The Stories Behind Overwhelm
The key is not about whether you are or aren’t overwhelmed as a highly sensitive, or whether things are or aren’t overwhelming in your business, or whether you are afraid that you’re going to be or get overwhelmed; it’s really just a matter of how would you like to manage that energy.
Something I’ve seen over and over again with myself as well as the Highly Sensitive Entrepreneurs that I’ve mentored over the last 20 years is there is a meaning that is attached to the energy state of overwhelm.
There’s a personal story that you have activated around what it means to be overwhelmed. Some of the common themes that I’ve heard over the years are storylines that sound like:
- “I won’t be able to handle it.”
- “There’s too much to do all at once.”
- “Where do I begin?”
- “What will my family say?”
- “What if I can’t take care of it all?”
None of those storylines are valid or helpful. Often what activates overwhelm is not so much of what you need to manage in terms of tasks, but again, the meaning that you bring to what it does or does not mean.
Nothing about overwhelm is real. It’s all about what you tell yourself about it.
What is Needed to Manage the Energy of Overwhelm
What is helpful instead is to have a tangible and trackable way to manage the energy of overwhelm as a highly sensitive – an energy management tool – so you can stop it when it creeps up, and eventually even stay out of overwhelm all together.
In fact, overwhelm is the state from which so many of the energy management tools I’ve created actually came from – me, looking for a way to manage how to operate in the unpredictable, non-linear and often chaotic world of the self-employed.
The Nature of Employment vs. Self-Employment
I remember when I was first stepping into the world of being self-employed. I was stepping out of the world of being a high school teacher. If you want to talk about a structured way to operate your day, dial back your memory to what it was like being in high school. Unless you were fortunate to go to some alternative school where you got to finger paint all day, most of us have the experience of being in high school where the bell rang, you had a class to go to, you had 4 minutes to get there and so on.
Not only was that my own high school experience but that was also my experience for 8 years as a teacher. Not a lot of room for overwhelm in that much structure.
So wherever you came from career-wise before stepping into being self-employed, most likely somewhere along the line you were taught that there’s a linear way of being in your day. Then suddenly you step into the world of being self-employed and it’s like ‘Where’s the bell? Who’s ringing the bell? Why aren’t they doing their job? And how do I know where to go and what to do 40 minutes from now?’
Energy Management Tools to Manage Overwhelm
The non-linear nature of self-employment as a highly sensitive can be and feel very, very scary and frightening and confusing, which is why I created a tool like the Order Form to the Universe, which is one of the tools you can find in our “Stop the Overwhelm” Training Kit here.
This tool was created for me to get clear and create direction in order to move forward. It supported me in being able to release the clutter from my mind, even if it was just about a schedule for my day and get super-clear about:
- what I did want,
- what I didn’t want,
- how I wanted to feel,
- how I didn’t want to feel,
- how I wanted to have others feel as a response to my actions, and
- what my next inspired action was based on my answers to the previous questions
That’s an example of a tool that’s available for you to use to help you focus, to support you in creating a sense of a linear direction in a world where there’s never going to be a linear direction.
If you are expecting the world of being an entrepreneur to someday at some point even out to be more reliable, to have a bell that rings every 42 minutes, for it to be predictable, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time.
What’s ironic is that most likely what attracted most of us to being an entrepreneur is the creativity and the room for flexibility within that creativity. But then we get ourselves all freaked out because suddenly we’ve got so much of what we actually wanted but don’t know how to handle it.
When I first started being self- employed; that was one of the things I was so excited about.
“Great – I can set my own schedule! Awesome!” and then I was like, “Oh God, I’ve got to set my own schedule…”
The Nature of Being an Entrepreneur Will Never Be Linear
So it’s about beginning to release the belief that it will ever be a linear process because the truth is that you don’t want it to be. If you really, really, really want the experience of being an entrepreneur to be a linear experience, really what you want is you want to be an employee.
It’s about rectifying those 2 parts of yourself, letting go of the story that it should be more linear, that there’s something wrong with you because it’s not more organized or that there’s something wrong with you because gosh, haven’t you gotten it together enough yet so that it doesn’t feel so chaotic, so confusing and so overwhelming? When again, that story isn’t true.
The nature of being an entrepreneur is that there will always be something that’s new, something that needs to be created, a situation that needs a solution, an opportunity to go to Plan B because Plan A didn’t work exactly the way you expected it to. It’s about releasing the tendency to fight the natural nature of being an entrepreneur.
The way to do this is use tangible trackable energy management tools, like the ones we have in our Stop the Overwhelm training kit, to support yourself with moving beyond these unsupportive stories.
And again, any stories you might be telling yourself about that, about what it means about you or your abilities. It doesn’t mean anything about your or your abilities; all it means is that you’ve chosen to be an entrepreneur.
