I love the beginning of the year, and making New Year’s resolutions, and feeling excited about all the things I can accomplish in the coming year. Dreams are a beautiful thing, and I love embracing them at the start of the New Year when it feels like I have all the time in the world to make them happen. I make resolutions every year. My goals for this year are:
- Finish my first novel and self-publish it.
- Gain more clients and increase the number of projects I take on.
I begin January with big dreams, but often a few weeks later the reality hits: goals are hard. Running a business is hard. Finding time to ‘level up’ and do even more when you work fulltime and have a family is difficult. Pretty soon I start getting frustrated that I’m not meeting my goals fast enough, and that there’s too much to do and not enough time to get it all done. I mean, when my to-do list feels like it’s always getting longer instead of shorter it’s hard to stay positive.
I get overwhelmed, and start to wonder if my goals are possible and my dreams achievable.
That’s when I need to step back and remember that overwhelm is a feeling and not my actual reality.
For me overwhelm happens for a few reasons: feeling like I have too much to do and not enough time to do it, feeling like the task is too big to accomplish, and having too many options and not knowing which one to pick. Each of these problems has solutions, but when I feel overwhelmed it’s sometimes hard to remember that. I have to remind myself to step out of the loop of worrying-but-not-acting and make an actual plan. Making an achievable plan of action is the best way to get rid of overwhelm and actually meet my goals. So let’s look at each of these reasons for overwhelm and how they relate to my goals.
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