#466 How to focus on outcomes to reduce overwhelm

Summary

In this episode of the Squiggly Careers podcast, hosts Sarah and Helen delve into the stressful feeling of overwhelm, both in and out of work, and discuss how focusing on outcomes rather than activities can help alleviate this stress. With delightful interjections from Helen's pet rabbits, Poppy and Cookie, the duo explores the external and self-imposed pressures that lead to these feelings. They provide practical strategies such as connecting activities to desired outcomes, having meaningful conversations, and ending your day on a positive note. The podcast concludes with a reassurance that seeking help is a strength, not a weakness, in managing overwhelm.

Highlights

• Helen shares the amusing backdrop of having her pet rabbits in the studio. 🐰
• Understanding the root causes of feeling overwhelmed at work and beyond. 📈
• Connecting activities with their impactful outcomes to find motivation. 🔗
• Utilizing three types of helpful conversations: challenger, clarity creator, and coaching approach. 👥
• Practical exercises to end each day with a sense of achievement and clarity. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Overwhelm can be reduced by focusing on outcomes rather than just activities. 🎯
• Recognizing feelings of overwhelm helps in dealing with them effectively. 🤔
• Integrating small, meaningful actions daily can lessen feelings of stress. 🗓️
• Communicating with a clarity creator or coach can provide new perspectives. 🗣️
• Ending each day by acknowledging achievements reinforces resilience. 🌅

Overview

This episode of Squiggly Careers brings a refreshing perspective on dealing with overwhelm. Joined by Poppy and Cookie, her children's pampered rabbits, Helen and Sarah explore how external stressors like news and internal pressures exacerbate these feelings. They recognize common triggers, such as overloaded to-do lists and an avalanche of meetings, expanding the notion of overwhelm beyond the workplace.

The hosts delve into contrasting approaches—activity versus outcome orientation—and how shifting focus can enhance productivity and satisfaction. Through personal anecdotes, like Helen’s husband’s humorous remarks about self-imposed stress and Sarah’s realization about her own overwhelm triggers, listeners gain relatable insights.

Sarah and Helen recommend identifying clear objectives in tasks and seeking conversations that either challenge, clarify, or coach through difficult times. They stress the importance of positive daily reflections to bolster resilience, wrapping up with a reminder of the importance of reaching out for help and enjoying the lighter side of life, like Helen’s bunny companions.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Podcast Topic In the introduction of the Squiggly Careers podcast, hosts Sarah and Helen set the stage for the episode by discussing the central theme: focusing on outcomes to help reduce overwhelm in one's career. They emphasize providing listeners with actionable insights to improve confidence and control in navigating their careers. The episode promises to explore this concept further with the help of special guests in the studio, adding a unique dynamic to the discussion.
• 01:00 - 02:30: Discussion on Overwhelm and Impact of External Factors The chapter opens with a light-hearted discussion about pet rabbits, Poppy and Cookie, which belong to the speaker's children. The speaker humorously mentions giving updates to Sarah, who is joining virtually, about the rabbits and the costs involved in maintaining their well-being after a vet visit. These updates, though perhaps unsolicited, show the speaker's investment in the rabbits' happiness. The playful tone sets the stage before diving into more serious discussions, hinting at a transition from personal anecdotes to the main topic of the chapter: discussing overwhelm and the impact of external factors. The speaker implies that the lighter conversations and any distractions, such as filming the rabbits, are a prelude to the significant topics ahead, underlining the importance of the discussion that follows.
• 02:30 - 06:00: Understanding What Contributes to Overwhelm The chapter explores the concept of overwhelm, its contributors, and practical advice to handle it. It reflects on the external factors that impact feelings of being overwhelmed, particularly in a work context, even if those factors are beyond immediate control or influence.
• 06:00 - 11:00: Identifying Personal Overwhelm Triggers This chapter discusses the difficulty of separating personal emotions, influenced by external factors such as news, from professional responsibilities. It highlights how negative news can impact team members' mood and performance at work, as witnessed in a team setting. Employees found it challenging to compartmentalize their feelings triggered by distressing news, which subsequently affected their demeanor and engagement during meetings.
