Overwhelm can hit anyone at any time. Any person who has a dream or goal will experience it at some stage of their journey and, if your business is centred on creativity… it’s the quickest way of blocking that creativity.

So what exactly is overwhelm and, more to the point, how can you deal with it if you’re currently experiencing it?

Overwhelm is the rising panic and worry you experience when you’re feeling snowed under. It’s the thought of not knowing where to start when you look at your “To Do” list. It’s when you have lots of great ideas or project to work through; but feel as though you’re getting lost amongst, and drowning under, the weight… it’s when you don’t feel in control of yourself or your business and your creativity has run a way and is nowhere to be found.

Stop and give yourself time

When you’re experiencing these types of feeling, it’s important that you actually give yourself time to stop and assess the situation. Take time to find the facts – are you taking on too many tasks? Have you given yourself enough time to complete a project? What’s causing the stress behind the overwhelm?

Discover your belief patterns

Is it a feeling or thought that is causing overwhelm? Do you feel as though you’re not good enough? Do you believe you’re not capable of achieving the desired end result? Make a list of what you think and feel around the situation – then write a list of how you want to feel and think about it. Self belief and having confidence in your own abilities is a great slayer of overwhelm… and is great for reconnecting with your creativity.

Prioritise and take action

Finally, break down the tasks and projects you have and put them into manageable chunks. Prioritise them in order of importance and… take action! Keep your focus only on the immediate task at hand and take baby steps towards the end goal of completion.

First, you’ve got a split second to decide if they are one of those people who want the facts – what do you actually do, not the marketing babble about what you do for me; or actually will their interest wane the second you tell them you are a coach, consultant, accountant etc. Even worse, once you’ve decided which way to answer, perhaps the story comes out jumbled, apologetic or vague. The result, you lost your moment to make the impression you wanted to.

I was at an event the other day and someone asked me a great question – What are you about, what’s your thing? How fabulous, this gave me an invitation to talk about what I love – what you expect of yourself.

When you read pop psychology, inspirational quotes and the like, the views are mixed. It’s easy to find people who say ‘expect less and you won’t be disappointed’, ‘lower your expectations you’ll be happier’, ‘the route of all heartache is expectation’ etc etc. If you are away from motivated, ie you are driven by what you don’t want to happen or fear of something, then this may work for you to some extent. It isn’t a great way to achieve what you DO want though.

The mantra of many successful leaders and business people is quite the opposite. It is very much about expecting more of people, believing in their ability and expecting them to come up with the goods. Yes, sometimes you will be disappointed, more often you’ll be amazed at just how good they are. Rightly or wrongly, most people are influenced by what others expect of them and raise or lower their performance to meet that expectation.

This is also true for what we expect of ourselves, we live up or down to those expectations. The difference is, and this is key, we have total control over what we expect of ourselves. Yes, it might take a lot of conscious effort and some time to change our expectations but it is possible. We can also choose not to live our lives by other’s expectations of or for us.

While we have an infinite capacity for self-deception, why would you settle for less than you want, then spend your time trying to convince yourself that it’s OK? Next time this happens to you, stop & think for a minute – are you really ready to give up on this particular dream or aspiration?

Change your expectations:

1. Pay attention to what you are thinking and the results you get.
2. Be clear about what you do want and focus on that, not on what you don’t want.
3. Remember that you can’t control others expectations you can only surpass them.
4. You can think you way into success just as easily as thinking your way into failure.
5. Practice, practice, practice – and don’t wait for perfection!

For those who hate networking, ask yourself what you are expecting. Do you expect to get tongue tied or vague when asked what you do? Do you expect to find it difficult to meet interesting new people or even potential clients? Do you expect to see someone you know well and spend the meeting with them?  Most critically, do you get what you expect…..

Perhaps this is a good place to start changing your expectations, be clear about why you are going to the meeting, expect to meet interesting people, expect them to be interested in you and ask good questions – ones that encourage others to talk with passion.

So my thing ….. Expect more – of yourself and for yourself, you may just be surprised by your own brilliance!

 

This is a re-run of a blog from a couple of years ago, for which I make no apology – it is worth another read.

How often do we get stuck in the same routine, doing the same thing, often with the same people and coasting through our work and even our lives. It’s easy and comfortable and we feel safe. But what would happen to your life if you did one brave thing everyday?

I guess the first question is what constitutes a brave thing? Is it something heroic, where you face mortal danger? Or is it simply something that moves you out of your comfort zone – even for a few minutes, something that gives you a different perspective? I would say both apply, but the opportunity to do the later is much more readily available.

