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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Parenting Podcast (formerly The Horsemanship Journey Podcast). My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
Today talking about overwhelm, being overwhelmed. You hear, you know, overwhelmed is so common. Hear it so much with parents of teens. I just—so much talk about this feeling of overwhelm.
You know, one thing about it, there's just oh so much to do as a parent. You know, you got to get to work. You got to provide, right? You got to make sure that your job's going good. You got to take care of these kids. You got to maintain your household. You got to maintain the relationship with your whoever—spouse or whoever it is—and your kids. And they have dance, and they have sports, and they have this, and they have that, and have church, and blah, whatever the old things are.
It's an endless—you know—endless, endless tasks, right? Just list after list after list of the to-dos. So much to take care of, maintain your own relationships and everything that goes into all that, and all this activity you got going. It could just feel overwhelming, like it's just too much. How are you gonna get it all done? Right?
My clients at Stable Living, they describe overwhelm as feeling stuck, frozen, just not able to take action. Right? Just not knowing what to do and having too much to do and not enough time to do it, or the frustration of being bogged down and just consumed by so much tasks. There's just so much to do.
You know, I was just sitting there one day staring at the wall or something. My wife came in, she's like, "What you doing?" I'm like, "I have so much to do." You know? She might have been thinking, "Why aren't you doing it?" You know, which would have been a good thought. She didn't say that. I'm not sure I would appreciate it at times she would have, but really, why wasn't I doing it?
When you ask people why they feel overwhelmed, they usually say things like they're confused, right? With the number of things that they have to decide. They just can't decide. There's just so many things that go into it. There's just so much. They can't—they're confused with the number of choices.
We don't know what to do with all the things that aren't going my way. That's one for me too. I mean, if one more thing happens that’s not going my way, I just don't know what I—I can't do anything. Everything I do just goes the wrong way.
So we just—we can't decide what to do with it. We can't decide what to do with the things—too many things or the things that aren't going away. We just can't decide. Stuck, okay? We're stuck in overwhelm.
Most people think that the number of things on their to-do list or the number of the things that they perceive as going wrong in their life are what causes overwhelm, right?
"I just have so much to do. I'm overwhelmed. Can't you see? I've got all these things to do. I'm overwhelmed."
That's what overwhelm is—too many things to do. When in fact, the number of things on your to-do list has nothing, okay, to do with what you're feeling. What you're feeling is based on what you're thinking about the things on your to-do list or what you're thinking about the things that you think that are going wrong. Okay? It's what you are choosing to think—consciously or not—about those things. That is those thoughts that are causing you to have this feeling of overwhelm. Okay? Not the things on the to-do list.
You can prove that. You can talk to people and do, or I've seen it so many times. And what I'll do is I'll say, “Okay, well, you have so many things to do. Okay, let's go through what they are. Okay.” And you list, and maybe they can come up with 10, or maybe they can come up with five. Maybe they can come up with 20. Nobody usually gets past 20.
And then you look at somebody else and say, “Well, you know, well, I've got more to do than that.” And they—you know—they've got a hundred things on their list and they don't seem to think it's fine. You know? Or they come up with three things, but it feels like it's way too much.
The point of it is, is when you break it down and look at it, it's easier to see that it's not those things. Okay? It's not those things when you break it down and look at it. And even if you said it's because of these, you could have another person with the same list—whatever the size of the list—look at it and say, "That's nothing, I got it. No overwhelm, I'm just gonna move forward through it."
So it has nothing to do with the list. Okay? It’s when we choose to indulge ourselves in overwhelm. And I said that word—when we choose to indulge in it—because we are just indulging in it.
And here's what I mean. As miserable as it sounds to be overwhelmed, it's usually better than we perceive the alternative to be, okay? And here's what I mean.
When we're faced with a whole bunch of choices, and we have so many choices, like we have to make so many decisions on a daily basis, we have so many choices, and it seems like there's more and more choices all the time, right? Just look at—turn on your TV and look at all the apps and how many things you could choose to watch or how many buttons you can push on your phone. I mean, just for a beginning, right?
But when we're faced with a lot of choices, a lot of times we avoid making decisions. And that—when we avoid making those decisions—then that's one of the things that keeps us confused and in overwhelm. Okay?
And it seems like not making the decision a lot of time—like I said—even though that's going to be uncomfortable, and it doesn't sound fun, it doesn't sound happy, it sounds pretty uncomfortable to be in overwhelm, to be confused and paralyzed and frozen and not making progress. It doesn't sound too pleasant.
But a lot of times it's preferable to our mind, to our brain, because we might think that it would be worse if we made the wrong decision. Okay—the wrong decision.
So that brings up this: well, is every decision right or wrong?
