Understanding Overwhelm in Creators
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[00:00:00]
Shawn Buttner: If you feel overwhelmed, it's an outcome that you're realizing, not a feeling you are experiencing. What do I mean by that? Creators live and die by how they manage overwhelm. 'cause a lot of people create because they feel like it. They feel like they're in the zone, they feel in flow, and.
Conversely, when they feel overwhelmed, they feel distracted, they feel unmotivated. because we're overwhelmed, we do not feel motivated, right? We tell ourselves, if I only. Took this online course, if I only had this very specific new AI tool, or they think to themselves, I can't get all of this done by myself, or they give into distraction.
They're like, if I check off a thousand things on my to-do list that don't actually move my life, my business, my creative work forward, I'll feel good [00:01:00] about myself. But at the end of the day,
all of these lead to a feeling of restlessness, of at the end of the day. So I've gone, gotten so much accomplished, but so little done right? My projects didn't move forward. I still have, all these big things that I gotta do, these deals to make these people to reach out to.
It's because you're overwhelmed and not addressing it properly,
Because the, if onlys, the busy work, the distractions stop your progress. It's because these are the things that h help us delay doing the things that we need to do, right? The are the things that allow distraction to come in, to prevent us from doing the things to do. And these are the things where self-doubt festers.
it's, we see progress in action. But what if you could prevent the delay, the distraction, and the doubt with a few [00:02:00] easy habits? Five in particular, right?
Introduction to the Episode
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Shawn Buttner: In today's episode of Creators, the Crush we're gonna answer is motivation, A Feeling. We'll talk about the five causes of overwhelm and lack of motivation, and the five habits every creator needs to overcome, overwhelm, and find their motivation.
Welcome To Creators That Crush
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Shawn Buttner: Welcome to Creators of Crush. I am your host, Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach, and I am attempting to marry certified high performance coaching principles with being a content creator because so much of the work of doing your creative work happens around your projects, happens around your YouTube channels, happens around your podcasts.
it's your time management. It's your self-talk and mindsets and your energy levels, this is the show where we help creators go from being crushed by the creative careers to crushing it as a creator.
Personal Story of Overwhelm
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Shawn Buttner: before we get into today's episode, [00:03:00] let me tell you a quick story about overwhelm. I first started my tech career years and years ago before becoming a coach and all that at the. A company known as Walmart. I dunno why I phrased it that way. But, so I started working at Walmart's Information Systems division and what I immediately got thrown into was, you, you jump in, you do a very short orientation and they expect you to perform.
And at my five years at Walmart, there was an arbitrarily short deadline. There was a mountain of work with not enough people to get it done, and a lot of times you weren't told why you were doing the project. And so you go from a college kid who's.
very into controlling their own schedule and planning things out in a way where you get all the work done to an environment where the work is never going to be done. and you don't have the why behind it, you're going to feel overwhelmed. And that was [00:04:00] me in those years and I felt resistance to everything that I did if I had to.
getting up in the morning was tough 'cause I wasn't sleeping 'cause I was so stressed out because I had so much work and it was this vicious cycle and maybe. You've felt that too, as a creator? So when I was at work, I would spend a lot of time socializing or going for out walks outside or crushing busy work, everything else.
But the project work and it just was overwhelming, right? It's still, it was stressful. It wasn't a pleasant experience. So what I actually needed to do was to do the dang work. and focus on the things that would move the projects that I was responsible for forward so I could get promoted and all that.
And creators are the same. have you as a creator ever been in a situation where you're like, I don't know how I'm going to get all of this stuff done this week. I know I have, and I'm not even like that successful of a creator. I'll be very [00:05:00] honest about that. there's so much work we can do.
There's so many things we can chase. And knowing how to systematically go about it is very important. have you ever as a creator too, like really lost the reason why you're doing it? like many of the projects at Walmart, it's it's to serve the customer, which is a very vague goal. But when you're doing daily tasks that don't tie directly to helping the end customer in that particular space.
