Dealing with overwhelm
Starting and developing a business venture can be exciting, gratifying, an adventure - and endlessly demanding, perhaps even more after it becomes successful. You can feel overwhelmed, scattered and anxious.
Molly Gordon - president of a coaching and training company for “Accidental Entrepreneurs” - writes, “How long do you stay tuned to a radio station when the music is drowned out by static? Not long, I’m guessing.
“But how many times do you stay tuned into the same problem in spite of the static caused by overwhelm? Overwhelm is a physiological, mental, and emotional state that drowns out any clear signals that might otherwise come through…
“No one can handle more than one thing at a time. The moment we believe we need to do more than that, we start to get anxious.
“As anxiety increases, clarity diminishes. And when you work for yourself, who’s going to break the vicious cycle?”
She goes on to describe Three Keys to Shifting Out of Overwhelm in her article How to Make Your Business an Overwhelm Free Zone.
Being an entrepreneur, but also a highly sensitive person, can make overwhelm even more likely and intense.
Jenna Avery writes in her article Overcoming Overwhelm, “As a sensitive soul, it’s easy to get overstimulated. With stimulation all around, it’s not surprising. Our urgency-addicted culture and mainstream work ethic is overstimulating.”
She describes a number of strategies to help.
[Image from Employee to Entrepreneur: A Mind, Body and Spirit Transition, by Suzanne Mulvehill.]
