Differently

Journal Share: Turn Overwhelm to Insight

• Carla Reeves | Creator of The Differently Coaching Experience

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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Differently, Carla Reeves shares another powerful journal entry to highlight the impact of interactive journaling. If you're feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities, deadlines, and expectations, this episode will provide valuable insights into breaking the cycle. Learn how to identify patterns in your thinking, shift your mindset, and take ownership of your thoughts to create meaningful change.

Key Takeaways:

  • The power of interactive journaling as a tool for self-awareness and personal growth.
  • How feelings of overwhelm are often caused by thought patterns rather than external circumstances.
  • Recognizing the common habit of collapsing multiple responsibilities into a single, urgent demand.
  • Strategies to release pressure and gain mental clarity.
  • Key questions to reflect on when feeling overwhelmed:
    • What is your go-to response when overwhelmed? (Avoidance, overworking, numbing, etc.)
    • How long have you been feeling this way? Is this a recurring pattern?
    • What does making progress truly mean for you?
  • The importance of addressing the root cause rather than just the symptoms of overwhelm.
  • The role of childhood experiences and learned behaviors in shaping how we handle responsibility today.
  • Practical strategies to regain control and move forward with intention:
    • Release pressure and apply love.
    • Separate real pressure from perceived pressure.
    • Identify small, actionable steps towards progress.

Resources & Next Steps:

  • Experience interactive journaling and coaching support at carlareeves.com.
  • Connect with Carla through the podcast show notes and share your thoughts.
  • Subscribe to the podcast for weekly inspiration and practical insights.
  • Share this episode with someone who might be struggling with overwhelm.

Call to Action:
Feeling overwhelmed? You don’t have to navigate it alone. Explore Carla's coaching programs and interactive journaling to break free from recurring stress patterns. Visit carlareeves.com to learn more. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend and subscribe for more transformative conversations!

Thanks for listening – see you next week!

Learn more about Carla:
Website: https:/www.carlareeves.com/
Connect on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reevescarla/
Connect on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@differentlythepodcast

Go to https://carlareeves.com/freeclass to get The Class schedule, sign up, and/or pass it on to a friend. Each month is a new topic. Come hang out and learn with us for FREE!

Get your copy of 5 Ways to Manage Your Mind

Go to https://www.carlareeves.com/getunstuck.com to download Carla's on demand journaling workshop + exercise to help you stop spinning and start moving forward.

Explore Coaching with Carla: https://bookme.name/carlareeves/lite/explore-coaching

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Thank you for listening!

Speaker 1:

I'm Carla Reeves, and this is Differently. Whether you feel stuck in survival, navigating a change or seeking more for your life, may this podcast be your weekly nudge to take a risk to build a life that is uniquely bold, authentic and in alignment with your deepest values. What if you worried less about the bumps in the road and instead got equipped for the journey? Get ready to rethink what's possible. Thanks for choosing to listen to this podcast. I know there are many places you could be and I'm honored that you are choosing to be here. So this is going to be our second journal share episode. Last month, I opened up my journal to share with you, and these episodes are designed to show you the power of interactive journaling and also walk you through my coaching approach, and as you listen, there are going to be things you can apply right in your life today. So, as I mentioned in the first episode it was on January 23rd it starts with journal share in the title, and I had shared that.

Speaker 1:

I started training guides this last year to work inside of our new offering, re-imagine, which is an interactive journal and life dashboard that I've used with my clients for years, but we're now offering this as a standalone where you can journal with a journal coach, trained by me, on the other side of your journal not AI, a real human and someone really committed and trained to help you get out of your own way and challenge your own thinking. And as we did that training, I was reminded of the honor that it is to peek inside of another's journal and life and how we find ourselves in the stories of others. We so often think we're alone in our thoughts or feel like our thoughts are crazy, and I can tell you that, after reading hundreds and hundreds of journals over the last decade, I can tell you that we're far more similar and alike than we are different, and we struggle with the same thinking challenges, despite our circumstances. My hope is that these episodes offer you a new insight and inspire you to either maybe begin a writing practice as a tool and vehicle for navigating your life, or maybe it has you explore your own journals deeper if you are already a journaler, or maybe it's going to call you to take the next step with us, where we combine the power of coaching with a journal, where we combine the power of coaching with a journal. So in this short episode today, I want to share a snippet from an anonymous journal, and one that represents so many that I've read over the years. Here's the short entry Everything feels like too much right now.

Speaker 1:

Work deadlines are piling up, my family needs more of my attention and I can't shake this feeling that I'm dropping important balls. I want to make progress, but I feel paralyzed by all the competing things. How do others make it look so easy? I just don't have the capacity to do anything else. End of journal.

Speaker 1:

These feelings and symptoms capture the essence of how many people feel when they start coaching with me. They feel stressed, they feel overwhelmed, they're running on empty, they're spread thin and it's beginning to impact some really important things in their life, which just isn't okay. When you feel overwhelmed, I want you to start to think about what's your go-to. Do you pull away? Do you work harder? Do you grab a glass of wine? Do you work harder, thinking it's going to get you somewhere or that there will be less to do and you'll have more time once you get more done? Or is it lashing out in ways because you're spread so thin and then you later have regret? I get it.

