Welcome to the Wildly Confident Podcast, where we discuss all the ways to help you get more confident, make more money and get the results you want in your life. I’m Katherine Weisner, your host, I’m a certified life coach, and the createtrix of my own multimillion dollar business. Hey, everyone, I’m so glad you’re here, we are going to be working on one antidote today to the overwhelm weed. And the overwhelm weed is really prevalent in this culture. It was something that used to grow a lot in my garden, and it still crops up from time to time. This is a critical weed to work on because it will stop you from getting the things you want done in your life, or it will make you go into total burnout. The way that this shows up for my clients, and I’ve seen it also show up for me is two different things. Okay, it either shows up in with the numbing weed. So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to last week’s podcast on the numbing weed, basically what that is, is when we feel potentially overwhelmed, we don’t like that feeling of discomfort in our body. So we are going to want to distract ourselves so we don’t feel that feeling of overwhelm. And we’ll go to things like we’ll hop on our social media, or we’ll watch TV or we will emotional e or drink or do something that temporarily feels good. But it’s a vicious cycle, because you still haven’t done anything really about your overwhelm. You’ve just set it aside. You’ve said, “Oh!, I’ll put you over here while I do something temporarily, that feels good.” But whatever was you were thinking that was making feel overwhelmed is still there and still has to be handled. What ends up happening is then you end up next time you notice that thing, you’re overwhelmed by going right back to the numbing weed, whatever you’re using for that. And the overwhelm just continues to grow and grow. If you’re not using numbing to deal with your overwhelm. The other thing I see women do a lot is perfectionism, perfectionist wheat, I have not talked about this weed yet super common for overachievers. And what those women are doing is that they are using negative emotions as fuel emotions such as self judgment, shame, guilt, blaming yourself. So you’re starting to feel overwhelmed because of some things you’re thinking. Maybe you’re thinking you have so many things that need to get done today. And if you don’t get them done, it’s going to mean that you’re a bad mom, or you’re not a worthy person, or that you’re a loser or whatever you’re thinking that’s making you kind of just get into this overwhelm state. And you are going to not want to feel that way. And you are going to then overdo it. You are going to use all those negative emotions as fuel to get done all of the things even if it takes you till midnight. And these types of people end up with total burnout one day, because they have been going and going and going against their own bodies, wills and you know, wishes, because they wanted to make their head feel okay, they wanted to feel lovable, they wanted to feel worthy. And eventually their body’s like, Oh, hell no, we’re doing this anymore. Like we are done doing, doing ,doing, giving, giving, giving, and not taking a break and taking care of ourselves. So that is the two ways that I’ve seen that over. Well, weed really manifest into people’s lives. And it can be a mixture of both. And what I’m going to be doing on this podcast today is really talking a lot about why the overwhelm weed is so prevalent for women. And I don’t see this as much for men. I really think there’s a societal aspect here playing out. That’s really clear, some be chatting about that in a moment. But what I want to say is that I have a separate training that has really practical advice on getting less overwhelmed. And if you want to go ahead and listen to that training, which I highly suggest, you can find it on my website under free resources under my YouTube channel. It’s called How to Get 25% less overwhelmed today and you will just take it you were gonna feel so much better doing it and the tips on there are super strategic and practical. And you’re going to at least do one or two of them today and it’s totally going to help your brain just calm down a bit and get more done. So I am going to describe the reasons why. I believe women have more overwhelm in this culture through the lens of the Buddhist story of the first and second arrows. So the The Buddhists say that anytime we suffer a misfortune, two arrows fly our way. The first arrow is the actual bad event, which can indeed cause pain. And in this case, when I talk about bad events on this podcast, sometimes they are specific things, but a lot of times they are systemic. First arrows, institutionalized first arrows, racism, sexism, any type of kind of systemic institutionalized discrimination, I am going to be including in that first arrow category. And then they go on to say, the second arrow is the suffering, that’s actually optional. The second arrow represents our reaction to the bad event. So the second arrow is all about what we want to believe and think that first arrow means in our life, this is where all of our power, all of our choice, all of our control lies is in our thoughts. And I want to be clear here, that I’m not talking about trauma, if you have trauma from the first