Leadership Overwhelm Explained - Episode 8

Episode 8 – the Leadership and Management Reset Podcast Hello and welcome back to the Leadership and Management Reset podcast. Today we're going to be spending some time unpacking something that sits in the background for many of us leaders. But it doesn't always get properly explored, and that is leadership overwhelm. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through leadership overwhelm in a way that helps you really understand what's going on beneath the surface, not just in terms of how it feels, but why it happens and what you can begin to do about it. You see, for many people, overwhelm shows up as this general sense that everything feels like a lot, all at once and it becomes difficult to see a clear way forward. Now, I've spoken before about self-leadership on this podcast and there's definitely a connection there, but today I want to slow things down a little bit and really focus on overwhelm in its own right. So we're going to explore what it is. How it tends to show up why it happens and then importantly. How you can start to shift your experience of it in a way that feels more manageable and absolutely more sustainable. So let's begin by taking a little bit of time to define what we mean by overwhelm. What is overwhelm? Because this is often where things can feel slightly vague or misunderstood. Leadership overwhelm isn't simply about having a busy week or a long to-do list. Most leadership rules will naturally involve both of these things at different points. What tends to create overwhelm is when the demands being placed on you start to feel greater than your capacity. And importantly, that sense of capacity isn't just practical, it's all also psychological. It's about how capable you feel in that moment of holding everything that's coming your way, and that's why the idea of perception matters so much here. Because you see, 2 leaders can be dealing with exactly the same workloads on paper. But one might feel relatively clear and in control while the other feels stretched. They're reactive and they're unsure where to begin. So overwhelm isn't just about volume. Is also much more. It's also a bit clarity. It's about how clearly you can see what's in front of you. How confident you feel in making decisions about it. And how able you are to prioritise in a way that feels grounded rather than reactive. And what do I mean by grounded rather than reactive? I mean, being more in control. Being more intentional rather than shooting from the hip in a quick fire response, which might not actually enable or be clear or be helpful to the situation. When everything starts to feel important. Because let's face it sometimes when things are coming at us from lots of different angles, we feel that everything is just too much. Everything has urgency about it. And what happens is your attention gets pulled in multiple directions at once. And when your attention constantly shifts like that. Your thinking can quickly become crowded. Somebody described that sort of overwhelmed to me like thinking like #oh you have a Bath full of water with lots of. Corks, you know wine bottle corks in it. And you try to pop things that pop them down under the water and then they pop back up. And actually, that to me is a really good metaphor for what actually your brain can feel like when you're overwhelmed. You can't keep it quiet. You're constantly thinking about something and it's not sustainable. And that overwhelm starts to take control. It really starts to feel like it's not manageable anymore. You are not seeing order. You're feeling extremely stressed and something has to change. And one of the reasons why overwhelm can be difficult to recognise is that it doesn't always look the same from one person to another. So from the outside looking in, it can be very different. We all deal with our own and overwhelm internally. But how might it manifest if for your team members looking at you, trying to identify whether or not you are overwhelmed. So for some leaders, when they are feeling overwhelmed, they might lean in harder. And what I mean by that is they might start to work longer hours. They might constantly be busy. They might never seem to be able to breathe and stop. And they are constantly trying to keep things moving. And I've been there. I know exactly what that feels like. For me, when I'm overwhelmed, that's how I behave. And on the surface, to your team, that looks like you're super dedicated, you are looking extremely productive, but underneath it often comes from a sense of that if you slow down, everything's going to collapse round about you, everything's going to start to unravel, and everything's going to fail because you've failed. And for others, the response moves completely in a different direction. There are other people who are overwhelmed. And what they do is they show up. With avoidance. Where they delay in making decisions, where conversations, difficult conversations mostly, but maybe meetings are postponed. And there's a pull towards the easier or more familiar tasks that they like doing instead of the ones that acquire energy, strategy, direction, clarity. And then there's a whole emotional side of all of overwhelm as well because you might start to notice that patience is shorter than usual. That when something gets in the way like you're interrupted in the middle of something, it can annoy you much more. Or that smaller issues, you know, the stuff that you can shrug off or um delegate very easily start to feel disproportionately frustrating. And those things that you would normally handle quite easily start to feel like they really are taking much more energy and effort than they should require. But. Sometimes over will is much more quiet. And it's the mental load that sits in the background. Because when you start over to feel overwhelmed as a leader. You start to hold multiple conversations in your head you replace situations. You're thinking of you're constantly thinking about work when you're not at work. And you find it extremely difficult to properly switch off. It feels like