your life is great and that you should feel grateful , but it doesn't feel that way to you . You put on a suit of armour to get through your day in the belief that you just need to toughen up . You spend a lot of time . Please don't destroy the basket . Good girl , just settle down . Good girl , good girl , nutmeg . Good girl , rosie . Do what Rosie's doing . Rosie's asleep . Do what Rosie's doing . Yeah , good girl , thank you .

Speaker 1 4:35

You spend a lot of your time and energy coping with your life . You push your poor brain to focus until it hurts like it's bruised . You're exhausted but can't switch off . You think there's something wrong with you and compare yourself to others who seem to cope better and enjoy their life more than you . You think you want too much and if you downsized your dreams you wouldn't feel overwhelmed . Your day is focused on getting through your whack-a-mole to-do list . You have an invisible and never-ending get better at list . You're clinging to the belief that when you achieve this next thing , all your stress will magically disappear . You believe that if you were only more organised , everything would be magically okay .

Speaker 1 5:21

You move so fast through your day that you bump into things and are surprised by how many bruises you have . You have inconvenient tear leakage that takes you by surprise and threatens your hard-worked-for professional position . You can't hear your partner through the noise in your head . You seem to have forgotten how to have fun . You get stuck in cycles of procrastination even though you have no time . When you get time to yourself , you don't know what to do with it . You feel guilty for taking time off and spend the whole time thinking about all the things you should be doing . You're always waiting for a calmer time so that you can do that thing and feel that way , but it never happens not really . Or when it does , you long for it to be longer or miss it , because your mind is travelling through space and time faster than you can get it to stay with you in the calmer time and better feeling .

Speaker 1 6:16

You've created a life that is just really hard work to hold together . You've created a life you don't feel at home in . You've created a life you don't feel at home in . This is not the life you intended to create . None of these are character flaws , all sides weaknesses . See part one it's not you , it's over .

Speaker 1 6:35

Well , you do not need to wait until you've cleared your to-do list , earned some ease , improved yourself enough to deserve it , can afford to go part-time , have paid that debt , have got that promotion , have grown your business to that size , have moved house , downsized , shrunk your dreams into something that requires less of you retirement . There is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list . That feeling that you want , that you think you'll get when you've finished this and done that and achieved that next goal . You already know that's a trap . The bad news is there is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list . The good news is there is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list .

Speaker 1 7:22

Everything you do is so you can feel more at ease , more at home in your life , safe , satisfied , content , happy , loved . You can't get that feeling by pushing through overwhelm , because overwhelm prevents you from thinking straight . Oi , destroyer of baskets , good girl . Good girl , the basket's fine , it doesn't need eating , it doesn't need chewing . Thank you very much , good girl . Good girl . You can't get that feeling by pushing through overwhelm , because overwhelm prevents you from thinking straight . It hides all the easier ways , the more fun ways . It causes you to react too fast and make decisions as if you were swatting flies . It causes you to make mistakes . It causes you to snap at people . Then you have more stuff to deal with , more problems to solve , more mistakes to fix and more people to apologise to . Pushing to think straight through overwhelm just causes even more overwhelm . You can't get that feeling by treating your body like a slave either .

Speaker 1 8:33

Pushing yourself to exhaustion as if it doesn't matter how you feel as long as you keep the to-do list working , is a nonsense . You matter . How you are in the world matters . You are the centre of your life . Only you can live your life fully If you give away your precious time , energy and attention to your to-do list . Your to-do list becomes your life . Likewise , pushing yourself to exhaustion , putting your own needs last to keep other people happy , is a nonsense too . Those who love you would never want you to do this . Those who love you find you easier to be around when you're the relaxed , happy version of yourself . Those who love you are inspired when you feel at home in yourself . When you stop pushing yourself as if you don't matter , you give others permission to treat themselves with more kindness and respect . How you are in the world matters , even when you think no one notices .

Speaker 1 9:32

Overwhelm is a trickster and it's time to take it more seriously . Deal with the overwhelm first , and what you want will follow . Look at the list of things that are in your way of having the feeling of ease you crave . They are either all too far away retirement impossible , finishing your to-do list or require you to be somebody other than you are self-improvement list , downsizing your dreams . So I'll say it again overwhelm is a trickster . You can't have a life you feel at home in by pushing through overwhelm . Overwhelm hides the easier ways for you to live your life , your way To have a life you feel at home in , by pushing through overwhelm . Overwhelm hides the easier ways for you to live your life , your way , to have the ease you want . You're going to have to try a different way . Ease equals more at home in your life , safe , satisfied , content , happy , loved . Deal with the overwhelm first , and your way will be revealed to you . Overwhelm is your guide .

Speaker 1 10:24

All those signs and symptoms of overwhelm are course corrections , an opportunity to see things differently . Noticing them completely neutrally is a powerful step and probably enough . Right now , what you want is the opposite of the feelings . You're utterly fed up with how gaps are a trap . Every time things ease up a bit holidays , evenings , if you're lucky , and weekends , maybe at least part of them allows you to patch yourself up and get back into the fray . Every time you think you've found a solution . Sleep hygiene , diet hacks , productivity hacks and things are better for a while just adds to the trap . This is why you keep going around in circles until you can't anymore . But that's burnout and , if possible , best avoided as a very expensive mistake .

Speaker 1 11:18

Overwhelm is not the deal you make with the universe to have a full life . Overwhelm is not the deal you make with the universe to have a full life . You can't martyr yourself in order to deserve the life you long for . You get the life you long for by being yourself . Being yourself is how your dreams come true . Overwhelm is optional . It takes new skills , new habits and new perspectives to make it optional , but it's worth it . It takes commitment , but you don't have to do it alone . A full life does not mean overloaded . You worked hard so you could live your full adventure . You made sacrifices so you could have more freedom , more choice over how you spend your time and more money to allow you to do the things you dreamt of doing . Now you have a full schedule and an overloaded mind instead .

The Path to Feeling Successful

Speaker 1 12:11

Overwhelm is inevitable . It comes from overusing your mind and overloading your nervous system . It comes from allowing the mind to be the boss . It comes from not understanding that the mind is constantly on the lookout for bears . It comes from ignoring the signals from your body as inconvenient . It comes from treating the body as an inconvenient way to transport the mind around to get things done . It comes from treating the body like a series of problems to be solved instead of loving it as the incredible , magical thing it is . It comes from disconnecting from your heart . It comes from believing that it's dangerous to follow your heart . It comes from toughening up , shutting down the heart and refusing to listen to the body like the old friend . It indeed is . Good girls , you're going to need to control your attention so that your body and heart can weigh in on the navigation . The mind on its own is just not that good at navigating you into your full adventure .

Speaker 1 13:31

The way you were taught to create a successful life only gets you so far . Keeping your head down and working hard works . It's how you created your successful life . But feeling at home in that life , feeling successful , that's a whole nother level that you weren't taught how to reach for . And the life you created that old pushing breaking yourself way is really hard to maintain because it requires the same energy and effort it took to create it . It's built of the wrong stuff . It's time to do things differently .

Speaker 1 14:05

You want to feel at home in your life , at home in yourself . You're fed up of waiting . You're fed up of feeling like a child in the back of the car asking are we there yet ? You want to feel successful . You didn't work this hard to work this hard . You want your full adventure . If you didn't , you would have settled by now . You'd have stopped fighting to have what you want . You'd have stopped being a struggling rebel . But something in you keeps whispering I want more than this . You want your life back . Now , please , and before anyone realises just how close to breaking you sometimes feel , because you want to keep your hard-won professional respect and , quite frankly , it's none of anyone's damn business that you're screaming inside For more resources to help you gently rebel .