Rebel Quietly: How to Master Your Attention and End the Overwhelm Cycle

This isn't about mastering the world or conquering your overwhelm. It's quieter than that.

In this episode I map out a gently rebellious path from burnout to deep heartfelt success — treating overwhelm as useful information rather than something to push through.

• making overwhelm optional, not inevitable
• inside-out change through neutral noticing
• the Gentle Rebellion as playful discipline
• five steps to reset before you act
• The One Minute Marke — a 60-second practice you can use anywhere
• structure that creates freedom, not pressure
• harvesting past success to create from ease
• kinder approaches to email, ambition and sustainable success

For big-hearted, driven professionals who are done with the overwhelm into exhaustion cycle.

This podcast was created to help big-hearted, driven professionals break free from overwhelm and experience more clarity, ease and joy.

Overwhelm is Optional: Join The Gentle Rebellion

Focus and satisfaction at work

Switch off, laugh easily and be present at home

Sign up for Gently Rebellious Emails here.

The Gently Rebellious One-Minute Journal: A simple, powerful way to stay focused on what matters most to you.
 Buy here 

Explore practical tools, resources and ways to work with me.
Visit here www.heidimarke.co.uk

Free Audio: The One Minute Marke

The Gentle Rebel Space - monthly membership

Thanks to Purple Planet for the music.

Affiliate Links & Disclaimer
Some episodes and show notes include affiliate links for products I personally recommend. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

This podcast is here to soothe and inspire, helping you reclaim your life from overwhelm. It is not intended as medical...

