Too much going on at once we get overwhelm. It happens when sensory inputs are full and the mind can’t separate nor link them. If not sorted it leads to frustration and illness. Here’s nature’s way….

TRANSCRIPT

00:01 Ok. Hey, today we are talking about overwhelm and we’re talking about mind noise. I put some music on in the background to give you a some ambience watch. 00:29 And now I’d like to talk to you about overwhelm. Overwhelm happens when there are a multitude of things going on at once, none of which combined to make one thing that we really want to hear because when we hear them, there are too many things happening that to make one thing really sensible, each one of the things that’s happening feels important, but each one of the things that’s happening isn’t important. 00:56 And so now I’d like to stop all this noise and get back to talking about mind noise. Hey, Google, off. 01:11 How about that Mind noise? It’s a terrible, terrible thing when we get so many inputs coming into our brain and they all seem to be valuing valuable. 01:31 Like the Google music that I was playing for our balcony, the Siri music that I was playing on my phone, me talking, they’re all combining at once. 01:43 They’re all important there, there’s nothing wrong with each of them individually. It’s when they all start to happen at once. 01:50 We call it overwhelm. We have a couple of little kids at home here, Jessica’s kids, and I guess I’m the inherited stepfather of these kids. 02:08 They sometimes talk at the same time. Sometimes they talk while I’m working. Sometimes they talk while you’re watching tv and then sometimes someone else talks while we’re watching TV or they don’t talk. 02:21 And overwhelm comes when there’s a lot of sources of information coming in, and we are unable to separate them. If you put me in a room with the Google Music playing the Apple music playing and me trying to talk and then trying to listen at the same time to what’s going on around me it wouldn’t take long for me to develop nervous sense of nervousness because so many inputs coming in at once would just completely fog any sense of identification, I wouldn’t know which is which. 02:59 I wouldn’t be able to separate them. Overwhelm happens at work a lot because you have a multitude of stakeholders. They want everything they want, and they, they are each individually very important. 03:13 The Google, the Apple, the listening, the talking, they’re all important, and everybody thinks their watch tells the right time. So everybody thinks what they’re talking about should be the most important thing to you. 03:29 This is really sad when it becomes top down, sideways, across, and bottom up in a business world. It’s very frightening when it happens in a house because especially with a little bit of alcohol, which makes dividing noises a little more difficult, people become quite they become quite primal in their response to this multiple levels of inputs. 04:00 I’ve seen some people, we owned a a branding company and there were 35 people in the team, and I’ve seen people with blasting their head with earphones and playing heavy metal and working on a computer screen, doing a design all at once. 04:19 And there is nothing out of sync with that if the heavy metal and their process dovetail. It’s just when the heavy metal combines with the not very heavy metal combines with something else that doesn’t dovetail. 04:37 So overwhelm comes from too many inputs at once that aren’t linked to each other and in Zen the idea is to, to bring what you’re hearing and what you’re smelling and what you’re tasting and what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling into the one moment. 04:55 That’s all very well for a zen monk in a, in a temple. How do we do it at work? Well, asking the mine to dis distill multiple noises is, is asking too much. 05:14 So we know that when we go into isolation, when we go away into on a holiday or we go into the mountains or we go somewhere away from multiple noises, we calm down. 05:28 One of the reasons we go to nature and leave the phone in the office for 10 minutes is to just have one input source. 05:35 What you see a tree, what you hear the wind in the tree, what you feel is the bark of the tree. 05:42 What you smell is nature. All the sensors become at one with something that’s really easy to do for five minutes. 05:52 Then you go back in the office and you’re in an open plan office, which is a very silly thing to organize for your team than somebody’s phone call. 06:01 Somebody’s earphones, somebody’s emotions. And the thing that we don’t appreciate in all these, in this mathematics of overwhelm is that we feel other people’s thoughts. 06:15 That’s a very, very important part of inner wealth to acknowledge that you, one of the noises that you are hearing on a constant basis are the feelings and the thoughts and the the ideas of others. 06:30 And they’re not always constructive. They can be highly emotional. And so we’ve got these inputs coming in from all directions. 06:39 So what’s the solution? How do we get mentally calm around noise? The first thing and most important thing is to be primal and in, in as much as environment dictates everything. 