The reality for many people is that they stay safe, play a small game, and settle for OK, while justifying why they can’t or won’t do something simply because it is too risky.

Now I’m not talking about waking up polar bears here! I’m talking about everyday stuff, the opportunities that fly in and out of our lives while we are running the potential scenarios and outcomes through our heads. We look at the risk – real or imagined – and if we don’t like it we create all sorts of reasons why we can’t take the opportunity. Most of us have a great bank of excuses ready to draw on, you know the ones, ‘I’m just too busy’, ‘I can’t get childcare’, ‘it wouldn’t work for me because…’, and a whole load of I’d love to but ….’ excuses.

All of these are great excuses not to expose yourself, but lets be honest what would really happen if you took a bit of a risk each day?

For example: you meet someone you’ve always admired and would love to work with and he says “give me a ring”. Great you think, then you spend days putting off making the call while you perfect what you want to say, or wait for the right moment, etc etc. A week goes by and you’ve not called yet. Then you start to talk yourself out of the call, it’s too late now, they won’t remember me and guess what you never make it. But you do re visit the scenario every now and then just to remind yourself that it wouldn’t have worked for you.

What if you’d just been brave and picked up the phone the next day and said hello and gone from there? You may or may not have got the outcome you wanted, but you’d stand a much better chance of getting it. The likelihood is you’d also save yourself a whole load of emotional energy worrying about it too.

For me doing one brave thing a day quite simply means getting on with the stuff that holds me back in my business and my life. The things I have to stretch myself to do, where I don’t feel quite comfortable or confident. Things like recently running my first live webinar, I was terrified the technology would let me down. It reminded me of a time about 10-12 years ago when I had to give a powerpoint presentation for the first time, same fear. Did I still do it? Yes of course, it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough and the next one was even better, mostly because I was concentrating on the webinar not the technology.

I’d not really thought of stuff like that as being brave, but it is and kind of heroic too. Sort of rescuing yourself from yourself, and don’t we all need and deserve to be saved from time to time. So my challenge for you is to look at what you do and perhaps more importantly what you don’t do that you might want to do, then decide where you might need to take action.

So what difference could you make to your life by doing one brave thing a day?

What happens, as we get older, feel we have a reputation to uphold, we need to prove and justify and we transmit what we believe will make us credible. Exit the real you ……

We may look and say the adolescents’ view would be a bit clichéd for someone older and maybe it is, but surely it’s better to share a bit of who we are than just what we do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying young people don’t care what others think. Of course they do, and there was plenty of angst about whether they would achieve, whether they were good enough, whether people would approve just as you might expect. At the same time though there was a sense of optimism and expectation in the way they show up on social media.

You see, we all need confidantes, trusted friends, mentors and we all need to explore and move through challenges and anxieties. What we don’t need is to keep telling ourselves we have something to prove. No one needs to justify their existence to clients, to friends or family and most of all to ourselves.

If you can learn to value yourself, understand what your special value to others is and how you contribute to the world then the job is half done.

Try:

Identifying What You Value

• Write, draw, record (whatever medium you like best) all the things you value about yourself.
• Give yourself time and space – it’s not always an easy exercise if you’ve not used to finding the good stuff.
• Acknowledge any negative thoughts, recognize they have a purpose (may be it is to keep you safe, protected or unchallenged, you know at some level what their purpose is) and let them go. Draw your focus back to the things you value
• When you can think of no more ask yourself very specifically “what else do I value”
• Keep writing until you have satisfied yourself you have everything out

What Is Your Special Value To Others

• Write, draw, record (whatever medium you like best) all the things you believe others value in you
• Prioritise your list, what are your top 3?
• Now the scary bit – ask people! Ask your friends, your family and your work colleagues what they most value and what do you contribute in their relationship with you
• Find the themes in this information, in there will be the value you bring to others
• Identify how this compares to your top 3

Distill your answers from above and decide how you want to contribute to the world.

All that is left is finding the courage to stand up and shine. Your social media profiles may be a place to start, do they really reflect you and the value you bring, is it really what you want to share?

I’m off now to revisit my profiles ….

Do tell us what you think in the comments section below.

If you liken this to your life, your dreams, or your business the same is true – except that experiences, expectations, and self-belief often conspire to restrict the size of your ocean. They may not even be your experiences and expectations, but those of the people who influence you, care about you and spend time with you.  Before you know it the vast oceans you saw as a small child have shrunk to a safe area by the beach, or worse a swimming pool.

What I mean is, we start out with great plans and great expectations for ourselves, but as things become difficult or doubts creep in we start to review our plan and create all sorts of obstacles and reasons why we can’t do something, or why it’s different for us. So eventually we settle for swimming in a smaller safe area.

