I don't know about you, but I can tell you that the month of January is putting me into a state, or let's put it this way, it was putting me into a state of overwhelm. I did a lot of thinking about it last night and today, and I came up with a few things, and I've got to tell you they're helping. We all hate being overwhelmed. It is, it is just the most, it just really is the most, but it's something that we have to deal with.
Sometimes all these little things in our lives just come creeping up to us and knock us into a state of overwhelm. What does overwhelm mean? It means all these things come at you at one time, and you cannot deal with it because it's just so damn much. Yeah, that's what that is.
Overwhelm, by the way. This is one thing I did. I did some research. I went on that interweb thing.
I remember whenever I did research when I was young, I used to go into the Encyclopedia Britannica thing. Did you have one of those in your house? We all had them in our house. Actually, we did not have the Encyclopedia Britannica.
There was a thing at Kroger's in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the 1960s, I guess, early 1960s, where they had their own encyclopedia, and every week they had, it was a 24-book set, but you had to go every week to go shopping, and you could get one book for a dollar, which seems like nothing now, but it was a lot of money back then, because our grocery budget for a five-person household was about, I don't know, $25 a week, and probably not even that much. I don't know. I was young. But every week, my mother would pick up the current copy, number one, number two, all the way through, so when it was all done, when it was all done, 24 weeks later, we had a complete set of encyclopedias, and that's where I used to do my research, and that's what I would have done my research back then if I was wondering what overwhelm was.
Well, here's what I learned from going into the encyclopedia of Google. Overwhelm isn't just a feeling. It is actually a biological response. It is.
It is something that is biologically going on inside of our heads, and you know what we can do? We can actually hack it. We are hacks for being overwhelmed. I remember listening to Tony Robbins' program, the very first one he came out with, Personal Power.
I bought it on the infomercial, the cassette tapes, in 1985, whenever it came out, and I remember Miles in Dark and Springs listening to it when he talked about overwhelm, and he says, you know, we need to get into a state of overwhelm, and I remember just hearing that, and I do not for the life of me remember what he said to do, because back then I was never overwhelmed, but I remember it's not that thing. I meant to dig that up and look it up, but anyway, you have to stop. Here's what you got to do. You got to stop the storm.
In other words, you've got to stop what is happening that's causing all of this overwhelm, and when I say that, we're talking about multiple things. You've just got to take one thing at a time. Remember when I was talking about, you've got to do tiny things. You've got to do tiny things.
Well, that's what you've got to do. You've got to take these little tiny things that are just building up, and you have to throw every one of them out the window except one, and you grab that by the neck, and you solve that problem, okay? You solve that problem. Then you take the next one, and by the way, you prioritize.
You start with the worst one, the absolute worst one. Like, you know, how am I going to make my mortgage payment when I don't have the money? Well, you do have the money, and you can always figure out a way to make it work. So you put all your energy on that one thing, that one thing, and by golly, by gum, you will solve that one thing, and then you've got your list of things that are overwhelming you is now quite a bit smaller because you've taken out the number one thing.
Now you go to the number two thing. What's the number two thing that you've got to go after? Okay, my ex is being a real pain in the, you know, yeah, whatever. You don't care because it's your ex, okay?
You move on, or you solve the problem. If there's a real problem, say you have an ex and their children involved, and the ex is bitching about something that the children need that that person feels you're not providing. You sit down and you say, what can I do to make this better? You know, and here's the other thing you have to learn how to do when you're in a state of overwhelm.
You've got to learn how to look at this. You've got to learn how to say no. Yep, you've got to learn how to say no without, you know, looking like you're a real a-hole. Because when you're in a state of overwhelm, people are going to be coming at you and wanting you to do things.
Well, people come at you and want you to do things all the damn time, but when you are in a state of overwhelm, and somebody comes up and says, oh, I need you to do this, and you can't because you're overwhelmed. You have to learn how to say, I can't deal with that now. Talk to me in a week, but right now, I can't deal with it. I love you very much, but I just can't do it.
Now, as you make these victories on your overwhelm-solving thing, like you got rid of the big one, then you got rid of the second big one, then you got rid of the third big one, and there's probably 30 damn things. You just start, you know, you celebrate the small victories. You just heard my cat jump up on my chair, one of my cats. He's sitting here at my neck.
This is weird. I'm not editing it out because it's pretty damn cute. All right, but you celebrate those minor victories. You just celebrate them.
The other thing that you don't do, you don't add fuel to the fire. That's the main thing. You figure out ways to make sure that what has happened, or what have, you know, all these things that have happened to you are going to be minimized in the future, or better yet, non-existent. Just try and reconnect with what really matters in your life.
The cat's going to jump up on my shelf where there's stuff that he's going to mess up. And it's her, not him. Ramona, you need to get down. Hop down, baby.
Hop down. That was my cat being persuaded nicely to jump off the top of my chair. Anyway, I don't edit. I just keep going.
Everybody wants to do, when you run into a situation like this, you want to do a to-do list. I don't. I don't make to-do lists when it comes to hacking overwhelm. I just take one thing at a time.
And by the way, I don't even know what all the things are that I'm just all screwed up about in my brain, but I take the, you know, I start with a big one, knock that down, and then I start working my way down. So beyond the to-do list, what you do is you start reconnecting with what truly matters in your life. That's what I do. You know, once I get some of these things knocked out and continuing knocking these things out, I just said, okay, what's going to make me happy?
What's going to, you know, what's going to make my heart sing? Because that is what is truly important. Remember, what I just talked about are starting points, but they're important ones. So I want you to deal with them.
Okay? Oh, by the way, boundaries, not barriers. That's the other important thing. And once again, that means learning to say no.
When I was in a state of overwhelm yesterday and the day before that, you would not believe the people that were coming up and wanting me to do more stuff. And no, I have this thing I'm speaking at the end of the month. I'm putting all my energy towards that right now. And when that's done, I'll deal with everything else.
All right, go out and have a terrific day. And I guess we'll see you tomorrow, because tomorrow's Friday.