there's a constant low level noise in the background that never fully quietens. And over time that state can start to feel normal, we start to normalise it. And we say to ourselves, okay, that's just part of being a leader that's what leadership involves. But it's important to recognise that whilst it might be common, it isn't something you have to accept as the baseline for you and what you experience in your role. Because let's face it. Your role does not define you as a human being. So therefore, thinking about your role constantly is not appropriate or correct. And so why does overwhelm happen? You know we can just go over shut and that's really easy because it's just what what leadership is and you're managing lots of things and that's very true. If you step back and look at the nature of leadership. It becomes clear why overwhelm shows up so often. You're not you're no longer just responsible for your workload. You're responsible for people. You're responsible for decisions, and for the outcomes, and you don't fully control all of that, because if you are leading well, then you are delegating well, you are passing the battern of responsibility to others, whilst ultimately holding that final level of responsibility. And when you're overwhelmed or perhaps you're not even getting clear strategy or clear direction from your line manager, then. Things can get difficult because you stop to have clarity yourself and in that lack of clarity in your own role, then chaos can be created. Well, you don't have clarity. Everything feels equally important. It becomes incredibly difficult to prioritise in a way that feels confident and more importantly intentional where you have control over what you're prioritising. Because to do that, you need a clear head. And when you're busy and when you are fleeting from one thing to another, what you don't have is a clear head. So instead, everything gets a similar level of attention, and that's where the sense of overload begins to build. There's also another layer here that's worth bringing into the conversation because it tends to amplify everything else. And that's imposter syndrome. That underlying question of whether you have enough experience as a leader, whether you're doing enough or whether you're fully belong in that role that you're in. And when that's present, when imposter syndromes, they are even in the most subtle way, it often increases the pressure you place on yourself. You might find yourself overthinking decisions. Preparing more than necessary, although I do sometimes think that there's never an, you can never over-prepare, or holding onto things longer than you need to because you want to be absolutely certain before moving forward. There can also be a sense that you need to prove yourself, which means you carry more than you should and you take more responsibility than it's actually required. Or you do more that's needed, all to prove to other people that you are the correct person for the job. And all of that adds weight to what you're already managing. It adds doubt, it adds a further layer of pressure that doesn't need to be there. So, when we talk about leadership overwhelm, it's rarely just about the workload of isolation. It's much more about the combination of clarity, pressure, responsibility. And the expectations you're holding yourself to on a day-to-day basis. So now that we've looked at what overwhelming leadership actually is, what are we going to do about it? The starting point isn't to add more strategies to push yourself harder. It's really to begin by seeing your work differently. Because if overwhelm is driven by a lack of clarity for you, then creating that clarity becomes the most valuable place to focus. If you have multiple tabs in your brain open all the time, you're not going to have clarity about what you're doing next. One thing that I work with my clients on is sometimes just identifying where your priorities are. What's important to you as a leader? And a great tool to use is eyes of the Eisenhower matrix. Which helps separate your work into four distinct categories. There's urgent and important. Important, but not urgent. Urgent but not important. And neither. And what tends to happen for many leaders is that most of their time and energy gets pulled into responding what feels urgent in the moment. But when you step back and look at it more objectively, the work that actually moves your leadership forward. That work that creates long term impact. Often sits in the space that feels important, but not immediately urgent. That's things like planning. Developing your team. Thinking ahead, strategically and having conversations that create clarity and alignment and those are all leadership. Strategies, their leadership skills that need work to be able to create. Great clarity in what you're doing with leaving your team. Remember, leadership, leadership skills are not your role, specifically, your role will be lots of things to do with the business that you work in, the projects that you're running. But when you're leading a team, you have to add another layer to that role that nobody talks about, and those are those leadership skills and qualities that I've just referred to there. So the shift here isn't just about organising tasks definitely it's about changing how you relate to your role and where you choose to place your attention. Alongside that, I just want to bring something more personal because this is something I've had to navigate myself. One of the things that has made a significant difference for me is creating more structure in my calendar through time blocking. What that's allowed me to do is give specific pieces of work a clear place to live. Rather than holding everything my head or scattering across different notes unless. I no longer have a to do list. I might have the occasional post note on my desk that gets only because I still have to add it to my calendar. But by allocating time to actually do the work rather than just listing it down in a to-do list. Allocating that time in my digital calendar because everything we do takes time. It's enabled