Transcript

Defining Overwhelm Is Optional

Inside-Out Change And Self-Acceptance

The Gentle Rebellion Explained

Choosing To See The Good

On Success, Chains, And Coffee Shops

Why Overwhelm Blocks Joy And Focus

From Exhaustion To Heartfelt Success

Five Steps To Make Overwhelm Optional

The One-Minute Mark Practice

Email, Offers, And Gentle Marketing

Upgrading Into Deep Heartfelt Success

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to Overwhelm is Optional, the podcast for big-hearted, highly driven professionals who are ready to turn overwhelm into clarity, ease, and joy. I'm Heidi Mark, the Gentle Rebel Coach, and in each episode I share insights, stories, and practical tools to help you gently rebel against the pressure to push on through. Because you matter. How you are in the world matters. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the next episode of Overwhelm is Optional Season 2: The Gentle Rebellion into Deep Heartfelt Success. So that's my working title for this. I'm not doing, as you know, if you listened to last week, I'm not doing a big launch, I'm not rebranding, I'm not making a fuss. I'm just gently and firmly rebelling against all of that and saying, okay, it's my podcast, I want to extend it further. So what I thought I'd do is start by talking about what I mean. So when I'm talking about overwhelm is optional, what do I mean? When I'm talking about the gentle rebellion into deep heartfelt success, what am I talking about? Now if you've been around here for a while, you probably know but will enjoy the clarity. And if you've just rocked up, I'm sure you'd really like to know. So let's do this. So firstly, overwhelm is optional. So this comes from the idea that when I burnt out and I looked back, I obviously did lots of self-blame. I should have known better, I should have done this, blah blah blah blah blah, all the ways we do. And then I realised that there was nothing I could do about it because actually I couldn't see clearly enough to know what I needed to do, and I blamed overwhelm, which was a really good thing to do because it enabled me to then actually do something about it. And because I'd done some retraining with a Zen master and I'd retrained as a Zen yoga teacher, I had the skills, even though yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? I had the skills before because I'd done all the mindfulness and meditation stuff, but anyway, hey ho, I now felt able, this is seven years ago, to think about turning, no, not turning, that's another stage. Ha ha making overwhelm optional by taking it more seriously, using it as guidance, using it as useful information, and saying, okay, so when I do things through overwhelm, this is what happens, and when I pause first and get out of overwhelm, this is what happens. So all of that feedback's really, really useful for navigating my life more skillfully. And this was my zen learning and practice infused into the evidence-based psychology which I had previously, and I found this really helpful because it allowed me to drop the judgment, and I think it's the self-judgment that was holding me back, the idea that I ought to know better. Because as somebody who is intelligent and well-read, like you, you know, you we know the stuff. It's not that we don't know the stuff, it's that we don't know how to turn it into an embedded practice that works, it's it's the using of it because there's so much information, and it's not that any of it's wrong. Well, some a lot of it's wrong, but it's it's whether it's right for you. And for me, learning the benefits of allowing my body and my heart to weigh in on the conversation and to support my mind in navigating my life was revolutionary, absolutely revolutionary. It completely changed my life. It's it's it's where this podcast comes from, it's where my work starts from. Fundamental principles. There's nothing wrong with me, there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with the situation. It may look like everything needs to change externally for you to be able to think straight, switch off, sleep properly, and get your life back. But what if that's not true? What if it is all yeah. What if it could be true? It may or may not be true, but the point is it's all an inside job, and it's easier and more effective, and also fundamentally necessary to create transformation from the inside out anyway. You then might want to afterwards make changes externally, but the changing of things externally does not always, as I'm sure you know really well, doesn't always result in things feeling better internally. So our power resides within us. It is far more effective to take responsibility for ourselves and practice some form of self-development that doesn't tip us into this endless self-improvement where if only I was better in a million different ways, everything would magically fall into place. But instead, self-acceptance, um, self-acknowledgement, self-awareness, the the the real self-development, you know, the stuff where you come to that deep self-knowledge that actually you're right, you're alright, you're doing alright, everything's okay. You can you can drop all that anxiety and worry about trying to control the universe in order to feel safe or to justify your existence or to feel like you're worthy and a of value that you're worth taking up space on the planet. Anyway, overwhelm is optional and it's absolutely essential, in my opinion, to make it so because when you're out of overwhelm, you are nicer to be around and you are more effective, you can think clearly, you're not you not only can focus better, but you you are more likely to focus on the things that actually matter and be able to drop the things that don't