06:56 And therefore, if you’re an environment where there are multiple input sources, stop. And so if someone’s playing their iPad and someone’s grumpy down there and someone over, there’s got a political agenda, give yourself arms length from it all. 07:11 And that’s called detachment. So you don’t necessarily always have to run away and go bush, but what you can do is just remove yourself one step away from the, the mere and just move yourself back mentally and physically and emotionally from the turbulence. 07:30 I think that’s step one is the most important because if you try all the other things we’re going to talk about and you haven’t done step one, you haven’t created a some sense of incubation, some sense of isolation from the noise. 07:45 If you’re attached to it, if you’re attached to what that person thinks, if you’re attached to what that person’s doing, if you’re attached to that music, if you’re attached to what you are doing, then that attachment’s gonna tell you like horse is pulling you in two directions. 08:00 I think that’s number one. And number two, when we feel overwhelmed is because we’ve got a list. They’re all, all the list is coming at us at once. 08:10 We’ve got family, social, career, health, financial relationship. All these topics are coming at us at once, and we operate really surprising to many people if we score our sales, the v i p score in each of the seven areas of life, if we score ourselves on our v i p score, what we’ll find is that we operate in all of them at the lowest of all of them. 08:38 So let’s just say you have a bit of a financial struggle at the moment. You’re not able to buy a house. 08:46 And so there’s a, a real sense of nervousness around the market going up and mortgages getting bigger, and you not being able to buy a house right now. 08:55 And you start to that, that input starts to ruminate in the back of your head. We talked about frustration earlier in, in an earlier podcast, but let’s just say the frustration starts to circulate. 09:09 And so now you’ve got going on in the back of your head, a real low primal worry, and that thing starts to dwell in there. 09:17 It’s, it, it, it gets a home in your brain, and then you go to work and you say, well, let’s put that aside for one minute. 09:24 I’m gonna work on, you know, building a new car or designing something or having a meeting or working with someone else. 09:32 The thing in the background, the noise in the background forms part of the overwhelm. Now, when you go to work and you, you, you are working with people, we sort of have an expectation that they’re going to function as we would under the same circumstances. 09:58 And therefore, when somebody gets quickly triggered by something we say or something we do, we kind of like say, that person’s not in a good place. 10:08 They’re not in sync. But it might be far wiser to say that one of the seven areas of life that you can’t see and that person will never let you see is, is for that person in, in a not a good place and one more straw on the back of the camel, which means one more thing that you say or do, triggers them over the line. 10:32 It means something else has gone pear shaped. Their consciousness is down the bottom of the bucket, and all you have to do is give them one little straw on top of the big load that they’re carrying, and boom, they react to you. 10:47 I think understanding this part of the human condition is very important, firstly for ourselves, that when you hand somebody work or when they hand you work and it feels like the world has just been dumped on your shoulders, it’s typically not the work alone that’s causing the overwhelm. 11:06 It’s typically that thing that’s churning around in the back going, I wonder how I’m gonna buy a house. I wonder how I’m gonna buy a house. 11:13 I wonder how, I wonder if I’ve got enough money to buy a house. I wonder what the market is doing, is my house and there at work who’s got nothing to do with the house? 11:20 You’re there doing a job and someone says, can you get this done by Friday? And boom, you crack it, you know, you, you, you react, or someone says you didn’t do a good job on that, and you crack it, boom, and your behavior at work becomes countercultural, and you get a bad review and you don’t get your bonus, and the house gets further away <laugh> than you wanted it to be. 11:44 So we gravitate to the lowest of our thought process, not the highest. And that’s a very, very interesting thing to observe, that if there’s something lingering in the shadows in your mind, fear of someone dying, fear of your own unwellness, fear of not paying for something, fear of relationship not coming true, all of those sort of ruminating thoughts that linger are a, a very, very big part of the cause of mind noise. 12:17 Now, it’s all very well to, like most people try to do at some stage in their life sit in meditation, but if you’ve got mind noise in the back and you sit in meditation, all you’re doing is ruminating about the mind noise more, or you’re making all the surface noise go away, but leaving the mind noise, the ruminating thing stuck in place. 12:39 So it, the reason I don’t advocate meditation for a lot of people is that we need to get rid of, we need to be aware of the mind noise, not cut it off by sitting in a, in a breathing pattern or something of the sort and temporarily blocking out all the noises because it’s very easy to, let’s say you’ve got something chewing or churning away at you that’s killing you, in fact, because it’s body, mind health and you’re worried ab got some anxiety about your own life, for your own career, your own direction, and that’s chewing away and you feel overwhelmed. 