What are you even doing? Is it just busy work? Is it to fulfill somebody else's ego in the company that's managing stuff like you don't know? And I feel creators are the same way, where sometimes we're using chat GPT, but we don't know why, or we continue to. Talk about things we don't really care about or know about because we're supposed to, because another creator did it and it's not what we're interested in or it's not that we have a particular insight into that.
And I'm guilty of that [00:06:00] a hundred percent myself over the years. So we need some habits to keep us on track, right? and how do we do that? it's habits, it's. Also reminding ourselves that we are responsible for our overwhelm. And I know that's not maybe a popular opinion to state, but it's so true because if you are.
If you are using the right habits in your day-to-day life, you can prevent overwhelm from happening. You can encourage motivation every day where you wake up, you're like, I am so set to get after it today. I'm so excited to, to go after it. And that's what we want as a creator. That's why a lot of us, probably our creators, if you're watching this.
You didn't decide to quit a comfy corporate job to start a business where you're stressed out, you don't know what to do. And you don't really care about the things that you're talking about, right? You're just trying to make some quick cash, I don't know. you're not [00:07:00] most creators that I know, especially in the education space and the coaching space where I have a lot of peers are doing it for service.
They're doing it to make an impact on the world. They're doing it to put some goodness out in the world, and God knows we need that today. So we need habits, all that to say we need habits to help us move forward. So here's some.
Five Habits to Manage Overwhelm
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Shawn Buttner: Here are five habits to help you manage overwhelm successfully. Because overwhelm is an outcome that we are intentionally creating or not, and it's something that we can control and it's not just a feeling or a whim of the day.
Okay, The first thing is we can use physical habits, to help change our energy, right? To help change how we feel about something so that we can get after and focus down, right? And so one of my favorite [00:08:00] exercises, that I've been doing or experimenting with recently is, from the an the Huberman lab.
Where he talks about regulating your nervous system. And one of the easiest things when you're feeling anxious or stressed or overwhelmed is to just scan side to side. essentially Back when we hunted and gathered. we'd searched to look for dangers if the tiger was gonna jump out after us. it's a simple thing to help regulate.
Something a little bit less weird is meditation. And there are, a million apps for meditation. There's a million different things to do. It are. There's a million different methodologies of meditation, the traditional religious type stuff. Two just affirmations. the one that we advocate for in high performance is the release meditation, which is just a mantra based meditation where you repeat the mantra release for 20 minutes if you try to just release tension and relax [00:09:00] for five minutes to 20 minutes.
and I have a video that I can link below that I walked through that before creators that crush. So it's an old YouTube video. it's really weird 'cause I'm going through this meditation for 20 minutes and recorded it. So check it out. put that in the show notes to if you're listening to this on your commute or whatnot.
But, so you could do the side scan that Erman recommends. Just keeping your head still and scanning your eyes right and left. Looking out for danger that it seems to work for me. I've been doing it for about a month. Try check it out. Meditation definitely works for helping you regulate. the third thing to do if you are overwhelmed and want to manage it is the A SDM analysis.
And I've talked about this before on the podcast, but I'll bring it up again. And that is to add, subtract, delete or magnify. F tasks that you do every day, right? [00:10:00] So if you're stressed out and it's because you're not regulating your nervous system, try the side scan, try meditation. You add those into your schedule.
If you're like, why am I even handling this work for someone else? That's their project. So you're like three times removed. You're like, I have no connection to this work and it's not really helping me, helping my career, or helping. The team or whatnot,it's like, why are you doing it?
Get rid of it. just say, I'm not doing this anymore, and project manager guy. Or if you're a solopreneur like me, it's hey, if you don't see why this is important to your creative business to do, just get rid of it. Don't do it. And if you don't do it, and nothing bad happens. That means you've been doing something that was not adding any value to your life other than adding stress and sadness.
So we don't want that. So get rid of that stuff. you could de delete, I guess is more like delegate is what I'm meant [00:11:00] to do. So subtract us, get rid of. D is to delegate. So it's like this is something that needs to get done. I need to do show notes for my podcast every week. Maybe I can get chat GPT to analyze a transcript and come up with something that's a good like draft of that to save me a half hour every week on doing that.