There are three kinds of obstacle in my ocean:

1. The lighthouses
2. The currents along the way
3. The sharks

Lighthouses

These are material obstacles are that can make pursuing your dream practically difficult. They are things you can’t just plough through; you need to navigate around them.

They might include things like:

• Financial constraint
• Family commitments
• Your health or fitness
• Your current skills and knowledge
• Profile and contacts in your industry
• Access to your ideal clients

None of these are insurmountable if you work them into your plan. Remember lighthouses are there to illuminate the way, and keep you from crashing against the rocks. If you believe they are impossible to navigate round it might be your obstacles are sharks not lighthouses.

Currents

The second group of obstacles are the currents you run into on your voyage, the things that might throw you off track, or even worse drown you if you don’t take action to keep safe. These are things you hadn’t planned for, or expected to encounter, they change the horizon, even if temporarily.

The key to navigating the tides is in the way you react; your behaviour, your attitude, and, most of all, the action you take. We all perceive circumstances differently and that perception can make all the difference in how we ride the waves. Our responses, the energy and the passion (positive or negative) that we put into the situation, impacts on how those around us react too. Choose to interpret obstacles and events in a way that empowers and reinforces your path to success. This may be by navigating a different route, it may mean going back and learning how to navigate this particular current or it may mean maintaining focus and direction and riding out the storm. It doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening and swimming against the waves as this will eventually exhaust you.

Again if you really can’t find a way to navigate the currents you should check they are not sharks.

Sharks

The sharks are the thinks that appear in your ocean, the beliefs, expectations and experiences that keep you close to the shore, in safe water – or your comfort zone. These are the most dangerous of obstacles because they are internal, somewhere in your subconscious. They stem from fear, a perception of lack, or your attitude and they can stop you from taking action all together.

Big fears include:

• Failure
• Success
• Ridicule
• Lack of money
• Not being good enough, etc.

A huge amount of energy and time is wasted worrying about the what-if’s, and because we overthink stuff, we imagine so many variants and different scenarios, we can finish up confused and paralysed. In other words afraid to go into the oceans in case the sharks get us. The only real way out of fear is to take action and move through the fear. Before you can do this you need to understand what, specifically, you are afraid of, where it comes from and what you are prepared to do to resolve it.

The good news is that by developing your Success Mindset you will identify this and tackle these obstacles. To learn more about Lynda Holt’s 7 Steps to a Success Mindset visit http://www.lyndaholt.co.uk  or get her latest book ‘Get Out Of Your Own Way – how to stop sabotaging your business and stand out in a crowded market’  available on Amazon

Sometimes life can feel very tough, unfair or even impossible and you know, sometimes it is.I know most of you who read my blog are in some form of ‘helping’ profession – so we know the answers don’t we? You know the ones, the clichés – you choose how you react, your responsible for what you attract into your life, it’s all about your attitude etc etc. And to some extent this is all true, although not necessarily immediately helpful when you find yourself or a loved one in the middle of a crisis.

So why the uncharacteristic gloom? Well, I believe that sometimes you need to go there to come back. It’s important to acknowledge when you feel you’ve been dealt a rough deal, to feel the pain, and see what it teaches you. However it’s equally important to hold on to where you are going, especially when life deals you a rough deal.

I love Whoopi’s quote,

“Children of the world – never give up on your dream”

Your dream matters; and having something big, maybe scary, perhaps not quite realistic out there waiting for us matters too. It is this that drives us to be who we really are, to find our inner potential and to sparkle. You can spot the people who have this, and you can spot those who’ve lost it. The difference is often as simple as what we believe, what habits we have and what we fill our lives with. Our dreams get lost because of conflict between our desires and what we believe to be possible. For this read what we believe about ourselves and our emotional state.

Of course life gets in the way, we focus on the practical day to day stuff that has to get done. So why is it some people fly and sparkle and get what they set out to and some don’t?

A recent client of mine really struggles with this – she says some people are just lucky and she’s not! People don’t help her or support her in the way others get supported and it everything is more difficult for her because she has no support. Well there are a whole load of value judgments to work with there, (and I do like clients who make my life this easy). The key thing I want to pick up on though is being lucky.

Luck isn’t about some fairy godmother shining down on you and making things happen; it’s about a strategy, knowing what you want, who can help you get it, and how you can engage them in your mission.

Luck is about believing in yourself, by this I don’t mean always unconditionally believing you’re good at everything you do and its easy – if your there you’re probably too settled in your comfort zone and not following your dream!

