A simple and yet powerful framework for managing your emotional state and focussing on problems that you can fix

Feeling overwhelmed? Control the controllable and stay afloat.

Hands up if you’ve felt a little overwhelmed in the past couple of years.  Both my hands are up.  And my feet. 

At the best of times, life is full of stress and complexity; there are competing demands in our work life and there are challenges and stresses in our personal life.  Add to that the little pandemic you may have noticed, some very confronting news stories from around the world and the impact of rising costs, we should all be forgiven for occasionally wanting to scream at the world to just back-off a little. 

It may get a bit noisy if we all did that though, which is why it is so important to take practical steps to differentiate between the noise that we can’t affect, and the demands that we can take decisive action about. 

There are some substantial costs if we don’t do this.  At work and at home it can be hard to truly understand where our focus should be for our individual and common good.  We can find ourselves getting frustrated and angry about things we can do diddly-squat about, which can manifest itself in negative or downbeat behaviours; and ruins everyone’s day. 

Often, a lack of action can also have an undesirable impact on our mental health, which affects both us, and those around us. Perversely, the closer we are to someone, the greater the affect our poor mental health has on them. 

So, our reality can be overwhelming, the benefits of taking control are significant, and the impacts of not taking control are even more significant. So, what can we practically do? 

There has been a huge amount of research into various frameworks and models to assist in this area, and two simple ones that can be effectively combined to have significant impact.  They are the ever-relevant Stephen Covey’s circle of control & concern, and Eisenhower’s Urgent Important Principle. 

Stephen Covey’s circle of concern & influence

Covey’s framework is such an impactful tool. If you haven’t come across it before, it can be game changing. If you have come across it before, odds are you haven’t applied it recently, so perhaps it’s time to blow off the cobwebs. 

The premise is simple; first, draw 2 circles on a page (as above).  The inside one is your circle of control and the outer one if the circle of concern.  Consider the things that are impacting you at the moment and plot in the circle of control those things you have full control of, and you can take action to address.  In the circle of concern is everything else.  The last step is the important one.  Acknowledge those things that are beyond your control and let them go.   

‘Let them go’ is such a throwaway line, so what can you actually do?  You can employ emotion focussed coping strategies like relaxation techniques, to corral those unhelpful thoughts about matters but you no control over.  Help in this area is so much more accessible than it used to be, with plenty of apps as well as standard smartwatch features that can be a great initial building block to help learn this skill. 

Remember, the energy you spend on the things you cannot control is wasted and can be detrimental. 

An additional layer to this is the circle of influence.  These are items beyond your control, in the area of concern, but you may be able to influence them.  Influencing them successfully expands your circle of control. 

Let’s use a couple of contemporary examples to bring this alive, one at work, one at home. 

At work, you can control the actions you take on a day-to-day basis, and you will be concerned by the financial wellbeing of the organisation, but for most people, they cannot do anything to significantly change that.  That said, you may be able to influence how efficiently and effectively your peers in your immediate team deliver group objectives and this will influence the financial wellbeing of the business.   

At home (and this may be a bit controversial), you can decide if you have a flu or covid vaccine, and whilst you may be concerned with what others do, you can’t make other get jabbed too.  You may be able to influence what your family do though.  If you do that, you have more control of your immediate environment. 

Eisenhower’s Urgent Important Principle

So that’s step one complete.  Now have a clear idea of where your focus should be.  Unfortunately, the list of actions you need to take may be long and that urge to scream at the world may still be strong.  Here’s where Eisenhower comes in. 

Plotting that list of actions on this simple matrix enables prioritisation: 

• Urgent and important. These are the things you need to get on with.  Just do it!  This may be the stuff that give us immediate gratification and can be addictive.  The danger here is that without a pause to reflect and prioritise, everything can feel or seem to be urgent AND important, and this is what leads to feeling overwhelmed.  So stop and critically consider if the actions on your plate today ARE all urgent AND important. 

• Important but not urgent.  These are the things that are bigger tasks that are important to you and may not be urgent for you (although they may be urgent for someone else).  Leaders need to learn to spend more time in this quadrant because the activities here create real value.  Your annual objectives may sit here.  The actions you need to take to address the root-cause of issues that create a heap of urgent and important actions may sit here.   Essentially, if you do not understand what should be in this quadrant and then prioritise the action required, if is very hard to take a role, or team, or business forward to a better place.   

• The not important (to you) but urgent tasks are perfect for delegation if you can.  This delegation is a great opportunity to grow others too.  Remember that delegation is a skill too.  The better the delegation the better the outcome.  Perhaps that is a great subject for another blog! 

• Finally, what do you do with those things that are neither urgent or important?  Cross them off the list, give yourself a solo high-five and move on!  Hurrah! 

So, in two simple steps it really is possible to move from feeling swamped to an understanding of what you should be focusing on, and in what the priorities are.  Even better, there will be a whole heap of things you have been able to let go. 

You can stop screaming now. 

If you are a leader and this has been useful to you, it’s probably going to be useful to your team too.  It is certainly an area of development that the team at Steople are often asked to help organisations with. We love expanding on this with teams and helping to embed new habits as it makes such an immediate and visible impact.   

If this is an area of development that strikes a cord with you, contact your local Steople Office here.