13:16 Because on top of that, you’ve got inputs, you’ve got music coming from different sources, you’ve got noise coming from different sources, and if you take away the noise from the different sources, it feels really, really good just to sit with the thing that we’ve, that’s churning around in the background, but it’s no longer disruptive because we’re so used to it. 13:41 It feels like it’s part of the ambience. And the reason I don’t advocate meditation for most people is I think we need to deal with that ambience first. 13:50 We need to find the root of my noise. We, we need to find the root of our worries or anxieties or stresses, what’s really going on down there and clean it up so that the stuff that gets put on top doesn’t feel like it’s taking, it’s, it’s overloading the baggage compartment. 14:11 How do you clean it up? Well, the first thing would be to, as I said, remove yourself from the plat, from the sources of all the overwhelm and find out, then ask the question, what’s still going? 14:25 What am I still thinking about? I usually go around the seven areas of life, go around the circle, score myself every day, whether I’m, you know, eight or nine. 14:36 And I really try to be brutally honest with myself and say, is there anything spiritually I’m worried about? Like, you know, a year ago I had a conversation with my brother where he said something that was quite hurtful, and I said, right, well, let’s just take a break for a while. 14:56 And I really needed to put myself at arm’s length from even my brother to, to see what, why him saying something that was insulting would impact me, because I’ve never been insulted by anything my brother’s ever said to me in my life. 15:16 <laugh>. And we’ve said some pretty heavy stuff to ourselves in heated moments. So you can see that. And as I removed myself, I realized it wasn’t about him. 15:26 It was about something of a completely unrelated in another area of life, and it just gave me the opportunity to clean up the, just to clean the table again. 15:37 I, I think that’s why I would not advocate meditation and but, but that hasn’t yet solved the overwhelm. I think being able to go for a walk in nature helps to peel overwhelm apart and get to the root of it because as I said, the things that are overwhelming, you are adding to something very big already. 16:08 And if you can get rid of the big, those little things that are overwhelming, you will become little things that are annoying you. 16:16 I think the next part about it is, is to make sure you never try to think things through in your head. 16:23 My old boss used to say, I’m just gonna think out loud for a minute, which meant they weren’t inside his brain anymore. 16:30 He was putting them out. Now, it was a nice way of saying, I’m about to give you some information you may not want to hear, but by saying, I’m just gonna think out loud. 16:43 He was distancing himself from what he was saying. In other words, he’s saying, this is not fact. And it’s not, I’m not being definite here, but I’m just ruminating out loud. 16:55 So I think ruminating out loud is really important When you feel overwhelmed, I think ruminating out loud is far best done on a whiteboard because I think drawing pictures and lines and boxes and circles and thinking on a whiteboard really helps the other parts of your mind, which may be engaged in the over overwhelmed process or emotionally hooked into something helps them come out. 17:26 I think thirdly having someone that can, that you can, once you’ve drawn this thing on a whiteboard, you can try to explain it to somebody, what’s going on for you. 17:36 And when you try to explain it, you start going and the more you stutter and stumble and stop, the more you know that the whiteboard is telling you the truth. 17:47 You, you, you’re, if you run through it really quickly, you know you’re not, it’s not hard enough. It’s gotta be, it’s gotta be diff When you try to explain your whiteboard, it’s gotta be quite difficult in order to dig out the stuff that is sitting underneath the feeling of overwhelm, scribbling it on computers, typing, I don’t think works. 18:10 I think drawing it on iPads, I don’t think it works. I think a whiteboard is, is the magic. And explaining that whiteboard to someone is the magic of that. 18:20 I know people who use flip charts, same thing. It, the good thing about a flip chart is when you finish, you can rip it off, screw it up, make sure no one ever sees it ever again. 18:32 So there’s a few. Finally we serve many gods. So our value system will sa will innately ask us to do something every day. 18:50 That’s really important to us. But trying to work out what that is amongst the seven areas of life, it’s really complicated. 18:58 You might have a family and a spouse and your spouse rings up and says I need you to babysit tonight cuz I’m gonna go out with some friends. 19:06 And you go, okay, I serve that one God cuz I’m now being told that that’s my moral or emotional obligation. 19:15 Then you go the soccer club brings up, or the footy club brings up and says, we’re doing a special training session tonight at seven o’clock. 