6 Surefire Tricks for Getting Past Overwhelm

Christine Li  0:01  
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode 72. One of the very first pieces of work that I do with new clients is I listened to their current situation, and I listened for what is causing them to feel overwhelmed. When any of us feels overwhelmed, we are not functioning at our best. And my goal. And typically the client's goal is always to restore that feeling of wellness that I think is natural to us. And I think we all crave feeling overwhelmed is not fun, and interferes with how we see ourselves how we see our work with our focus and how we view our future opportunities. In this episode, you're going to hear six great tricks that you can rely on to develop a smoother way of working and to keep overwhelm at bay. Let's go listen to this episode together now.

Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they can begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn a powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast.

My purpose in hosting this podcast is to help you stay in your state of flow. Or to help you learn how to develop that state of flow. If you feel like you've not felt it yet, flow is that feeling that there is no fear in your mind or your heart, and nothing that can keep you from moving forward in the direction that you choose to go. It's a great feeling state. Procrastination, fear and feeling overwhelmed are all forces and habits that we get ourselves involved in that go against our natural state of flow. And notice that I use the word natural there on purpose because I do believe that we at our core are ready for action. We're ready for creativity, and we're ready for growth that is our natural desire. It's our natural ability. And by nature, we like to be in flow. Even though right now you might be caught in a very old pattern of feeling stuck or not in flow, you're stuck from your desire and your ability to move in perfect and smooth flow, you really are just temporarily held back from that natural, well performing part of yourself. So let's get you back to flow. If you're feeling overwhelmed today, that's my purpose for this particular episode. i By the way, used to live in a chronic state of overwhelm, I just left my chest by the way, if you're not watching me on video, I was behind on stuff all the time and more stuff was always coming my way. And I felt like I had no idea of how to stop this frenetic pace, this frantic feeling inside my heart and the stress that seemed to keep building and building. But that was until I learned that I can actually alter my relationship with getting things done. Here are some of the tricks that helped me to heal my relationship with getting things done, and allowed me to actually heal my relationship with myself in the process. The first trick that I have for you today is for you to remember that nothing is really that critical. Most of us are not dealing with life or death situations and issues on a day to day basis, fortunately, but our nervous system sometimes are acting as if we were and I just want you to pause and wonder why is that? Why do you feel everything is on the line? Every time you look at the next thing that you have on your to do list? Why is everything feeling so critical? Why do we constantly put ourselves in a state of crisis examine that and learn to approach each new task with a sense of calm in your heart instead of starting with a sense of panic? I want you to start a new and start by making sure that you're feeling calm in your body and your mind before you approach your next task. Learn how to relax while you work. Don't wait until the finish line And to feel happy and relaxed, I want you to feel happy and relaxed. Before you even start. I feel like that's a major secret of being productive and getting things done, and not making yourself nuts in the process. All right, the second trick that I have for you is to remember your creativity allow your creativity to flow. When we get all caught up in being everything for everybody, and we try to make everything just so imperfect, we tend to lose sight of the fact that our brains typically have the answers that we're looking for. Already, we're just blocking our natural intuition and intelligence. When we get into this, everything needs to be perfect idea. When we relax our approach to getting things done. Remember what I just said, in step one, we begin to trust our brains more and more. And it's easier for our brains, to feed us with the ideas that we once thought were so far away that we were incapable of coming up with, we no longer feel stuck, we start to trust our intuition and the ideas that are springing forward in our minds. And then we develop our confidence and our creativity. At the same time. It's that creativity that is just waiting to come out and to support you fully. Trust me it is there. Even if you're saying all of that Dr. Lee, she's talking garbage again, I want you to really believe that you have what it takes deep inside, and start to trust your brain and the nudges that it's giving you it's trying to communicate with you. And you may be in a habit of just not listening to yourself and feeling too nervous about your performance, to really trust the good material that you have, creatively. So start to trust yourself, start to slow your pace, so that you can feel calmer and trust your intuition, your creative mind, and your good brain once again. Alright, the third trick that I have for you, is to make sure that you don't burn yourself out what is overwhelmed in the first place. Overwhelm is that state when we have so many things going on, that our ego can't tolerate the stress and the amount of things that we're looking at. So fix that pattern of getting overwhelmed. Make sure that you have rest periods every single day, make sure that you have several rest periods. Over the course of a day, make sure you are handling one thing at a time, even when there are multiple deadlines looming, because I believe we focus much better when we have one thing in front of us. And we have one thing to focus on, focusing on all the things makes us feel overwhelmed. It makes us feel like we're getting nowhere. And it makes us feel like we're in a crisis. Again, we want to move away from that feeling that we can't handle things. And that our to do list is going to eat us alive. Do not sacrifice your body to get your work done. That's part of that tip of not burning yourself out, make sure you're keeping your diet healthy, make sure you're doing regular exercise, even if even if it's a little bit every other day that still counts. Because you're keeping yourself again in that attitude and motion of flow. Make sure your body knows how to perform consistently and well. Without that high stress level, tearing it apart. The fourth trick that I have for you is to find the joy in working. One of the most common comments that I get from new clients is that they find their work is hard, or the thing that they want to get to is frustrating. And I teach them right away. That it's that perception that things are hard and difficult and frustrating that keeps us literally away from our work, it makes us want to run in the opposite direction. And my purpose is to help you to feel like you want to run towards your work that you're attracted to your work, that you're attracted to the idea of getting it done, that you're attracted to the idea of pure freedom, when you turn your work in or when you press publish, or when you close the book for the evening. That really it's that joy of knowing that you can go through the beginning, the middle and the end of your work and feel good about yourself and the work throughout. We're basically eliminating that story. That work is always frustrating work is always too hard for us and that we're never good enough for how we'd like to perform. Because those stories are keeping us underperforming and in a procrastination state Those stories are keeping us sad, and underperforming. So let's get out of those false stories, find the joy that you can have in working again, don't see things as burdens, don't see yourself as a burden and go get them decide that you can create an entirely new relationship with working so that you can feel the benefits of being engaged in your work, being focused, having creativity flowing, and having real productivity. At the end of the day when your head is hitting the pillow. And you're feeling great about how the day went. The fifth trick that I have for you is, you are allowed to take the shortcuts. I don't often times teach this tip because I tend to help people work more quickly and work more easily. But sometimes, they're just shortcuts that are available to us that sometimes we might think, oh, it's not really legitimate to do this so quickly, or to have this be easy. And I'm just here to tell you, we want things to be easy. It's wonderful when shortcuts present themselves, or when we find them, or when we get into a flow. And things really don't take as much time as they used to enjoy those shortcuts. You are not an illegitimate worker, your process of working is not illegitimate, you're actually just getting better and better at it. You're getting smarter at getting things done, you're becoming your higher, productive self. So enjoy that. Don't feel like you're sneaking around, you're not everything's on the up and up. You're just getting better at this. Remember that done is great. Done takes far less time than perfect. So get things done and get to the other side of your work so that you can have a lot more free time and that you can enjoy that free time really fully without guilt without shame and without things hanging over your head anymore.