Speaker 1:

Life can feel full and it's easy to feel powerless, especially if your mind and your thoughts are running you instead of the other way around. So I'm on a mission to help you not get sucked into the vortex of thinking that if you just worked harder, if you just did more, if you just got better or more efficient, that things would be better. I did that. It's how I lived for many, many years, trying to please and work harder and make sure everybody else was happy and putting my needs at the very bottom of the list over and over again. It didn't serve anyone and it left me empty. It doesn't work and it's a lie. The truth is that you're going to feel better when you take the reins of your life in a new and different way. That disrupts this pattern, because until you break the pattern, the hamster wheel keeps going. Because until you break the pattern, the hamster wheel keeps going.

Speaker 1:

So let's take a minute and just look at and notice what's happening in this short entry, because there's key patterns that I think we can all learn from. One of the first things that I notice is that overwhelm is often a consistent habit of taking on too much, but it's also a thinking problem, because what happens is we begin to feel overloaded and then our mind begins to spin and add to it, making things only worse and feel heavier. The other thing that happens is we often collapse things, so we start to feel overwhelmed and then all the things we have on our plate collapse family work, community, church, all these commitments we have. It feels like they're all urgent and they all need to be done today, and so that can create a spiral again that just creates more weight and heaviness, and so that can create a spiral again that just creates more weight and heaviness.

Speaker 1:

So when I'm working with someone, one of the things I want to do first is to help them release some of that pressure so that they can have a little bit of mobility again. And the way I do that is by helping you separate from your thinking and so that we can find where you do have control to shift your experience a little bit. And so in this entry you notice he or she is talking about, you know, dropping balls like this, fear of dropping balls, and so just that idea and those thoughts create stress and fear and all kinds of emotion, and we tend to do that in our mind. We get dramatic in our thinking. That makes us feel a certain way which causes us to behave a certain way, which often derails us, and while there might be some truth to that, there's likely a lot of things that are not true, and so my job is to help them pull that apart so they can see what's real and what's perceived. So there's like perceived pressure and there's real pressure, and if you can learn to separate the two for yourself, you're going to have more power.

Speaker 1:

The next step is we're going to do that and is the deeper work to help you so that you don't find yourself here again and again repeating the same cycle, because that's what usually happens, and these are some things that you can begin to ask yourself, to crack open what's really going on here. And, instead of addressing the symptom with a glass of wine or avoidance, or working harder and harder and more, you can start to make a shift in breaking that repetitive cycle. That's going to give you power to create lasting shift around overwhelm in your life, and my job here is to help you assess what are the blind spots that are not just tripping, that are tripping you up here, but are also tripping you up in other places, because if I can help you do that, I can help you not only shift this part of your life, but likely this shows up in other places too, and when you change it in one place, you then have the tools to change it all over your life. So the deeper work in this case is to start to explore and identify the places where this is a habit or a survival way of being that causes you to take on too much. This might come from a role you took on as a child. Maybe you grew up in a large family and you were a child that had to take on a great deal of responsibility early. Maybe you grew up in a large family and you were a child that had to take on a great deal of responsibility early. Maybe you grew up with a single parent and you had to be responsible starting from a very young age. This becomes a strength you have and sometimes we overuse a strength where it ends up becoming a weakness, and I see that a lot with clients. Where they're so good at taking things on, people start to know them as the go-to person, but they don't know how to do this in a healthy way in their life today and have healthy boundaries and likely, while this may have been a strength at one point in your life. Today it might be producing a life that you're drowning in, right and all of this responsibility. So there are ways that you can begin to shift this. Once you recognize it in a very loving way, that starts to change things over time.

Speaker 1:

Other things I'm curious about and would ask in response to this journal, either in a journal response or on our next call together is how long have you been feeling this way? You know, is this familiar? Is this showing up again and again, and again? Like we talked about, we'd also explore what is making progress. You know they wrote about making like just this desire to make progress and instead of just living in this unfulfilled desire, start to drill down into what is making progress really. Look like, what could some small steps be in that direction and start to get them out of this spin or this rut, because the moment we can do that, things start to open up. So you can see, it's a process of not only helping you to alleviate some immediate pressure and overwhelm, but also to address the pattern so that you don't find yourself here again and again and again.

Speaker 1:

So, as we close, I want to remind you of a simple prescription for overwhelm that I've talked about it again and again release pressure and apply love, because if you can release some pressure and relax a little bit, you're going to have greater clarity, more options, more mobility. We have a tendency to be so incredibly hard on ourselves and place enormous amount of pressure, so when you find yourself in this spot, remember that you have the ability to step back. Apply love, remove pressure so you can move more freely, and there's a quote that I have shared with you before that says we all carry a load the heavies in our head, so meaning that the sense of urgency and pressure is often self-fabricated and unnecessary. This is just a glimpse of how interactive journaling can help you move from overwhelm to insight and forward intentional momentum insight and forward intentional momentum. In our coaching experiences. You get very personalized feedback from a live human no AI here on your journal entries, plus access to our life dashboard where you have that ongoing.

Speaker 1:

If you're ready to experience a greater level of support and clarity in your own journey or you want to break through this overwhelm pattern that shows up again and again in your life, but you feel like you need support to do that, go to our website. Check out our programs, carla Reevescom, and remember your thoughts are powerful. Take ownership for them, because they are the very stepping stones for your growth and positive change. Let's do this. Remember a deep change in the way that you live requires a deep change in the way that you think.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of differently. It's been an honor to share this conversation with you. You know, one of the keys to living fully is to take action when you're inspired to do so. I hope you found that spark of inspiration today and would you help us spread the word. Did someone you know come to mind while you were listening? If this episode could impact someone you know, please share it and pass it along. New episodes drop weekly, so tap that subscribe button and join us next time as we continue to challenge the status quo and get equipped to live life differently.