Text-based Coaching: From Overwhelmed to On-Top-of-Things

Why you are so overwhelmed:

You are probably experiencing a negative feedback loop between procrastination and overwhelm. When people feel overwhelmed, they tend to procrastinate. That procrastination, in turn, increases the sense of overwhelm.

You can break this negative feedback loop by decreasing your sense of overwhelm. After coaching hundreds of people, I have found there is a common cause of overwhelm: People often feel overwhelmed because they are lacking priorities.

Without priorities, everything feels important, which makes it hard to start and complete any of the tasks on one's to-do list.

The difference between a priority and everything else you could do is comparable to triage in case of an accident: dealing with injured people can be very stressful. That's why it's crucial that everyone focuses their efforts on the most important things. Medical personnel will make sure that an injured person stays alive (priority) but they probably won't worry too much about cosmetic damage to their patient’s nose (not a priority).

While it's harder to identify priorities in our everyday life, the same principle holds true. Not all tasks you think you should do are created equally: some can make a huge positive difference in your life (priorities) while many others won’t move the needle much (to-dos).

But when you are overwhelmed, you are in a state of stress, and that makes it harder to determine what category tasks fall into.

What will likely happen if you don't heal the root causes:

If you don’t deal with the underlying causes, here's what will likely happen: your sense of overwhelm will keep on getting worse. As more tasks pile up, you will try to do more, which gets you more stressed, which makes it harder to focus. You will likely stay in this downward spiral until you get competent help, learn to address the underlying causes on your own, or something changes in your external circumstances.

If your sense of overwhelm is caused by a lack of priorities, even changing your job to a much less stressful one might not completely erase the problem. Because we live in a time when almost everyone has too many things they could do, learning to prioritize is a crucial life skill for the 21st century.

How to heal the root causes and what to expect if you do:

To solve the issue you are facing, you need to learn how to differentiate between priorities and to-dos, and then follow through on completing your priorities. You also need to set appropriate boundaries with other people so you can stay focused on your goals. Lastly, having too much to do has likely left you tired and drained, so you will also need to learn how to rest and recover.

Once you address these underlying causes, you can start to reduce your pile of undone tasks, and in the process create more time and energy for what really matter to you in all areas of life. Instead of just putting our fires, you can start to work on creating the life of your dreams—your ability to prioritize will help you with that.

In other words, your life can get a lot better!

If you would like my help with this process, please read on:

How I can help you get from overwhelmed to on-top-of-things:

I have been a coach since 2016 and I have been helping people (like Camilla and Deb) through text-based coaching since 2018.

Here's why I got started with this form of coaching:

If you would like to hear more about my text-based coaching approach, check out this short video where I reveal why you should ignore your to-do list and what to focus on instead. 

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