A lot of times we choose to think that every decision that we're making is going to be right or wrong. And we don't want to make the wrong one for so many reasons, right? Why would we want to make the wrong one?
What will people think about us? What will happen? What will we think about us? Right? What will the consequences be? What if I fail? What if this? What if that?
And so, when we view decisions as right and wrong, that's one thing that—right there—it’s a choice. And, you know, I've noticed that the more times that I make decisions not have a right and wrong—to just have a right and a right, or a good and a better, or if it doesn't work out, I'll change it to the other one—that I am able to make the decision easier on something that seems like a harder decision. Right?
"Well, if I do this, things will be good. And if I do this, things will be good. Which one do I prefer?" Right? If I'm really struggling with a decision.
So it's really something to think about—is to know that we don't have to view every decision as having a right and a wrong. Okay? So that's just a big piece of it right there.
Because if we do—if it does have a wrong—and we do make the wrong decision, this can lead to us feeling that we're wrong, okay? Or we're deficient in some way. And that doesn't feel good. We don't want to do that, right?
We might be putting off making the decision and staying in this confusion and this overwhelm because we have a fear of failure, okay? That if we make the wrong decision, we might fail. And then what will that mean? What will people say? What will they think about us? What will we think that they think about us? What will we think about us, okay? If we fail—if we make a decision and fail.
So we just put it off. We just lack the confidence. Okay? We just lack the confidence to make the decision.
So confidence, one of the things that confidence is, and my favorite definition of self-confidence is the willingness to feel any emotion. Because knowing this, if we are willing to feel any emotion, we can show up, okay, with courage. Feel the fear, go through the new thing that we haven't done before. Fail. Have it feel bad for a minute and just get up and change course a little bit and march forward. Okay. That's progress. The other, not progress. It's not only not progress. We're going backwards when we choose to get lost in this, overwhelm. Okay. I'll talk more about that in second.
So, we might be afraid of how we're going to feel or how we're going to be perceived if we decide and that we fail. We lack the confidence so that we just, so we think it's like it will be easier just to stay paralyzed. It's a little bit easier. Okay.
So then we procrastinate because it sounds easier than failing because that's going to be rough. I don't know. I don't want to do the wrong thing. I don't want to make the wrong, look at the consequences. Look at what could happen if I make the wrong decision. So we put off making the decision, and then we're procrastinating. We're putting off the decision. We're not doing anything. We're just lost in this, in this place of nothingness. And nothing's happening. That doesn't feel good.
So then we, sometimes we do things like buffer. So that is, we're stressed out and so that doesn't feel good. And so we, what buffering is, is we do something to change how we're feeling. Usually things that don't help us. They don't serve us. Right? But we're, we do something to avoid that discomfort and how that feels. Okay.
Things that we do to buffer are drink alcohol or overeat. So when we are spending time in overwhelm, okay, it can be harmful in lots of ways and disappointing at its best. Right? Because we're not making progress in our lives. When we're in this state of overwhelm, when we're feeling overwhelmed, when we're indulging in this, when we're refusing to make decisions and just staying stuck.
We're not making progress towards our goals. We're not improving on our self-confidence. Okay, it's not helping us feel better and we're not actively working on how to generate self-confidence. We're not exercising our courage. We're not facing our fears. What we are doing is feeding our indecisive narrative, right? We're making it mean something about us that we're not moving forward.
A lot of times we blow up, lash out. I mean, I do that sometimes. My brain takes over and it's like, one more thing goes wrong and then it does and then, you know. Then what I've noticed is, is that every time that I do act out with that frustration, it's just not helpful. Right?
When I have too many things going wrong, if I take one of those things and look at it and say, “What can I do to make this better and make a decision?” Then I can go to the next thing. Or I can march forward on the decision I've made with the one thing and be making progress.
Okay, so yeah, another thing that we do when we're in overwhelm is we communicate the same way with confusion, right? Everybody around us, we're just like, we're not clearly communicating. Okay? Which causes further confusion and it just kind of fuels this state of disrepair, I'll call it.
We also, like I said, a lot of times we buffer, we do things that are harmful in an effort to feel better, right? It doesn't feel good. So then we do something to feel better. Okay. Buffering is doing things like over-drinking, over-eating, over-spending, over-working, over-social media. If that's not even a word, but just burying yourself in your phone and your media, burying yourself in TV and Netflix and whatever you're watching on TV for forever.
And what we're not doing is we're not improving or moving towards living our best life. That's what we're not doing. Okay?
So, you know, we all feel overwhelmed at one time or another, to one degree or another, and that's okay. You know, the thing about it is, is the key to having better results for ourselves, for our children, and for everyone that we love is to minimize and work to eliminate the time that we spend in overwhelm. Okay, and I'm going to show you how. Okay.