The last trick that I have for you trick number six is to remember to breathe. I was recently being interviewed for a podcast by my voice coach Tracy Goodwin, she's amazing. Listen to I think it's episode six. It's one of my first episodes with Tracy Goodwin on this podcast. Her podcast is captivate the room. So I was being interviewed for that podcast, and I was enjoying my conversation with her things were really flowing, we were enjoying ourselves so much. And at the very end of the episode, I started feeling like my voice was straining. And I started to cough. It was a mild cough. But if you've ever been a podcast guest, you know, you don't want to have a coughing fit in the middle of a podcast episode. So I was done with my coughing. We turned off the recording, everything was fine. And I asked her what was that about? And I asked her was I talking from my throat again, something that I've had a habit of doing in the past. And she had corrected that habit so that I started to talk from my mouth instead of my throat. And she said, No, Christine, your voice is fine. You're just not breathing when you're talking. And I could not counter that I knew the moment she said that, that that was true. I was basically forcing the words out of my body without breathing. And so I was having difficulty at the end of the 45 minute interview. In getting the words out. It just makes sense. If you have no gas in the tank of your car, your car doesn't run as well. So that is the root of this particular trick. I want you not to forget to breathe, breathe when you're talking. Breathe when you're working. Breathe when you're resting breath is basically the rhythm of your life. Breath is what keeps us alive. Breath is what keeps us having gas in the tank, when we're trying to think of new things or get things done. So remember the rhythm of your life and remember to give yourself the benefit of calming yourself down of taking a deep breath of maybe even stopping for some intentional deep diaphragmatic breaths. Diaphragmatic just means that you're seeing your stomach move in and out that you have this deeper well of breath from the diaphragm, the lower part of your torso and take that time for yourself. Again, it's not a legitimate it's actually the way we're supposed to be talking and working. So remember to breathe, go with the pace that is right for you. Try not to rush things as I was trying to rush those words out on that podcast interview and learn learn from your mistakes at Secure coaches, what do I need to do to speak more clearly to speak more powerfully, these lessons tend to build upon each other and you get better and better and better. So that's the list that I have for you of the six tricks that can help you move past. Overwhelmed. I'm wondering, what do you have to add to this list? I'm dying to know. So please let me know what you tend to do. To make sure you stay clear of overwhelm send me a direct message. On Instagram. I'm procrastination coach on Instagram. And let me know your secret trick. Let me know what tends to work for you. And I would love to share that out. If you give me permission to do that, I will start a conversation with everyone over on Instagram. Let's make sure that we use these tricks day after day after day, so that we make time to have our success. Thank you so much for being here today for listening to these tricks. For really considering how we can add to our performance without adding stress to our performance. Let's calm our nervous systems down. Let's add the breathing. Let's add the planning. Let's add the focus. And let's enjoy the extra time that we have at the end of the day. I look forward to hearing about all your stories of success. And I'll see you next week when the next episode drops on Thursday. Thanks so much for being here. Bye. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. We'll talk to you soon.

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