Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah and in this week's squiggly career shortcut, I'm going to be talking about three quick strategies to help you cope with feeling overwhelmed. This gives you a sense of how my week has gone. So I started off on Monday and I was feeling really overwhelmed with what had to get done in quite a short space of time. And I was thinking what has supported me to sort of find my way through this week?

So, three things. Number one, signal early and fast to people around you that that's where you're starting from. Otherwise I think you can behave in an unpredictable way or an unhelpful way and people won't know why. And hopefully you're in a high trust team or you've got good relationships in your team. You don't have to share with everybody. It might be with one person, it might just be with your manager. But when you do signal that you are feeling overwhelmed, I think it's particularly useful to then say how someone can help you. People want to be helpful. Do you need support? Do you need a sounding board? Do you need solutions? Like, what does that help with the overwhelm look like I shared that I felt like this on Monday in our team meeting and that's quite rare for me. Like, that's not a word that I use that often. It's not a feeling that I have that often. And straight away I could see that people were definitely looking for, like, how can I be helpful? What does being useful for Sarah look like? And it's different from different people. So if you know, then let people know. Sometimes it might just be about people being by your side during the week and checking in on how you're doing. But never be afraid to share. It's like, it's okay to be overwhelmed and I think in those moments you sort of need an extra dose of support. I've really felt that this week and it has really, really helped me.

So that's number one. Number two, empty your head and don't worry about making sense of it. So sometimes you will hear me talk about the value of to think lists or mind maps or whatever it might be, but actually in this instance, all I'm describing is getting things out of your head and onto a bit of paper. Don't worry about thinking, well, what needs to go first or prioritising it is really just trying to hold less in your head and to stop things like repeated thoughts and remembering. So whether you just write a page of everything that's in your head at the moment, or that's on your worry list. Whether it is. Whether you do just do a diagram, whether it's just a massive list of words. I think if you can just get stuff out of your head, it leaves a bit more space for then what comes next. Sort of the. Rather than trying to hold too much at once.

And then the final thing, which is probably what has helped me the most this week alongside some people who've really supported me. But, uh, I looked at my week and everything that had to get done and it felt challenging and quite stretching. And I thought, okay, I can't do all of these things to exactly the same quality. Now that might feel uncomfortable to say out loud. It definitely does for me. I want to do everything amazingly. Um, but I knew that was unrealistic. And so I looked at everything that I had to deliver and I did a list of where was it okay to be good enough and what was the one or two things. And I think limit yourself to two where you do need to be great and that is you making some choices, some trade offs. But then I think you, it helps you to sort of cope as you go through the week. You realise that, you know, you take a bit of pressure off yourself in certain moments. You're just thinking, you know, as long as I'm trying hard, good enough is great in this situation, like, that's fine. Um, but you know what? This one thing that I'm doing this week, that's what's most important, that's what matters most. So I need to make sure I'm conserving some of my energy so I can do that really well. And as I have gone through the week, I will get to Friday and not feel like I've completely collapsed or got to the point where I was sort of so stressed. It ended up being kind of really unhealthy.

So I hope that helps. It happens to all of us. And if you want to listen a bit more to thinking a bit more about Overwhelm, maybe this is not just a one-off week for you. Maybe this is how you've been feeling for a while. Maybe have a listen to episode 199 of the podcast because that's all about how to cope with Overwhelm at work and we dive into it in a little bit more detail. So I hope that's been useful. And we're back with you again soon.