Feeling Overwhelmed With Everything? Me too. Here's What to Do Next.

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Hey everyone. Welcome to Daily Creative. My name is Todd Henry. So in 1914, Ernest Shackleton posted what has become one of the most famous job listings in the history of exploration. The ad, which may be apocryphal in its exact wording, we're not really sure, but it's grounded in historical fact, reportedly read something like this. Quote, men wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in the event of success. End quote.

Todd Henry [00:00:36]:

The response was actually overwhelming. Thousands of people applied for this role. Shackleton selected a crew of 27, and in August of 1914, they set sail for Antarctica aboard a ship called the Endurance, with the goal of becoming the first expedition to cross the continent of Antarctica on foot. But here's the thing: they never even set foot on Antarctica. Because in January of 1915, the Endurance became trapped in a pack of ice off the coast. For 10 months, the crew was locked in, helpless, watching as the ice slowly crushed the hull of their ship. And in November, the ship sank. They were stranded on a floating ice shelf with 3 small lifeboats, limited supplies, and no way to call for help.

Todd Henry [00:01:23]:

By any rational measure, they were finished. Obviously, their objectives were completely, at that point, out of the question. But here's the twist. Every single member of the expedition survived. 22 months after losing their ship, all 27 men made it home alive. And after an 800-mile open sea journey in a lifeboat, a crossing of South Georgia Island on foot through unmapped mountains, and multiple rescue attempts. It's one of the most extraordinary survival stories in human history. But here's what I find most remarkable about this story.

Todd Henry [00:01:58]:

And here's what I think applies to many of our situations today. It's not the physical endurance. It's what Shackleton did in the very first hours after the Endurance went under. He gathered the crew and he immediately redirected the mission. The goal was no longer to cross Antarctica. That was out of the question at this point. The goal was simple: every man gets home. He didn't pretend the situation wasn't dire.

Todd Henry [00:02:23]:

He didn't spiral. He didn't freeze. He found the next move. When everything is spinning out of control— and listen, friends, I know for many of us right now, it does feel like there's so much uncertainty. It feels like things are spinning out of control. We cannot turn our head without hearing, obviously, about war, hearing about how AI is going to eat all all of our jobs. Anybody who uses their mind for their work, they're going to lose their job. Hearing about economic uncertainty, economic downturn, all of this.

Todd Henry [00:02:51]:

When everything is spinning out of control, the question isn't, how do I get back to what I lost? The question is, what does winning look like now with what I have? What is my next move? So today I want to talk about overwhelm. I want to talk about that sense of uncertainty. I want to talk about what to do when you feel like You don't know what to do next. And what does it take for all of us as creative professionals? Again, creative, hooray, we get to make things for a living. Professionals, we have to show up. We have to deliver results. We have to figure out what the market needs from us. So how does this apply to us as creative pros specifically? Because overwhelm isn't a productivity problem.

Todd Henry [00:03:32]:

It's a creativity killer. It's a motivation killer. It's a drive killer. It's a focus killer. And it operates in ways that are subtle and sneaky enough that we often don't recognize what's happening. Until we're already stuck. Okay. So let's talk about what overwhelm, what uncertainty actually does to us.

Todd Henry [00:03:49]:

When we feel overwhelmed, we experience what I've come to think of as creative compression. Okay. Our mental bandwidth narrows, our time horizon shrinks. We stop thinking about what we're building toward, where we're going, and we start thinking only about what's in front of us right now. The thing that's most urgent, most uncomfortable, most demanding of attention. And for many of us, we freeze in that moment because we become so paralyzed with the uncertainty. In Die Empty, my second book, I wrote about the difference between diving and wading. Wading, W-A-D-I-N-G.

Todd Henry [00:04:21]:

Diving is intentional, focused, purposeful engagement with meaningful work. It means going deeply into not just the tasks in front of you, but understanding the why behind the tasks and really diving in to try to find the connections between seemingly disconnected things in your work. Waiting is being pulled along by the current. It's reactive, it's scattered, it's always responding, but never truly contributing. Overwhelm turns divers into waders, not because we lose our ambition, but because of the sheer volume of demand that is on us. It makes it nearly impossible to find a place to stand. And here's what makes this especially dangerous for creative pros. Our best work doesn't come when we react.

Todd Henry [00:05:03]:

It comes from reflection. It comes from depth. It comes from the quiet moments between inputs, intuiting non-intuitive connections, a space where those connections form and insights surface. Overwhelm colonizes that space. It fills it with noise. So the first thing we have to understand is this. If you feel right now a little overwhelmed, a little uncertain, and you feel like you can't think clearly, like your best ideas have dried up, like you're just reacting, you're grinding, but you're not gaining. Overwhelm may not just be a symptom of having too much to do.