or to park them and make them wait without them nagging you and waking you up in the middle of the night. You are more present to the joy that is already here, you feel more at home in yourself, you feel safer, you just feel better because you're operating at a higher um higher performance. Yeah, I don't like high performance just because it can get very shouty and pushy. You're operating more skillfully, you're operating from a higher functioning version of yourself, you're just operating in a different way, a different space. It's it's a major human upgrade, which is why for however many thousands of years people have meditated because without some form of mind-based soothing training, uh the mind is pretty crazy because it's fear-based, and it's fear-based in order to keep you safe, safe, but not necessarily feeling safe and definitely not happy, because being happy doesn't necessarily keep you alive, and from an evolutionary point of view, we are descended obviously from people who stayed alive, not the people who were necessarily happy. There's a difference. If you want happiness, you're gonna have to do things differently. The how we do things differently is the gentle rebellion. Why? Because I don't know about you, but I can get quite determined and forceful and shouty, and I've got this new idea, and it's really exciting, and taking a big stand and making grand announcements and blah blah blah blah blah. It's hard work. It's hard work going against the grain when everybody around you is overwhelmed, either with their knowledge or without their knowledge, but when everybody around you is overwhelmed, and when everybody around you believes that that's just the necessary price you pay, that that's just the way things are, that you expect to be overwhelmed, that you want the moon on the stick if you expect to have this much in your life and not be overwhelmed. You're just asking too much. When overwhelm is expected and normalized, it is very difficult to decide to make it optional for yourself. Therefore, I invent you invite you to gently rebel against the norm to say, I still want a lot, I don't want to quit the things that I love and the things that I want, and I don't just want this and be able to handle it with peace and calm and less emotional reactivity. I also want more because I have big dreams, of course you do. That's why you're here. This is a podcast for highly driven, big-hearted people, not for people who are happy just coasting along. That's that's for a different podcast. So gently rebelling allows you to do it privately, secretly, internally. You don't, it's not demanding for anybody around you, it doesn't require grand announcements, so you're not measuring yourself against failing. You're not thinking, Oh, I said I'd do that, and now look at me, I said I'd be calmer and now look at me, I'm all shouty, which helps drop the self-judgment, which is absolutely fundamental. It also is playful. I don't know about you, but I love, love, love the word rebel, rebellious. I'm a natural rebel, always have been, it's just who I am. But when I do it in a kind of forceful way, I'm not doing that, this is how things should be. It's just it's draining, it's not great, and it's hard, it's just harder because I'm making a stand. Instead, if I gently rebel, then it's just more fun, it's lighter, it has a playful energy. For me, it's energizing the gentle rebellion. So I call myself and am known as the gentle rebel coach. So I'm coaching people in a gently rebellious way back to themselves. I'm saying, look, you want a lot, this is the cost because you believe you can only do it by pushing through overwhelming into exhaustion. But what if you could do it a different way? And what would that different way look like? And let's find out together. It's also a gentle rebellion against the idea there's something fundamentally wrong with you or the world, because when we think there's something fundamentally wrong with ourselves, the situation, or the world, or other people, and we need to change ourselves dramatically or change you know, everybody's behaviour around us needs to change in order for us to feel a certain way, or the world needs to be so much better, and we could all do that all day, couldn't we? The world needs to be so much better in a million different ways. But the thing is, the world is what it is, and we're all part of the world, and how much change can you implement on the world? And how many people with really good attention intentions? You know, the whole the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are all sorts of people who were inspirational leaders who did terrible, terrible things, which looking back you can see oh they're evil, but when they came along, obviously people didn't think they were evil or they wouldn't have had a big following. Like it's all very well judging the world and deciding you need to change it, but who are you to make everybody else conform to your own personal expectations? It's much easier and more effective to start with yourself, but not from a judgy point of view. So a big part of the gentle rebellion is this rebelling against the idea there's something fundamentally wrong in the first place, and instead, it's not that we don't want to be better, we do, but if you have a sit down, write down all the ways you think you need to be better, and the way you think the world needs to be better, and it's endless. And is that any way to live? I don't think there's any way to live, it's just it's just no fun because what we're doing there is we're noticing everything that's wrong. Well, of course we do, because that's how our brains are wired, they have that negative cognitive bias in order to keep us safe, safe