Fine. so you want to either delegate with a tool or with a team member. Maybe you hire someone to do the show notes to go through. And, compile that for you. But it's things that aren't high value add, but still need to get done in the business. So get rid of those or delegate those.
And then the things that you need to magnify or multiply, right? So maybe you're like, okay, I'm ready to release. Instead of doing one YouTube video a week, I'm going to do three YouTube videos a week. And, 'cause I know that adds a ton of value to my creative business or my. Impact or why I'm doing my creative work.
[00:12:00] And so that could be, just creating more YouTube videos, but maybe then you have to delegate and hire a team to do the editing or to do the packaging. Or maybe you're hiring a coach to get better at it. 'cause you're like, this is really high leverage for me. so you want to add things that'll help you get rid of things that don't you want to delegate.
Things that need to get done that don't need to get done by you, and then you want to amplify the things that are really working in your business. Cool. the fourth habit. Oh, and so for each of these right side things, you could do daily meditation, you should maybe do daily, A SDM analysis could be done weekly or monthly to assess your work.
if you are not connected to. Why you're even doing the thing in the first place. That's when we need purpose statements and your value metrics, and I'll again point to the value metrics [00:13:00] episode in the show notes below. We already talked about that, but very simply, your purpose statement is what you aspire to be, what you aspire to do, and how that helps people.
I want to be creative and supportive of creators so that they can create with full joy and growth and impact, and so that we can shift how content creation is made. Something like that, just off the top of my head, but a succinct purpose statement that has what you aspire to be, what you aspire to do, and how that helps people is the three part.
formula for a purpose statement. We talked about that before. Maybe I'll link that in show notes too. And then value metrics. What are the three words that you aspire to be every day as a creator? Like this? I aspire as a YouTuber and podcaster to be informative, [00:14:00] to encourage people, to crush it as a creator, So I want it to be inspirational, informative, and, fun, right? I, I. And I've failed with making this as fun as I it possibly could be, right? as someone that came from a technical background, I can get really stuck in my head and I love getting stuck in my head by that's fun for me, solving problems.
It's not fun when you're watching that in action, which is why I'm doing this new slide format to try to make it feel a little bit more relaxed. so I'm gonna have to structure the slides and whatnot. So if you're listening to this, on my YouTube channel, you can see the slides with all this going on.
but it's helping me keep on track and feel relaxed. Okay? HA habits we have so far, the side scan from the bin lab meditation. So these are physical things you can add to your schedule. adding a [00:15:00] weekly or monthly A SDM analysis and making sure you're implementing that is maybe metrics or whatever.
So third point, creating your purpose statement and measuring yourself maybe daily or weekly on your values metrics is helpful.
Creating a Performance Mindset
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Shawn Buttner: The fifth habit is to have the creator performance mindset. What do I mean by that? High performance is simply beating your normal results consistently over time,
Without burning out, without hurting your health, or without hurting your relationships. this is important, especially with all the turmoil going on in the world right now. We need to when we are in crisis, and you can argue with the tariff stuff, however you feel about it, it has shook things up and has caused people to pause, to hold back, making decisions because they're uncertain about the future, right?
There's one thing we could agree about, it's that the future is more [00:16:00] uncertain now than it was before. And if you're holding back on hiring people. Making investments in your business and making career changes. 'cause you don't want, you're afraid that if you make a change because of all the uncertainty, you're gonna fail, you're gonna get stuck doing things that you're comfortable with.
And it's my job as a high performance coach to push you out of your comfort zone into the things that make you a little bit uncomfortable, but cause you to grow and build the life that you want. That's the whole reason for the show. It's the whole reason why I coach, is to help people live into the lives that they want and have a sense of joy and fun with it, to have confidence as they're doing it.
And to have an impact out in the world, right? And so the creator performance mindset isn't saying, how do I, what do I have to do to hunker down right now? It's what do I need to [00:17:00] do to set up my life and my business and my creative work to thrive in these uncertain times? That's gonna require a lot of self-belief, self-confidence.
