Overcoming Overwhelm: Replay of Effective Strategies for Business Owners

Experiencing a sense of overwhelm? Feel like you're suffering from fogged thinking, panic, or just don't know where to start? This week we are airing a replay of a popular episode and even if you're listened it before, this is your sign to listen again. 

Life as a business owner can sometimes feel like you're on a hamster wheel, constantly chasing deadlines, dealing with emergencies, and never quite catching your breath. But what if I told you that it doesn't have to be this way? I'm here to share strategies that can help you shift from a reactive mode to a more proactive one, enabling you to take control and steer your life towards success. 

In this episode, let's dive deep into the root of overwhelm and how to free yourself from it. I'll break down the top four reasons why business owners often feel overwhelmed and I'll arm you with effective strategies to stay organized, maintain productivity, and live the life you truly want.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 2:07

Are you a woman who runs the world but know you need a little support to Listen up? Through coaching clients and pursuing my own health and ambitions, I've found getting to a goal takes more than just willpower. It takes a mindset restart and learning how to adjust and not quit. In this podcast, you'll hear from women out there leading the way in momentum and I'll be sharing impactful mindset strategies to help you get out of your own way. Whether you're on a health journey, starting your life after a big change or trying to keep up momentum towards your passion project, with all the ups and downs, this is for you. It's time to decrease the things that hold you back and increase the things that move you forward towards a life that you want. I'm Amber Bebelheimer and this is the Momentum Restart Podcast.

Speaker 1: 2:59

I have a toy fire extinguisher on my desk. It lives there. A friend sent it to me as a joke because some days, as a business owner, it can feel like you're just putting out fires every single day and on those days when you're putting out fires all day long, you never actually get to the things that you want to do and, even more importantly, you don't get to the needle moving things in your business. You feel like you are working all day in your business but not seeing that growth and shift forward. Overwhelm happens when we are stuck in reactive mode, working in our business instead of on our business. It's that feeling of working all day. Maybe you can relate to this feeling like you've been working all day, you've checked off so many boxes, but you're feeling behind and you get to the end of the day and you think what did I even accomplish today? You're just keeping afloat. Really, that is all you're doing and overwhelm comes in. So I want to dig into overwhelm today, because it's a word that I hear often. When I'm creating 90 day plans for clients, we always start with. I love to hear where we're starting from, and so I want to ask you today how would you describe your schedule right now? What's one word? And there's no right or wrong answer and there's no judgment on how you feel. This question really gives us insight to know where we're starting from, and I've heard so many different answers and a lot of them run in with the words of it feels chaotic or non-existent or overwhelming. Overwhelming is the word that pops up a lot and ultimately, a lot of you are feeling like you're just living in reactive mode. And I get it. I've been there and I get it.

Speaker 1: 5:15

And I have been reading lately this book, atlas of the Heart, from Bernay Brown. It's one of the books I was reading this winter and she was describing overwhelm, the feeling of overwhelm. In this book of Atlas of the Heart, it's describing all the different feelings that we have and what that might feel like in our body or why it's happening and all these different things. And what's so interesting is when she was describing the word overwhelm, she pointed out that it's not a feeling. Overwhelm is not a feeling. It's a reaction. It's a physical reaction, a mental reaction to the stress or events that are happening around you, all of those fires, right, that are happening around you. It's too much. I was looking at the definition today of what is overwhelm and all the definitions were saying it's just too much, there's too many things happening at once. It overtakes. And when we feel overwhelmed, what happens is when we can start to feel foggy, we can start to feel like we can't concentrate, we're unable to make decisions, even all the way up to the other end of. If that keeps building and we don't stop that overwhelm, our heart starts to race, we're not able to catch our breath, we're in a panic and I've been there. We can also feel like we just don't know where to start first. What do we do first? And so what happens so often when we're overwhelmed is we don't do anything at all, we freeze. This happens when we feel in the weeds in our business.

Speaker 1: 6:59

We moved into this house that my husband and my two boys live in. Now we live in a single family home. You know it was our first home with a yard. I think it was six years ago when Jack was a baby. Jack was a baby, max was two years old. We moved in, loved this house. Everything that we wanted on our list was in this house. We just knew we had a lot of work to do on this house, from touching everything in it before we can move in, including the yard.

