Managing Overwhelm

Chris: Good afternoon. Hopefully there are some people dialed in now and able to hear us. Just a very quick introduction from me. My name is Chris Towle. I'm a corporate partner with Gowling WLG based in the UK. Thank you firstly for joining the first of our wellness week sessions. Got Jordan here to talk to you in a minute. Probably far more interestingly then I will be doing for the next 30 seconds. For those of you that know us, whether you're familiar with the firm, thank you. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for catching up with this week. Thank you for visiting our booth. We are sorry that we're not able to give you socks this year. We know that's probably been the one downside of the conference. It's certainly the thing we've been getting the most comments about so telling you that is pretty much all we're good for. For those of you that don't know us, we're delighted to have you here, thank you. We're a large sector focused in ... law firm. We've got lots of ... countries, based primarily in the UK, Canada, Europe and Asia. Absolutely nothing in the US so if you need legal assistance outside of the US come and have a chat. We'd be delighted to talk to you. That's probably the official reason to visit our booth. We've got lots of people there happy to have a chat, willing to give you free consultations, all the rest of it. We've also got a couple of competitions. We're not allowed to name what the prize is for copyright reasons but it's a peloton bike. So worth coming along and putting your name in the hat, if you fancy that. We've also got free coffee. We've got other stuff. So come along, have a chat. Tomorrow, and the rest of this week, we've got two other sessions so details there are at our booth. Please come along and think about dialing in. But right now I'm going to hand over to Jordan who is the person whose come to speak to you and hear from. So Jordon's the co-founder of Shift Collab which is one of Canada's largest therapy and mental health education firms. He's here to talk to us about how we can better manager ourselves and our overwhelm in the fast paced environments in which we find ourselves working and living even more so right now in this kind of virtual sphere. Jordan in particular works with people in senior positions like yourselves, managing executives. Helping them to better help themselves and their teams to tackle this kind of situation within the work place. So, Jordan, if I can hand over to you. Thank you very much.

Jordan: Wonderful. Good afternoon or good morning or good evening, depending on where you are in the world, of course. I am going to share my screen here and we will get right into this. Okay. Brilliant. First of all, big thank you to Gowling for putting this session together. Certainly mental health conversations within this industry is absolutely essential, just like any industry, and of course what's been amazing during COVID is that we are talking about these topics in a much more detailed, thoughtful way that's bringing new folks into the fold and it's about time. How this session is going to work, in a nutshell, is as follows. There's going to be three parts. I'm going to set the stage a little bit and we're going to do some thinking about how our own stress and overwhelm shapes us day to day. We're then going to talk about the building blocks of stress and overwhelm in a very no nonsense kind of way. Then we are going to get into tools that we can try out without ourselves, with our peers and colleagues or with any of our family members, right away as soon as this session is over. And, during throughout, if you have anything that you want to share or say I encourage you to go to the live chat option in Zoom here. As well, if you have any questions throughout, you can go to the Q&A function in Zoom and submit a question there and we're going to make sure that we have a couple of moments to stop and talk throughout as well as towards the end too.

With that, I want to say this, life was messy before COVID. Things were stressful before COVID. I know it feels like so long ago. I know it feels like a million years ago. But, anything that was going on in our worlds at that time felt pretty big in and of itself. We may look back on it now and say, "You know, I'm mad. I thought things were really stressful but now things are just so much worse.", and surely, whatever was existing before has only been exacerbated now. But what we often can do is diminish the stress that we had before and how things were functioning when really all that COVID has done for many of us is blown up our stress. And even so, many months into this, in a dynamic uncertain situation, things can be hard. So for anyone that's watching this today I want to applaud you for taking the time and because it is important. It is an incredibly important dialogue to check in with yourself and hopefully this can give you some fodder that you can take into your work, your relationships, both professionally and personally.

Now, we are grieving how we used to live. There's a lot of curve balls that are being tossed around right now. I want you to know at the outset that I am there too. I am there in a situation where I have a company of a bunch of people and navigating these challenges internally for us, and we go around and speak and teach and do therapy and stuff all day long every day, for us this is tricky. That's a reminder that for all of us, no matter where we are, we are experiencing a very similar phenomena right now. For one of the very first moments, in probably modern civilization, we can look across all the different professionals inside of our own organization and have a sense about, oooh, they're probably feeling a little bit of what I am. What a fascinating moment that is. All this is to say is that none of us are alone with whatever we are right now. For the purpose of this session it is critical that, as much as possible, that you leave aside any distractions that you have and you're able to free yourself up and treat this as some time for you where, sure you can listen to what I'm saying and follow what I'm teaching you and I hope that you do, but as I'm talking about certain things ask yourself how does this resonate with you? How does this relate to you? How does this feel as your hearing these words? Because that's how you will get the benefit out of this session. My goal for today is pretty straightforward. I want to help you understand how stress and overwhelm shows up for you and your professional peers and what you can do about it.

