Are You Amplifying Your Overwhelm? Here’s How to Stop

[00:00:00] Rachel: Recently, we ran a survey asking people what keeps them awake at night. And we got an overwhelming response from hundreds of you. Mostly it was an overwhelming workload. And then the worry that you’ve missed something or made a mistake.

[00:00:14] Rachel: A lot of people said they were worrying about their team, about team dynamics. They felt so responsible for stuff. And then when we asked, why can’t you leave work at work? You talked about doing other people’s work for them, not be able to switch off at the end of the day in case your team needed extra support from you, or feeling guilty because you’ve not done enough, or firefighting stuff all the time.

[00:00:37] Rachel: So in this quick dip episode, I want to talk about the way that leaders in health and social care can actually amplify that own workload by that hone behavior. And when I say leaders, I mean, anybody who has any responsibility for anybody else. So as you progress in your career, you will turn into a leader if you are supervising anybody. If you’re just someone that your colleagues come to for help and support, if you’re a coach, a mentor, a clinical director, a senior partner, a line manager, you name it, you are a leader, whether you like it or not, whether you see yourself as a leader or not.

[00:01:10] Rachel: And when it comes to workload It’s just too much to do. There’s no denying it. And it’s not just in health and social care that this is happening, it’s all over the place. Since COVID what let’s have just ramped up, and it doesn’t help with the economic climate and the lack of funding for various things. But in health and social care, there is overwhelming patient demand, people are going off sick with stress and burnout, people are leaving. So that just leaves more work for the people who are left.

[00:01:36] Rachel: Now many, many people. In the answer to the survey said that one of the reasons they can’t leave work at work because they’re so busy during the day job at work that they have no time to do that management and leadership responsibilities. And we know that there’s a lot of stuff which comes with that such as appraisals, once a ones, you might be organizing the rota, thinking about strategy, just general support for your team. All that stuff takes time. And it’s very rare to be given enough time to do that. But on top of that, there are things that make this worse.

[00:02:07] Rachel: This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I’ve chosen today’s topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you’re up to feeling energized and inspired. For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don’t forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:02:36] Rachel: Now, most of us think that the reason that we are overwhelmed is completely external. It’s just, there’s too much stuff coming at us. That’s quite a dangerous mindset to be in because let’s face it, there’s always going to be too much to do. And we know that we have no control over patient demand, about the stuff that other people give to us.

[00:02:54] Rachel: So then we think that we have no control over the workload. If we think like that, though, what happens is we just work harder and harder and harder in order to do everything that’s required of us. That leads to stress and burnout. It also means we don’t have any time to look after ourselves to keep ourselves fit and well.

[00:03:11] Rachel: And we feel like we’ve got no choice. We fill out that we have to do it. And the amount of people that say to me, if I don’t do it, who’s going to? When we are in the mindset that we just have to get on with the workload and there’s nothing we can do to control it. It feels like we’ve got a big wooden box and that box is our finite time and energy and people keep giving us water balloons. These are the tasks that we need to do, and we’re trying to squash these balloons into the box.

[00:03:39] Rachel: Now. We think that we can just get more and more efficient and more and more productive, and yes, there’s a little bit of efficiency that can be made, but as we know, when we try and go for too much efficiency, when we try and aim for too much productivity, then patients suffer, services suffer. And all that happens is that the quality goes down and we still feel overwhelmed. So it’s rather like trying to squash these water balloons into a big box and we’re trying to push them down, but they just keep bolting out elsewhere. And what happens is that either the water balloons exploding leak everywhere, or the box breaks and we can no longer do anything.

[00:04:12] Rachel: I want to talk to you about a different way of doing things. And that is. As if you have the box and you’ve got some water balloons, but you’re taking on less water balloons, and what small, these water balloons have less in them, so there’s more time and space and you have the time and capacity to do everything. And the way you do that is by identifying the five ways of behaving that are actually amplifying your overwhelmed. And these five things are under your control.

[00:04:39] Rachel: Now, a few months ago, I was talking to a large group of GP trainers and I asked them what was stopping them, giving their best at work. And they said, well, there’s lots of different things, but it’s mainly the workload. I just have too much to do. And when I asked them what they felt responsible for, the answer was pretty much everybody and everything. When it came to their trainees, they felt incredibly responsible for whether their trainee passed their exams or not. They felt responsible for the trainees’ wellbeing, whether they were enjoying their job. They felt responsible for all the patients that the trainee saw. They felt responsible for the ways that other people in the practice interacted with their trainees and how happy they were at work.