but not necessarily happy. In order to feel more ease, joy, safety, security, fulfilment, all the damn good stuff that we assume we get by sacrificing so much and working so hard in order to be successful. In order to have that, we have to train our brains to notice it. So by starting from the premise that there's nothing wrong, it's all just useful information. By neutrally noticing it, by gently rebelling against the idea the world has gone, you know, mad and that everybody needs to be better, like it's this constant self-improvement, our relationships need to be better, and we should read more books, and we need to be fitter, and we need to have more energy, and we need to sleep better, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Oh my god, are you have you had enough yet? Seriously, how nice is it when you when you feel at home in yourself? How much nicer are you to be around? How much more flowy is your day, how much more easeful is your day, how much more joyful do you feel when you just go, huh? I'm okay. Not just for a moment when the laundry's folded or that project's finished, or that client's on boarded, not just for fleeting moments, but more of the time, by choosing that, by choosing to notice. Because at any point you can look at anything, you can just look out in the world and you can choose where you place your attention and how you place your attention. And it is an act of utter rebellion to choose to notice the good when everybody's screaming about how the sky is falling in. It's a giant act of rebellion, but if you do it in a shouty way, you're gonna get loads of crap back at you, and it's gonna cost you, so you're not gonna you're not so likely to do it because you're having to take a stand against everyone else. If if everybody else is lamenting about all the terrible things going on in the world and how the world is just terrible and it's gonna end, then and you come in and say, Oh, but there's and I get into trouble for doing this actually. Now I'm saying this, I realise I just need to gently rebel a bit more. You know, if you just dare to say, but actually, I did it, I did it the other day with somebody's, you know, everybody loves to bash big businesses, right? As soon as a business, like coffee shops, right? How many times do you hear somebody say, Oh yeah, we must go and support the local independent? As if the chains are terrible, they were set up by tyrants. No, the chain started as an independent and became really successful and employed more people and took on more debt and more risk and had lots of courage and then they ended up everywhere, and then everybody loves to hate them because suddenly they're just oh they're terrible because they're so successful, and we hate success, don't we? Do we? No, we don't. We love success because we're successful people and we want more success. Success is good, employing other people is good, it's all good. There just seems to be this moral thing of oh, you support the weakling, the the poor independent coffee shop. Now, why? I don't know what that's about, and I I personally think it's really sad. Now I understand when you end up with a monopoly, that's different, and that's what that's not that's the rule, the rules have been rigged, stuff's gone wrong there, there's some corruption going on, isn't there? If if smaller businesses are crushed by bigger business, it's different when the best business wins because that's better for customers. But there's usually you know, people want different things. If you like independent coffee shops, go there because the coffee's good, it's not too noisy. Man, what is it about coffee shops and noise? When I was at a networking event um last week, I got talking to this architect and I asked, What is your favourite kind of building or something like that to um what did I ask? What's your favourite kind of building to design or something like that? Fascinating conversation, and he was the first person I've ever spoken to who's complete agreement with me about noise, like it's so irritating to me that buildings are built with terrible acoustics, it's horrible you can't hear people, and the place you come together to talk to people are the noisiest places, aren't they? Coffee shops, because the making of the coffee is in the middle, it's the and it's really noisy, and now they don't wash up in a back uh a back room, they do the clunking and stuff next to the noisy coffee machine. God, it's loud, it's painful. So, for me personally, I don't really care whether you're a highly successful chain or an independent coffee shop, I care about the experience. So, do first of all, it's got to be really good coffee. Secondly, it's got to be a nice atmosphere. Thirdly, I really like it when the people serving you are professional, you know, like they're grateful you're there, they want to serve you good cup good coffee rather than that awful thing of like you're in the way, you're annoying, you're just another person to process. I don't like that feeling, I'm not interested. So for me, there's a whole other lot of criteria. I've no idea how I got into my rant. What was I talking about? Hang on, I'm gonna pause and think about it. No, it's gone. If it's important, it'll come back. So let's get back to it. So making overwhelm optional matters if you want the things that you set out to achieve. The peace of mind, um, the clarity, the focus, the joy, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of having arrived, the accomplishment. Why? Because when your brain is completely when your mind is overwhelmed, it's flooded, you flooded your nervous system with stress stuff, and it's just it's a rubbish way to live, but and everything's harder, it's harder to