Overwhelm: Good or Bad?
Being a business owner can be absolutely overwhelming. Am I right? YOU are responsible for success. Whether or not you have a team of one, or a team of several, the buck stops with you. There are so many drivers to overwhelm. It can be success, failure, too much work, or too little work.
Overwhelm is dangerous for business because it leads to the same place: YOU, or YOUR business is stuck.
The definition of the word overwhelm is interesting. According to the Webster Dictionary, overwhelm is described as “Upset”, “overthrow”, and “to overpower in thought or feeling.” We often hear this word as business owners and think of all the negative symptoms of overwhelm.
You don’t want to go to work.
When you go to work, you feel anxious. You don’t know what to do next.
You are losing sleep because you are thinking about work.
You feel like you can’t get ahead, but you don’t know why.
You keep doing what you have always done because you don’t know how to change or what to change.
Overwhelm can lead to “research”. You scour the world of blogs, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. looking at other businesses in your industry. You see what others are doing to be successful. You consider making changes to what those others are doing in order to change your own business.
In the end, the research leaves you in the same place: STUCK.
What if you do something different? Here’s a concept: what if we focused on the positive meaning of the word? We often hear this something like, “I was overwhelmed with love”, or “The neighbors were overwhelmed with the outpouring of support.”
I challenge you, can overwhelm be a positive word in your business? What if you use the negative symptoms of overwhelm to make a positive change?
Treat overwhelm as a DRIVER instead of as a BARRIER.
A driver to improve, or change. A driver to change where you are (your current state) to where you want to be (your future state). Use it to move your business forward. Here is a quick technique you can use to take BACK overwhelm.
Breath (slowly, deeply, calmly)
Address the challenges in the way
Celebrate the accomplishments so far
Knock the barriers out of the way with a manageable plan.