[00:05:19] Rachel: And when I ask them about what the consequences of that were for them,. I got answers like, well, they were coming home from their annual leave to, to, to mark the portfolios that been handed in late. They were bending over backwards to make life easier for their trainees at their detriment. And these behaviors just didn’t work. It seems to make things worse, actually.

[00:05:39] Rachel: So these GP trainers were falling into the trap of the first overwhelmed, amplified. That is over responsibility. That is feeding responsible for things that are outside of our control. There’s no way that these trainers could be responsible for whether their trainees pass their exams or not. They were not in the exam hall with them. They could not write the answers for them.

[00:06:01] Rachel: And there are so many things that would have affected that candidate’s performance on the day. The trainer could not possibly take responsibility for that, but they felt that they were. As a consequence, they were rushing around getting very frustrated and not just feeling frustrated, but feeling very guilty when anything went wrong for that trainee, even if it wasn’t their fault.

[00:06:22] Rachel: And that’s the emotion that we feel predominantly when things happen that are outside our control, but we’re taking too much responsibility for those, we just feel guilty. And this adds to our workload as we just work harder and harder trying to effect everything. But no matter how hard we work, we’ll just be ineffective, because if it’s out of our control, there’s nothing we can do about it. So they were just increasing their workload and their stress, when an actual fact. They weren’t taking control of the things that they could do, such as setting proper deadlines for the portfolio, having the conversations they needed to with their colleagues when they weren’t delivering the right training sessions, and setting boundaries with their trainees to help them survive once they’ve qualified.

[00:07:04] Rachel: Now the way out of this over responsibility amplifier is to accept that we can’t do anything about things that are outside of our control. And one thing that’s really helped me is knowing the difference between caring about something and carrying it. Because I may care deeply about my trainees and their success, and if they pass their exams, But if I can’t control the outcome, then I can’t be responsible for it. I can care, but I can’t carry it. I can’t carry that load of responsibility. So working out the difference between caring about something and not carrying it is vital here. So, what is it that you care about deeply, but you can’t carry?

[00:07:44] Rachel: The next overwhelmed amplifier is actually making the opposite mistake, of not doing stuff that we could control. Like I mentioned before, setting boundaries saying no, having those difficult conversations, giving the feedback, and addressing the issues that, you know, you need to address before they just spiral out control and take you an awful lot more time.

[00:08:04] Rachel: This takes courage and it takes a bit of skill. And a lot of us, if I’m honest, don’t really know how to have those difficult conversations and we really fear conflict. So we avoid doing those things that we could do. We avoid addressing issues. And this just increases your overwhelm and your workload by letting issues spiral out of control, and they take an awful lot longer to source out further down the line.

[00:08:29] Rachel: Uh, I heard a very useful analogy, which isn’t entirely appropriate, but I’m going to share it anyway. Someone said to me once, well if you’re going to be kidnapped, the time to get his way is the minute they grabbed you and they’re pointing a gun at your head. You need to kick them shout and scream and run off, because you’re much more likely to survive than if they stick you in the boot, drive you off to a place, and hold you in some sort of shed in the middle of nowhere.

[00:08:53] Rachel: So the time to deal with issues is straight away. But we fear, we fear conflict. We feel the effects on the relationship. We fear their shorts and consequences, don’t we? But in the longterm, It will increase our workload. It will increase our stress. If these things aren’t addressed. So avoiding potentially difficult situations, avoiding conflict is the second overwhelm amplifier.

[00:09:15] Rachel: What can we do about that? Well, firstly, identify the things that we could do something about and get upskilled, learn how to have those difficult conversations, get some coaching, get some training. And if he wants to find out more about that, we did a whole Frog Fest Virtual live training about This Time it’s Awkward, how to have those awkward conversations, so you can check that out and we’ll put all the links to our resources in the show notes.

[00:09:39] Rachel: One thing you could do if you’re worried about compensation is just get really curious. Say, well, I’m curious about what happened there, which meant that this behavior happened. Just state what happened. Make sure you ask for their perspective, ask them how they thought about things, or even get them to write their own performance and ask them how that went. And then there’ll be much easier to address things with people.