focus, and you tend to be more emotionally reactive. One of the first things I've noticed that goes is the ability to switch off and laugh easily. Have you noticed that? When you're really overwhelmed, it's just oh, just leave me alone, leave me alone. I remember when I was in my burnout cycle, even my beautiful dogs, it was too much because they're just so happy to see me. It's like I can't cope with all of this stuff, it's too much happiness. So the ability to get out of overwhelm is a skill really, really worth learning, and the the shifting out of the normal track to successful living, I say successful living with a little bit of playful jests there, and maybe some inverted commas from the normal traditional success, which seems to involve pushing through overwhelm into exhaustion, into what I'm calling deep heartfelt success, which is basically the version of success that you thought you were signing up for. Yeah, how is that working out for you? So the joy's there, the freedom's there, it's all there, but it's hidden under the overwhelm. When you make overwhelm optional, you get that the it comes through. So if you think about um like a dirty window and then you clean it and you get a bit of light through and you get a bit more, it's a bit like that. So the more you step out of overwhelm, the more you get all of the things you set out for in the first place. But the journey from the overwhelm exhaustion, traditional success into the upgrade of deep heartfelt success, how you get there matters, right? Because it's not a destination anyway, and how you do it is everything. So the how we are doing things when we get stuck in the overwhelm into exhaustion cycle is because we believe certain things, we we believe there are limitations, so that you know we have to work incredibly hard to pass the point of sense into it, you know, pushing through overwhelm, like your head's full of concrete into exhaustion, because that's just how things are done. So if you're going to move out of that, there's some fundamental mind shifts and beliefs that that need to move. But if you get too, I found that if you get too kind of um judgy about it, like I should be meditating, I should be exercising, I should be better at self-care, I should be better at compartmentalizing, work and home, I should be spending more quality time with my partner and my children. Like all of the shoulds, I should be taking proper holidays, I should be making better use of my evenings, I should be, you know, resting better at the weekends, having more fun, I should be more fun, I should be seeing friends, I should should should should should should should. That how that's not fun, is it? So what we do is we change the how from a list of things that need to be improved, this endless self-improvement list, this endless get better at list, this endless must-read list, must listen to list, this must do all of these, you know, habit stacking, amazing things. Um so I was in that, and that's how I managed to burn out while prioritizing my self-care because I just added to my overwhelm. So we just changed the how to gently rebelling. So we're rebelling, we're rejecting it. It's a nonsense. That's that's so last year, darling. That's that's just not how we're gonna do things anymore, and we're just gonna but we're gonna do it gently and in our own time, in our own way, and we we're moving into more self-trust, more self-acceptance, more self-awareness, very important, and eventually more self-love. This is who I am. This is this is my previous adventure, and rewriting that in a way where you you get the treasure of the the mistakes, the errors, the the things that you you now you look back, you can see at the time you couldn't see. For forgiving fast and furiously, and moving into deep heartfelt success, which is an adventure into claiming the very things that you've worked. So hard for the ability to switch off laugh easily. Imagine when you get that back easily. The ability to go on holiday without taking your work in your body and your mind and be able to make full use of your holiday as in to switch your attention from kick-ass work focus to switch off and enjoy your holiday without that awful drag where the first week is trying to unwind and feeling guilty because really there's things at work you really would like to be doing, or why will the stressful conversations not leave you? All that kind of stuff, and then by the time you've unwound you've got to start winding yourself back up again. That's no fun. What if we could actually take holidays that were holidays? Imagine that. So cool. Anyway, so the gender rebellion's got a lot in it, obviously, and I've done pre many previous podcast episodes about this, but I just wanted to lay it out at the moment. So overwhelm is optional because it's the well, being in overwhelm is painful, frustrating, and largely ineffective, and getting out of overwhelm gives you more clarity, focus, and energy, and it's more effective and skillful way to live. So it matters very, very much. So it's optional, as in you can learn the skills to make it optional, it's never going to go away, but you can switch it faster. But it's also not optional if you want deep heartfelt success. Now, how do I make overwhelm optional without going back and binging the entire podcast? So this is roughly it. One, become aware of your own overwhelm states. So just I invite you to neutrally notice, that means become aware and then drop the self-judgment. Become aware of when you are overwhelmed and what it feels like to you. This matters because you what you want to do is notice the difference between the two states. So when are you not overwhelmed? What does that feel like? What does it feel like in