me to create space to properly focus. To think more clearly and to complete tasks without constantly switching between other tasks. It's allowed me to feel less guilty about spending focussed time on something when I know there are other things to do. And the reason for that is because I know the other things to do have already been assigned a task in my calendar. And that for me has been a little bit of magic in me helping me manage the chaos over my, over my brain. It's allowed me to be much more in control of my work. It's allowed me to. Lose the pressure that I was feeling that was putting on myself. And with my menopausal brain, it's helped me reduce that mental noise, okay? Because it's created a stronger sense of structure. It's helped me stop worrying about have I forgotten something? And it's made it far easier for me to plan ahead in a way that feels much more intentional because if I've got a project coming in, I always start at the end and work backwards and plan and prioritise time to make sure I have. Enough time in my calendar to be able to do that work. And suppose the next layer to this is having some kind of system that works for you. And that doesn't need to be complicated and it doesn't need to be perfect, but it does need to give you work somewhere to sit outside of your head. So for example, in my calendar, I will have just a heading and I might have some bullet points about what I might cover in that. But I have systems that I use in my business where I hold all the information. And it's not really about. The system you use per se, but more about having things tracked. Because you need, you want to avoid the overwhelm and if you have detail of stuff that work that you're doing the project, the outcomes that you're trying to work towards the actions that you propose to take. Held somewhere, then you're not holding that in your brain. You're avoiding overwhelm by having that organised structure. So a simple external structure can significantly reduce, reduce rather that intent, that internal pressure. And if you're looking for some help with that, I can recommend Sarah Stewart. She's a great time management coach. So I'll pop her details into the show notes. And there's one final shift that can be incredibly powerful, even though it can take a bit of time to fool it go of, which is the idea that you need to have all the answers because it's not true. Many leaders carry that expectation. Often without questioning it and it quietly adds weight to every decision. And every situation they're in. I don't know this all. I've not worked as long as this person in this field. I am too young or I am haven't experienced this type of project before. I'm not good enough. I don't have all the answers. Sound familiar? But leadership isn't really about having all the answers. It's about again it keeps using this word creating clarity. It's about setting direction and it's making it possible for others to contribute effectively. For others to step up. and lead within a project, for others to show their expertise. Your skill is for you to manage and facilitate that so that other people have the opportunity. It's not about you having all the answers. That's impossible. And at some point. You need to realise that. That's not an expectation you're creating space for others that's the expectation. Not just in your workload or their workload, but in how you think how you show up as a leader and how your team see you as a leader. They shouldn't see you as the expert. Because you should be in a position that you could say, folks, I don't know the answer to this, but I know one of you does, so let's explore that. And when you start to realise that, and when you start to communicate differently with your team, then that changes. And by those simple conversations, those simple statements that you make and being vulnerable with your team, about you not knowing the answer, then allows you to shed that weight you're carrying about, having to know the answers, because you don't. And that's where change starts, because if nothing shifts. Nothing will change. Overwhelm doesn't tend to disappear. It becomes just normalised, it becomes a normal part of the rhythm of your work. And if you don't change it, It could make you burn out completely. But I would recommend not trying to change everything at once. It's often most effective if you try to just change one thing at a time. So one shift in how you prioritise. One shift in how you structure your time. One shift in how you think about your role. Just start with one. Start there. And you'll see a big difference going forward. So that's leadership over well explored in a way that hopefully gives you something more practical and tangible to work with. If you're recognising parts of this in your own experience. The most useful place to begin is awareness and if you're recognising that then you are aware. But take a step back. And ask yourself, where this overwhelming setting. What are you holding onto that isn't yours to carry, that you can give to someone else to do? What expectations have you placed on yourself that could be a, that could be adding unnecessary pressure? What systems or lack of systems is not working for you to help you feel in control with your brain? How can you close some of those open taps that you have in your head? When you start to see things more clearly, when you really take an objective helicopter view of what's happening for you on a day-to-day basis, it becomes so much easier to start changing them in a way that feels realistic and sustainable. If that helps you, I'd like you also to go back and listen to the self leadership episode where I explore how you manage yourself within your role in more depth. But if you'd like a little bit more help, then always you can always get in touch for a free conversation with me. And we can see if there's anything that I can do to support you in finding a little bit more clarity in your leadership. And helping you reduce the overwhelm that you're feeling. So thanks for listening to this episode. I'll see you in the next one. Have a great day, bye.