[00:09:59] Rachel: So the first two overwhelm amplifies the firstly over responsibility, second avoiding conflicts or difficult conversations. Now the third one is getting stuck in the urgency trap.

[00:10:11] Rachel: So many people told us that they spent so much time firefighting urgent stuff for other people. And just doing stuff that came up, that they had to do their regular work in the evenings, outside of the normal working time. Cause they just didn’t get anything done. And the urgency trap. Is where everything seems urgent and important, and it becomes so stressful that we can’t see the wood for the trees. And then the stuff that’s urgent seems to trump the stuff that’s important, and this is particularly stuff. Other people.

[00:10:42] Rachel: And this is where the people pleasers in a surface. We don’t want to upset people, but you don’t want to say no. We want to help, we want to be supportive. But it’s a profoundly, stressful place to be, and we end up ignoring those important tasks that we really, really need to get to. And again, this just increases our workload.

[00:11:00] Rachel: The way out of this is to learn how to prioritize powerfully. And we used our shape, the prioritization grid to do this. But even if you’ve just spent 10 minutes writing down what the really important things were for you, what your priorities are, the things that you know would move the needle massively for you, you’d know what you need to focus on. But then the issue is saying no to that stuff that you know, you’re not going to focus on.

[00:11:22] Rachel: And the fourth overwhelm amplifier. Is getting stuck in rescue mode, taking the rescue at mentality. Several people in our survey say that the reason they couldn’t leave work at work is ’cause they spend a lot of time doing other people’s work for them. And as leaders, every bone in our body wants to support our teams, be a good human being. And often we interpret that as just taking over for people, fixing it for them, doing their work when they’re overwhelmed, or helping them out when they get stuck and often doing it for them.

[00:11:54] Rachel: The problem is that this rescue mentality is actually a very toxic form of leadership. Why? Because it keeps people stuck, disempowered, gets them into unhelpful victim patterns. And the problem with being in the victim mentality is that’s quite comfortable because you don’t need to make too much effort. You can blame everybody else. So we end up in the stance. We end up stuck in the drama triangle.

[00:12:15] Rachel: So taking the rescuer mentality means that again, our workload is massively increased as we just feel. We’ve got to do everything for everybody else. And as a consequence, we don’t let anybody grow and develop, solve their own problems or learn for themselves. The way out of that is to instead take a coaching approach.

[00:12:34] Rachel: Now, we teach a lot of coaching techniques and teaching models but you don’t need to, to a massive long coaching course to take a coaching approach. You could just ask somebody well, what could you do about this? What have you already thought of? How could you solve this for yourself? What I did is you have? And leave the ball in their court.

[00:12:53] Rachel: But there’s one more, and this just trumps all at the And actually it’s at the root of everything. And those are the three toxic tethers. The three behaviors that mean, we can’t say no or set boundaries, or when we do set boundaries, we just crumble in the face of pushback. And that is perfectionism, people pleasing, and pre living.

[00:13:13] Rachel: Perfectionism means that we can’t possibly leave anything undone. We’ve got to get to the bottom of our to-do list, because if we don’t, that means we’re not good enough. We’re not, we’re not perfect. And the thought that we’re not perfect quickly leads to the thought of, well, I’m not good enough, which quickly leads to I am not enough, and that is the basis of shame.

[00:13:30] Rachel: So many of us feel shame when we have to set limits around our time and our work, and so we don’t do that. We want to believe that we are superhuman. And we can cope with everything.

[00:13:42] Rachel: People pleasing. We hate upsetting people. We feel guilty even if we’re not responsible for stuff. We feel guilty if we can’t see everything for everybody. Now, this is hardwired into us. Our amygdalas will detect a threat if we upset people so we’ve very, very quickly default to guilty.

[00:13:59] Rachel: I’ve realized that most healthcare professionals have got a massive chip on their shoulder. It’s a guilty chip. We so quickly take on the blame for everything and feel guilty for stuff that’s way out of our control. And what happens then is we work harder and harder, we try and do something about it, adding. So our workload.

[00:14:15] Rachel: And then a third toxic tether is pre living stuff, thinking what will happen if I get complaint? What if this goes wrong? What if I’ve made a mistake, what if I’ve missed something? We pre live stuff that hasn’t even happened yet. Mark Twain said I’m an old man. I’ve known many troubles. Most of them haven’t happened.

