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Are you an aspiring leader who knows you have more to offer but you can't seem to get ahead? Do you frequently feel overwhelmed and undersupported? Listen to the overcome to become podcast as we talk about actionable tasks and mindsets that you can apply to begin leading yourself. Hi, my name is Angela Buckley, your host and author of the Strength in Nature Leadership series. I'm a mother, consultant, triathlete and author of Overcome to Become. I share with you the science, fact and experience proven lessons I've learned in my own leadership journey to beat burnout. Thanks for listening.
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Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the last episode in season one of Overcome to Become. My name is Angela Buckley. I am your host today in this episode, and I am the author of Strength in Nature Leadership series. And I am an aspiring PhD student in organizational leadership and development with a focus on adult learning theory. I am a mother, triathlete all around kind of person who likes to give back to her community and I am excited today to be here to talk to you about 3 hard things. So we've been talking recently about micro habits.
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Last time I mentioned about the analogy of putting 3 walnuts into a jar, or a certain amount of walnuts into a pint jar and then pouring the rice around that.
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Why is that such an important image when we're facing overwhelm? One of the things that is such a challenge for us is that we want to say yes to everything. And we talked early in this season about saying yes and being available to everyone. And many of us have a servant mindset to get it all done, help others.
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And somehow, somewhere along the way, we realized that we haven't taken care of ourselves. And what that means is that we have accepted simply more work than one person can do, and we step up. We want to contribute. We want to be a part of society, and yet somehow.
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We end up hurting ourselves, and when we don't guard our energy, when we don't take care of ourselves, we end up not being the leaders that we want to be. We end up not being the parent that we want to be or the successful professional or the community citizen that we want to be in our life.
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So we are talking about how we can take a step back, how we can understand what overwhelm looks like, and how we can manage overwhelm in our own lives and by setting boundaries and by setting goals that are achievable and align to our values.
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And learning how to say no. And when we talk about micro habits, we first spoke about water, drinking enough water. We spoke about having green, green space nature in our immediate vicinity and we spoke about taking a walk and being out in nature. These are three micro habits that are super important to supporting our physical well-being. And then we spoke about the micro habit of learning how to plan a day, taking the time in the evening to reflect again. I like to do this in the evening. Many people like to do this in the morning. But putting on paper what you would like to get done in the following day. Once you've written down that task list, that is probably immense because that's what most of us have.
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Now, we need to learn how to prioritize that and do the three biggest and hardest things, the things that are in your way first.
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I was visiting my girlfriend when I was working on my Masters thesis and she was working, I think maybe on her masters, maybe her PhD. And there was a lot of work to be done and a lot of grunt work, a lot of work that is not enjoyable. And we joked how clean our house was. We joked how many cookies we made for our kids and our families and our friends and our colleagues.
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And we joked about all the ways we looked busy to make sure that we didn't have to actually do the real work which was working on our papers. There was nothing more enjoyable than baking cookies for my colleagues when I was supposed to be working on my paper. I really don't even bake cookies that much, to be honest with you, but baking cookies sounded like a much better idea than working on my paper. And yet the paper was what was going to move me forward.
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The paper was the hard thing. And so when I learned to first get up in the morning and do the hard thing first.
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Somehow there was always enough time to bake cookies later or do whatever it is that I was going to do. But frankly, once I got my paper done, I didn't feel the need to make cookies. It's not always my personal pastime. It is a fantastic indicator that I'm procrastinating. Though my girlfriend seemingly had a similar procrastination technique, her husband commented that the house was never as clean as when she had a major paper submission due, and there were absolutely never any cookies in the house except when there was a major paper due. So I guess we're good friends because we have similar procrastination techniques, and yet we were not moving our personal goals forward by participating in these activities. Rather, we were admittedly procrastinating. Thankfully, we can look back and laugh. And we had relatively healthy procrastination techniques.
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However, sometimes when we are in the overwhelm we might not be actively participating in healthy procrastination techniques, and so our opportunity then is to be intentional. Our opportunity is to say listen, the list is too long.
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It's not healthy to expect ourselves to be able to complete this list by ourselves, so we are going to limit our goal to three things.
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It's fascinating, has always been fascinating to me, if I can get those first three things done by 9:00 o'clock. First of all, people think that I'm incredibly productive. Secondly, I have room (time) to do everything I want to do in the rest of the day.
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What can you do to identify the three most important things in your life that move the needle for yourself? Are you moving forward? Are you increasing your activity level? Your productivity level? Are you reducing your stress and your overwhelm every day by making sure that you do those hard tasks first?
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If you can manage to figure out how to start, get your day going, and get those undesirable but very important tasks off your plate first, right off the bat, the rest of the day is so much more enjoyable. And it breeds energy, it builds energy, it feeds you, it feeds you in your soul because you don't have the worry or the stress or the overwhelm of the activities that you didn't really want to do, but had to do.
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If you push them off, worried about them, worry is an extremely negative energy consuming emotion.
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Get those tasks done early in the morning.
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And let the positive energy flow for the rest of the day.
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So my micro habit tip of today is 3 hard things. Plan your day, the night before or early in the morning and make it your goal to get 3 hard things off your plate.
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And then go about your day, enjoying it and loving life.
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Thank you so much for joining me. My name's Angela Buckley. I am an aspiring PhD student, and I am so excited to share with you all of the tips that I have learned through academia, through experimentation, and through powerful coaches and mentors that have guided me along my journey in intentional leadership. I look forward to speaking to you again very shortly in the future.
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In the meantime, please make sure that you check in on our website, our Instagram and everywhere that you can find anything more about overcome the overwhelm from Strength in Nature. Have a great day. I look forward to speaking to you again soon.
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You've just concluded an episode of Overcome to become a leadership podcast focusing on leading yourself first. Thanks for listening. I'm Angela Buckley with Creatively Efficient author of the Strength in Nature Leadership series. To learn more about mindsets and leadership, follow me on Instagram @CreativelyEfficient.
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