Dealing with Overwhelm
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 6th, 2023
So I gotta confess, this morning was a bit of a mess for me. I was knee-deep in a whirlpool of overwhelm.
Too many things on my plate: content creation, the newsletter, the YouTube channel, and a secret project I’m dying to share (can’t spill the beans just yet, though!).
Overwhelm feels like a freight train of frustration, right?
But here’s the trick…ask yourself, “If I could do just one thing today and call it a win, what would it be?”
That brings clarity and drowns out the chaos.
And when I’m overwhelmed, I step away, go for a walk, and return with fresh eyes.
Remember, focus is courage. It’s cutting out the noise and zeroing in on what truly matters.
Try this tactic next time you’re overwhelmed; it did wonders for me and it just might do wonders for you too.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“If I could just get one thing done today and it would be a win. What would that one thing be?”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Alright, so full confession this morning, I was really struggling with some feelings of overwhelm. There’s just so many projects on my plate right now, ranging from both content creation, the newsletter, the YouTube channel, invictus a new business that we’re launching and I’m really excited to talk about that over the next year or so. I think that’s going to be an amazing opportunity. I’m really excited about, but I can’t talk about it quite yet. And guys, I was feeling overwhelmed because there’s just a lot on the plate, there’s a lot to do and I was kind of stuck not feeling like I knew exactly what needed my attention in that moment. And what happens a lot of times when you feel overwhelmed is you just kind of shut down and instead of just making forward progress and getting some kind of momentum, you just get into overwhelm, you get overstimulated and you just tend to go into do nothing mode. That’s at least what I do. And what I found is that overwhelm really stems from a lack of clarity.
Anthony Vicino:
You don’t know what you should be doing, you don’t know what the most important thing is. And sometimes all you really need to do is just get clear on that, be able to cut through the muck and all the different things that are convying for your attention in that moment and just get to the heart of, okay, what is the thing? What is the most important thing? And then, like we’ve talked about before on this podcast, momentum is the cure for procrastination. It doesn’t have to be a lot, just anything, just forward momentum. And what I found to be very, very helpful is this simple activity where when I’m feeling overwhelmed and I know the key is I just need to get clarity, is I pull out my notebook or my Notetaking app. On my phone and I write down the question. If I could just get one thing done today and it would be a win. What would that one thing be? And then I write down what that one thing is and then I give myself permission to ignore everything else and just focus on that one thing. Poof.
Anthony Vicino:
Just like that, overwhelm just is gone for now until you finish that thing and then you come back. But what I found this to be helpful is just to be able to say, you know what, there are a lot of things that could use my attention, but I have thought about this and the thing that needs my attention the most and therefore I must zero in on it is this thing. And so I’m going to push everything else aside and just focus there. And until it’s complete, the overwhelm can just piss off. Okay? Now the other thing I want to suggest to you is that I have found my mind quiets when I’m in motion, for whatever reason, when I go to workout, if I’m doing activity, my mind just naturally quiets. And so sometimes when I’m feeling overwhelmed, all I need to do is go move my body and just give myself a period of time away from that overwhelm, that monkey mind running on the hamster wheel. Just give myself a little bit of a break so I can come back. I can address the overwhelm from a position of being rested, a little bit more perspective maybe, or just more energy to tackle it.
Anthony Vicino:
And sometimes that’s an easy solution. It’s just get away from everything, go distract. And we’ve talked about this in a previous episode. Psychological studies show that the best way to deal with a traumatic event is not through rumination or talking it through, but through distraction, at least in the initial aftermath of that event. Like getting away your mind away from the thing and not going into that kind of death spiral of rumination, just getting distracted and going doing something. What I find is that my mind just naturally goes quiet when I’m in motion. So sometimes that’s the cure for overwhelm. As I’ll go for a long walk, that can be a sufficient amount of motion.
Anthony Vicino:
Sometimes it needs to be a little bit more intense. But for everybody it’s going to be different. But at minimum, this activity of just writing down, if you could only get one thing done today and it would be a win, what would that one thing be? Determine that and then focus there. Give yourself permission to focus there. And in a very real way, focus is an act of courage because you are cutting off everything else in your world and just letting it go by the wayside. And that can be very, very scary. But recognize that the goal is not to make the fear go away, it’s to act in spite of that fear. And so courage is action in face of fear, right? And these are big words maybe when we’re talking about overwhelm, suddenly it’s like, oh, now, fear and courage and bravery and all these things.
Anthony Vicino:
But that’s how I think about it in a very real way. By sometimes amplifying these things and making them a little bit more grandiose, it starts to make you feel like you’re more grandiose and you’re capable of fighting big things. And so by simply saying sitting down and writing this article right now is an act of courage, I don’t know, it elevates it in your mind and you attack it with a different type of fervor than you would if it was just another mundane Tuesday task. I don’t know. So that’s going to do it for me, guys. Hopefully this helps you deal. It gives you a new strategy, maybe a new tactic for dealing with overwhelm if that’s something that you’re encountering. It was very helpful for me today.
Anthony Vicino:
I literally went through this exercise. It helped me get very clear on that. One thing was I needed to do I did that thing, and then, wouldn’t you know it, all the overwhelm went away because I had momentum. I had traction. I was moving forward, and I was no longer just kind of spinning my wheels. And sometimes that’s all you got to do is get your wheels on the ground, get some traction. So hope this brings you guys all some value. I’ll catch you tomorrow.
Anthony Vicino:
Until then, stay happy. Focused, my friends.
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