A Coaching Power Tool created by Nisha Lall
(Life Coach, INDIA)
o·ver·whelm [oh-ver-hwelm, -welm]
verb
- to overcome completely in mind or feeling: overwhelmed by remorse.
- to load, heap, treat, or address with an overpowering or excessive amount of anything: a child overwhelmed with presents; to overwhelm someone with questions.
- to overthrow.
col·lect·ed [kuh-lek-tid]
adjective
- having control of one’s faculties; self-possessed: Despite all the turmoil around him, Bob remained calm and collected.
- brought or placed together; forming an aggregation from various sources: the money collected to build an orphanage; the collected essays of Thoreau.
Do you find yourself overwhelmed, guilty and frustrated that there is not enough of you to go around? Or maybe you feel if you are not perpetually in an overwhelming state, you are not pushed to ‘do’ enough since you equate ‘always busy’ with ‘getting work done’? Add to that the fact that the only constant in life is change. And change is tough to handle. It’s unpredictable. It’s demanding. Whatever the reason for you being ‘overwhelmed’ all the time, it eventually leads to chaos! Being collected on the other hand, restores a sense of calm to your mind, which in turn enables you to restores order to your life. And having order in your life is a huge enabler for you to self-manage yourself effectively and optimize your time, energy and resources in life.
Coming from a place of ‘overwhelming’ is dominant in the universe. The result being confusion and chaos and people dwell in misery and unrest and their conduct is faulty. ‘Collecting’ yourself and ordering your home life, work life and your mind can sometimes be a challenge. Too much clutter can make life much more difficult, and important things, tasks and papers can get lost in the shuffle.
If you are like most people today, you feel that you have too little time and too much to do. As a result, you often end up not getting the things done that are needed to be done. And even little things grow into a mountain of work that you feel you can never climb. Take the example of Anne.
Anne’s underlying belief was that, ‘life was very overwhelming’. Consequently, she used to be very unorganized. On all of her report cards that she received as a kid, the teacher always made that cute little comment “needs to get organized.” She had a desk that was a mess at school and a room that was a mess at home. One day, the teacher dumped out everything in her desk on the floor in front of the class and told her to pick it up. She can still feel the sting of that humiliation.
Her mother was not as cruel. She would clean her room so that the Board of Health didn’t come in and condemn their house. Both of these people tried to help her get order in her life, but neither one of them really helped her at all. Her teacher used drastic and humiliating tactics that didn’t work but just made her upset, and her mother did the work for her instead of making her do it herself. It wasn’t until Anne was an adult that she realized how to get organized, why it was so important and how to teach her own children how they could stay organized as well.
Although Anne eventually realized that it was much easier to have her important papers at a place that she could find them and the value of having a home that didn’t look like a pigsty, her mind was in chaos throughout much of her life. Her kids were forever joining activities and she was forever driving them around to different events after school while trying to maintain a job as well as her home. She often felt like a hamster on a wheel. It wasn’t until much later when she learned not only how to order her home and work place, but also her mind.
Replacing chaos with order in your life leads to effective self-management, which in turn doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed. Ask yourself how would you feel if you put in order every aspect of your life – from your home, your work and even your mind and life? Also ask yourself, how you can stay in order even when things get a little chaotic that throws you off your routine. We are not robots, we’re humans. And as everyone knows, we have things that come up that are unpredictable that can throw us off our kilter. You want to be organized, but you do not want to be so rigid in that you cannot handle a break in the routine without, as the kids nowadays say “tweeking out.”
Order is essential for you to live a healthier life in both mind and body. When you feel as though your life is in order, you also feel as though you have more control in your every day life. It makes those around you more comfortable and also lends to harmony in the family. Why get a little order in your life? The answer is simple – to retain your sanity, make you more efficient and to also give some sort of structure to your life and those around you.
