Work can be a lot sometimes. How often do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by all the things you need to do and how much work it's going to take to do them properly? It's making me stress just thinking about it. In this mini episode, I want to share with you a simple but truly effective way to dial back that overwhelm. And I use it myself and with my coaching clients. And now you can start using it too. My name's Carla Miller and this is Influence and Impact for Leaders, the podcast that helps leaders like you increase your impact and build a happy and high performing team. Each episode delivers focused, actionable insights you can implement immediately to be better at your job without working harder. Ready to be more impactful? Let's get started.

Work can be a lot sometimes. How often do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by all the things you need to do and how much work it's going to take to do them properly? It's making me stress just thinking about it. In this mini episode, I want to share with you a simple but truly effective way to dial back that overwhelm. And it's one I use myself and I use with my coaching clients. So first up, a truth bomb for you. We often overcomplicate things. So yes, it is likely we have too much work coming in our direction, but we can also end up adding to our own workload by overcomplicating things. That might look like aiming for the most brilliant all the bells and whistles version of something from the start instead of starting simple and then improving it as you go along.

Or it might look like completing something and then going back and redoing it because we've had a new idea since we completed it, or because we struggle with perfectionism so we're always feeling that it could and should be better. Overcomplicating might also look like going above and beyond on a piece of work when it isn't needed and might well not be valued either. I find one simple question can cut through the overwhelm very effectively. I ask myself, what if it were easy? How could I make this simpler? What that question does is it opens your mind up to the possibility that there is an easier way to do things. That sense of possibility and hope shifts your state and your brain starts working on ways to streamline your approach. I did this recently with a client, let's call her Katie. Katie secured an internal secondment to a new role, but she was concerned that she'd be asked to do both roles for a while. So she was concerned that because they hadn't found anyone to replace her yet, she was going to keep doing her old role and start to take on the new role.

Spoiler alert. She was right. They did indeed ask her to do both roles for a period of time and she was feeling quite overwhelmed at the idea of this. So we looked at what she spent her time on and one of the most time consuming things she did every week in her meeting with her sales team was to run a really in depth report for each of them that she presented to them in the team meeting. It took her hours to pull and edit the data for each team because it wasn't already in the format in which she needed it. So I asked her, what if it were easy? What if it were easy to still look after this team going forward for a period of time? And she replied, well, I'd stop creating that report, but I can't do that, can I? It turned out when we explored it that the team weren't actually getting a lot of value out of her presenting the report in that way, and that actually they'd be better off pulling and analyzing the data themselves and sharing their insights, especially as they were going to get less support going forward. The team were happy with that. Katie never had to run that dreaded report again, and she got half a day of her working time back each week.

It was that simple. She had been going above and beyond to create something that wasn't needed and wasn't particularly valued. There was a smarter way of doing things for me. When I ask myself this, what if it were easy? How could I make this simpler? I often end up getting clearer on my boundaries. So I might end up cancelling that call, for example, that I didn't really want to have but I said yes to because I was being polite. Or I'll make the choice that's right for me, rather than a choice that's based on other people's expectations or more realistically, my imagined expectations from other people. So, for example, as you will have heard in the last podcast, we are pausing our open programs for a period of time. I spent such a lot of time thinking that through because I didn't want to let people down.

But actually that decision has freed up so much of my time and headspace and has given me the energy to get back to this podcast. The other thing that often happens when I ask myself this question, what if it were easy? Is I end up getting creative. So, for example, getting my son to go up to bed at bedtime is sometimes challenging. But when I ask myself, what if it was easy? I turn it into a game instead of nagging and it's so much easier and we both have more fun. So what if you asked yourself that question? What if it were easy? How could this be simpler? What if that piece of work or project that you've been putting off starting for ages because it feels so big and overwhelming was actually easy? What if an ongoing issue which is taking up lots of your headspace, could be resolved with one conversation? What if you just didn't volunteer in that meeting or keep taking part in the pta, whatever it is that you don't really want to be doing? What if it were easy? So have fun playing with that question. I hope that it gives you that same cut through in overwhelm that it has done for me and Katie and some of my other coaching clients. Now, before you go, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please make sure that you've hit follow so that you get all the episodes when they come in. And if you're listening on the 16th or 17th of June, please help us to bring the podcast back with a little bit of a bang and either leave a review or on Apple Podcasts or share the podcast on social media.

Take a screenshot of either one of those, send it to me@helloarlamiller.co.uk and I will send you a set of my Influence and Impact affirmation cards which will help you to build your confidence as a leader. Thank you so much for doing that. And there's another mini episode coming your way in a minute.