Now, there's going to be lessons in here whether you are a department of one, within your organization, or whether or not you lead a small team of in house counsel, or otherwise how it applies to the broader leadership and executive teams that you collaborate with. To tackle this we're going to have a couple of different parts here. Now, typically we start these sessions off with a very cool anonymous sharing exercise. However, today it's not entirely the way that we're going to start things off. I'm going to do things a little bit differently. So we're going to take about 5 minutes there, and then as I said we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of stress and overwhelm, followed by a discussion on the tools that we have. Now, in order for us to get on the same page we need to get very real with ourselves. How we normally do this is we built out this very, very cool anonymous texting platform. Where anyone can share anything that they are feeling and it can't be traced back to you. We're not going to do that today. <laughter> I'm teasing you. We're not going to go there today but instead I want you to think about the questions we would ask. Okay? Because these questions are extremely illuminating and allows us to get to the core of the topic. Two things that we're always most curious about, within these overwhelm sessions, is this; if you were tossing and turning last night, in the middle of the night, if you knew that you had to rest but you just couldn't get your mind to shut off, what was on your mind? What was keeping you up? Was it a sense of regret? A sense of remorse? A sense of stress, anxiety, fear, guilt, shame? What was that? Maybe it wasn't last night. Maybe it was two nights ago. Maybe it was last month. Maybe it was last year. If it was last year you're doing a lot of things right. But for many of us we have these sleepless nights and these middle of the night difficult thoughts and feelings all too often. So what was that for you? Just think about that for yourself. You don't have to write it down anywhere. You don't have to share it. Not going to make you text it in today. Then the next question you want to ask yourself is this; while you reflect on what's keeping you up at night and you're following that thought pattern, you're following that evidence, what's one thing you wish you were courageous enough to share with your peers? Now, what I mean by that is what's one thing you wish you were courageous enough to share with your peers so that you felt like you could be more transparent at work. You felt like you wouldn't have to withhold part of yourself or information about your life. Information about your relationships, with how you show up at work. Many of us feel like when we go to work that we're putting on a mask or that we're filtering ourselves. Over time we get so good about that we can barely tell it's happening. It's exhausting though. Never mind challenging to our mental health. So this question is, if there was one thing in your life that you wish you could just scream from the rooftops to the people that you work with every day, now knowing them being aware of that would make you feel so much more witnessed. So much more seen. So much more valued as you. Again, you don't have to write it down. You don't have to text it in. But ask yourself what's that one thing.

Now, these questions are tricky. When we do these sessions one of the most phenomenal things that happens is we start to see that, even within one organization, that the same themes will pop up time and again. We'll see that even though each person submitted just one response to each question, that many of them overlap in ways that are genuinely surprising. To the point where attendees will say, "Oh my goodness. I didn't write any of those but I could have." We do this because we are so convinced that every day of our lives we are alone. We are the only ones that are struggling. We are the only ones that have ever experienced whatever it is that is being experienced in that moment. We've convinced ourselves that we are the protagonist and that no one else will ever understand that we are uniquely broken. That we are uniquely flawed. But we're not. In fact, the challenge is this, is that for whatever you're imagining in your own responses to those questions I just asked you, if you imagine that you went out into the rest of the conference and you pulled in ten people each, and you brought them on this Zoom and they responded to the same questions. Chances are a lot of their responses would be really similar to yours. Then even more confusingly, if we then went out onto the street, even though we shouldn't be doing that right now, but if we went out onto the virtual street, so to speak, and grabbed ten people as well. If all of us did that, so just not you but the ten people from the conference and then if everyone went out and grabbed ten other people and brought them onto this Zoom, regardless of age, background, level of education, where they're from, what language they speak, regardless of any of those barriers, if we just had a true cross section of our society here and ask the same questions, the submissions would be virtually indecipherable. In that we wouldn't be able to say who said what. Because fundamentally we are all living in an age of anxiety. Fundamentally many of us feel as though we are withholding a big part of ourselves every day at work. It's not just a you thing. It's not just a me thing. It's all of us.

Which brings us to the topic of the day. Now, whatever came up for you as I was giving that opening and sliding past our interactive exercise, whatever came up for you I want you to hold onto that. Take a note for yourself of what came to your mind when I asked those questions. Because in those questions are a lot of clues around where you're at and around what you really need. So, let's talk about how we understand that a little bit more. Stress is inevitable. How we respond to stress, well, we've a little more agency around that. Stress isn't all good. Stress isn't all bad. In fact, if you think of watching your favourite sport what you will notice before it begins is that you don't see the players showing on sidelines with their feet up. Just absolutely checked out and relaxed. No. You don't see that. You see them on the court, if you're an NBA fan, or on the field if you're watching football right now, or baseball, and you'll see them getting warmed up, getting hyped up and getting focused. Key performance for most of us requires us to be in a mid-level stress. Manageable level of moderate stress. Now the key is that in order to achieve this optimal performance we need to be able to be extremely aware of what being fairly low stressed feels like and also feeling what very high stress feels like. But we are often very bad at that because we treat stress like this binary kind of thing. Either we're stressed or we're not. One of the great challenges, of course, in being high performance, high pressure work environment is to have some degree of stress, for sure, that will keep you focused, that will keep you engaged, that will keep you driving. You know those days where you just have so much to do and you're just going dant, dant, dant, dant, dant and you're getting so many things done. Being in that zone, being in that state of flow is extremely valuable for you as a professional.

However, if that goes a little too far, and when that goes a little too far, getting to the state of feeling extremely anxious, where it can't be controlled, or where you feel like maybe you are getting a little irritable or angry or feeling a sense of panic come on, that's no good. This is called the 'Erik Stenson Law of Psychological Performance' and it fundamentally underlines most of sports psychology. It applies equally in the professional world. That is to say that on those days where you are feeling extremely relaxed you're probably not going to do your best work. The question is how can you better be aware of what gets you into that optimal zone and what keeps you from that sub-optimal anxious zone. All of that is about becoming extremely familiar with your thinking patterns. On the flip side, if you go way towards the high level stress for a sustained long term way, research now shows us that our brains are going to be much more focused on survival. That is our basic human instincts rather than on higher order tasks; whether it's the ability to learn; the ability to consolidate information; the ability to remember; the ability to self-reflect; the ability to develop emotional and mental awareness. All of those are going to be second level to the focus on absolute survival. Not to mention, more fascinating in the last couple of years, a great amount of research has come out that's shown that those that sustain high degrees of stressors for a very long period of time are adding much greater risk of developing mental illness, the formal mental illness as in some that's included in the DSM-5, and degenerative diseases. So this is serious stuff. This is not a joke. This is not something that we can put off. This is something that we need to get very friendly with. Now this is not me saying you can never be stressed. Again, that is just not realistic at all. But it is to say that we have an important obligation to ourselves, our organizations, our families to be able to get into that moderate stress level, be able to nip it in the bud before it goes too far. Then when it's not time to perform be able to ensure that we are at that low level so that we can be fully present with those that we love.

