Coach yourself out of the overwhelm with just one question.
Clients are telling me that they feel particularly overwhelmed and weighed down at the moment. ‘Struggling to see the wood for the trees’ is coming up a lot in my sessions.
I don’t want to add to the fog. I’m going to share with you one of my favourite questions to help you find your way through it.
Given everything that’s going on, what’s most important right now?
Ask yourself that question when you are feeling stuck or anxious or you catch yourself procrastinating.
Ask it in a meeting before you waste lots of time talking about the wrong problem.
Ask it in 1-to-1s to shift the person onto their real challenge, not all the lesser ones that spring to mind.
Once you pinpoint the real issue, you’ll most likely know how to deal with it.
Try a variation:
What’s the most important challenge we are facing now?What’s the real challenge we should deal with?
What’s the greatest issue facing us and what should we do about it?
Given all these options, which one has the greatest impact?
What’s the most important thing I should deal with now?
Relax your goals, adopt a more flexible mindset and just keep going
Even the most control freakish amongst us (me), have to develop a greater tolerance of uncertainty now. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Scramble to some safe ground, then move on to the next patch, whatever direction that may be in. Your goals may have to change, so don’t hold too rigidly to them or they’ll hold you back. In unchartered times like these holding too tightly to old plans can squelch innovation. Keep moving and see what happens.
I’ve just read Oliver Burkeman’s book The Antidote, Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He talks about the ‘bird in the hand’ principle: working with what we have, even if it’s not perfect.
Burkeman quotes a research project where hugely successful entrepreneurs were given an exercise to launch a new business, with a control group of seasoned senior executives from large corporates. The latter group created detailed business plans and conducted extensive market research (institutional crazy busyness). The entrepreneurs improvised, mostly finding a client and working backwards from there. Their approach was ‘Ready, fire, aim’ rather than ‘ready, aim, aim, aim.’
Burkeman likens it to a home cook using ingredients in the cupboard, rather than a trained chef concocting a vision of a dish and hunting for the perfect ingredients. The secret to the entrepreneurs’ success and resilience was flexibility.
Opportunities lie somewhere in that fog of overwhelm and uncertainty. Be brave enough to step into the fog and find them.
Forest Image (c) Liz Charsley-Jory