Overwhelm Is A Horrible Thing
Overwhelm is rotten. Particularly when it comes before you’re ready to take the next step. It doesn’t matter whether your next step is to start your coaching business or one of growing it; if you’re plagued with ‘when this then that-itis’, you’re overwhelmed.
What I mean by ‘when this then that-itis’ is that horrible situation of not being able to tell what the best next step should be. Let me give you a couple of examples:
Example One
- You want to talk to a/some potential coaching client(s).
- However, before you can do that, you feel that you need some business cards.
- Before you can get your business cards printed, you need to sort out your logo.
- You know you can either go cheap and get a logo for $5 (fiverr.com) or get someone good to create a whole brand image for you, but you can’t decide which would be best.
- In order to make that decision, you need to talk to someone who can advise you and you’ve discovered that your local Chamber of Commerce offers free business advice. However in order to be eligible for that business advice, you have to have filled in a form.
- You can’t fill in the form, because it wants to know your trading address and you haven’t yet decided if you’re going to continue working from your kitchen or take up that offer of a bit of space in a friend’s office (after all co-working is the thing, isn’t it?).
In short, you can’t speak to that potential client for hundreds of reasons!
Example Two
- You want to launch your new website
- However, you haven’t finished finessing your coaching programme.
- Before you can complete it, you have to learn some more about ABC and XYZ.
- In order to be able to learn some more about ABC and XYZ, you need to research various training providers to find out which is the most appropriate.
- Your blog is ‘sort-of’ ready. You know the kind of things you want to write about but you can’t quite decide on the blog layout.
Do you get the idea?
Overwhelm isn’t always about having too much to do and not enough time to do it. It can also be about having a complete ‘tangle of string’ of stuff to do and no way of finding the end of the string. Or the beginning for that matter.
How Can You Overcome This Kind Of Overwhelm?
It’s Simple: Break it down.
Break the overwhelm into little tiny bits and write them down. Whether you have 10, 25, 50 or 100 tiny steps doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are out of your head and now a list, not a tangle of string. We all love a list!
Once you have a list, get it into order of priority – or sanity – and get cracking. Just being able to achieve something – anything – every day helps tremendously with the overwhelm.
Having this list helps with something else too. If you’re in a position where you need to fit your coaching business around your other commitments, having that list means that when you do find 10 minutes to spare, you don’t have to spend it wondering what you could do with it.
Once the overwhelm is gone, then the work can start.
The Easiest Way Of All
Of course the easiest way to avoid overwhelm is to have the ear and support of someone who has already achieved what you want to achieve. That’s us.