Now, in the context of COVID, the stress that we're experiencing is far more devastating to us. That is because stress is made fundamentally worse when it is either anticipated or unpredictable. Or when it's unclear when the stressor will be over. In the case of COVID we don't know how long we're going to be living like this. We don't understand what will be happening next. For anyone that doesn't feel like they have a lot of support to cope that is going to take another notch out of the belt. When we are losing a sense of control over the stressor, as we will see, it fundamentally depletes the resources that we have to be able to meet and address that stressor. Then it all spirals out. Now, there are three schools of thought on stress. I'm going to go through this very quickly without boring you with the fine grain details. But it's very important to understand what stress is in the modern context. So around the 1950's the response school of stress was starting to be studied. The research started in the 20's and it really became mainstream by the 50's. Which understood stress as a simple physiological defense. Right? The greatest example of this is like you see a polar bear, maybe not one that's waving at you in such a cute way, but you see a polar bear in the wild when you are wandering around Antarctica, you are going to be stressed. Right? Immediately. You are going to feel your fists clench. Your palms are going to get sweaty. Your shoulders are going to get tense. Your hearts going to start beating really quickly. Right? So that's your physiological response. Now the problem is, sure that might be true for some thing like polar bears, but that's kind of a little too simple, don't you think? Like life's a little more complicated than just having one level of stress response to some sort of external challenge. Surely that can't be applied. Which led to the state of the school of stress. Which has said that, "You know what? There's actually different levels of stress responses because stress is divided across a bunch of factors. But if we had a scale that would basically outline different things that could happen in a persons lives we could actually understand the relative stress for the average American against one another." Which is kind of funny. Now it's not just this single dimension thing but you have these varying levels of stress but it's still very, very much painted with a brush that all people are equal which, of course, they aren't. So this is called the 'Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale'. If you're interested in going deeper into this stuff just look it up. It's very illuminating and very shortsighted. It's illuminating in that it's pointing out these interesting variables around things that are, of course very stressful on the surface, but other things that maybe wouldn't be so stressful to some of us. So for example, a death of a spouse being at the top of the scale. Of course. That would be absolutely devastating. But on the other side, a revision of personal habits, 24. Okay? Well, what could that mean? Or change in a responsibilities at work, 29. That could be getting a promotion, being stressful. Right? Grieving the past, that can be stressful. What's interesting is they started to introduce things that aren't necessarily traditionally positive, nor traditionally negative, to this scale, acknowledging that things are stressful regardless of the broader outcome. Because they saw change as stressful. It didn't really matter what the change was to but change is stressful. Change is hard. But even still this didn't quite cut it because it still made all of this far too simple. Which led to the transactional school of understanding stress which was mainstreamed in the 1970's and we've been riding that wave, and different versions, since. Fundamentally it's a little bit more detailed of a process. Okay? So here's how it kind of works. When you get a notification in your in box, from someone that you really don't want to hear from, like maybe an old client or an old colleague or the professional you have a difficult disagreement with, shall we say, and even before you read that email, just seeing that name of somebody can be pretty tricky for many of us. What's happening in the moment before you respond, either mentally or physically or behaviourally, with the "ugh" kind of thing, your mind is actually a series of questions. Very quickly. The first thing it's asking is, is this thing actually stressful to me. Right? If it is, you'll say yes and then you will go on to the next question. The next questions being is this thing going to challenge me or harm me? Challenge me as in is it going to challenge me to be the better person, be the bigger person? Challenge me to learn from my past? All that kind of stuff. Or harm me. Is it physically or emotionally going to be harmful to me. Then the last question is do I have the resources required to meet this demand. This is the fundamental transaction of stress. If something is stressful to me, is it going to challenge or harm me, and regardless do I have the resources available to meet whatever this thing is going to do to me?

I'll give you an example. That is my fiancé and I. We were speaking in the Middle East not too long ago, doing a bunch of stress management and mental health workshops with the Government of Dubai, and we had a couple of days off and we decided to go to the world's longest zipline. I hate heights, with a passion, as I learned I also hate gliding across a mountain range hundreds and hundreds feet above a very rocky valley, only held to a wire with this ridiculous thing that they strapped around me. So they basically kind of lift you up, you're stomach down, they put these straps around you. You can't move your arms. You can't do anything. Like it's all on them. In that moment, as I'm getting strapped in, I really stress out. Going back to this, this thing is going to harm me and no, I do not have the resources to meet this demand. Not even close. But what they did is they tapped the amount of resources outside of my control. You see, the funny thing about resources and demands is that they are functional stories we tell ourselves to give ourselves a sense of control over a stressful thing that's happening to us. My story, that I was telling myself, is that I don't have the resources to meet this demand because I am scared of heights, because I believe that I'm going to get hurt, because I don't trust these people that are strapping me in. Because who would want to work in a place like this? Like aaugh! But when in reality they were actually going to challenge my perception by ensuring that they were controlling a lot of the resources I would functionally need. In particular, they were very careful to have, of course, extremely thorough safety equipment and protocols so I knew exactly what was going on. They had stress tested. It's not like I was the first person on this thing. They had gone through all sorts of certifications from bodies all over the world in order to make it safe. They brought in the team that runs the then second longest zipline in the world, from Central America to the Middle East, to run the thing. So they had brought a lot of resources at play but I didn't care in that moment because I was stressed and I felt like I didn't have the resources. So they gave me them. Resources and demands, when we're facing a stressor, kind of a funny thing. Right? Because we treat our thoughts as if they are facts but they aren't. They are, in fact, our thoughts are stories we tell ourselves. So if we tell ourselves the story facing a stressful work event that we aren't supported by our peers; that there's not effective leadership over our organization; that we haven't learned anything from the past; that we have no unique subject matter expertise; that I don't have the time for this; that I don't know how this functions as part of my role in this organization; yadda, yadda, yadda, then I'm not going to feel like I have a lot of resources to meet a particular challenge.