• 12:00 - 19:30: Strategies for Connecting Activities to Outcomes The chapter discusses the overwhelming feeling generated by constant exposure to negative news, such as natural disasters and global political issues. It highlights the resulting fear and anxiety about the wider world and personal impacts. The content suggests strategies for coping with and navigating these emotions by linking activities to tangible outcomes, possibly offering readers/listeners ways to better manage their emotional response to news consumption.
• 19:30 - 34:30: Actionable Advice on Managing Overwhelm In the chapter titled 'Actionable Advice on Managing Overwhelm,' the discussion centers around the various sources and effects of feeling overwhelmed. The initial focus is on emotional responses such as anger, confusion, and sadness, which can result from both personal and external factors like global events. It emphasizes that overwhelm isn't limited to work-related stresses, but extends to information overload and emotional triggers encountered from media and news. The narrative underscores the importance of recognizing these diverse sources to effectively manage and mitigate feelings of overwhelm in daily life.
• 37:00 - 41:00: Conclusion and Encouragement The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Encouragement' discusses the natural inclination some people have towards novelty, referred to as a 'new and now bias'. This bias attracts individuals to new ideas and creations, which can lead to benefits like innovation and freshness. However, the downside noted is that constantly producing newness can result in an overwhelming volume of work. This can be particularly challenging for those who are present-focused, as they might struggle with managing the continuous influx of new tasks and ideas. The chapter likely provides motivation and advice on balancing this innovative tendency with practical considerations to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

#466 How to focus on outcomes to reduce overwhelm Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hi I'm Sarah and I'm Helen and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where every week we take a different topic to do with work and share some ideas and actions to help you navigate our Squiggly careers with that bit more confidence and control and this week we are going to be talking about how focusing on outcomes will help you to reduce overwhelm and if you can hear any sort of chomping in the background it is because I am joined today in the Squiggly studio with two special guests
• 00:30 - 01:00 neither of which are Sarah cuz she's joining me virtually but in my studio I have my children's rabbits Poppy and Cookie who are living the life of luxury after they've been to the vets yeah I keep giving Sarah rabbit updates that she doesn't really want like they're eating they're eating they've come out they've come out well now I know how much it costs to keep these rabbits happy i'm like I feel very invested in making sure that they're okay if only this was being if only this was being filmed it probably be quite distracting and actually what we're talking about today is very important
• 01:00 - 01:30 and I think overwhelm is something lots of people are experiencing so hopefully we can give you some bit of practical support and advice today so first worth just reflecting on what contributes to overwhelm and then also when specifically do you feel overwhelmed and I think at the moment the outside world can have a really big impact on how we're feeling at work so even if you know events outside of your orbit of work you know you can't directly influence or you're not part of you know
• 01:30 - 02:00 just that kind of classic thing of when you read the news and it you know a lot of that news is hard to read or hard to take then it's inevitable that you can't separate out you know the rest of what you're spending time reading watching and listening to to then how you show up at work and we definitely saw that in our team last week you know people kind of mention mentioning things that that you know were making them feel either kind of sad or quite down and it's not like you can switch that off then when you start in your first kind of meeting of the day and one of the articles I was
• 02:00 - 02:30 reading in preparation for this podcast was um why the news feels overwhelming and and how to cope and it was saying things like natural disasters like you know the fires for example in Los Angeles it was an American article global political context clearly quite a lot going on there at the moment causing quite a lot of distress but it was saying that um when these you know you're surrounded ed by all this sort of negative overwhelming news it can start to kind of create a bit of fear like what does this mean for the world what does this word mean for my family what
• 02:30 - 03:00 does this mean for me also anger like why is this happening what's going on in the world those sorts of feelings and that can turn into like an emotional state of overwhelm exhaustion sadness so it's it's not a small thing sometimes I think we just think about overwhelm as you know what's going on at work but actually there are often factors outside of work that can contribute towards these feelings that we shouldn't I think you shouldn't you shouldn't ignore when you're kind of getting lots of these messages you know on your phones or on the news or wherever it is you're absorbing them from another thing that contributes to overwhelm which Helen and