arrow that is super important and valid, and you need to work through that trauma. Before we really start working on the concept of the second arrow and how much control you have over the pain of that second arrow with your thoughts. So I’ll tell you that I started noticing a pattern in my female clients, I started noticing that their to do lists are often a lot longer than my male clients. And they were just complaining a lot more of overwhelm. And I started just seeing a pattern emerge and started wondering what is this about? I think the overwhelm weed is one of those ones that’s really associated with the patriarchy, and its system to keep women more oppressed. Because there’s so much media out there, so many stories about women being able to do it all. And the problem with that is, men are not expected to be able to do at all really no one else but women are women are expected or praised and idolized in this society, if they’re able to take care of their family and raise children and have that whole lifestyle, which is really what we were originally slotted into per societal standards in a patriarchal society. But then, with the feminist movement, and women’s empowerment, which are all absolutely wonderful things you guys know, I am an intersectional, feminist, and I, absolutely and completely passionate about that movement. But women were given more opportunities to leave the house and do more things. And now the standard is kind of like, Hey, you need to be doing both, when men are not necessarily, you know, the expectation is not there for them to do both. And so we have really some women that really have put an unrealistic expectation on themselves, to be able to do it all. And there just simply is not enough hours in the day to do it all and you have to learn how to pick and choose. This is one of my favorite quotes. From Valerie rain, she’s a PhD, and it’s from her book, “The patriarchy, Stress disorder.” Great book, guys! But she says “women’s empowerment has gotten hijacked by the patriarchal over culture, and become about giving a woman the opportunity to burn herself out by working harder, and doing more while playing by the patriarchal rules. They used to burn us at the stake. And now they just hand us the torches.” Great quote, right. So what I’m getting at here is women’s empowerment has been feminism and all the different movements have done an amazing job of helping women step away from the patriarchal system. But that system is still in place. And we’re still following some of the rules too. And so we just need to become aware that there’s some pretty unrealistic expectations of women right now, as I would like to say we’re transitioning away from the patriarchal system. And we just need to be aware of those and aware that that system is the first arrow, and we don’t need to be a victim to it. We don’t need to let it overwhelm us. We get to choose what we want to do and why we want to do it. We don’t have to do anything in our life. We don’t have to show up in any certain way to be a good person to be worthy to be lovable. So the micro practice for the week is short and simple. Only because this is a very big topic, I work with women on reducing overwhelm, putting better boundaries up learning how to say no self care practices for weeks and weeks. So I’m going to be dribbling information to you on this topic on various podcasts. But the first tool I want to teach you here is just whenever you are feeling overwhelmed, okay, and just to pay more attention to your emotions, right? When you’re feeling that overwhelm, I want you just to take a moment and remind yourself that you have a choice, okay? You have a choice, you do not have to do anything at all in that moment. That’s making you feel overwhelmed. Okay, and I just want to remind you that you’re choosing to do that thing. And if you are choosing to do it, do you want to do it? Okay, and why do you want to do it? These are just some questions to ask yourself to kind of be curious around it, there doesn’t need to be self judgment, there doesn’t need to be perfection here, okay. It’s just about having the curiosity for when we’re feeling overwhelmed, to remind ourselves, that we always have a choice about being overwhelmed, we have a choice not to do the things that we think are making us overwhelmed. And it’s through that choice. and discovering that choice that we get to start changing the narrative and changing our reality to something where we’re going to be less overwhelmed. And we’re going to be getting more done of the things we actually care about. And I know this is small, and this is just where we’re going to start. Okay, like I said, there are many more steps to learning how to reduce your overwhelm and getting more into your choice and getting up the boundaries and getting more of the life you desire. And we start here we start with the small micro practice. And before we get off, I feel called to share another quote with you. This one’s one of my favorites. It’s from Mary Oliver from her poem “Wild Geese.” “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Thank you for joining. I hope you come back next week. Join my mailing list to get notified of my podcast. Follow me on Instagram at @KatWeissner and check out my website about tons of free stuff on there www.klwcoaching.com.