your mind? What does it feel like in your body? When you are supremely overwhelmed, what does that feel like in your mind? What does that feel like in your body? And when you're in between those, because there's various degrees of overwhelm, aren't there? Which tend to increase as you push through. So just gathering the useful information. So what we're doing here is we're treating overwhelm not as a problem to be solved, but as useful information, and then you can use it. And when you use it, you can use it in an in an alchemy-like way. So then you can turn overwhelm into ease, you can turn overwhelm into more joy, you can turn overwhelm into clarity on purpose, like a magician. Da da. So then what you want to do is once you've you've gathered your information about overwhelm this and its states, how it affects you, what you want to do then is really focus on the cost. Because in order to motivate yourself to get out of overwhelm and to start living more skillfully, you need to be really, really aware of the cost. So we are more motivated to avoid pain than to seek pleasure. So really focusing. I would invite you to write out all the ways that overwhelm negatively impacts your life. So for me, it would be I'm more emotionally reactive, I'm more likely to go into wailing banshee mode, um, I'm more likely to cry, not in a good way. I mean, I cry quite easily, I cry because I love people, I cry because I'm a flower being so beautiful. Yeah, so I cry quite easily, but it's not those kind of tears, it's the frustrated, pent up because overwhelm is like this explosive. If you think about the energy that's in overwhelm, imagine if you could harness that and and use that energy in a different way. But you see, that's seeking pleasure. You are less likely to do something about overwhelm by looking all the ways getting rid of it or being able to turn it and make it optional would be good for you. You're much more likely to be motivated to do something serious about it if you can list the costs. So I invite you to list all the costs, and then once you've done that, I invite you to list the benefits of getting out of it first. Now we're not looking at living without a we're not like we're not going to become Zen monks. Well, you can if you want to be a Zen monk and go live in a cave for seven years, fine by me. That's not what I'm about. I'm about finding solutions for people who want to keep their full life but make it better, upgrade it into deep heartfelt success where you just you get the stuff, you get the rewards you work so hard for, the feeling of fulfilment and accomplishment, the ability to think straight and focus on what really matters to you, the ability to be present with those you love. So, what we're looking at is being focused, more focused and satisfaction at work, and the ability to switch off, laugh easily, and be more present at home. That's what we're looking at. Because usually they're put in opposition, aren't they? You can either kick ass at work or you can be you know lovely to be around at home and actually hear your partner speak. But what if they're the same thing and they're not in opposition? That's a whole nother episode. Let's get back to this. So, one, become aware of your overwhelmed states, it's all just useful information. Self-awareness matters until you don't know what you don't know. So make yourself aware of how overwhelm impacts you and when you're not overwhelmed. Really interesting to see when that will be. Notice the cost, get really clear about the cost, and also the cost of not doing anything about it. So if you carry on as you're carrying on, what will be the cost over the next month, year, 10 years, 20 years time, and then maybe if you want to, you could do the the in Zen there's the contemplation of death as a life-enhancing spiritual practice. So if you imagine that you were at the end of your life and you were looking back and you hadn't done anything about the cost of overwhelm, what would be the cumulative costs? That's well was doing you just you've got to find the stuff out to motivate yourself. Next, notice the benefits of getting out of it before you do something. So I can teach you a method, or you can just go and sign up for the one-minute mark, which is my one-minute audio, which is a one-minute practice to get you out of overwhelm. It's not actually designed to get you out of overwhelm, and if I tell you too much about it, it's actually unhelpful, which is interesting. So I'm not going to talk too much about it, but it's popular and it's well used, and people who've used it cumulatively over time, it has immediate benefits, and then over time it has huge life-changing benefits. So I invite you to click the link in the show notes and get hold of that practice and start using it. It's not designed to get you out of overwhelm, but it tends to. Um, I'm not gonna say any more about that, I'm gonna be mysterious about that. Leave you with that one. Um, but if you use the one minute mark before a meeting, after a meeting, before you go to write that letter or that email, before doing something, you can switch into that body mindfulness, body, mind, heart connected so that you have the clarity to do things more effectively. In doing so, you tend to allow your nervous system to reset. It's just it's really lovely, it's very grounding. We can use it in lots of different ways. I use it all the time. So I invite you to get hold of the one minute mark. So if you imagine that you can learn to switch from overwhelm into ease, overwhelm to ease, or overwhelm to joy, overwhelmed to clarity. Imagine that is once you're at that skill level, which doesn't take long, um, you are making overwhelm optional. And then what you want to