• 03:00 - 03:30 I both recognize and when we read this we were both like "Yes that that's us." Um is if you've got a kind of new and now bias so a new bias is a tendency to you like you're attracted to new things you like new ideas you like creating newness and obviously there's lots of upsides to that but one of the downsides is obviously you're like always creating more and more and more so just volume and volume obviously leads to overwhelm and if you're particularly present
• 03:30 - 04:00 focused which is less relevant for me because I'm slightly more future focused you you sort of want everything to be done today um or quite quickly and sometimes you can even kind of create that overwhelm for yourself by perhaps committing to you know when we say sort of in quite an offhand way oh yeah I'll get that to you today or like Helen was saying she always says to people I'll get that to you by Friday because it's just like almost like whatever it is whatever day it is it is always I'll get that to you by Friday my husband mocks
• 04:00 - 04:30 me sometimes like I'll just be saying like it mocks me quite a lot but um I'll say go so much to do at the moment and he'll say wouldn't it be amazing if you ran your own company and you could decide what you wanted to do and what you didn't want to do and I'll be like that's an unhelpful it's an unhelpful statement but I think I I I create lots of my feelings of overwhelm because I like doing new stuff and I want to get it all done now and it's that sort of yeah I I I struggle I struggle to turn that off and it definitely contributes to these feelings for me other people
• 04:30 - 05:00 can contribute to your overwhelm yes Sarah yeah we'll talk a bit more about each other later but um we were actually reflecting on in our team meeting yesterday Helen and I shared quite a few just different updates with the team and we were saying I wonder how that felt for everybody because our assumption is oh this is all exciting and energizing look at all these experiments that are underway and probably if you are feeling optimistic and you're feeling good it will have felt like that but if you were
• 05:00 - 05:30 already feeling a bit overwhelmed you might have listened to Helen and I and just thought "Wow that is just more work maybe that's coming my way or what are all the consequences of all the things that they're talking about?" And so I think sometimes managers leaders or kind of people just generally in position of power or influence can unintentionally create overwhelm they might just not know you know how you're arriving at a conversation and suddenly they've created all this kind of extra
• 05:30 - 06:00 overwhelm or sometimes I think people can be too disconnected from your dayto-day and so you know a throwaway comment like oh could you just get that presentation sorted oh if you could send it over tomorrow and it's perhaps not a definitive or it must be done by then but that's how we take it those sorts of things can also create a load of overwhelm for people so understanding what contributes to your overwhelm is a really good place to start with this and then a build on it just so you can get
• 06:00 - 06:30 really specific before we get into what can help where's where's the support now I've recognized I feel like this so a build on kind of what contributes is when in your week do you start to feel overwhelmed and there are a couple of I guess moments that we talked about there might be more moments for you but these are the ones that we sort of recognized so um perhaps at the start of a um when you are kind of looking at your list and you're thinking how how am I going to get all of that done i think sometimes to-do lists are a very kind of
• 06:30 - 07:00 visible trigger for overwhelm when you're kind of just adding all those actions sometimes it's for me so I I have my to-do list in my diary if I haven't done it I like carry it on to the next day and when I'm literally carrying so many things over I'm like "Oh it's just getting longer and longer and that starts to feel horrible." Accumulating actions in a meeting this is a big one for me if you're in the sort of role where you have quite a lot of meetings to go into and there is not a lot of time between meetings to actually get anything done I can start to feel progressively more overwhelmed
• 07:00 - 07:30 when the actions start to accumulate so I'm like "This is a really good meeting but I've just written five more things down that I need to do." Then then there's another five and then by the end of the day I've got like 25 things that I now need to do and I can't quite work out when I'm going to do them but it's just like it's in the moment i find it very distracting in the meeting because I'm just thinking when I do want to do this and maybe it is my job to do this but when on earth is this going to get done and that's that's probably the third thing when doesn't have to be if you're in lots of meetings but it's that
• 07:30 - 08:00 you can see what needs to be done but you can't see the time to do it so any of that sort of start of the day looking at a list lots of meetings actions are accumulating um or just I can see what I need to do and I can't see when the time is going to get done any of those wens might feel relevant to you which one would it be for you when do you start feeling overwhelmed Sarah um pretty much always the third one so because I do like to look ahead and because I think I'm I'm naturally quite a planned person
• 08:00 - 08:30 if I know what needs to get done and then there's a gap between you know like understanding the job to do and then not being able to spot the time to do it I find that really stressful i think I feel out of control which I don't like and it does kind of create this sense of overwhelm i had it the other week actually and it was an interesting reflection for me where I was doing something in an evening so I'd got kind of I was seeing a friend and it meant that I had to stop work at a certain