Todd Henry [00:05:36]:

It may be the cause of this creative drought that you feel, that you sense. Anxiety freezes us. It causes creative compression. It forces us to shrink down into a narrow bandwidth of consideration. So when this happens, when we're overwhelmed, when creative compression sneaks in, we're often overwhelmed and we tend to reach for the thing that feels most like progress, which is busy work. So we crank through our emails, we organize files, we make lists about our lists. We do things that give us a sensation of movement without actually moving toward anything that really matters. In The Accidental Creative, my first book, I talked about how the pressure to be constantly productive can actually undermine the conditions that make great creative work possible.

Todd Henry [00:06:22]:

We confuse activity with output. We confuse motion with direction. And the trap is that busy work feels virtuous. It does. It feels like we're doing something. It feels like we're handling things, but what we're actually doing is avoiding the harder question, which is what actually needs to happen here? What am I actually trying to do? What problem am I actually trying to resolve here? Instead, we focus on project work. We focus on getting things done, moving through the work, not actually doing the work. Shackleton didn't spend his first hours after losing the Endurance rearranging the cargo, right? He asked an essential question.

Todd Henry [00:06:58]:

What does success look like from here? Now, what is the problem we're now trying to solve? Originally, the problem was how do we cross Antarctica, right? Safely, maybe not even safely. Now the question is how the problem they were solving is how do we get everyone back safely? And he organized around that problem. And that's the move we have to make when we're overwhelmed, not more activity, but Clarity. We tend to think that the antidote to uncertainty is certainty, but it's not. The antidote to uncertainty is clarity. So how do you actually find traction? How do you gain that friction that you need? The good kind of friction allows you to make progress when it feels like your wheels are spinning. Here are 3 moves I found genuinely helpful personally, and I've pulled from my own work and my work with leaders over the course of decades, uh, over the past 20 years of my experience doing this work. And the first move is to shrink the target.

Todd Henry [00:07:55]:

Okay. Shrink the target. When everything feels urgent, nothing is. When everything feels overwhelming, that means you're not making progress on anything. I like to, I like to think about it sort of like you're moving a wall forward one inch at a time. Your arms are spread and you're moving the wall forward one inch at a time. And it feels like you're not making progress on anything because you're trying to do everything. One of the most powerful things to do when you're overwhelmed is to deliberately and artificially limit your field of view.

Todd Henry [00:08:21]:

Not forever, just for now. Ask yourself, if I could only accomplish one thing today that would make everything else easier or less necessary— this is the one thing question from the book The One Thing— what would it be? If I could only accomplish one thing today that would make everything else easier or less necessary, what would that be? That's your target. Everything else gets pushed to tomorrow. One win creates momentum. Theresa Amabile wrote about the progress principle, how making small amounts of progress builds momentum, which builds drive, which builds focus. Momentum boredom creates clarity, clarity creates capacity. So that's the first thing we want to do is we want to, we want to shrink the target instead of focusing on everything and feeling overwhelmed and feeling anxiety, which often comes from too much focus on things outside of our sphere of influence, right? A sphere of concern, but not our sphere of influence. We need to shrink the target.

Todd Henry [00:09:15]:

The second move is to name what's actually wrong. Most overwhelm isn't really about having too much to do. It's not. Most of us have broad shoulders. Most of us have proven to ourselves we can accomplish a lot. We have the ability to do what we need to do in order to succeed. That's not where overwhelm comes from. It's about a specific fear or unresolved tension that's lurking beneath all of that busyness.

Todd Henry [00:09:39]:

Maybe there's a conversation that you're avoiding, a decision you're deferring, a project that's lost its meaning and you don't know what to do about it. Maybe it's just a general sense of, I don't know where this whole economy and where my industry is going. And that, you know, feeding yourself with your Twitter feed, with Instagram Reels, with whatever, with YouTube videos about how everything's about to turn upside down, that is causing you to lose sight of what's really wrong, what's underneath, because you just feel this general sense of anxiety without a way to sort of pinpoint what it is that's making you feel that way. In Herding Tigers, I wrote about the most important leadership move that we make is often the one that addresses what's actually going on beneath the surface rather than just managing the symptoms, right? So a lot of leaders, they play whack-a-mole with symptoms. So they're constantly fixing problems, but they're not dealing with the core issues that are causing those problems. The same thing is true for your own life, for your own work, for your own creativity. Overwhelm is often a symptom. The cause is something much more specific and usually more addressable than it feels like.