do is notice the benefits of getting out of overwhelm before doing something. So ideally, what you'd start to do is notice, oh, I'm really overwhelmed, I'm seem to be pushing through here. Pause, get out of overwhelm, then do the thing, notice the difference, you're gonna do it more, right? So learning how to switch from overwhelm into clarity and ease matters, and then when you've done that, you need to stay committed with the normal things, discipline, commitment, courage, habit stacking, whatever your usual way of doing things is, and then note and then really importantly, notice the effects of your practice because when you notice the effects of your practice, you gain momentum, you're like, Oh my god, this is awesome! Why do I keep forgetting to do the one-minute mark? Because you will, so you forgive yourself and you do it anyway. The I think the forgiving yourself fast and furiously, a phrase I heard from Chase Hughes, who's uh I don't know what he is, I can't remember. Is he X C I A or something? Anyway, he does some really interesting YouTube stuff, but I loved his idea that you forgive fast and furiously. I mean, forgiving fast, I think I'd heard, but the idea fast and furiously I quite like, but in a gently rebellious way, because furiously isn't gently rebellious, but I'm saying it with that gently rebellious energy, fast and furiously, forgive yourself. That doesn't mean that you're not taking notice of when you've hurt someone or it doesn't mean that. It means that we get stuck, don't we, in loops of self-doubt and we hold ourselves back because we're like I've messed up and then we end up in a pool on the floor. So that's it. I will say those five steps for you again, and then I'll give you some hints of how to do it. One become aware of your own overwhelm states, notice the cost, notice the benefits of getting out before doing things, learn how to switch from overwhelming to clarity and ease, like permanently learn it, and then stay committed, and then know help yourself stay committed by noticing how you're upgrading your life. So, how do I switch, Heidi, from overwhelm to ease? Get hold of the one-minute mark would be my go-to thing, obviously, because I invented it and I've tried and tested it. I use it myself, it works. Or whatever works for you. So you might be a meditator, use that. You might like another audio, somebody else, people like Paul McKenna, like whatever works for you. Just choose to notice the overwhelm and get out of it before doing something, and do that regularly, and you will make overwhelm optional. Pick something that works. The reason I like the one-minute mark is it's a meditative practice which which does lots of things, and they are all linked to the gentle rebellion, so it has within it the how, which is why it's not designed to have an outcome because we're changing the how, excuse me. So it's allowing you to notice neutrally, it's it's a practice of what I call neutral noticing, which is non-judgmental awareness. Very, very powerful. So you're dropping the shoulds and the oughts, you're dropping the I am trying to change my state. So I'm inviting you to neutrally notice rather than try and clear your head. There's no trying, there's no trying to achieve, there's just noticing, and that is more powerful in my experience and opinion than trying to change your state because you're practicing deep acceptance. This is where I am, this is how things are. Notice it neutrally, it's all just useful information, and however you are is however you are, and that's okay. And from that point, things start to shift. So you're practicing a rebellious form of meditation and self-acceptance, and it's very gentle and very powerful. So the link will be in the show notes, the one minute mark. Get hold of it, give it a go, not just give it a go, commit to using it every day for a week, and you know, if it's not for you, it's not for you, but it's one minute, you have one minute. So, and then if you want to know more about it, when you sign up, you'll then get an email. You only get two emails because I've changed how I'm thinking about email. I always find that this is pressure to you should be sending more emails. Like, I don't want to send those of emails, because even if they're nice emails, if you send too many, it's like, oh my god, there's too many emails, I can't cope with them. So I've decided to attempt the gently rebellious email list, trying really hard not to clog up your email box with things you don't want. So just delightful emails when I have something to share, something to offer you. Of course, I'm gonna try and sell you stuff. It's a business and it matters because selling stuff that you need is a gift when you need it and you want it. So I'm not gonna not sell you stuff occasionally in an inbox, but I want my emails to feel like a delight, even if you don't want what I'm offering you, and I'm not going to be offering you stuff all the time because there's no need. I'm a life coach, you know where to find me. I occasionally run courses, I have a membership, you know what I'm selling, I have books, and I have lots of free stuff. So enjoy all of it, and when you're ready, come further into my world if you want to or not, the choice is yours. But yeah, I'm trying to send um delightful emails that you just think, oh, so nice, so nice. I'm so glad Heidi wrote to me. Can you imagine that? I don't know, it's it sounds like quite a tall order because I I have emails from people I've signed up with who I love and sometimes like please don't send me any more because as much as I love you I can't read that and I feel guilty for deleting it. And then I do delete it because I think that's okay, they'll send me another one soon, it's