How to Deal with Overwhelm in Your Business

Personal brands, coaches, authors, and content experts are so overwhelmed with all of the tasks they are doing BY THEMSELVES for their business. Instead of caving to the overwhelm, follow these three phases and ditch the overwhelm so you can grow your business.

Write copy for the website, get photos taken, choose a photographer, figure out what to wear, post a behind the scenes for the photoshoot. Create copy for social media, update my bio on all my social accounts, figure out how to do stories, message people about my promotion that's coming up. Figure out promotional partners, create my email, opt-in, grow my list, and I still need to help my customers.

Overwhelm has taken out more than one gifted entrepreneur, but it does not need to take you out. So let's talk about it.

My name is Amanda Bentow from AmandaBentow.com, and as a solopreneur, entrepreneur, you know what it's like to feel overwhelmed by all of the tasks that there are to do in your business. You are literally doing all of the jobs in your company and to make matters worse, you look around and see people all around you who seem to have it all together and are doing it much better than you. My friends, comparison truly is the thief of joy. So, rather than allowing overwhelm or comparison to take you down, let's get on top of it and get you back in action once again.

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Phase One - Brain Dump

Phase one in dealing with overwhelming your business is what I like to call the brain dump.

Sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and yes, I said pen and paper. Write down everything that is rolling around in your brain. And I mean everything, all the tasks because that information up there is gold. The problem is that it's just rolling around all willy-nilly, and we're not able to capture control of it. So, your brain spends time and energy trying to organize those things, remember them and make some sort of sense out of it instead of putting energy toward moving you forward.

And once you have it all written down, it should feel like a little bit of a sense of relief knowing that that brain space has been cleared up and now you have in front of you on paper where it can't get lost, a list of all the things that you need to do. Now, just make sure it doesn't get lost. Be sure to take a picture of it before you do anything else.

Phase Two - Triage

Phase two in dealing with overwhelm in your business is triage. Look over all of the things that you've written down and decide which ones of those are directly related to growing your revenue. Those are called income-generating tasks and which ones are related to growth. Those are growth tasks. Doing the best job of serving your current clients and customers is a huge part of being able to make money. They are potential testimonials for you in the future, they are referrals. They give you also a boost of confidence because you know that you're doing your work well.

Getting a photoshoot done is a growth task. It's important for your brand. It's important to creating the type of website that you want to have, but plenty of people have made a lot of money without professional photography.

I'm a big fan of great photos for your business, but it doesn't need to be one of the very first things you need to get done if you're feeling overwhelmed right now and just need to make money. So within those two categories of income-generating tasks and growth tasks, you can identify those things that are the most important, the ones that are the biggest priorities for you to get accomplished and get completed.

Phase Three - Calendering

And phase three in dealing with overwhelm in your business is called calendaring. Set business hours for yourself. All of your self-care, your reading, your personal development, your laundry. Those are all things that should be done outside of your business hours. When you set your business hours, you are there to get work done.

Now, within those business hours, there are a few categories I want you to create next.

The first is serving your customers or clients. The second is income-generating tasks. Consistency is generally really important here. So things like reaching out to new people, fostering relationships, and building those, creating an active and involved social media presence. Those are all tasks that really require consistency so you can't ditch your income-generating tasks and still expect to make money. Those are important and they're important to maintain with a sense of consistency. And the third one is a blackout time for your growth tasks. Choose one project at a time and you may have multiple tasks within that project, but choose just one project at a time to focus on growing. You'll be tempted to do all kinds of things all at the same time, but when you choose just one, you'll make so much progress much faster when you create that sense of focus in terms of growing your business.

Now the percentage of all those times will vary depending on what stage in your business you're at. Sometimes you'll spend more time on the income-generating tasks if that's where you really need to focus. And if you feel like income is at a stable point and you're ready to do more toward growing your business, then you can put more time and attention toward growing your business.

Bonus Tip

And here's a bonus tip. If you're not able to accomplish as much as you'd like to in a time that you have set aside, then my friend, it is time to consider delegating. Delegating can look a few different ways. One, you can either find a trusted friend or family member who you can offload some of those things too, so that it either, A: you're offloading some of your personal tasks and that frees up more time to work on your business or you're offloading your business tasks and maybe you have a really nice person in your life who will help you with some of those things for free.

Or you can look at hiring someone to do some of those tasks for you. Now, either way, when we start to delegate things, we have to acknowledge that no one will have the same vision for your business that you have and no one will do things exactly the same way that you would do them. So it takes a little bit of time and some adjustment for you to both share your vision and oversee the work that they're doing. So spending a little bit of time upfront on both training and you know, helping them get on board and do things the way you would like to is really going to be helpful for you. But also keep in mind that sometimes people wouldn't do things a little bit differently and you can give them a little bit of time to see if it's working or not. If you're delegating to someone new, I always suggest starting out small and allowing them to take just a few tasks at a time.

And you can always grow that over time as you kind of figure each other out and you know each other's gifts and strengths. So while that's also a time investment when it's done right over the long-term, it can save you a ton of time and money.

FREE Stuff

Now to make things even easier for you, I've compiled a free guide to creating an unstoppable brand. You can grab it at the link below this video and it's going to walk you through all the steps that you need to be able to grow an online presence. That's all for today. So make sure you subscribe so you can grab the next video and remember, your dream is worth fighting the overwhelm for.

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