• 08:30 - 09:00 time which you know completely acceptable to do but it really meant that I was like I sort of needed that evening to be able to get something done i was like running out of time i just got more and more overwhelmed and then I felt so relieved when that person cancelled and I was like "Oh but I don't I that's not how I want to feel." Like I actually really wanted to see that person it's somebody I really like i really want to spend time with and it' been planned for ages and you know poor them they just weren't they just weren't very well but I remember thinking in
• 09:00 - 09:30 that moment I don't want I don't want to feel this way when someone cancels doing something that I want to do because it sort of it was almost like releasing like you know like the pressure valve valve of like oh actually now I don't feel as overwhelmed i'm back in control i've got this extra pocket of time and now I can do what I need to do but that was completely kind of coincidental and just happened in that moment and so yeah I always find that very difficult if I if I can't connect the dots between what
• 09:30 - 10:00 needs to get done and when it's going to happen probably just I was just thinking there probably one other situation when I feel overwhelmed and and it's very it's very recency biased because it's yesterday when you're wearing a lot of different hats on the same day if that makes sense so yeah a lot a lot of switching and sometimes that can be like location switching you know like I'm okay I've got to be here I've got to be there I've got to go there like you move those sometimes that can create overwhelm but sometimes it's like work and life i was trying to like yesterday I felt like I had sort of like a work
• 10:00 - 10:30 and life misfit you know we talk about work and life fit like a work and life misfit in that I had a breakfast for my daughter's birthday in the morning which is a lovely moment then I had to go take these rabbits to the vets then I had a quite a full-on day at work then I had to It sounds the thing though it's not had to see my children i should want to see my children but it became a little bit like that because I was wearing so many hats that I think I just became hat on hat off hat on hat like you know all day and that feeling of sort of switching and identity switching i think
• 10:30 - 11:00 that can feel quite overwhelming as well at least at least it did for me so 7 p.m you were going back to the vets to collect these flipping rabbits you were like you know and I was just thinking no this is your day felt like it went on for a long time the amount of medication they were like "Can you feed this rabbit with the syringe six times a day with these three different things?" I was like "You you just keep adding it you just keep adding these things to do to my days." Sure sure actually I guess what we've not talked about here about um when do you feel overwhelmed but we talked about it before on the podcast is
• 11:00 - 11:30 you were saying about like changing locations and kind of lots of transitions can be tricky also lots of technology so I think it can feel really overwhelming if you feel like you are you know if you're really trying to focus and get something done but then you've got loads of emails waiting for you loads of Teams messages or Slack messages waiting for you you know so you don't feel like you're on top of things or you feel like you're missing things because perhaps you've got something you need to get done but then like the tech that's surrounding you isn't helping you
• 11:30 - 12:00 to feel in control and I think I I sometimes do feel like that if I've been like right I need to I'm okay at turning everything off and then really focusing but then you know sometimes it's like you come back to everything and being able to make sense of it can then create overwhelm in that moment so we've got three actions to share with you today which we hope each of these will practically help you kind of turn that feeling of overwhelm into you know how do you just create a bit more clarity
• 12:00 - 12:30 control bit of calmness like in these moments which I think happen really frequently so I think it's a really useful skill to learn and action one is connecting activities to outcomes so it's useful to start by defining the difference in your week between activities and outcomes so activities is kind of all the stuff that you do it's what you'd see in your diary on your to-do list it's emails meetings
• 12:30 - 13:00 presentations proposals recording a podcast is an activity outcomes are why the work matters like can you connect the dots between what you're working on and why it's going to make a difference so if we were thinking about podcast for example we could say okay well we record one activity that we do every week is we prepare for the podcast believe it or not who knows we prepare by doing some
• 13:00 - 13:30 kind of research the second activity would be we then have a conversation together to kind of challenge and build and and put our ideas together we then record the podcast that podcast then gets edited i'll have to say not not by us by people much better qualified to do it than than us and then also that podcast gets shared wherever you're listening to your podcast we obviously create then pod notes pod sheets pod mail so there are loads of activities that sit around the podcast even that you probably get to a list of what seven
