From Overwhelmed to Motivated (and The Annoying Coach Questions That Got Me There)
The month of January was kind of a mess for me, honestly. I had somehow come off a high at the end of 2023 and driven myself right into the heart of downtown in Overwhelm City. By early 2024 a few not-so-great things sprung up and I spent most of the month running around trying to resolve the ever-growing To Do list of problems, with just not enough time, not enough money, not enough help, not enough snacks in the whole of Trader Joe’s to help steer me back to dry land. What was “causing” the overwhelm (causing is in quotes for a highly annoying coachy reason I’ll get to in a minute) included: family, work, money, health, friends, pets, other people, bills, insurance, life admin, the state of the world, the state of my fading Botox and the lack of room on my calendar to do anything about that...The list, honestly, was neither unique nor interesting. And yet there I was, overextended and drowning under To Dos, with no idea how to actually do anything except tread water. (Wait, I started this post with a metaphor about a city. Now I’m drowning? What is happening? Have I written us into Waterworld? Fuck, see, I am a mess. SOS).
So, of course, I am a coach, and I know you’re supposed to turn to coaching to help during times of big emotional overload - such as when you’re feeling so overwhelmed you can’t even keep your simple blog post on dry land. In coaching, one of the things we focus on is the idea that thoughts create our feelings (unless we’re talking about Big T Trauma, which in coaching we aren’t), and if thoughts create our feelings, and “overwhelm” is a feeling, then it’s actually not that laundry list of Life To Dos that is creating my overwhelm, but the thoughts I have about it that are actually doing the damn thing.
THOUGHTS — (create) —--> FEELINGS
Follow me here: if I look at that list above and my thought is, “I’m so overwhelmed” or “I don’t know how to handle any of this” or “This is too much for me to take on” or “I’ll never be able to manage all of this” - those thoughts will each trigger an emotion. And in my case here, any one of those thoughts created the feeling of “overwhelm” for me when I looked at my To Do list and thought about them. The list itself is not the problem - the list is a collection of words on an iphone Notes app. The problem was my thoughts about the list. Those thoughts were what was creating my overwhelm.
OK great, you might be thinking, so my thoughts caused me to be overwhelmed ...but I still have this list here and that didn’t go away just because I realized my thoughts were causing all the problems with it. So now what?
Fair question. Let’s go -
The overwhelm, caused by thinking, is an emotion that feels a certain way…for me, in January, in my circumstances, the feeling of overwhelm felt heavy to me. It felt like a weighted blanket that someone was threw on top of me,and it made it really hard for me to actually take any action (because actions are created by our feelings…and in this case my actions had been more like, “there’s no fucking point in even trying to get this all done”). So, of course, I got very little (ney, nothing) done on my list because I couldn’t seem to come out from under the heavy, weighted overwhelm blanket…which was created by the thoughts I was having.
In other words, my thoughts about being overwhelmed just perpetuated my overwhelm.
See how it all fits together?
When I am coaching clients I often ask them how they want to feel about a certain circumstance, and then we figure out a thought that will create that feeling (and then lead to the actions) that they want to experience. For example, in the circumstance of my To Do list, we know I felt overwhelmed by it. But how did I want to feel? When I asked myself that question, the answer I came up with was, “Motivated”.. That’s the truth - I want to feel motivated to get up and handle what was on that list. I am someone who can handle a lot, and there’s a part of me who knows all of the shit on the list - even the hard, complicated, messy shit - is figureoutable (thanks Marie Forleo). So I want to feel motivated to attack it. My job then was to figure out what thoughts I could think that would create the feeling of “motivation” for me, and start practicing thinking those thoughts until they become natural for me.
Sounds like an easy enough process, right?
It is, and it isn’t. Which is the bitch of it all, of course.
When you’ve been thinking a thought on repeat for a long time (and many of us who feel “overwhelmed” but life’s demands fall into this category) then what happens is your brain becomes accustomed to thinking that thought, and so it reaches for it quickly and easily whenever you’re in a circumstance than may trigger you. This is why just flipping a switch and changing your thoughts is not a magic bullet solution to all of your problems (though it's a massive necessary step towards that). You need to first look at your overwhelm, and the thoughts creating it, and question it. It’s like shining a flashlight under the bed to see if there’s a monster there - you need to LOOK at the overwhelm in order to see that it actually may not be so scary…..
Back to me as an example, back in January when I was overwhelmed as heeeelll. After the requisite pity party, I pulled myself together just enough to ask myself The World’s Most Annoying and Useful (what a combo) coaching question:
Why is this a problem?
My To Do list, which was triggering all the thoughts that were making me feel all the overwhelm, seemed like a huge problem upon first glance. My answer, when I asked myself this absolutely painfully annoying question, was a snarky, “Look at all this shit I have to do and no time to do it all. That’s why this is a problem” .
And then, the next in a line of Annoying but Useful Coaching Questions…..
OK. So, what is true here? (or, what are the facts?)
Our brains like to be real insistent that whatever thoughts it serves us are of course true. They’re an unwavering fact of life. Your boss is an asshole, money is hard, you suck as a parent, you’ll never get that promotion ….Our brain serves us these (brutal) thoughts as if they’re cold hard proveable-in-a-court-of-law facts. And yet, most of the time, thoughts aren’t facts at all. They’re literally written in pencil - they’re just thoughts that we have the ability to change.
Simple example: “I’m 5 foot 6 inches tall” - I can’t change that. That’s a fact.
“I’m a crappy coach” - well, maybe, but maybe not? How do we know? Is that a fact? Yeah, some people may think that, but some may not. So it’s not a fact. It’s just a thought, and I can choose to believe it or I can choose to change it.
How does this relate here to overwhelm? Because we use phrases like “I have no time” as if they’re factual when in reality, they’re not. We have all the time. We have 24 hours in a day. We have time, we just choose to spend it in ways that may mean some things get done and some don’t. But “I have no time”? That's a lie. It may seem like semantics but it’s really not - because it’s your thoughts that create your results in the end. So if you think unhelpful thoughts, you’re going to get pretty unhelpful results. Once you start to see how your brain is serving you a lot of thoughts that just aren’t true, and you call BS on it, you’ll start to more easily see how to resolve whatever problem it is that you’re facing…..even the overwhelm of a massive To Do list.
So for me, the facts were:
I had a To Do list that I typed in my Notes app
Some of the items on the list had deadlines, some did not
Some of those deadlines were moveable or changeable by me alone if I wanted to move or change them, and some were not as they required other people’s engagement (doctors appointments, for example).
Some of the items were one-time events, and some were on-going or had multiple steps.
….and that was about it. Everything else on the list was, in fact, a thought. It was changeable.
I want to get this done by X date - Thought
I need to make this happen next week - Thought
I don't like this - Thought
This is a priority - Thought
I’m the only one who can do this - Thought
….the more I pulled apart my list the more I saw how many things were simply not urgent, not required, not on fire, not only doable by me, or not factual. And that alone was a huge step in helping me manage my initial feeling of overwhelm; suddenly the list of what HAD to get done RIGHT NOW by ME ALONE was pretty damn short. Suddenly that list was pretty damn manageable.
“I can do this stuff,”...”This won’t take me long,”.....”This is pretty easy to do in a day”, were new thoughts that came up when I looked at my To Do list through this new lens. And with that, I was not so much being drowned by my overwhelm as I was being buoyed by my sense of confidence that I could get done what was really needed to get done And everything else would get done over time (which I have plenty of now that my epic list is a lot less so….).
My thoughts were creating the feeling of motivation. And the more motivated I felt, the more I stopped treading water and started actually getting shit done….
…back on dry land.