Guys, when was the last time you felt overwhelmed, maybe too much was happening that felt outside of your control or life was throwing way too many curveballs at you at once, or maybe you've just taken on a project and you feel your mind has convinced you that you need to do all of the things right away, and you need it all to be perfect straight away. I know for me that I sometimes struggle to take a step forward, even though my mind is moving at 100 miles an hour just because of the demands that I put on myself. And so in this podcast, I wanted to share with you four techniques that I've developed, and that I use pretty much on a daily basis now to keep myself out of overwhelm. And when I am in that feeling of overwhelm to get myself out of it quickly. Legends Welcome. I'm Scott Radford. This is the performance hackers, I appreciate you being here with me for the solo sessions, as we aim to provide some really practical insights and tools that you can implement straightaway to continue to build on that success that you know you're capable of. Now, without further ado, let's jump straight back into talking about the four ways in which we can overcome or avoid that feeling of overwhelm. Now, I've developed these techniques from flying in some quite high stakes, high pressure emergency situations as a commercial pilot, but they're all pretty transferable into everyday life. And I think before we go into the four techniques, it's really important to define what overwhelm is to you, and try and understand that you have control to change that feeling. Now for me, overwhelm is when the perceived demands of my environment, whether that's demands that I put on myself, or demands that other people put on me are greater than my perceived ability to handle it at the level that I want. And understanding that it's the perceived demands versus a perceived ability is really, really interesting, because you can then understand that it's you getting yourself into an emotional state, and therefore it's your choice or whether you can get yourself out of that state, it's a really liberating fact to know that because overwhelm is an emotional state, based on your perception that you can do something about it, you can change it. And so that's the first thing I would say, to understand. Before we go into these four techniques. The first technique that I use, and this is to avoid overwhelm all together, is to ask myself better morning questions. Now, this is a little bit like a brief that we have before we go flying. So if you can imagine before we go flying before the chaos of the flight starts, we ask ourselves some pertinent questions, that allows us to become a little bit more proactive with what the threats and the risks are of the day, and how we're going to overcome them. When they come up. As a here's three questions that I asked myself to get myself really proactively on task for the day, and to avoid that feeling of overwhelm that build up of that emotional state. Now, the first question is, what is my number one task for today? And how can I complete it with excellence? Now, this is a really important question to start the day with. And before you've opened social media, or started becoming reactive to everybody else, try and focus in on what the one task or highlight for the day is that will make the day successful. The second question is, how am I displaying courage today. Now, this probably feels a little bit left of centre, but bear with me, because I know that when I feel overwhelmed, it's normally because I've put myself in that position of feeling slightly behind the drag curve, I feel like maybe I've procrastinated on something or I'm not moving forward at the pace that I really want to. And the longer you leave something, the more it builds up into your mind, and triggers that fear response. That then induces a stress response into the mind and the body. And that is exactly what overwhelm is. And so if you're taking courageous action, you're actually probably knocking out all of the big tasks that keep moving you forward purposefully. And the more you progress forward with those big tasks, the more you're able to get out of overwhelm, because you're in motion. Now, you're not feeling like you're falling behind the drag curve. And the third question is, what can derail me? And how am I going to either avoid it, trap it or mitigate it throughout the day? Essentially, how am I going to own the situation when it comes up? So I often look at this as I either try and either avoid the situation that's going to derail me. Or if I can't avoid it, I'll look at how I want to show up in that moment. So that it's not going to DRAM and you're almost pre briefing, the threats that are coming up. And that's what we do when we're flying. We'll brief what threats could possibly happen today that are normally not present. And how am I going to deal with it? Like, actually, what am I going to do when that comes up? So in your life that could be going into a meeting and somebody saying something that takes you off guard? How are you going to respond in that moment that doesn't overwhelm you doesn't create that fear based emotional response, but actually allows you to still operate well within your capacity. If there's nothing you can think of for the day. How about cutting off some of the external input and stimulus that we use on a day to day basis that almost puts us into overwhelm before we even started the day? I'm thinking social media. I'm thinking checking emails first thing in the morning, watching the News, the things that keep your mind busy and active when you don't need it to. So number one, ask yourself better morning questions. How do you focus in on what's important for the day, cut out all of the busy noise and prepare yourself for the moments in the day that invariably going to come up that are going to wobble you? And how do you get back on task there. The second technique is to create space. Now, this is easier said than done. I think a lot of people feel that they're in reactive mode for most of the day. But hey, listen, if we can create space, when emergencies are happening in the air, I guarantee you're able to create space on the ground when you've got a little bit more time than you think. And the way that we think about this is by what's called caging, the chimp, you've probably heard of the Chimp Paradox, where you have two sides of the brain act, and you have that sort of more human logical side. And then you also have that chimp half of the brain, which acts primarily due to feelings and emotions, rather than the logic. And in this moment, what we're trying to do is just give ourselves a little bit of space, so that we don't act with emotion that we act a little bit more with logic and intention. And if you think about it, what in life is a true necessity to respond to immediately, I mean, it's normally