• 13:30 - 14:00 or eight activities around one podcast episode and so you could say well the outcome is a podcast episode that goes out but that's probably not kind of super motivating that's probably not zoomed out enough what we could say is well the outcome for us is to be a free source of squiggly career support or you could be even more numbers based so you could be more databased and go well the outcome is we hope that every month
• 14:00 - 14:30 between 50 and 100,000 people will listen to our podcast episodes so that's how many people we are supporting or helping and when Helen and I were exploring this idea we were saying there are different kinds of outcomes that that might be useful to consider and sometimes you might be working on something that has lots of different types of outcomes or it might have one one outcome that's kind of really obvious so you might have an impact outcome you could have a learning outcome or you could have a relationship
• 14:30 - 15:00 outcome and there are probably more that that we've also not thought about so you know we could say for the podcast so the impact outcome would be 50 to 100,000 people like listening and learning with us every month that's like the impact we're having a learning outcome might be Helen and I saying "Oh we're going to experiment with different formats for the podcast to see if we can help more people in kind of different ways maybe we could do some things that are going
• 15:00 - 15:30 to specifically help teams to learn from the podcast in organizations." So that might be a learning outcome and a relationship outcome could be something like if I think about the career stage series the people that we invite onto the podcast and the conversations that we have with experts actually we're building new relationships as a result of the podcast and actually that's one of the things that I do really value obviously I value my relationship with Helen but I also value the opportunity to learn from other people i actually
• 15:30 - 16:00 recently did um an expert interview with a lady called Dr senita Sar on how to say no and it was just brilliant you know when you have a conversation with someone and I was just like I was learning all the time great insights and I was honestly thinking I I cannot wait to share this because I just know people are going to find this so useful so actually when I think about the podcast sometimes for both of us the podcast can feel overwhelming we're like ah we've got to think of something useful to say we've got to find the time to say it we
• 16:00 - 16:30 always want the quality to be as good as it possibly can be but when I then start to list the impact learning and relationship outcomes that feels really motivating and meaningful so it can just be a good reminder of like why you're doing what you're doing i think it has a secondary benefit as well which is if you're sort of an activity accumulator which I would say is someone like me I'm like we can do that we can do that we can do that it just gets bigger every day when I'm starting to create things versus someone with an outcome
• 16:30 - 17:00 orientation i think when you have an outcome orientation so let's say my intended outcome from the career stage series is to build better relationships with a broader range of people right let's just say that I think it then helps you to look at your activities and prioritize them and sometimes you might be like well okay well if that's the outcome that I'm aiming for then of all these activities these are the ones that I should work on first or actually of all these activities these are the ones that aren't contributing to that and some of
• 17:00 - 17:30 it is about kind of the meaning and motivation you know the why behind the work so you stay committed to it even when it can feel overwhelming but I think some of it is an outcome orientation creates a filter for what to do first and what not to do and I think that is really helpful as well because when you're just accumulating activities you really haven't got that filter like more is better that is very hard to work through but the outcome orientation it just gives you almost like a like just a filter to look at your work slightly
• 17:30 - 18:00 differently i also think it might help you to challenge yourself on you know sometimes those activities that feel nice to do or maybe less pressing or urgent you know like sometimes you're responding to emails just feels like a very oh I should respond because they are there whereas you might think about you know having a conversation with someone that you've not met for a while probably will never feel like the most important thing to do but if you were thinking about a relationship outcome you might be like
• 18:00 - 18:30 "Oh yeah but by having that conversation I'm building a relationship with someone who either challenges me or helps me to think differently means I can borrow a bit of brilliance because they spend time in a very different world." So often when actually people set goals you know performance goals or they're thinking about like what they need to achieve as a team or as an individual people talk about this idea of like OKRs which is objectives and key results and actually I can sort of start to see the link here between actually a if you've
• 18:30 - 19:00 got very clear outcomes you probably just get better at prioritizing you're probably less likely to be overwhelmed but you're probably also more likely to achieve kind of what matters for you and your team it's quite a good discipline and I think this would also be a helpful conversation to have as a team you know like almost you could take a week couldn't you and go well let's just look look at the week you've just had look at all the activities almost like draw a line to what you think the impact