19:22 You need to be there and now you’ve got another God to serve. And then finally your boss at work says, oh, we’re running late on a project. 19:29 We’ve gotta deliver it at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. We need to all work back late now. Now you’ve got three gods that you’re serving. 19:35 And the question will become, how do you deal with that overwhelm? How do you deal with the nightmare of three almost equally powerful demands on you for your time and your space? 19:49 And there’s going to be in that resolution in working through that. There’s gonna be a short-term benefit for some of the things you’re about to do. 19:59 And there’s gonna be a long-term drawback for some of the things you’re gonna do. There gonna be a long-term benefit in short-term drawback. 20:06 And so it’s complicated to work out what one should do when there are multiple strings being pulled at us to deliver on time in a particular time space. 20:20 And that’s where values and vision and the homework that you do before that moment becomes crucial. Because at the end of the day, you, you’ll have a sense of purpose, sense of vision, and what the question will become is, which of those three has the greatest impact on my vision? 20:39 Now if your vision is to become a professional footballer, then it’s the footy. If your vision is to be a happily married, stay-at-home parent, then that’s that. 20:51 And if your vision is to become CEO of a big company, then that’s that. So there is no preset order or sequencing or prioritization. 21:02 There is only yours. And when they write in a book and you read it all over the internet, know yourself what they’re basically saying, cuz there is no self to know. 21:13 Ultimately there is no self. We, we are formless. But what you can know is your values. And if you know your values, you will know which of those three choices, or as it is sometimes for us, 10 choices, go on holidays, stay home, spend the money, not spend the money, buy a house, not spend a rent. 21:32 You know, like there’s a million things going on in everybody’s brain. The question will become, which is my priority. If you don’t have a sense of priority, then you’re just a firefighter and the alarm bell goes off, you’re out, you put up the ladder, you put the fire out, you come back, wait for another fire to happen, run out, put the ladder up, and you get used to that level of excitement in life to the point where a lot of para maniacs that start fires are actually firemen or fire people. 22:01 I think they call it fire people who have become bored because there’s nothing to fight. So they cause a fire. 22:07 And people are like that in relationships, in their business, in their health, all sorts of things. They, if it becomes, if they’re, they start to run out of vision, they, they get into a frustrator and get stuck, they actually construct trouble. 22:23 And that’s when overwhelm becomes more than it needs to be. So separate yourself from it. Recognize that there is usually not the thing that’s giving you the final straw is usually not the most important thing to work on. 22:44 Better to work on the thing that makes 80% of the difference, which is usually one thing, then something that makes 1% of the difference, which is gonna take a long time. 22:55 Thirdly, sort of separate yourself work on the big chunk own your value set, work out what’s important, what’s not important to you, and do highest priority. 23:11 First, there’s a start. I have a form that I’ve used from time to time in moments of overwhelm. And it’s really funny that when you feel overwhelmed, there’s a reluctance to, to solve it by slowing down. 23:27 We, we, we speed up pe many people talk faster panic more when they’re in overwhelm, but actually overwhelm is the, the, the statement Overwhelm is slow the hell down. 23:41 And I have a form that’s called a do dump delegate form. So I write down a list of 20, 30 things that are on my head, you know pay the bills, buy the new house, car, da da da, da, all these things be be available for coaching, make my choices, blah, blah, blah. 24:03 And then I’ll go three columns. Do dump, delegate, do dump, delegate do it means now. So I’ll go down, tick, tick, tick. 24:14 Six things have to be done. That’s what I do. Dump means to a later date. Delegate means ring someone up and say, would you do that for me? 24:26 So today, for example, I have some money missing from one of my accounts. I tried to search for it for a couple of hours by ringing up the bank and ringing up superannuations and all these things, and they’re all confused. 24:39 So I, I contact my accountant and said, I’ll give you half the money that’s missing from my account if you solve this problem. 24:49 I delegated it and I paid for the delegation and I put them on it rather than a dollars per hour. 24:56 I, I offered that person commission. Because I, I, I don’t know how many hours of work is involved in getting the money back. 25:05 And I don’t wanna spend $10,000 to get a couple of thousand dollars back. Do dump delegate and if it’s delegate to who, and then you put a call, call back, point on it, say, I’m gonna give this to that person. 25:22 Now you, you know, the organized supervised deputized process, which I’ll go through another day on the podcast, organized supervised deputies, how we delegate. 25:31 And that’s another story, my noise. Keep it quiet. Bye.