On the flip side, demands are also very similar too. If I feel uncertain around my current relationship with an organization I'm not going to feel that resourceful. If I don't have a clear understanding of what's going on. If I see that I'm going to be hurt in some way. If I feel as though I am set up for failure because of overlapping demands. If I was just given a bunch of new responsibilities and tasks. If I'm feeling like I'm already out of balance between work and the rest of life. If I'm feeling all these pressures. If a major thing is happening personally with a big lifestyle challenge, all of that is going to be a demand that is placed on me. So the easiest thing about all of this is that it's all fluctuating in real time. It's largely dependent on the stories that we tell ourselves. There's also a functional element of this too. That functional element often is borne by the organization to ensure that they are setting their people up for success and will not let anyone fail. But if we don't believe that that organization is not going to let us fail, then we can very much convince ourselves that failure's the only option. When we believe failure's the only option, that we don't have the resources to meet the demands, then we are going to feel awful.

Now, the problem is this. Life isn't as simple. I'm trying to adjust this so I don't have light in my face fluctuating here. One of the big problems is this. It's not like any of us just have one stressor and that's it. Right? We all have a ton of stressors that are going on and they overlap. So that's why this dynamic situation of where our resources spread around against the demands they can vary so much from one hour to the next. One day until the next. That it makes our heads spin and that uncertainty in and of itself of ,whether or not we can cope with all of it, exacerbates all of these stressors and that's when we get to a state of overwhelm. So the word stress and overwhelm are often used interchangeably but they shouldn't be. Stress is referring to one stressor. I'm experiencing stress which would be one or more stressor. But overwhelm refers to the point where ultimately we can't delineate between different stressors. Where we feel like everything's just in this fog, in this haze, and when we're in the state what we find ourselves doing is kind of a funny thing. We'll start taking out the fact that we're stressed about one thing on someone else that's totally not related to that stressor. Right? So if you ever catch yourself getting very frustrated with your partner or with family member over something that's going on at work, like a situation they had no involvement in whatsoever, that's a good sign that you're in a state of overwhelm. Because you're wires are getting crossed. Or otherwise, if you ever feel like a sensation of flooding. Great example. You're driving. You're late for something that's really important and you find that all of sudden you are white knuckling the wheel of the car, and you have a sense of tunnel vision, and you are driving aggressively beyond belief and you can't focus on anything else except for just how fast you're going and when you're going to be there and shaving off 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. That sensation of being flooded is a really example of being overwhelmed. Because in that moment there's a bunch of different things that are going on. You're not acting that way because you just want to drive fast. You're acting that way because you are telling yourself all kinds of stories about what happens if you're late. You're spiraling out on that.

Another good example, if you're in an argument ever with a friend, family member, significant other, that feeling of being flooded where you don't know what to say, you don't know what to do, so maybe you stonewall the conversation or maybe you get more upset or maybe you just walk away, that moment where you just don't know what else to do, that's the feeling of overwhelm. Or when you have so many things that are important to work on at the beginning of your day that you don't even know where to start and you just kind of spiral out from there. All of those are feelings of overwhelm. It's really important that we understand, for each of us, when we hit that spot. When we go from being stressed about a couple of things, and being able to manage them even if imperfectly, to this state of being flooded. This is kind of like learning how to play golf. This stuff kind of takes a lifetime to figure out. Young or old this is very tricky. Now, the funny thing is that when we get to a state of overwhelm is it looks differently for each of us. It can start to mean that we are either missing work, maybe we're not productive, maybe we're not taking care of ourselves, maybe we make reckless purchases or buy something and then return it. That makes no sense. Or otherwise maybe move money between savings accounts in a way that doesn't make sense. Or make a big withdrawal. Maybe we're exhausted and unable to sleep. Maybe we're just irritable. Maybe we're feeling hopeless. Maybe we're feeling scared. Maybe we're drinking a lot. Maybe we have thoughts that are kind of scary with some self-harm ideation. It could be any of those things and a bunch of others because all of this is unique to each of us. Now, there's a fundamental breakdown of cognitive behavioural therapy which plays out like this. So for anyone who's been through CBT, ever, you'll remember the thought record and the process of going through and evaluating the voracity of our thoughts to balance them out with facts. What's interesting about CBC, before we get to that, is that the building blocks of it are essentially that everything is connected within you. Your thoughts, your behaviour and your mood are tied together in a three way race all of the time. So if your thought pops in your head you'll notice your mood change. If your mood changes your behaviour is going to change. Or if you have a thought maybe your behaviour is going to change right away then your mood follows. Everything is connected as a singular unit. Any thing can start from anywhere. Getting familiar with what it looks like for us when we are overwhelmed is absolutely essential. The thoughts, moods and behaviours that you exhibit when you are overwhelmed are going to be hugely different than someone that is, even your oldest best friend that may be like you in so many ways, but it could be totally different. So it's really important, all we can do is believe, build the awareness of consciousness of what we do and start with that, rather than trying to look at others and come to conclusions.

Now, four telltale signs though, that we are in a state of overwhelm are these. These require unhelpful thinking patterns, and they typically do accompany a mood or behavioural change, but the thinking patterns themselves are very clear. The first thing to keep in mind is just the flooded piece. Right? If I feel emotionally flooded then, sure, then absolutely I am going to feel like just totally done. I'm going to be able to label as overwhelm. But when you're in a state even of being flooded, not all floods are created equal, and for many of us being flooded may be the predominant emotion but we may actually experiencing other things as well. That's where these unhelpful thinking styles come in because they're far easier for us to recognize. This sun is driving me nuts! I'm going to, here. Ah, there we go. That's going to be better. Okay. Perfect. <laughter> Okay. So, what this means is there are four that are fairly common with highly ambitious professionals. Now these will come out in each of us at any given time. All of us will do all four. But typically we each do one or two of them.

The first one is all or nothing thinking. This is the black and white thinking that we see, that we exhibit, very commonly. What's interesting though in our thinking is that we tend to oscillate between everything or being perfect and then everything falling apart, pretty quickly. We can do that within a day, within an hour, within a week and we can do that for a lot of our lives. It's absolutely exhausting.

