How To Get Your Shit Together (Fighting Overwhelm) – Business Fixer Podcast 007

In This Episode You Will Discover

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Hosted by Haroon Rashid, the Business Fixer Podcast is for any business owner who wants to know how to get from A to B in the simplest possible way. This business podcast is full of business tips including leadership, sales, marketing, finance, culture and much more. Does something need fixing in your business? Don’t know where to begin with your startup, grow or turn around your business? Whether you’re a startup, established business or a multimillion-pound business, the Business Fixer podcast will help you understand where you are, clearly define where you want to be and guide you on the road to get there.

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[SHOW NOTES] How to Get Your Shit Together

[BOOK RECOMMENDATION] Free To Focus – Michael Hyatt

[BOOK RECOMMENDATION] Getting Things Done – David Allen

[BOOK RECOMMENDATION] The 5AM Club – Robin Sharma

[TRANSCRIPTION] How To Get Your Shit Together (Fighting Overwhelm)

Business Fixer Podcast – 007

Hey sports fans and welcome to the Business Fixer Podcast where we believe that clarity is king and simplicity is queen. I am your host Haroon Rashid. Today, episode seven – How to get your shit together. When things are just overwhelming, you just can’t see the wood for the trees. Everything seems to be going wrong or you’re fighting fires constantly. You don’t feel like you’ve got enough time of the day. This episode, I’m going to give you a couple of really good tips that have helped me over the years, years of just how to get it all together, get in a good place, relieve stress and crack on and achieve everything you need to do privately and professional.

The Business Fixer Podcast is sponsored by Dad Mode. That is hilarious Dad gifts – that’s dad t-shirts dad mugs. Uh, if you are a fan of dad jokes, these are perfect gifts for a dad or a father figure. Uh, just make him smile rather than giving him the pair of socks this time. Hey, uh, that’s Dad Mode. That’s dadmode.co.uk 

So. There’ve been many times in my career where I have had a meltdown and, uh, I, you know, I’m fine to say that, you know, I’ve had a very stressful career. Uh, I’ve been in very high pressured environments, very high pressured situations. And like everyone. I’m human. And occasionally there’ll be those times when I just fall apart.

And I just feel like everything’s getting on top of me and I feel overwhelmed. My stress levels go through the roof. I don’t sleep well. I’m not eating right. I might be, you know, binge-eating or eating late or missing meals. And, you know, my, my exercise routine just goes out the window, by the way. Does any of this sound familiar?

Well, if you’ve ever felt this way, then you know what, the first thing is to note that it’s it’s okay. It’s okay. To feel like that it happens to all of us. It happens to the best of us. So in this podcast episode, I just wanted to just give you a couple of quick tips that have really helped me. And a lot of the clients that I coach when people feel overwhelmed.

So the first thing to do is that when, when you feel overwhelmed, when things have gone on top of you, the first thing to do is stop. And I know that that might sound very counter-intuitive because you might feel like, well, Haroon, I’ve got a to do list. That’s the, you know, the length of my arm. I can’t stop right now because if I stop, then this is going to fall over and that’s going to catch fire and all that kind of stuff.

And I get that I’ve been there, but. The thing is that you’re in a cycle right now and we need to break that cycle. And the only way to do that, or the best way to do that is to stop. And this actually comes from a great book called ‘Free to Focus’ by Michael Hyatt. Uh, again, if you go onto businessfixer.co.uk I’ll put these in the show notes and you can get yourself this book, but, um, step number one in Free to Focus funnily enough is stop. You know, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, you just need to stop and take stock and take care of yourself because you can’t keep going on the way you’re going. If you carry on doing that, you’re just going to get further and further into this spiral and we need to stop it. So the first thing to do is stop.

The second thing that I always advocate people to. And I do this again on a regular basis. Whenever I need it is to do something called a brain dump. Now this comes from David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. If you’ve ever, um, ahead of this book, it’s a fantastic book. Again, it’ll be in the show notes, but the principle is the operations are not designed to store things.

Our brains are designed to think through things, but what we often do is we’ll say, oh yeah, I’ll remember that. Uh, and we won’t write it down anywhere, but that doesn’t help anybody. And what you’ve done now is once you start collating tasks or collecting tasks in your head, you’re adding to your stress levels because your brain is not designed for that.