Here's how you get it done. Okay. Four simple steps. Number one is to recognize that it's a choice. Okay? The feeling of overwhelm is coming from what we're thinking has nothing to do about the list of items. Okay. Or how many things that we've got or this or that has nothing to do with that. It has to do with what we're thinking about those things. Okay. So recognize that, and know that to start with.
Two is to commit to consistently working on developing our own, to learn how to generate our own self-confidence. Alright? This is an ongoing thing, how we feel about ourselves. It's not something that you get done early in life and then it's done, check it off the list, now moving on to the next thing. Self-confidence and the beliefs that we hold to be true about ourselves is something that happens right now it's happening. It's happening with you and it's happening with me.
We're either moving towards more self-confidence or less because we're making meaning about what we're doing. What, we're doing what we're causing to have happen and what's happening to us both of those things we're making meaning about. We're making meaning about what that means about us. Okay, and what we want to believe about ourselves is that we have the willingness to feel any emotion. Okay, and if we're working on generating self-confidence, generating the courage to feel the fear, to go through it, to move towards failure.
And the thing of it is, is we're gonna fail, you know? We're gonna fail. That's gonna be part of the deal. That's part of the process. That's what we need to be willing to do is to fail and feel it and have it be okay. The more that we can generate our own self-confidence, the easier decision-making becomes.
And the less that we care about what other people think or what we think that they'll think, because we really don't even know anyway. We're just guessing, right, what somebody else is going to think. So the less that we think about that, the more that we have learned how to generate our own self-confidence and believe in ourselves and march forward with strength, courage, progress. Fail, bring it on. Right?
I'm up and I'm still moving, no problem. Readjust, make a different decision and go for that one. Because it's going to be okay to fail.
A lot of times this perfectionism business, it sinks and it sets in and we have it ingrained in us so much that we're just froze. We're not going to make the wrong decision. I'm going to research it for another six months and think it through because I'm not making the wrong decision.
How many times have you heard that one of the keys to great leaders is being able to make decisions quickly? Because if, it's important, and this is number three in the process, the third thing is to recognize that being frustrated and that acting out is not a good use of time. Okay.
Feeling overwhelmed at too many choices, where too many things aren't going your way. Acting out on those things, not a good use of time, taking a look at it and seeing what we can do and make a decision is what we want to do. And that is what leaders do, is being able to.
Not all the time, but I've got to the point where I'm pretty good at making decisions. I'm so good, I've been accused lots of times of, you know, firing and then aiming. And I'm not suggesting to make poor decisions without using your best judgment with what you have to work with at that time, of course. But just not putting off making a decision and making up a bunch of excuses and dwelling in overwhelm. Okay? That's not where you want to be.
And then the fourth step is just to practice making decisions quickly. Okay? That's what it comes down to. We've got to be able to learn the skill of being willing to make decisions quickly. To recognize it, don't put it off. Not going to procrastinate, not going to overthink it, overanalyze it, over anything. You're going to make the best decision that you can and go for it.
And know that it's okay, you're going to fall down, get beat up, and it's not going to feel good. And that's still going to be okay, because you're going to be fine. Knowing that, that's the self-confidence, right? Not dwelling in this procrastination, being stuck. Okay?
This is the solution, okay? Because the bottom line is that is the willingness, not the capability. The capability has nothing to do with it. The capability has nothing to do with it. It's a decision. It's the willingness to make a quick decision. Okay. That's what is going to propel us forward towards our next failure and ultimately towards our next success. Okay.
So, when we do this, we're able to more fully participate in living. And, when we do this, we're refusing to indulge in this feeling of overwhelm. And then sometimes that leads to the buffer and it just, it's a, it's a bad cycle.
Cause here's the deal. Indecision is a decision in itself. And I interviewed Josh Frost who's a world champion bull rider now, uh, uh, for The Horsemanship Journey show. And one of the things he said is, “If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.” Right.
So, this isn't when you're in overwhelm, you're not just like doing nothing. You're regressing. Okay. That's the way that that is what it is. And so, choosing to be willing to understand in that and being willing to make decisions quickly is going to be a something that's going to, is going to be a skill that you can, that as we work on, we'll improve your own life, your kid's life, and the people that you love.
So I appreciate you taking making the choice making the decision to spend your time here with me today. These things, overwhelm and such, are things that we deal with on a daily basis in Stable Living Coaching, and all other kinds of parenting challenges you can find out about that at Stable Living.
Stable Living you can find out excuse me about Stable Living Coaching at stablelivingcoaching.com.
Appreciate you taking your time to be here today, and remember you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin’ It.