Todd Henry [00:10:46]:

But the problem is we live with days or weeks or months of overwhelm, and we don't pause to ask, what's causing this right now? And is it valid? Listen, there are some things we should be concerned about and focused on, but if there's nothing we can do about it right now, then we should not let it paralyze us. So sit down, consider, write it down, write down what you're anxious about, write down what's overwhelming you, finish this sentence. The real reason I feel stuck right now is blank. Spend 10, 15, 20 minutes on that exercise. Don't edit it. Don't rationalize it. Just write what's true. You might be surprised how much relief comes from simply naming the thing that is behind your anxiety.

Todd Henry [00:11:27]:

And then the third move is protect a pocket of presence. Protect a pocket of presence. That is really hard to say. So when we're doing creative work, which means we're working with our minds, we're solving problems, we're strategizing, it requires a quality of attention that doesn't scale well under pressure. You need moments, even brief ones, where you're fully present with an idea rather than just passing through it. And this is the real temptation, I think, right now of generative AI, right? Is that in the moment when we feel anxious, we can just pass off our creative thought to our generative AI and just let it do the hard work for us. But that's not really helpful to us because we still feel the anxiety, the underlying anxiety. When we're not doing the work, when we're just moving through the work, it doesn't resolve that underlying uncertainty and anxiety for us.

Todd Henry [00:12:21]:

Even on the most overwhelming days, carve out 20 minutes, not to solve everything, just to think, to sit with your most important question. One, truth I have come to after years upon years of working with people who are leading at the top of their game— these are people who are significant leaders in industry— is this: many leaders have no idea what's actually on their mind. They don't because they never take time to be alone with their thoughts. So spend 20 minutes with your thoughts. Get a blank sheet of paper. I bought several years ago, I bought blank notepads. So 8.5 by 11 notepads on Amazon. I bought like, like a pack of 20 of just blank notepads.

Todd Henry [00:13:05]:

I would just sit sometimes in the mornings for 20 minutes with a blank notepad on my lap. And I would just write whatever comes to mind. I would just spend my time writing down ideas, whatever it is that comes to mind. Um, just so I know what's on my mind, because often we're worried, we're anxious, we're nervous. We've got little ideas that are forming that we're not aware of. We don't even know what's on our mind, right? So spend some time today, 20 minutes with a notepad, something just to let ideas that have been waiting at the edge of your awareness finally get some air. Figure out what's on your mind. So the Endurance crew, right? Shackleton's group in the middle of one of the most desperate, desperate survival situations imaginable, held regular shipboard routines.

Todd Henry [00:13:48]:

They had meals together. They had music in the evenings. They had a sense of normalcy. Shackleton understood that the human spirit needs a rhythm to hold on to, even when everything else around it is chaos. A pocket of presence is your rhythm. All right. So here's what I want you to take from today's episode, or what I hope you take from today's episode. Overwhelm is not a sign that you're failing.

Todd Henry [00:14:11]:

It's not. It's often a sign that you care, that you're carrying meaningful work and real responsibility. I mean, Listen, if you didn't feel nervous from time to time, if you didn't feel overwhelmed from time to time, I would question whether you're really fully deployed. If you're fully deployed, you're going to feel overwhelmed from time to time. That's just the reality of it. But I can't lie to you. I can't make you feel like this is going to go away, but I also want to ensure that you don't feel like overwhelm makes you feel like nothing is possible. Like the gap between where you are and where you need to be is too wide to cross because that's what overwhelm can do for us.

Todd Henry [00:14:47]:

It freezes us. You know, going back to Shackleton, he didn't cross that gap in one move. He made the next right move and then the next one and the next one for 22 months. You don't have to solve everything today. You don't, but you do have to find one place to stand. So shrink the target, name what's actually wrong, and then spend some time with your thoughts so you can protect a pocket of presence. That's how you find traction. That's how creative people, talented, ambitious, creative people keep making meaningful work, not when the conditions are perfect, but even when everything feels like it's spinning out of control.

Todd Henry [00:15:27]:

You've got this, friends. You do. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Uh, if you would like to get more of these insights on a weekly basis by email, you can do so at toddhenry.com/subscribe. That's my email newsletter. Or if you want to learn more about my books, the books I mentioned today, Die Empty, The Accidental Creative, Herding Tigers, you can find them at toddhenry.com as well, as well as my speaking events. If you have a company event or something that you would like to bring me to, I am frequently out on the road speaking to groups and talking about some of these dynamics. So feel free to reach out through toddhenry.com as well.

Todd Henry [00:16:07]:

Remember, friends, cover bands don't change the world. Don't be a cover band. You need to find your unique voice if you want to thrive. We'll see you next time.