The second is using a mental filter. This is where when you are looking for evidence to meet the belief you have about yourself. So if you believe, today, that you are worthless and that you are going to get fired, then you are going to look for every piece of evidence that suits that hypothesis. Even if you just crushed it on a big deal, you are leading some negotiation or contract challenges with it, even if you crush those and ten people praised you, if one person gave you some mediocre or lukewarm feedback, you're going to fixate on that. Because that piece of evidence is going to suit the belief you have about yourself.

The third is jumping to conclusions. This is where we like to imagine that we know what others are thinking or saying or doing. It's also known as mind reading or fortune telling. Right? So what we will try to do in this instance is play out the story that we believe is going on to give ourselves a sense of control. So if you ever felt like a colleague doesn't value your input or your feedback, because maybe one time they were a little short with you, you may have fallen into the trap of jumping to the conclusion that they don't like you, they don't value you, they don't see a future for you within this organization, blah, blah, blah. Instead, of acknowledging the simple fact that maybe they were just having a bad day. Maybe they were just externalizing their own stress. Maybe it wasn't about you at all. But, no, we like control so we make everything about ourselves. Right?

The fourth is catastrophizing where basically things will sort of stay at an okay baseline and then one thing will happen and everything will start falling apart. Right? So, oh my goodness, we didn't get this deal done. Because we didn't get this deal done I'm going to get fired. If I get fired then I'm not going to be able to get a job anywhere else. If I can't get a job anywhere else and blah, blah, blah, mrah, mrah, mrah, blah. Then it just spirals out and all of sudden, before you know it, you lost the house. You're living in a basement apartment. You adopted a bunch of cats to keep you warm at night. Like that's kind of where everything goes.

Now, we tend to oscillate between all of these. Like I said, it's exhausting. But most of us default to one or two. These are deeply mapped into how we respond to overwhelm. Okay? Now, here's my ask for you. Reflect on which you tend to gravitate towards, which one or two, and be more mindful of them. Because these are telltale signs that you're experiencing overwhelm. By the way, this is what you can start to look out for in others. Because if have noticed yourself exhibiting an unhelpful thinking style you can surely see it in others too. You may have to ask for clarification. You certainly don't want to jump to conclusions and make assumptions but these sorts of unhelpful thinking styles are fairly universal in different professional verticals. Especially including in house counsel. Okay? So, we'll come back to these in a little bit in a section.

Now, let's start with some more basic tools first. So far we've talked about some of the things we wish others knew about us. The things that are keeping us up at night. We talked about the DNA of stress versus overwhelm. So what do we do with all this? Well, effectively, we've got to think about what we need to do as leaders. Then we have to build a toolkit from that. If we, in our organizations, really believe in championing positive mental wellness, then we have to be extremely self-aware. We have to be extremely empathetic. We have to keep boundaries and reinforce broader support for ourselves and for our team members. Then the fourth is we have to actually have tools and processes to help us with this stuff. This is a very difficult thing to manage stress and overwhelm at work. It's not something to be taken lightly and it's often something that we feel, especially for those of you that are leading a team, we often feel like we just kind of ended up with this as part of some of line item in our job description that we didn't necessarily sign up for. Manage the stress of teammates? Oh my goodness! So, it's part of a modern work place and it's part of what we're facing every day. But here's the deal. A couple of these tools will make it fairly easy and straightforward if you stick to them. Remember that so much of what is actually going on is this duking it between the demands and resources that we perceive. Because, again, we treat our emotions as if they are facts but they are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. These stories, again, determine our sensibilities of what we have in terms of resources to meet the demands that are placed on us.

I want you just to think for a moment what is a story that you tell yourself when you're overwhelmed entirely. Those days when we're just flat out exhausted. Those days where you just don't know how you will fit in another phone call, another email, another client request, another internal request, whatever. What's the story you tell yourself? You don't have to share it anywhere. I just want you to think a bit for yourself. Then ask yourself, in the same statement what do your colleagues tell themselves? Do you think they tell themselves a similar story? Do they tell themselves a different story? This will vary across colleagues. We probably all tell ourselves our own unique version of a story but have we ever told anyone that story? Have we ever articulated it in that way? One way to do that is to start using labelling. So, effectively when we have stressful days they come from a couple of different varieties. Being able just to label what that story is, is tremendously effective. Because when we can label a story to ourselves, or maybe in describing it to a peer or to our relationship at home, it lessens the burden on us having to overexplain. One of the things that often keeps us silent, in the professional context, when it comes to voicing any of this is the fear that we're going to be judged, or word's going to get out, or that we're going to have to overexplain, or we're going to be seen as a liability. It is possible just to use very short terms, such as these, that don't mean you have to over disclose and offer too much context.

There's five kinds of difficult days that happen most often when we are feeling extremely stressed out. So the first is the emotional day. This is when you feel like you've just been giving all day long. You've been supporting somebody, whether at home or at work, just carrying a lot of emotional weight with very little space for yourself. You just feel that emotional fragility rub off on you because you haven't been able to, not only nourish your own needs, not able to talk about your own needs. You haven't been able to witness your own needs and you've just been keenly focused on the struggle of someone else. That is extraordinarily draining. So that's your emotional day.

The second one is, and there's been a lot of these lately, the world is a sad and scary place. That's just when you watch CNN and you shake your head thinking, "Oh my goodness." What has the world come to? We feel that, like very deep within us. We see it in our actions. We see it in our beliefs. We see it in our lives. We watch people on the street and we just have this doomsday kind of feeling as if everything is falling apart.

The third is the I'm in over my head day. This is one we feel like a fraud or an imposter. Maybe our boundaries are being pushed. We're ending up doing something new that maybe we functionally know a lot about. Maybe we deliver on it but we believe that we are total imposters anyway. We do another great workshop on imposters syndrome. We'll leave that one aside for another time.

The fourth is the I'm failing day and this is when something will happen and all of a sudden we'll exercise a lot of all or nothing thinking or the catastrophizing thinking patterns where we'll just spiral out. We'll be like everything's falling apart! I'm failing! I'm failing!

