Episode 87: The Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle

As we enter the season of planning and preparation for the new year, many of us find ourselves going back and forth between the excitement about all the things we want to create and the anxiety and overwhelm at thought of actually doing them. That’s the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle and today we’re talking about why it happens and what we can do to break the cycle.

87: The Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle

There's a common theme that I'm noticing among my clients, and also with myself. It's the tendency to vacillate between feeling really excited about everything that we could potentially create and feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and opportunities.

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Show Notes

There's a common theme that I'm noticing among my clients, and also with myself.

It’s the tendency to vacillate between feeling really excited about everything that we could potentially create and feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and opportunities.

That’s what I call the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle.

In this episode, I’m exploring the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle and how my thoughts and experiences with it have changed in the last couple of years. We’re going to talk about why it happens and what we can do to break the cycle.

I hope that this episode helps you guide your clients through their Opportunity-Overwhelm cycles and that you’ll find some gems that you can apply in your own life.

Topics covered

  • The phases of the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle
  • How “The Gap” pushes us toward overwhelm
  • Defining your product and process goals
  • The problem with Shiny Object Syndrome
  • How the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle keeps us safe
  • When our strengths become liabilities
  • Breaking free of the Opportunity-Overwhelm Cycle
  • Don Kelley and Daryl Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change

Resources mentioned

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Well hello, my friend, and welcome to the Coach with Clarity Podcast. My name is Lee Chaix McDonough, I'm your host. And I am going back in time for this week's episode, and this is something I encourage you to do as well if you are someone who is regularly creating content for your business. So whether that is blogging, podcasting, your social media posts, every so often, it's a good idea to go back in time and look at what you've created in the past. And ask yourself, whether this is something that is worth sharing again, whether as is or if it needs a little bit of updating. And that's something that I did recently, largely because we're coming up to that time of year where many of us, myself included, are starting to think about what we want to create for the next year. I am just beginning my planning for 2022. I've got some really exciting things coming up that I'll be sharing with you over the next several weeks. And my clients are also facing the planning and preparation time as well. And there's a common theme that I'm noticing among my clients, and yes, also with myself, which is the tendency to vacillate between feeling really excited about everything that we could potentially create, and feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and opportunities. And as I was hearing this common theme come up, it reminded me that about four years ago, I wrote a blog post all about this topic. Now four years ago, Coach with Clarity didn't even exist, I was operating under what is now my formal LLC name of Caravelle Coaching, and I wasn't podcasting. I essentially had a baby blog, where every so often I would write an article, put it up there, and pray that someone would read it. Which is not the strategy I would suggest by the way, if you are looking to gain visibility in your field, we'll save that for another podcast episode. But suffice it to say, I had this blog post that I wrote and I thought it had, you know, some pretty good concepts. And yet I didn't really do anything with it, except maybe reference it when speaking with my clients, maybe I would share the link with them. Here I am now four years later, realizing just how important the concepts are that I wrote about, and how maybe I might even take it to the next level. I re-read this article and I thought, “There's some really good stuff here. And there are some concepts that I missed”. 

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