“The trick is to be grateful when your mood is high and graceful when it is low.”

~ Richard Carlson

I’m sure everyone has days or weeks when everything goes to plan. When you seem to jump out of bed in the morning and have a spring in your step and a can-do attitude. It is on days like this when nothing seems to get in your way and ticking things off your to-do list is as satisfying as it is commonplace.

I’m even more certain that there isn’t a person on this earth whose every day is like this. For whatever reason, these glorious runs of high-performance and super-positive productivity don’t last forever and are inevitably punctuated by their counterpart: the low, the downturn, the downswing or the rough patch – usually characterised by a lack of energy, an undercurrent of negativity and a general all-pervasive apathy.

I’ve often asked myself why this happens and I’ve come to believe that the lows (as well as the highs) are just the way of things – the natural ebb and flow of life. If this is the case, what, if anything, can we do about it? One of my fundamental beliefs in life is that we cannot control or change what happens to us, but we can control or change how we react to things and that is the principle that applies here for me.

Because feeling low is completely normal and unavoidable, what becomes important is not trying to eradicate the lows, but learning how to better navigate them when they occur. In this post I want to share with you the primary way I do that in my life and business.

Recognising the low

Our lows have a tendency to sneak up on us. One day, we simply get out of bed with more of a shuffle than a spring, we head to our office and sit down at our desk with our shoulders a little more slumped than usual and as we begin our working day, often without us even realising it, there is a low-level hum of negative thoughts running through our mind. If we don’t get wise to what’s happening, before long, our inner critic is on the rampage with thoughts like: This is hopeless, I’m never going to make this business work. I’m just not cut out for this. Who am I to help people anyway? I can’t even help myself! It doesn’t matter what I try, nothing seems to be working and so on and so forth.

Before we know it, we’re googling jobs or funny cat videos (or both) and our work for the day has gone out of the window. At times like this it’s essential that we recognise that we are having a bad day because when we don’t acknowledge what’s really going on, we start to believe the nonsense our inner critic is feeding us. It’s on days like this that I like to acknowledge that I’m having a bad day. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel better to do so but it does make me conscious of the fact that my thinking will be off and that I therefore can’t trust it. So when the barrage of negative thoughts begins, I can say to myself the line an old Coach of mine taught me: “I hear what you are saying but I thank God it’s not true.”

You see the negative thoughts and feelings can be there without influencing what we do. If I believe that it’s all useless and that what I’m doing doesn’t matter then I’m much more likely to throw the towel in and give up for the day but when I get what’s going on, I can adjust my expectations of what’s possible for the day, depending on my level of consciousness at any given time.

Another metaphor that really helps me with this comes from Transformational Coach and Author, Michael Neill, who refers to the glass elevator of consciousness (sometimes also referred to as the ladder of consciousness):

“As individuals we all experience life at different levels. It’s like being in a glass elevator – the world looks different depending on what floor we’re on. And the elevator of our personal consciousness goes up and down all day long. When our level changes, our view changes right along with it: the higher our level, the clearer our view.”

~ Michael Neill

I like to think of it this way, if our elevator has stopped on the ground floor, then our view is limited – perhaps we can only see the walls of the adjacent building and with no view of the horizon and little sunshine, it’s dark and our view is obscured. At this level, our awareness of what is possible is also limited and we may experience feelings of depression, sadness and stuckness.

As we raise a few levels we might be able to see the streets around us and more of our local neighbourhood. Here we have a higher perspective but still a very personal one and also somewhat limited. We see more possibility, but not all the possibility that exists.

Now imagine going high, high up in the elevator, where your view takes in more than the surrounding buildings and streets but also the surrounding cities and even higher still has you able to see the horizon off into the distance and the wider world around you. At these higher levels, you have access to much wisdom and you see the bigger picture of life.

You’re no longer stuck in personal or negative thinking and can see that there is a wider perspective available to you. Possibilities are limitless here.

When we find ourselves in a lower level of consciousness than we’d like to be, rather than worrying about how to get to a higher level, resting in the knowledge that whilst we’re at this lower level, we’ll have limited access to all of the information we need, is our doorway to wisdom.

Knowing where we are at any give moment is wisdom, in and of itself. It’s also important to note that no level is right or wrong. We can change our level of consciousness multiple times a day and doing so is a natural part of life. It’s important not to beat yourself up if you find yourself temporarily at a lower level. Simply by being aware and accepting where you are right now will see you moving in no time at all. What has people getting stuck on lower levels, is self-judgment and self-loathing for being there.

So this is what I like to remind myself of when I’m having a bad day. Knowing that when my mood drops all that has happened is a shift in my level of consciousness, really helps me not to get sucked into the drama of it all. These days I’m much better at patiently waiting for my elevator to move on up a level or two and it always does. When we can truly embrace the idea that “this too shall pass” we don’t hang out in the lows for quite as long, we don’t buy into our negative thinking or make regrettable decisions while we’re there. We just wait for our elevator to move again and get on with our day as best we can.