The last is the I didn't have time to go to the bathroom day. Those are just when it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and then these kinds of days you're not even feeling the stress until later in the day, just because you've been so in it all day.

Those are five and there are more, for sure. I'll arrange for this worksheet to get out to anyone that's attended here. We'll maybe create a download link or something. Because being able to label these days is extraordinarily empowering because if you can turn to your colleague and say, "You know what? I'm having one of those the world is a sad and scary place days." What you're doing is your taking control. You're taking control because you are applying a label to a complex set of emotions that you were experiencing in any one moment. More importantly, that label is going to be understood by someone else without you having to overexplain. So you don't have to defend it. You don't have to offer context. You don't have to be worried about being seen as a liability because guess what? We all have these days. But it's enough for other people to know where you're at. Oftentimes that's most of the battle. Especially at work. So be aware of these. Share where you're at during these days with your immediate team members, or peers, and create the invitation for them to share. I think you'll be surprised what happens next. Again, labeling these days, calling them what they are, creates a sense of connection because it will stem from that ability to control and describe what you're feeling. You can even, here's a bonus point challenge, you can even come up with your own kind of day that is unique to your organization or your work. If you have say one day every two months that's like a heavy duty reporting day, or kind of like how accountants have tax season for example, if you have one of those days, or one of those weeks, label that. Come up with a fun, interesting name for that because then it gives your team the autonomy to say, "I'm having that." and everyone else knows exactly what they mean. It's powerful because then we are seen, and when we feel like our stress is validated, we feel like we are validated.

Tool number two. So this comes back to our unhelpful thinking styles. I've already explained these. Again, there are four predominant ones that come up with highly driven professionals fairly regularly. The challenge here is pretty simple. Keep track of your own. Even for one week. Keep track of which ones you are exhibiting. Take notes on it. You will find that you probably, as I said, gravitate towards one or two. Then the next level is talk about these with your immediate peers or team. Ask them which ones show up for them. Create a bit of a challenge where all of you are going to track it for another week, together, and then talk about it. A week, 30 days, whatever. Because, again, being able to interact in this room where you are monitoring unhelpful thinking styles is extremely validating. Because if you acknowledge that we all have these unhelpful thinking styles, and if you are labeling that within your team you don't, again, have to overexplain it. You don't have to provide unnecessary context and if it's a shared thing, as all of these are, it's not so scary. Okay? So now you're talking about things that are going to be defined on a worksheet, that aren't you spilling out your guts in a way that's going to feel very vulnerable and scary, but rather you're highlighting things that all of us are thinking anyway. So these unhelpful thinking styles are very, very critical that way. Okay? And again, as I said earlier, the unhelpful thinking styles are a telltale sign that you are in overwhelm. One offs, that's one thing. But if you find that you are in these frequently, you're overwhelmed. It's that simple and it's that hard at the same time. Whereas these guys, the types of day, these are high level just to top use as a one off kind of I had this kind of day and I'm struggling. So this is more about your short term immediate stressors. These are about the thought patterns that embody your larger long term stressors and overwhelm.

The third, I'm going pretty quick here. The third and we're going to get to Q&A in about 3 or 4 minutes. The third is your emotional bank account. Okay? So, just like a financial bank account we have an emotional bank account. We use somethings that add to our bank account. We do other things that take money our energy out of our emotional bank account. But most of us aren't actually very good at prioritizing the things that nourish us the most. One of the key ways for us to keep our resources strong, and certainly our perception of the resources that we have strong, comes from doing things that nourish us, somewhat regularly. There is no other way for us to feel strong other than having balance that enables us, at the very least, to do a couple things a couple times of week that nourish us. They can be something as simple as a 5 minute YouTube video, or a song that you love, or going for a run, or gardening, or a call to a long lost family member. Whatever that thing is for you. But what I would suggest you do at some point is, and I will make sure you have this sheet, is go through and write down five to eight things that you do at least once a week. Each of them should take less than 30 minutes or so. Then if you rank them on a scale of 0 to 10, on how nourishing they are, you then star which ones you do most often. What you will probably find is that the things that you do most often are probably not always the things that nourish you a lot. Right? We have a great way of doing a lot of things that mindless and that aren't very nourishing. We get lost in the news. We get lost on YouTube. We get lost watching Netflix. We get lost doing whatever at home. Right? Or even at work. Same thing applies to. We can caught up in small mechanical work that we should be delegating or that we should be developing a process around because, even though we are doing those things, it still gives us a sense of control. But it may not be nourishing us. It may not be working for our skill set. It may not be working to reduce our stress but we perpetuate it anyway. Okay? So, the key is to identify the things that are actually highest nourishing for you, and then look at those critically and figure out how you can do more of them, and less of the things that are only somewhat nourishing for you. These include work oriented tasks, for real. Some things you just have to do, as we'll see in the next tool, but a lot of things that cause us stress, or at least deplete our emotional energy, are things that we can actually get rid of or downplay a little bit. It's being critical. Now, if you are a little stuck make sure you ask yourself, "What am I doing is leading to me doing a lot of things that are low nourishing? Am I aware of what I actually need that energizes me? Do I know my love language, for example? These what nourishes me consistent with that? And how can I create a structure or accountability plan to make sure that I am executing some of these activities regularly, because I know that me being nourished is not selfish, is absolutely required, even when I don't feel like I have any time whatsoever." It seems easy but it's actually pretty tricky.