• 19:00 - 19:30 learning and relationship outcomes are and if you can't find an outcome there'll definitely be some things where you can't you know just noticing that actually would probably help you then to think well maybe that's something I don't need to do or maybe that's something that could wait also normalizing and accepting feelings of overwhelm like that doesn't mean that you're not doing a good job that just means there's quite a lot to do and sometimes it's hard to see through that i actually think these are very useful if if not at a team level a manager and someone who works level like when it when is your work feeling overwhelming
• 19:30 - 20:00 what are the outcomes you're working towards and then we can go on to some of the kind of other actions we're going to talk about now action number two is the conversation which is you know this point that we're saying but specifically having a conversation with somebody who is either a challenger so these people tend to hold a mirror up to what you might be saying or what you might be kind of seeing or experiencing at work that you might not kind of be saying to yourself so challenggers can sort of hold that
• 20:00 - 20:30 mirror up or somebody who can create clarity so I think for me my thoughts can get a little bit messy sometimes when I'm feeling overwhelmed so having someone who just talks to me and creates clarity is useful or someone with a coaching approach so this is somebody who will very good at listening so they kind of let you get all the overwhelm out but they will ask you some questions that might make you think about how much of this overwhelm is created by you or people that you are working with for example would maybe make you think maybe I'm driving a lot of this so these kind
• 20:30 - 21:00 of abilities that the challenger the clarity creator and the coach approach are really useful to have a conversation with and it might be I was saying that Sarah I think naturally is a combination of a coaching person because she has a really good skill of questioning and is a very good listener but then also it can be quite challenging like can will is not afraid to ask the challenging question some people are very skilled and they have more than one of these one of these traits but they are very useful
• 21:00 - 21:30 people when you're in a moment of overwhelm to have a conversation with and that could be I could just say to Sarah "Oh god this week is feeling a little bit difficult can I just talk it through with you because I'd appreciate your your perspective?" And you know Sarah would just listen to me and ask me some of those questions that she naturally does one of the things that we did say though is in these conversations a bit of a watch out and it's something that I do and so maybe Sarah can share her perspective on how this actually feels is let's say if Sarah Sarah comes
• 21:30 - 22:00 to me and she says oh I'm having a bit of a week could do with a bit of a chat through whilst I am good at creating clarity my actual default trait is to solve people's problems and so Sarah might come to me for one of these types of conversations like an overwhelm conversation and I might unintentionally diminish how Sarah feels feels and be like "Oh don't worry about it i can just sort that out it'll only take 2 minutes." Which is my sort of natural default and that might solve some of the work problem cuz it takes it away from Sarah but what that doesn't do is in any
• 22:00 - 22:30 way acknowledge or support Sarah with how she's feeling about that problem and overwhelm is kind of both a practical thing there's some stuff that needs to get done and also a psychological thing like there are some feelings about the things that need to get done and if you just solve the work you don't necessarily support the feeling so just a bit of a watch out sarah would you how would you like an example sure list list them for everyone why don't you i could I can think of a couple of examples so I would say um
• 22:30 - 23:00 well we were laughing about this it does come from a very good place obviously of you trying to be you're only ever trying to be helpful for example last week I was talking about a workshop I was doing which I knew was going to be difficult so I was like I've got got this workshop oh I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed generally and I'm a bit worried about it and Helen's first response is well I'll do it for you which is I mean that literally is what she said to me i could show you the WhatsApp message and all that really makes you feel like is that you're
• 23:00 - 23:30 failing because oh Helen's had to come to my rescue because this workshop's going to be hard and so sort of the signal that Helen's sending is well you can't do this so I'll just do it for you and actually if at its worst I think it can feel a bit parent child it's almost like I'm going to swoop in and sort this on your behalf versus I'm going to help you to be able to do this now you know that's a bit dramatic and uh you know
• 23:30 - 24:00 it's fine i I still did the workshop and I was like no no it's all right i don't you know kind of basically what I I don't need someone to do it for me what you need is a bit of help through that moment to kind of find your way through it and it's just thinking about I think when you are feeling overwhelmed almost like knowing that different people can do different things for you and so I see Helen create clarity for our team all the time all the time you know we'll be talking about something um we'll have