[00:14:32] Rachel: And pre living stuff leads to fear. What if they do think badly of me? What if they think I’m not good enough? And so we work harder and harder and do more and more in order to avoid guilt, shame and fear. That adds to our workload. And adds to our stress.

[00:14:48] Rachel: So we have a choice. We can continue thinking that our overwhelm and stress is entirely due to the external workload that’s coming at us, and try our best to do it all. That way lies, overwhelm, stress, guilt, all that sort of stuff. And it’s very hard to break out of that cycle. Or we can decide that there are things that we can do about our overwhelming workload. At the very least, we will decide not to make it worse ourselves by avoiding these five overwhelm amplifiers. Because we are in control of the way we think and what we choose to do and what we choose to take on.

[00:15:27] Rachel: And here’s the thing. Your wellbeing is directly linked to this. The biggest reason I think for healthcare professionals feeling stressed and burning out and having their health and their wellbeing suffering is because they do not have the time to attend to their own needs. If we solve overwhelm, I think we still have wellbeing because we all know what we need to do to keep ourselves fit and well, to practice that necessary care that we need to.

[00:15:51] Rachel: So can I suggest that next time you are in that mindset of overwhelm, you look for where you are, exaggerating it for yourself. And firstly you note, okay, which overwhelm amplifying behavior have I fallen into? Is it over responsibility, the urgency trap, is it rescuing, is it avoiding conflict, or is it those three toxic tethers of perfectionism, people pleasing, and pre living? Write it down, identify it and just go, oh, that’s interesting, there’s a bit of over-responsibility.

[00:16:22] Rachel: Next, write down what emotion you’re feeling. And I bet you there’ll be some guilt, some shame, or some fare at the bottom of it. It might also help to write down the story that you’re telling yourself. I should see that extra patient. Because otherwise there’ll be cross with me and the receptionist will think I’m awful. Or I really must check my emails at 11 o’clock at night, otherwise my colleagues might think I’m checking my responsibility. What are the toxic stories you’re telling yourself?

[00:16:50] Rachel: And then I’d like you to write down. What happens when you believe those stories, and what consequences it has longterm? And then write down the reason why that story isn’t true, or actually another story that’s more helpful. What are the long-term reasons why you might be choosing to set those boundaries? It might be, you know, there’s no point anyway, because you’re not in control of it. It might be that, you know that the rescuer mentality is actually very toxic in the long run. Write down the longterm reason why you are going to choose to stop with the overwhelm amplifying behavior.

[00:17:24] Rachel: Now there, of course, are some mistakes that we can make in all of this. The first is just blindly accepting that all the work that’s coming at you is just what you’ve got to put up with and not ever talk to your organization about what’s going on, and asking them to put some limits on it. So by all means, have the conversations that you need to do to address what’s going on.

[00:17:43] Rachel: The second is trying to address this stuff when you are. In the midst of the overwhelm. It’s really, really difficult. I did a podcast recently called you. Can’t organize your way out of overwhelms that if you are right in that situation right now, and you just can’t think straight, and we can’t think straight when we’re stressed, the best thing you can do is rest. Take a rest, take a break. UN. Start to think about this stuff when you’re back in your parasympathetic, when you’ve had a good night’s sleep, when you’ve got a bit of brain space to think about this. And by all means, find a friend, talk about it, discuss it, get some coaching, ask people what they think.

[00:18:18] Rachel: And finally, don’t wait until you are not overwhelmed to have time to look after yourself. You need to put in the wellbeing stuff right now, even when you don’t have time. Because believe me, you’ll get your time back, you’ll be pleased you did, and you’ll be in a much better mental state to be able to deal with all of this.

[00:18:35] Rachel: And don’t forget to get the help and the support that you need with this. We’ve got loads of stuff available. You can join the Shapes Academy. You can do our Beat Stress and Thrive course. We’ve got some short courses on boundaries called Get Your Life Back. So all of those resources are in the show notes below.

[00:18:51] Rachel: So recognize that when it comes to overwhelm, you do have a choice. Not over everything, but you have a choice over some things which will be making your overwhelm and stress much, much worse.

[00:19:04] Rachel: And that sorts and quite difficult to hear. And I’m really not trying to minimize the issues that are out there. But there is no Knight in shining armor that’s going to come riding and rescue you. There are small things that you can see yourself. And honestly, They’ll make a load of difference. So go, well, good luck with all of this, let me know how you’ve got on and I’ll see you for the next quick dip.