Speaker 1: 7:32

We had this dream, this proactive vision of what we wanted was a big backyard for the boys to run in and for us to play games in and to play and have friends over, and we saw this potential for this yard. But in our yard we moved in, there were literal weeds. There was this beautiful mind you beautiful wildflower garden in the backyard to attract bees, which is beautiful, and there was no way my kids could run through it. There was this huge vegetable garden, which is amazing. I know that I cannot garden. It is something I can. I'm sure I could figure it out, but in this time of my life I cannot. It is not gonna happen. Both my husband and I, yard work is not our thing. We do what we need to do to take care of what we have. But we knew that that's not what we wanna spend our time on, and so what we did is we were in these weeds, looking around, thinking we can't live proactively how we wanna live in this yard with all of these weeds, and so we got rid of everything. We removed the wildflower garden, we put inside. We removed the vegetable garden, we put inside, and now we have this beautiful flat, open space and we have used it every single day since we've lived here playing tag and playing baseball and playing soccer and having friends over and doing the slip and slide, and we love it. But we had to get out of the weeds in order to proactively live that life that we wanted back there.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Did you know you can increase your quality of life just by having a simple daily plan. Running a business is overwhelming at times. That constant rolling thought of how to make things better, who needs what, and what the next step is it can keep you running on a hamster wheel. I get it, I've been there. Now imagine jumping off that hamster wheel and running forward. You wake up with relief, order, peace. You are able to savor that hot, steaming cup of morning coffee because you're not in a rush, because you know exactly what you need to check off the list that day, to move the needle. This is what a 90 day done for you plan can do for you Personalize weekly strategy to help you be productive, efficient and effective in your business, so that you can enjoy your life too, because freedom to live your life is what is really important. Dm me the word 90 days and I'll send you the next step to your ideal plan. Or you can visit coachamberbycom and click on productivity packages to schedule your session now, because these days fill up really fast, with only four spots available monthly, and the best time to start your ideal life is now. So DM me the word 90 days at coachamberby or click on productivity packages on my website, coachamberbycom. So when we're working on our business, we're able to step up and out of the weeds of working in our business.

Speaker 1: 11:21

So why does this happen so often? Why does overwhelm happen so often as business owners? And there's four things that I see happen over and over and over again that causes overwhelm. The first is you think everything is an emergency. You think everything is an emergency. Every client reaching out to you, every new initiative that you're doing in your business, every new lead magnet, everything that you're doing, you're treating it as an emergency and that heightens our emotions to feel like it's too much and there's overwhelm. And I promise you it's not. Everything is not an emergency. Most likely, zero things in your business are an emergency. It's a business and things happen every day. Things are going to happen that are completely out of our control. We adjust and we don't quit. The research I've been doing lately on CEOs, the most successful CEOs, all of them over and over again, all the different research I've been reading, is how they have the power. They have the knowledge and the power and the capacity to restart, to adjust. Not everything is an emergency. We can't be afraid of those emergencies. We need to stop treating everything like it is Number two.

Speaker 1: 12:56

The reason why this happens so often as business owners feeling overwhelmed is you're spending so much of your time consuming everything and everyone around you, hoping for the next right step that's going to help you get there, that's going to help you succeed, when really truly it's already in you. That's how I coach, that's how I work through the done for you plan. You know what you want to do. You don't come to me and I give you the same 90 day plan I gave someone else to get to XYZ. No, we dig into what you really want, what you're made of, how you're made and what capacity you want to serve. That is the next right step. It's already in you. When we're consuming so much all the time, there's so much noise, that's too much, that's overwhelm, and then so often we're either living reactively to the latest thing we heard or we're not doing anything because we don't know what the next right step is.

Speaker 1: 14:06

The third reason I've seen why this happens so often as business owners feeling overwhelmed is you put so much pressure on yourself to do it all, so much pressure to do everything, and I want to remind you again, as I have so many times, you are enough. Right now, you are enough. And this pressure leads me into number four, because I really believe they go hand in hand. So often you can feel responsible for people's feelings and actions, ie your clients. You're feeling responsible for your clients feelings and actions, especially as a coach or a service provider. If you're in that industry, it's so easy to feel responsible for the actions that your clients are or not taking, but ultimately they are responsible for their feelings and their actions. You are only responsible for you to show up in your best way possible and to coach and serve in the best way possible, and then they have to take action.

Speaker 1: 15:21

So I'm curious which one of these hit home for you today?

Speaker 1: 15:28

Is it thinking everything's an emergency when it's really not?

Speaker 1: 15:33

Are you consuming too much, just searching for that next right step instead of trusting yourself? Are you putting too much pressure on yourself to do it all instead of remembering you are enough? Or are you taking on responsibility for your clients that you don't need to, that you're not responsible for, for their feelings and actions? I want to know, and I would ask you today to drop that in the review and tell me which one of these stood out to you the most, so that I can create a follow up episode for you to specifically help you let go of that area of overwhelm and stop living in that reactive mode and experience what being proactive in your life and business can really feel like. In this next quarter, it is absolutely possible to have strategy and take action proactively so that you feel like you are winning every single day and you'll have more time to enjoy the life that you're building. Thank you for listening to this episode of Momentum Restart Podcast. I would love to hear what you think about it. What were your takeaways? What action steps do you now want to take? Dm me on Instagram at coachamberby and let's keep this conversation going. I promise I respond to every message I get. Talk with you soon.