• 24:00 - 24:30 ideas and that conversation might go off in different directions and then Helen is absolutely brilliant at going okay so this is what needs to happen now next being really clear on kind of what can wait um or if anyone's ever got a bit of bit stuck I I can see that she really helps to kind of move people forward and so you know some of that might just be the dynamic between Helen and I like how long we've known each other the sort of work that we do the fact that we have jobs that are actually in lots of ways very similar whereas actually when
• 24:30 - 25:00 Helen's talking to our team she's not got the same job as kind of people in our team and you know it's um fine sometimes really helpful that she'll do things for me i like love it so I'm like one less thing for me to do perfect but I think it is worth just thinking about in that moment who are those people because they can be friends they might be previous colleagues brilliant if you've got a great manager or if you've got like somebody who's a mentor maybe you've got a really good friend at work and I think just never being afraid to have the conversation i heard someone in
• 25:00 - 25:30 our team say this actually the other week that you know those people where you always feel that bit better after a conversation and that conversation is always worth it i think if you keep overwhelm to yourself what is most likely to happen usually is it kind of by bottling it up you build it up and so it spirals so that overwhelm by yourself kind of alone alone overwhelm I think only gets worse so just knowing like who's that person that you can pick the
• 25:30 - 26:00 phone up to who you can teams message who you can WhatsApp and just notice if you're feeling overwhelmed but you've not told anyone I'm like who can you tell i don't that's the thing I'd really want people to kind of get it almost like out of their system because I think once you've started saying it then you can start like doing something about it and then I want something or should I go on to the third one yeah okay and action number three is about how to end a day or a meeting feeling good about it so I think there's a
• 26:00 - 26:30 danger here and again yesterday was quite an overwhelming day i think there's a danger here that you have an overwhelming day and you end it by well I'll just go to sleep because tomorrow is another day and I mean sleep does help i do think sleep cures a lot of things to be honest so sleep does help particularly if kind of emotions are getting high and you're tired and that's all contributing to how you're feeling so sleep does help but I don't think um this what I did yesterday i was just trying to trying to fit finish all these activities that I was doing and I didn't get them done and I just thought time to
• 26:30 - 27:00 go to bed and shut my laptop down and I don't think I ended the day feeling good i just think I ended the day and went to bed and actually you do want to try to connect with a different emotion at the end of an overwhelming day or an overwhelming part of a day and there are some prompts that we think are useful so that you feel better about the situation and I think that you you kind of take that into the next day i think this this is a lot of what contributes to resilience in moments of overwhelm and so there's a
• 27:00 - 27:30 couple of questions that we that we maybe I'll ask them to you Sarah can you can you answer it for yesterday if I ask these questions of course okay okay so we've got three questions so sort of retrospective resilience on Sarah's day yesterday so question number one this is about ending a day feeling good what's one thing you made progress on yesterday we submitted an entry for an award and I think that felt like progress because whenever you do an award entry you have to like bring together lots of different
• 27:30 - 28:00 stories and data points probably in a way that you've not before so they're never quite as easy as you'd imagine you sort of feel like you should be able to enter something you're like "Oh yeah we've got loads of good stuff to say but you do have to figure out how to say it." So I don't think they're super easy to write and there's always a deadline and last week we were like "Oh we're fine we've got loads of time." And then there were some curve balls last week across our team with things happening so it did meant that we were up against a very pressing deadline which actually is very unlike me so I I am a submit two
• 28:00 - 28:30 days ahead of deadline type person and we submitted it on the day of the deadline and I can't actually think of very many examples of where I've ever done that but I though I did find it quite overwhelming at times this like looming you know like a clock ticking essentially we did get in you know I felt good about the progress that we made on it and it it was submitted so that's good okay so that's one thing you made progress on which is question number one question number two who is one person that you helped yesterday
• 28:30 - 29:00 so somebody got in touch with us who um I don't know and this is on LinkedIn so that's this is where I think LinkedIn does work brilliantly and I I'm really grateful for it she got in touch and let us know that she's listened to the podcast for quite a few years um she has been going through uh redundancy like a restructure of redundancy and she'd been to our redundancy workshop and she told me like how useful that had been but also the podcasts have been useful and then she's got to the final stage of um
• 29:00 - 29:30 an interview process and needs to she's got to like facilitate some learning and was asking me for a couple of ideas and um I asked her a few questions back and I gave her some ideas though I do feel now both responsible and I'm like I really need do need to know the outcome of that um so I you know when you're like oh it feels like quite a big responsibility but equally I was like obviously I want to help so I help someone who I don't know and have never met hopefully with just a few small ideas that um you know might be useful
