Oh yeah, when you are feeling really, really overwhelmed than you are most likely really, really overwhelmed so respect yourself by listening to yourself and slow down. For over a week now, I’ve been tearing my hair out because of this one architecture class that I just decided to go full tilt boogy into the wind and overwhelm myself with this semester. Well, okay, maybe that’s being too hard on myself. I’ve got a lot of things that I’ve been slowly adding to my plate such as helping a friend create and produce a television show that we’ll be screening at the end of this month, researching, casting and interviewing guests for my blog talk radio show, blogging daily to reach my goal of 365 blogs in 365 days, coaching. and consulting and then all kinds of other responsibilities that we humans tend to weave in and out of our lives so that by the time it came to figuring out what I needed to create and accomplish for this particular class I was “done past overwhelm” and couldn’t figure out what the written directions were saying if my life had depended on it!

What a difference a couple of days make.

I realized that one of the consulting assignments I had taken on would make my Mondays and Wednesdays definitely 14-hour days (if not more) with some major driving to and fro thrown in for good measure. The good news is that it totally made me face up to how I was putting myself in major overwhelm mode. First clue: When you can’t slow your mind down enough to be able to read directions then you may be putting “the overwhelm” upon yourself in some area of your life.

As soon as I stepped away from that particular consulting job, the creative part of my brain became freed up enough to figure out the class assignment. The only thing was that my brain kept me up most of last night because of trying to figure out how to make origami people in specific dimensions and I was just tired enough that pulling myself out of bed to actually make them was not an option. Today when I was finally able to sit down, read the instructions and try to make the people, I calmly and steadily made the people. I made the parents (mom and dad) and the children of three sets of origami families. I’m not kidding myself, these people will not win me any prizes but I was so happy that my brain had finally decided to click into gear. In fact, tonight when we met some good friends for a birthday dinner I found myself looking for paper that I could tear up into 1/4-inch squares and show everyone how I could make origami people. I’ve promised my mom not to leave little origami people around her house for her to find after my next visit……well, maybe just one family.

So next time you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, just know that you probably are overwhelmed and take a step back to give yourself time to assess your situation and find one thing that you can remove from your “to do” list that may just help you to put your life back into balance.

When was the last time you sang, “make the world go away?”