It’s a tool that’s used to think things through, not to store information. So quite often when people are stressed or overwhelmed, they have too many things in their head. That had been swimming around there for days, months and yes, even years. So what I always say is do a brain dump exercise. Well, how do you do a brain dump exercise?

First thing is go away somewhere, private and quiet, no phones, no TV, no radio. Put the phone in another room is just you with a pen and paper and just start to dump everything on that page that is in your head. And these could be very small things to very big things. They could be personal. They could be private.

Uh, they could be professional, sorry. You know, they could be things. I mean, I’ve seen lists where people have done this exercise and there’s things on there. Like I need to buy milk and eggs too. I need to get my car service too. I need to hire the new secretary. I need to turn around the business. I want to book that trip to Mexico.

And I need to remodel the living room. You know, all this kind of stuff is just swimming around in there, but it’s no good in your head. Just get it out and put it on paper. Some people have done this exercise and you know, they’ve filled pages and pages. And I remember one guy did this, a senior sales director did this exercise in my office.

And, uh, we gave him about five or 10 minutes. You know, he wrote about half a page. And I said to him, look, just go away tonight. Get in a private spot and just, just do it. He came back to me two days later and he said, I spent four hours emptying my head of things and I was shocked at what was in there. I could not believe the amount of things that was just in there.

But why would we do this when we’re feeling overwhelmed? Because once you’ve emptied your head and you look at that, that list that you got there, you should start to feel a sense of control coming in. The stress should start to calm down and you should start to feel some sense of, okay, I’ve got this and this has worked so well for so many years.

The second tip that I often give people is to have some kind of routine in place. Now, when I talk about routines, I’m talking about morning routines or evening routines, all, both, both is the sweet spot. Really now having a solid morning routine. Is just one of the best ways for you to get control of your day.

Remember if you don’t take control of your day, your day is going to control you or something is going to control you and you don’t want that. So having read so many books on this, um, you know, there’s a common trend amongst successful people, and that is they wake up early and they have some kind of routine.

One book again, I’ll put it in the show. Notes is the ‘5 AM Club’ by Robin Sharma. Now, uh, he advocates, you know, getting up at 5:00 AM or sometime early in the morning and doing 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of meditation or journaling, and then 20 minutes of self-development, you don’t have to do that, but the point is get up.

Do something plan your day, even on an evening. Why are you working till stupid? O’clock at night, you need time to shut down your body needs rest. Whether you like to watch a bit of Netflix or you like to paint, uh, ship models and put them in a ball. I don’t know whatever it is that, you know, makes you happy.

You need to de-stress on an evening and you need that time to switch off, not answer emails, not look at the phone and all that kind of stuff and get some rest. So getting routines in places is definitely another one. The third one is actually linked to the morning routine. Uh, and this one has really helped me out a lot.

And, uh, and recently a lot of my clients, but it’s something called Morning Pages. Now, morning pages is a form of journal. And, uh, personally, I never really liked the idea of journaling. I thought it was just some kind of hippy-dippy bullshit, but you know what? It turns out that I was wrong. Um, but morning pages is of course writing, um, on a pen and paper.

In the morning early. No distractions, of course, but it’s free flow writing. So you’re not organizing your thoughts in any kind of way. You’re just writing down anything and everything that comes into your head. And you’re not going to judge what you’re writing. You’re just going to allow. The words to come and it might be jibberish at times.

It might not make any sense, but it’s kind of a form of a brain dump. And the key really is to try and get to three pages of writing. You don’t have to do three pages, but the principle is no distractions. Free flow writing. Just write a few pages down if you can. And that is a great way to do almost like a brain dump every single day.

And I’ve found that that has really helped me to a get things out in my head. To, to start B to processing emotions, things that are going on in my life or in my business, and to try and get hold of that. So they have it. There’s three really good tips of how to get your shit together when things seem like they’re on top of you, I hope that you have found this really useful.

Remember, still go over to businessfixer.co.uk where you can get the show notes of these great books and resources. And you know what, I’m sure that if you practice at least one of these things, things are going to look a lot better and you know what, thanks a lot. Everybody who’s been listening to the podcast.

I really appreciate all your messages of support and, uh, uh, it seems to be, uh, really helping a lot of people out. So thank you so much to everybody. Remember you can captures on pod beam, Apple Podcasts, um, Google Play. Uh, we’ll be hoping to get on Spotify at some point, but until next time, take care sports fans.