It's going to require a lot of. Strategic shifting as the environment shifts, it's going to be a lot of work. I'm not saying it's going to be an easy thing to accomplish, but moving forward you need to have the habits and beliefs and community behind you in order to thrive in uncertain times. And the creator performance mindset is, I will figure this out.
I will do whatever I need to do ethically, of course. To make sure that I'm taken care of, my family's taken care of, and I'm creating the impact that I want in my life. And that's what I hope for all of you. And I hope that's part of what you're getting out of today's episode. Okay, so the five habits, and so how do you create this [00:18:00] performance mindset, right?
So how do you create this performance mindset? It's asking yourself the question consistently. What do I need to do to progress a little bit quicker? If everything you're doing right now in your creative business takes you a week to do a question you can ask yourself is what would it take you to do this in a day?
And experiment with that. Maybe you try to do it in the day and see what happens, right? And what you'll find is like thinking about your operations a little bit differently and trying to think like, how can I. Make this tighter. maybe you won't be able to get it done in a today, but maybe it shaves off a day.
Maybe do it in four days instead of five. That's performance. You're now freeing up a whole day to do other things like outreach or sales, or develop your next thing or do another one of your pieces of content. So I [00:19:00] think, how could you use things quicker? What would it look like if it was easy?
It's more, Tim Ferriss's favorite questions. I. I like that. if you know you showed up as your best self, what would you change? Or if you could wave a magic wand in your creative business right now and make a change to make your life better, happier, healthier, more creative, more confident, what would you do?
And I think looking for those little moment, those, places to push can keep you engaged in your business and help you move forward. That's the creative performance mindset. Again, five habits to overcome. Overwhelm is the side scan or meditation for some physical things that you could do with your body, even just sitting there.
the A SDM analysis, your purpose statement and value metrics, and then the cur trying to, and then asking yourself how to improve your creative performance mindset. [00:20:00] Because every creator faces overwhelm. All the big creators, you follow everyone else, your peers, the people coming up, they will face overwhelm.
What will separate a creator that crushes versus one that is crushed is they use habits and strategies or, and they use proven habits to change the outcome.
Free Strategy Session Offer
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Shawn Buttner: Of overwhelm and to get them back into their productivity, their voice, their creativity, their impact, All right, real quick, if you need help overcoming overwhelm, I am offering for the first time a free 30 minute creator strategy session.
I'm testing out some new programs as I'm adopting the high performance coaching strategy to content creators. So you can go to shawnbuttner.com and there's a bunch of buttons there. You say, free 30 minute creator strategy session on that call. During that 30 minutes, you know you'll provide ahead of time.
Before you, you [00:21:00] select your time, the big struggle that you're having as a creator that you would love to solve. And we'll spend 30 minutes on that. And so as I'm trying out this new system, I. I know that the high performance stuff works as just putting it in a way that is helpful for creators.
So that's the work that I'm doing. I'd love to spend 30 minutes in your creative business, in your creative life, solving a problem that you're currently are experiencing and struggle so that you can thrive in these uncertain times because. we all need a little help sometime and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on.
So go to shawnbuttner.com, link to the show notes. If you want a three 30 minute creator strategy session from me to test out this new framework I am working on. I'd love just connect with you two. See your lovely faces. So be sure to sign up. I only have, 10 of these open, maybe. [00:22:00] So I only have a certain amount of time dedicated each week on my calendar for these.
So if it fills up, you'll get put on a wait list. I would hate for you to delay solving a big problem in your business, so make sure you sign up today so you don't miss out.
Conclusion and Next Steps
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Shawn Buttner: That concludes today's episode of Creators That Crush. Again, I'm your host, Shawn Buttner, and if you loved this episode, you might like the meditation episode over here or in the show notes.subscribe on YouTube, apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this.
It really helps the show, and I'd love for you to share this with three friends if you enjoyed it. If you could help us out, that'd be great. If not, we'll catch you in the next episode of creators that Crush.