Managing Overwhelm: How to Build Self-Trust
“You become indistractable by being the type of person who does what they said they were going to do for as long as you said you were going to do it.”
We live in multi-tasking world. A reality of constant emails, notifications, social media, messages, slack… you get the picture. We have slowly become accustomed to this never ending whirlwind of distractions in our day to day lives. Many of us are familiar with a deep sense of overwhelm, yet we are sure what to do about it. We seem to be working as hard as we can, and yet we never get ahead. As stress mounts we start to look for even more distraction to escape the strain of our day to day reality and we find ourselves living a life of reactions rather than intentions.
Phew. That’s all a bit heavy isn’t it!! As daunting as this reality is, I can promise you that it’s all going to be okay. We can, as Nir Eyal has coined, make ourselves “indistractable” by bringing awareness, intentionality, and self-trust back into our daily lives.
I’ve spoken before in this blog about the importance of measuring our self-worth against things we have 100% control over, in order to build a stable foundation of self-esteem. Nir Eyal shares how this concept applies to our daily time management skills and how over time, we either build or destroy our faith in ourselves in a very simple way.
When we measure our success by how much we checked off of our to-do list every day we set ourselves up to feel like a failure often. Instead, try to measure success by this simple metric: whether or not you did what you said you were going to do, for as long as you said you were going to do it. To do this we must build a thoughtful, realistic, and detailed schedule for ourselves each week that takes into account what we want to accomplish not just in work, but in our personal lives as well. Once built, our job is to follow the plan. If we get the end of the day and have done what we said we were going to do for as long as we said we were going to do it, we can give ourselves a pat on the back and know we are moving forward. If not, get curious about what went wrong. Analyzing what distracted you from your plan allows you to anticipate that obstacle and successfully navigate it in the future.
Imagine you had a friend who was constantly making plans with you then bailing on you at the last moment. Would you trust this friend? Probably not. We build or destroy self-trust in exactly the same way. Every time we flake on our own plans we see ourselves as the type of person who can’t follow through. Every time we stick to the plan we see ourselves as the type of person who can be relied on to see something through. Over time these separate experiences build up to shape our self-identity and over-riding sense of self-trust. Prove to yourself, one day at a time, that you can manage distraction and stick to the plan. Ironically, this approach actually leads to ticking more stuff off of the to-do list as it dramatically increases our focus and efficiency.
It’s never too late to re-build your self trust.
Wishing you many moments of high-performance fun!