By believing in yourself I mean truly believing that you deserve your dream, that you have the internal resources (however deeply buried) to achieve your dream and that you can ask others for help because you are worth it.

Believing in yourself also means managing your emotions – or dealing with the doubters (internal and external). Look at your life patterns if you don’t feel lucky, what happens when someone else dismisses your idea or dream, how do you react? Do you go into instant meltdown and disregard your idea as not possible, do you get angry and spend the next half hour trying to justify your position to yourself. Or do you see it for what it is, their perception, often given out of kindness or concern for you – especially if they are you family or friends, but limiting non the less. Lucky people have learned to manage other peoples’ perceptions, take what is useful and disregard the rest. They also learn to seek council or support from those who stretch them, help them towards their goal, which of course reinforces their sense of worth and value.

Internal doubts are even more important to manage. Lucky or successful people don’t have an unconditional belief they can do anything brilliantly – they have just as many doubts about their ability and as many moments of overwhelm as people who believe themselves to be unlucky. They just have better strategies for dealing with them. One of the main strategies being an underlying self worth, this enables them to separate the immediately “scary task” from their perception of themselves as a successful human being! Another is not worrying too much about the ‘what if’s’, living life in the present.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of a lucky person is the ability to take action that moves them towards their dream. Luck isn’t something that just happens, it’s something we have to work at. We have the emotional resource to protect ourselves from those who doubt us – most of the time. We put ourselves in places and with people that stretch us, raise our game and create opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise have; and when these opportunities present themselves lucky people grab them. We don’t talk ourselves out of them with reasons why we can’t do it – often excuses created to protect ourselves from perceived failure.

Lucky people have this deep held belief that we deserve our dream, we find the necessary resources (internal and external) to keep us on our journey. Of course we have the occasional wobble when life deals a curve ball; but we do choose how respond to stuff, sometimes that’s with hurt and anger, and that’s ok. In the end it’s what we learn from it that builds our coping strategies, resilience and self worth.

So what do you need to do to be one of the ‘lucky ones’? Do you have your dream, know what lights you up, excites you and makes you want to leap up and grab life? If not how can you go about re discovering it – because you had it once. Even though you probably know all this stuff and are brilliant at doing it with your clients, you need to take the time, even a few minutes a day, to do it for yourself too. Identify what gets in your way, what helps you and what’s going on when you feel like you’re really alive.

Go out and create your own luck, and live your dream.

I love this time of year, all chilled and relaxed from the summer. Whether it’s embedded from my own school / university days or whether its children going back after school holiday, the warm early autumn days always feel like a time for renewed focus, learning and growth. So a few days ago, as a birthday treat to myself, and something we all deserve to do regularly, I took myself off to think about what I want to learn and focus on this autumn.

As well as the great list of stuff I’m really passionate about, you know the ones that really ‘fill your well’, came a few things that if I knew more about or did a little better my life would be a whole lot easier. Top of the list – social media!!! I have my profiles and pages, I post periodically, engage in conversations, invite new contacts, share links to info I’ve found valuable and support friends and colleagues, I’ve even done some keyword SEO on my profile, so tick done social media. WRONG

Very often your social media profiles are the first thing people see of you, people regularly decide whether of not to engage with you based on your social media presence and people regularly sell themselves short, particularly on sites like linked in. Not because they are to modest about achievements or experiences, not even because they don’t fill in all of their profile, (although this doesn’t help) but because they write their profile when they set up a social media account and there it sits, a testament to their progress up until they joined linked in etc, never updated.

These profiles are your dynamic CV. They are your chance to tell people, (including those who may not know you yet), what you want them to know, what you want to talk about and who you want to seen as by others. In other words how you sell yourself. So what are you saying about yourself?

I’ve looked at some of my friends’ profiles, and (with her permission) I’d like to share one as an example. Many moons ago when we were both nurses, Clare and I worked together, now we are both business owners, in fact she is one of my private clients. So Clare’s profile talked about her nursing career, her promotions and success in the NHS, of which there are many, and her qualifications, at the bottom of which is a diploma in aromatherapy and a couple of other alternative therapy qualifications. Her current job title, Staff Nurse, NHS professionals.

The problem – apart from adding a new web address Clare has not undated her profile in the last 12 months since she started her business. The result what Clare says about herself is – I’m a really well qualified nurse, working as an agency staff nurse although I have held much more senior roles in the past. The all important action – to update her profile before our next session.

Once you’re all set up and running it’s really easy to forget to keep your profiles updated as well as your content. If you want social media to work for you I believe it is even more important to ensure your profiles reflect what you want to say about yourself – they may be the only thing potential contacts look at. So I’m off now to ensure my linked in profile is update!!!