Tool four! So, stress action worksheet. I love this one. In effect, one of things that all of humans is very bad at is knowing exactly what's stressing us out. So if we were to go through and write down three, four, five stressors that we have right now, most of us would be fairly clear for one or two, but some of them might be kind of vague. If we then, say we get to that level of clarity where we're not just saying work is stressing me out, but we're saying short term assignments that come from X department. That causes me a lot of stress. Write down a bunch of these individual stressors and then we rate them we then have a choice. The choice is pretty straightforward. With any kind of stressor we have four options. We can avoid, alter, accept or adapt it. You can't do a whole lot else. So, avoid it is where you're looking at a specific thing that is causing you a lot of grief in your working life. You ask yourself, "Do I really need to do this thing? Can I just focus on other things that I have more control over? Can I get rid of this?" It's amazing. A lot of the senior people get stuck doing a lot of things because of themselves. So, that's the first question. Now, most of us still have to do things that are stressful and challenging. So, that leads to the following three options. We can choose, if we can't avoid it, we can choose to alter it and that's where we make changes to the stressor itself. For example, if there's a workflow stressor where you find that you are constantly saddled with last minute work, that where you just do not have capacity and it's meaning that your working well into the evenings and you're missing out on things that are important to you at home with your kids, for example, what can you do to adjust the workflow so that you don't get saddled with that at the last minute. What boundaries can you put in place? How can those boundaries be communicated? How can you get other teams to buy into it? Don't take it's not possible for an option, because if this is something that limits your stress it's going to increase your longevity within the organization, never mind your overall happiness and effectiveness. The next option is to accept it. Sometimes we just have to deal with things that are stressful. Right? But that's where we have to seek out support. So I'm going to accept that I have to do this stressor, I have to execute on it, fine. But I'm going to get support. And support can come in a variety of different formats. It's not to say you have to go to a therapist or a counsellor, although they're wonderful, but creating time to speak with a mentor, colleague, peer, self-support through doing nourishing activities, peer support by engaging in a transparent way in a one on one confidential environment with a peer. Any of those are totally suitable and there's a bunch of other options. Then the fourth is adapting. So, how can you go and work through the stressor for now but reframe your expectations and your thinking. So that you are saying, "Okay. I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to tough it out but I'm going to remember that I'm only going to be doing this for another 6 months and this is teaching me an awful lot around how I won't want to ever work again in the future." It's a good reframe. So the key is this. You've got to go through and label, write down very clearly, the individual stressors that you're experiencing and a rating. Then you can decide. This is a very, very helpful exercise to do in the moment when you are identifying that one thing in particular is causing a lot of stress. Stop and ask yourself this, "Which of these can I do right now?" Again, it's amazing how much stress each of us shoulders because we feel like we just have to do it all.

Avoidance is the first key. You're senior. You're a leader within the organization. Do you have the capacity to avoid? Otherwise you have the capacity to choose one of the other three paths. All of those options are better than just toughing it out.

Lastly, this one. Now, I'm going to email out this one. I'm not going to give a fulsome explanation right now because it takes a bit to explain but very important. I put it in here for a reason. We do a lot of work with legal professionals. One of things that, and I have many friends that are legal professionals too, one of the things that many of my friends that are legal professionals aren't great at is balance. Balance is a bit of a fictional thing anyway. I mean, life is so integrated these days. Looking at church versus state it's not just how we can evaluate these things effectively. However, we can do a self-evaluation of how satisfied we are with different areas of our lives. We aren't saying that each area of our life should be catered too with equal weight, or time, but we can say, "Okay. Look, we have a bunch of different areas in our lives. Are we actually satisfied with them?" So what you do with this worksheet, from Smart Recovery, we did not design this worksheet. It'd be much more beautiful if we did, obviously. You go through and you label different slices of your life that are important to you. Then you rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, based on how satisfied you are right now. Then, once you've drawn a line through your rating for each of those slices, you then draw a line that connects them all. This is a powerful visual representation of where you were overall focus is going. More importantly sometimes, where it's not going. Then what you can do is do this sheet again once a quarter. So if you know that you are missing out on a lot of fun, for example, but fun is very important for you because it's high nourishing, it makes you come alive, it's a great counterbalance of all that stress and all that you're putting up with at work, for example, then you've got to prioritize that. Or if you find that your health is taking a nosedive. That's a really important area too then you've got to make some changes. So make some changes and come back and do this exercise again in 3 months and we'll see where you're at. What gets measured, get's managed. This is a very helpful way to be able to have a sense of control at a difficult time.

Now, I want to make three key points and we're going to do a rapid fire Q&A. So if you have any questions get started writing it down now. You can use the Q&A option on Zoom here. If you have anything that's a little bit more detailed that you want to talk about afterwards, I can stay in the room as well, but as much as possible throw it into the Q&A now as I'm wrapping here. Then we'll twist to that.

Now, I've covered a lot of ground here. This is a lot in an hour and I just list off five tools. Again, I'm going to make sure that each of you get access to a copy of these worksheets through the wonderful folks at Gowling. Three key things to remember at the end of this session. One is this, we are not alone. Okay? I don't mean that in some hyperbolic kind of way or like a motivational speaker kind of way. I mean it, functionally, we are not alone. The anonymous texting that we slid over at the beginning, if we did that in this context with everyone that was at the conference, thousands of people, we would see again remarkable consistencies between so many of our peers and we would see messages that would resonate so deeply, beyond our wildest dreams. These are people that are in similar roles, with similar organizations, maybe in another city. Even within our own teams and organizations, we are never alone. We may feel alone in the stories we're telling ourselves. We may feel alone in how depleted we are but, functionally speaking, we are not. Okay? Having that awareness is absolutely critical because if we have that awareness that all of a sudden tackling this through a series of tools doesn't seem so scary.

The second point is this, stress is unavoidable but overwhelm is. I genuinely believe that we can train our brains to the point where we are limiting the amount of overwhelm we ever experience in our lives. That is by doing work to get very clear on the granular stressors that are detracting from our nourishment now and being extremely aware of the thinking patterns that we are most prone to. Not from a state of judging them, as good or bad or anything of the sort, but rather being just extremely cozy with the thinking patterns that we embody when we feel like we're under pressure. If we do that, we can build awareness of it, and we can make changes so that it's not so devastating. If we make those changes we will avoid overwhelm.

The third is we have more power to manage all of this then we think. This is a game that we are in against ourselves. Now, some organizations are better than others in how they support employees and leaders in feeling elevated and able to take action. While you carry the brunt of this, because it is your mind, it is very reasonable to expect and to encourage your work place to work with you on things. You should never feel alone in this journey. This should feel like a common cause. I can tell you as someone that works with organizations all over the world this is far more common that we would ever, every believe. With that, I'm going to go to your Q&A's. I see a couple. Thank you. In the last couple minutes here. Let's do this.

