I am in awe of those African women who manage to carry such an amazing stack of things on their heads! I joke that I wear too many hats… but lately I have been feeling like those hats are all a bit too many for one single head. Those women carry enormous loads with a balance and grace you have to train for, and they make it look effortless because they’ve learned how, whereas I have been stacking without that training. I have been so busy trying to manage the weight of them that I was not able to do much else. It was making me feel like I’d had a sudden onset of ADHD. I’d start on one project, then have a meeting and suddenly need to send a follow up email, and then a call would come in, and then another quick meeting, and so it would go. Never mind a lot of hats, more like a chicken without a head!
Then home time would roll around and what had I actually accomplished?
The stress was building and I wasn’t sure how someone so very organised and always in control could suddenly be feeling so overwhelmed and out of control. At the mercy of her day.
I do feel people wear the “I am so busy!” response as a badge of honour these days. But it’s not cool. It’s not admirable. It’s not productive. Busyness doesn’t equate to accomplishment. Running on a treadmill feels like you are achieving something, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are going anywhere. (Forgive me treadmill lovers – I know it serves a purpose, but it feels so incredibly boring and frustrating and you are really running on the spot and not going anywhere!)
That is how ‘I am so busy!’ can feel too. I felt like I was crazy busy, but not noticing any real movement. In desperation I turned to Claude – my new best friend -for suggestions on efficiency tools, or calendar planning. That was how discombobulated I felt! Turning to AI to help me get organised, who would have thought!?
After a weekend of ‘switching off’ and some regrouping, here is what I am taking from this. The first lesson is that ‘busy’ isn’t always productive. I think watching how I think/ speak about my day is also critical. I often tell my clients that saying you’re anxious or saying you are busy or saying you are down are all half the problem. The language and power we give to things is critical. So, I am going to stop saying “I am swamped” and “I need to clone myself,” because then I feel like those hats are starting to suffocate me. I need to be better at saying things like “I am focused and efficient” or “I am gratefully busy!”
I read an interesting research project where they monitored the brain of anxious/ depressed/ fearful people. They then used different language to name the fear/ stressor, and watched what happened to the brain, particularly the amygdala area. With things like stress, anxiety, and fear, the minute they named what it was they were feeling, the brain wasn’t as lit up and stopped being so anxious. Lesson number two. I always say in my coaching that naming an emotion takes away its power. Time to use my own advice, huh? Funny how the cobbler’s kids never have shoes…
Another lesson I am going to apply is the ‘use it or lose it’ principle. I looked at my To Do List, and asked myself what is genuinely necessary and what will totally fall apart if I don’t do it. Or don’t do it today. I reckon God was dishing out guilt, I somehow got a double dose, so I tend to feel guilty about saying no or not doing things. And that nonsense has to stop. I tell my clients all the time that guilt is a useless recording. And yet, here I am… guilty as charged. From now on, I will only do things that are necessary, not because I feel obliged to.
I used to be quite diligent about blocking off my Monday and Friday morning for admin and planning and emergency appointments. But I have got quite slack with that rule and the cracks are showing. Starting my week on the back foot increases my feeling disorganised. I am making that a non-negotiable again. Bookend my week with feeling on top of things.
And finally – making rest and joy non-negotiables again. A few years back I decided to prioritise those, and I have felt it slipping again. My weeks are busy, my evenings relatively full, and then my weekends jam-packed. It takes its toll too. Because the weekends roll into busy weeks and back into busy weekends and I never feel rested. And we all know how low coping mechanisms dip when we aren’t feeling rested and capable. Somehow I have slipped back into “I will rest when I finish this” and then never seem to get finished. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle sometimes. We push to finish, and really want to, but then we are so tired that we don’t have the stamina to be properly productive and things tend to take twice as long and drain us twice as much. And all we ever feel is endless work pressure and deadlines that are miles away from our reach.
All of this must stop. And while Claude offered some really great options and some useful apps that I could put in place, it comes back to the basics that we know. The human element that we can’t ignore. We are not AI machines that can just keep going. We need rest. We need reflection. We need to feel calm and in control.
So today, I am clearing out my hats. I am going to try each hat on and honestly assess if they still suit me. Are they just frayed and worn and time to be sent to the hat cemetery? Are they seasonal hats? Are they hats I borrowed that need to be returned to their rightful owner? I need to be clinical and not sentimental. I need to decide if they really fit properly or feel a bit too tight or too loose. It is time.
I will no longer tell people I wear many hats. It’s language that keeps ‘the overwhelm’ alive. From now on, I am going to use language that makes me feel more in control of my roles and my ventures. I need to take a stand – a sturdy hat stand – and make myself feel more clear in my head around the things I do and the things I achieve. The hats I keep will be ones that genuinely fit, worn one at a time, and worn well. The worn and frayed need to go. The borrowed need to be returned. The rest come off. My neck, quite frankly, has earned it!