all fine. Email email marketing's just part of life and it does matter. And anyway, just some thoughts on that. Trying hard not to overwhelm you with emails you don't want. That's what I'm going for. Anyway, sign up to my email list and then you'll see how I'm doing with that. No, please do, honestly. Then I can send you delightful emails and things that you occasionally want to buy from me. So, where are we? Oh yes, so the second, you only get two emails if you sign up. You don't get like a if you sign up to the one minute mark. Apparently, I should send you ten emails, but I don't, I send two. One is giving you the download, and the second one is to check in with you, see how you did, and offer you the first steps in deep heartfelt success course, which is a tiny mini course, but it goes into the one minute mark in depth. So if you want to know more, you can you can find out more. You I mean know more, not have more. What did I say? You can find out more about the one minute mark by signing up to that free course, and that is worth doing once you've practiced with it first. Anyway, that's enough of that. I'm just waffling, I feel now. So, once you've done those five things in a gently rebellious way, dropping the judgment, which is built in, built into my methodology. Now you're operating at the overwhelm is optional stage, and then once you start making overwhelm optional, what I find happens is once you're getting more ease and more oh, thank god for that, you start after time, depending on how burnt out you were and how low your capacity was for all the joy and fulfilment which is there all the time. Then gradually I find that you shift into yeah, now I'm ready, now I want more, and that's when we start venturing into deep heartfelt success, and we do that by still the gentle rebellion, but we just deliberately examine things so we can, for example, look at how we're using our attention, how much energy we have, um, how we're focusing, what we're focusing on. Um, looking at willpower is one of the things we're going to be looking at in Q2 inside the gentle rebel space. Like, there's lots of different things. Satisfaction at work, how do you get more satisfaction at work? How do you get more presence at home? How do you sleep better? Like, there's lots of things, right, that you want. And deep heartfelt success isn't a destination, it's an adventure. So once you make overwhelm optional and you start to find more ease and space in your life, then in general, I find in highly driven people they just want more. And the thing is, you don't need to do more to have more because the the stuff you want is hidden under the overwhelm, it's just hiding. Like the the feeling of success is hidden under the overwhelm caused by the needing to generate more success. Well, what if you could have both? What if you could sit in the previous success and enjoy that and harvest past successes because you've experienced them, you probably didn't have time to fully embody them because you had to rush to the next thing through overwhelm. So there's stuff to be harvested from your past which can be embodied and brought forward now so that you can feel the success of past successes, and from that point, it is actually easier to generate more success because you are sitting in the energy of success, and it's also a whole lot more fun and enjoyable because you feel the success that you've worked so hard for, and at the same time, you hold the desire for more, and being able to hold both at once is a really interesting conundrum and idea, and I love that, and that's why I like the Zen idea of um holding opposite things at once. It sounds impossible, but it's a beautiful thing like structure versus freedom. Well, you can have structure that creates freedom, or you can have structure that in the end you need to break in order to have more freedom. There's lots of juxtapositions you can play with there, but I really like the idea that to generate more success you need to be the in the energy of the thing you want to generate, and so why not look back and harvest the success, the energy and the feeling in your body of the success that you didn't really have time to collect on the way because you were so busy looking up the mountain and not resting and looking at the view. Anyway, that's my ideas about season two, and it's also a really good inner nutshell of my work, very briefly. My work from the last oh, how many years are we in now? Oh, what year is it? Six, seven years? I don't know. 2026, how did that happen? Exciting times. But this podcast gives me the freedom to share whatever ideas I'm coming up with next. And I am gently rebelling against the idea that I need to make it really clear what this is about and to stay within that. I'm gonna just break the structure and give myself more freedom while also having a structure that gives you clarity to know whether or not to subscribe and keep turning up whenever I release an ed an episode. Structure and freedom all rolled into one. See you next week. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening and for being part of the Overwhelmers Optional podcast. If you want to continue the conversation, please do connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube. Let me know your thoughts. I love hearing from you. And if you found this helpful, taking a moment to share, subscribe, and leave a review would be much appreciated. It helps other people find the podcast. If you're ready to turn overwhelm into joy, you'll find my books, resources, and ways to work with me on my website heidimark.co.uk and on Amazon. All the links are in the show notes. Until next time, keep gently rebelling and making overwhelm optional for you.