One question that just came in is, you focus a lot on how adults can look after ourselves. Are principles the same for kids? Mine are 12 and 15, a difficult age at the best of times, (no kidding), how do I best support young teens? Okay. One of the best things you can do for kids at that age, because they are at a very important, formative time in their mental development is to teach them about the unhelpful thinking styles that we all tend to, not just teens, but all of us tend to turn to when we feel like we are overwhelmed. It's not even as much about the exact unhelpful thinking style and questioning them on that. It's more about teaching them that they can label their thoughts. If you can teach them that they can label their thoughts as one thing or another it is creating this sense of play within their minds. Because it's not so scary because it's something I can actually label it's (a) not going to define me, which is very important to make sure your kids believe at that age, (a) it's not going define me, and (b) it's something I have control over. I'm having a difficult thought. It's so much different than me being the difficult thought. And most teens, I work with a lot of teens and a lot of young adults, one of the things that is most devastating for individuals around that age is where we lose that ability to separate our thoughts from ourselves. So, labelling the unhelpful thinking styles is a really great way to get to the core of that because you're teasing that out in sort of a practical way. Other things, honestly, would just be, it all depends on your parenting style and so this is usually presumptive, but if you feel like you're one of those parents that can be very real with your kids, if you're bonding around something like, "Hey, what story did you tell yourself today?" For example, the five stories. Or, "Hey, the unhelpful thinking styles that you're experiencing." Share with your kids. "Hey, I had one of these days. Hey, I noticed I was doing a lot of the all or nothing thinking today when we faced that stressful thing as a family. How about you guys?" That kind of parenting, where you're a little transparent, speaks volumes and it really sticks with your kids. Because it's demonstrating that there's strength in how you can talk about these challenges openly. Those are a couple thoughts there. What's really cool about this topic though, is whether you're reading about stress as written by, name a lifestyle guru, like Tony Robbins all the way down to a functional, organization psychologist, all the way down to a kids psychologist, all the principles are pretty much the same. So you can take anything you learn from anywhere and adapt it for your kids. So those are a just a couple of ideas to get started. I will say this, the fact that you're asking about this is a very good start for them as well.

Cool. Alright. Any other questions at all? I hope I did that justice. Okay. I got one more here. Let's see. Someone just asked, I'm just trying to summarize it here. In a flooded challenging moment, this is me paraphrasing me but I think I'm getting the essence of it, in a flooded moment how can I take a breath and find my feet and figure out where to go? So basically, how can you de-escalate when you're in a flooded, overwhelmed moment? First things first. There's no silver bullet. There's no thing I can tell you that will just <snap fingers> like that get you back to where you've got to be. What I can tell you is that by acknowledging that you're in a state of overwhelm, and labeling that, you are going to start to feel more ability to be able to appreciate it when it comes on and when it's happening. When you are in that state, in and of itself, everyone is a little bit different, right, in how overwhelm shows up for them and the behaviours that they're going to exhibit, what it's going to do to your mood, your thinking patterns. I mean you maybe exhibiting unhelpful thinking styles. So you need to figure out what works for you. Which I know is a little bit of a cop-out but it's actually kind of not. It goes back to the nourishing, the emotional bank account exercise, where one of the best things you can do, ever, when you are feeling totally, just totally stuck and totally flooded, is to find the most nourishing thing that is possible for you to do in that moment. Often, when you get really granular on that, the most nourishing things aren't necessarily expensive, time consuming or complicated. Whatever is straightforward. Many people, for example, they know that listening to a specific song from their childhood or teenage years brings them back in like a moment. Right? Or other people they know that they just have to get out of their space and go for a little walk. Right? Or you know that you have to go and do some breath work for a couple of minutes. Or you know that you've got to go play with your dog. Whatever that thing is for your, have it ready to go, and on standby. That's why I say it's a cop-out because I can't tell you what that thing is. Only you can and that is so key to bring yourself back. Then the key is, once you're back, to really think about this very strategically and unwind. Why are you stressed? What's causing that overwhelm? What are those stressors that are piling up? That's when you can start using tools like the stress action worksheet because if you start to tease those apart you'll have more control. Okay?

Cool. Any other questions, folks? I'll give you like 20 more seconds. Okay, we're a little over time. So, with this, I think unless one sneaks in like a second, I want to say this. Thank you for being here. Joining this session as part of a busy conference is no small thing. It's a testament that you care about this topic. Again, you have an immense amount of control over how overwhelmed you feel day to day. Overwhelm is not a necessity of life. Stress is unavoidable but overwhelm is something that you have control over so do remember that. I'm going to make sure that we can get these worksheets out. Even without the worksheets, take any of these concepts and adapt them for yourself. This is not something that should feel so out of reach for any of us. But rather the more that we get familiar with what we do, how we feel stress, how we feel overwhelmed, the stories we tell ourselves, the more able we're going to be to figure out what truly will make a difference for us. If even today was a small stepping stone in that direction, it was a success. With that I want to say thank you again to Gowling for putting this together and to each of you for being here. I hope this has been useful. Now, on a quick note, Gowling has two more wellness sessions coming up. One tomorrow at 2:00 o'clock to 3:00 o'clock and it is going to be a nutrition workshop, which will be fantastic, and then on Thursday, there's going to be a mindful, virtual walking tour in Philadelphia, which sounds very cool, with a little bit of stretching involved too and that's going to be at 5:45pm. So don't be shy. Stop by the virtual booth and say hey to the wonderful folks at Gowling and, as well, if you have any questions about any of this stuff my email is on the screen. Don't be a stranger and please enjoy the rest of the conference and kudos for taking some time out to work on your own wellness in the midst of it.

Wonderful. Have a great rest of your day, and thank you again to Gowling, and thank you again to each of you for being here.