How about you? How do you navigate the bad days? I’d love to hear what works for you, so do let me know in the comments below. 

“You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.”

~ Timber Hawkeye

As first glance, feeling overwhelmed is at once the bane and the burden of being a solopreneur. With so much to deal with, learn and deliver, is it any wonder that we end up feeling overwhelmed? The cruel twist with overwhelm is that it is paralyzing and by its nature occurs when we need to be in action the most. With so much to handle, we become incapable of really handling anything and as a result our work really suffers.

It’s my belief that when we learn how to deal with overwhelm, everything changes for us as business owners and in this post I want to share with you one simple idea that changed my entire relationship to this destructive condition:

Overwhelm is a choice. 

I told you it was simple and yes you heard me right. If you are feeling overwhelmed in your business, I believe it’s because of choices you have made. When I first heard this idea, it blew my mind. Until that point I had always felt like overwhelm was a natural byproduct of having too much to do, but it’s not. How do I know that? Because I’ve met plenty of people who have more on their plate than I do who don’t feel overwhelmed and plenty with far less who do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s as simple as deciding or choosing not to feel overwhelmed. There are absolutely conditions and circumstances that make feelings of overwhelm much more likely but what I am saying is we have a choice about whether we create or choose to stay in those conditions. Allow me to share a few examples.

On the mornings when I wake up and immediately reach for my phone, flicking through all of my social media notifications and outstanding emails I feel more overwhelmed than on the days that I stick to my usual routine of putting my phone to charge in my office overnight (thereby resisting the temptation to check it first thing) and on sitting down at my desk, keeping my internet browser closed until I’ve completed my most important work for the day. Do you see the choice here?

On the days where I have 10 tabs open in my internet browser and flick from task to task with wild abandon I feel more overwhelmed than when I write out what needs to get done today, block out time in my calendar to do those very things and close down everything on my computer that isn’t related to the task at hand. Do you see the choice here?

During those times when I endlessly ruminate on everything I need to get done this week, this month or even this year I feel more overwhelmed than when I ask myself what my top 3 priorities are for the day and then decide what my most important next step is to make headway on those priorities. Do you see the choice here?

Now I’m not saying that I always choose the path of least overwhelm, certainly not, but I’ve come to realise that I can choose to create or stay in the conditions for overwhelm OR I can change my conditions in favour of focus. Ultimately for me, what this means is that when I begin to feel overwhelmed, I know that somewhere along the line I have unwittingly created the conditions for those feelings to occur and that I have the capability to choose and create a different situation instead. Personally this has been liberating.

Now you maybe thinking: but Caroline there are times when I have more to do than I can handle. How am I supposed to avoid overwhelm then? I hear you, I face this often. The key is not in how busy you are or not. The key is how you think about your situation. Let me use a hypothetical to illustrate the point. Let’s say you have a 6 hour working day. No more as you have family and childcare duties to contend with outside of those hours (my reality often). In those 6 hours you need to publish a blog post (which usually takes you 2 hours or more), do 3 hours of client work and you have two 60 minute potential client calls, when another client messages you with an emergency. You’re already overbooked. There are already not enough hours in the day. Cue overwhelm.

Here again you still have a choice. You can either succumb to feeling overwhelmed by focusing on what feels impossible to achieve and stressing yourself out or you can get super focused and figure out what you can do and what needs to be moved or reprioritised. On days like this the first thing I do is open my notebook and write out what absolutely has to get done. Then I put timings next to each so that I know, not only when during the day I’ll do them and in what order, but also how long I have for each task. Then I go through the list taking each task in turn, using my timer to keep me on track. It works, these are always my most productive days.

The key to this is making a choice not to perpetuate feelings of overwhelm when they arise by focusing on all of things on our plate. When we do that we inevitably spiral into a sea of overwhelm which only further diminishes our ability to get sh*t done. Instead, I encourage you to remember that we always have a choice about where we place our attention. It takes practice to experience feeling overwhelmed and to make the choice not to get lost in those feelings, I am by no means saying this is easy to do, but what I do want you to take away from this post is that you have a choice.

So, next time you feel overwhelmed by feelings of work-related stress, instead of your usual response (whatever that is) ask yourself this question:

What am I doing in this moment to choose or create feeling overwhelmed and what could I do instead?

I promise that when practiced regularly, with time overwhelm will loosen its grip on you and you’ll develop your own strategies for knocking it on the head when it comes calling.

Is there anything you would add to this? Do you have any strategies for dealing with overwhelm? If so, I’d love to hear them so please do share in the comments below and if you have any questions for me, drop them in there too.