• 29:30 - 30:00 like she she's going to do a she was doing a training session on well-being and I said what about opening with asking for ideas or examples sorry of active rest you know because then she can talk a bit about active rest and there's some good resources there might be something that people have not heard about before so that was my idea so I hope it was a good one okay final question final question what happened yesterday that made you feel good about your world outside of work i went for the first run that I have been
• 30:00 - 30:30 on for probably 5 years so running is not is not my preferred way of exercising but it is efficient and you can you can just walk out of your door and do it and it is this week in the UK it is a lovely sunny week so you know when you're out of excuses I was like I'm literally out of excuses and you know oh god I was so slow and I was like I'm gonna have I felt like I was gonna have a heart attack after about three minutes so it was it was definitely a run walk run based scenario but it did
• 30:30 - 31:00 make me feel really good just to get outside i did at the end of the day i always go for a walk at the start of the day but this was at the end of the day made me feel good to get outside mondays are quite manic in Amazing if generally some we were talking actually about like what we need to do differently so they maybe sometimes feel a bit less manic but I think it gave me a really good reset at the end of a Monday i think it helped me to relax i'm not sure I'm loads fitter as a result but it was worth it for you know like all sorts of
• 31:00 - 31:30 reasons outside of how rubbish I am at running i actually associate you with running because I think it was one of the things when we remember when we first met this is back in 2001 everybody there was like a we did this uh university course where there was like a little away stay to get to know each other and I remember you just went like went on this run and I was like oh god did I didn't yeah you did you did you went on some like epic run just to escape cuz I would have felt I think it probably was I would have hated I think the alternative was sambuka shots or something like that so I think the run was your safe zone I
• 31:30 - 32:00 think you know what this is the other thing I was I think I'm trying kind of redefine a little bit my relationship with running because because it's not how I would I'd much rather do other things like classes and various different things and actually you know I went for a run and came back and signed up for some online classes i was like God there's got to be a better alternative to running than this but also I tend to run um when I'm unhappy so if I think about the moments in my life that I have found really hard running has helped me but I'm not I'm not really unhappy at the moment so this
• 32:00 - 32:30 is where I came back and I was like why do I feel like I have to go running like I did it after uh maternity leave and and I was like I don't remember that time very fondly i don't remember what you just described very fondly so partly I don't want to have this like weird thing of like running equals unhappiness but also it did like I say tonight I'm going to do a dance class instead well I mean feel free to join me in a Pelaton fan club and then you could we could like I have looked at they're quite expensive though Pelatons are so but I just pay for it every month i am obsessed everybody i like PR for Pelaton
• 32:30 - 33:00 i absolutely love it wrote my personal best yesterday very proud very proud anyway the point of these three questions what's one thing you made progress on who's one person you've helped and what you feel good about in your outside world is to just change your emotional state and I honestly think if I had asked that it would take me like 3 minutes at the end of yesterday i probably would have recognized all the things that I had done well yesterday rather than feeling like I've still got more to do um and I think recognizing what you're doing well is a really important thing for your resilience and when you are feeling
• 33:00 - 33:30 overwhelmed we do need to connect with those feelings of resilience to get us through the moment i think overwhelm doesn't last forever but there are definitely regular moments of it in lots of people's work and so I think it's a very healthy practice to add those questions into the end of an overwhelming day or an overwhelming week at work and just remember if you are listening to this and you're feeling overwhelmed asking for help is always a sign of strength and never a weakness so please do talk to people please get the help you need we know work and the world outside of work can feel really hard um
• 33:30 - 34:00 so please don't kind of do this by yourself do some of the actions hopefully that we've talked about today but if you're still feeling a bit stuck make sure you start to have some conversations talk to other people you're definitely not alone there is no one I know who hasn't felt overwhelmed at some point in most weeks and just for the animal lovers amongst the Are the rabbits still alive the rabbits are fine they've eaten two carrots and some lettuce so I think they're on the mend they're on the men it's good news for all of us what a way to finish the
• 34:00 - 34:30 podcast that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening and we're back with you again soon bye for now bye everyone