the ego that makes you think that you have to do everything all of the time straightaway, you know, that's a surefire way of getting you into overwhelm. And so in order to create space, first of all, we need to convince our subconscious, that it's safe to take a little bit of time to respond. And so the way that we do this, is by auditing our wheat and seeing what responses do you actually need to do that are sub five seconds, that are basically based on instinct. And so when we're flying, I know that there are a few emergencies that require my immediate response to my instinctual response to, and I train those out, so I don't have to think about it when it comes. But nine times out of 10, when an emergency happens, and the bells start going off, and you start turning into fight or flight, when you look down and see something that is outside of that remit, meaning I don't need to respond instinctively, that I know that I can give myself a few seconds to come up with a response that's worthy of me. So what you want to do when you start to feel overwhelmed when you start to feel that emotional response kick in, and your body starts going fight or flight is to engage your parasympathetic nervous system. And we do this very, very simply, it's just by taking a breath, and making sure that out breath isn't extended. So I always every time something happens to me, I'll always take a sharp breath in, and then slowly release on the breath out. And that engages the parasympathetic nervous system, that neutralising nervous system that is responsible for reducing stress. So you've automatically reduced the stress response in a couple of seconds. And then what I like to do is I like to try and unplug from the pressure cooker a little bit by asking myself a really simple, obvious, lighthearted question. And so if I was in the air, and I was flying, I might just turn to my colleague and ask, okay, so what do we got here, then, which automatically shows your brain that you're capable of dealing with whatever it is that's come up, whatever it is, that has the ability to put you into that fight or flight or make you feel overwhelmed, you're telling your brain, I've got control of this, I can actually deal with this. And so whatever it is that that question might be to you take that long, slow breath out? And then just ask yourself a question, what does this situation actually demand of me, and you'll find that that instantly changes your emotional state, and brings a bit more rationality to your response. The third technique that I use, and this is sort of easier said than done, but I think it's an absolute game changer in the way that I operate as a person day to day not just as a pilot, but just as a person. And this is to change the tempo at which you act with. Now this is all about perspective taking, and essentially your relationship with time. I think that again, like we said before, we're so convinced that everything needs to be done this second. But if you can become more intentional with how you actually want to respond, give yourself as much time as is required to make the response worthy and representative of you, you probably realise that you've got more time than you think. And then you could actually work to your own tempo. Now I've got quite a funny example of this. And it was a really big learning point right at the beginning of my career. And we were in the same in a test environment, doing emergency descent. Now, emergency dissents are quite a high octane manoeuvre that we do, where we have to get the oxygen masks on, establish communications with each other, and then essentially get the aircraft down as quickly as possible because normally their aircraft depressurizing. So it's quite a high octane event.

And when I did mine, all I thought was, I need to do this as quickly as possible. That's how that's what success looks like. And so I went through the process, and then I went back to sweep it up afterwards to get the aircraft down and realise that I'd missed the button. And so I pressed the button again, that's exactly what the sweeps for. Okay, so there was no biggie there, and the aircraft started ascending. And it probably took about five seconds before the aircraft started ascending, and, you know, pretty successful outcome. And then the captain did his. And I just remember him moving so painfully slow, that I was looking at the training cut down. And I was just thinking, this guy is going to get absolutely roasted for how slow he's going on this. And he'd point at a button and press it. And then it goes to the next one. And it's slowly made sure it was working. And I remember him finally getting this aircraft down. And we get into the debrief. And I'm thinking, yeah, he's not going to, he's not going to like that. And he got to debrief point of basically getting told that it was the best amount of dissent he'd ever seen. And he was asked, actually, how many times have you done that amounted dissent? And he said, you know, maybe 6070 times in his career. And then he asked, How many times have you missed a button or mucked it up? And the skipper like, looked confusingly at him and said, I've never messed it up? How can you mess it up when you're going that methodically? And it was so true, it just made me think that a lot of the time we optimise for pace, because we think that speed is everything. But the fact that he found his own tempo and his own rhythm to do that manoeuvre and had the confidence to work at that tempo meant that he actually produced a much better result. And so I've taken that into other aspects of my life, that nobody is going to dictate how fast and what tempo, I work out to get the job done. And I know that you can say, yeah, there's deadlines that you've got. But a lot of the time us getting ourselves into that stressful state means that we think we're working faster. But actually, just like the emergency descent, we're not actually working faster in the real world, and that finding a slower and more consistent tempo, finding your pace, your rhythm is really, really what matters. And I always give this challenge out to the people that I coach, why don't you be the person that changes the tempo, and sort of role models or more chilled way to operate to those around you? Why don't you be the person that's less frantic, and less emotional based, and actually show the people around you that the job can get done at a more consistent and sustainable tempo. And finally, number four, is to reframe recovery, and what optimum performance looks like to you. So I learned this one at my rowing club, where there was a couple of really, really good rowers, they stood out from everybody else. And I asked them one day when we were training, like, what do you do to keep yourself ahead of the rest of the pack when it comes to performance. And they both agreed that it had nothing to do with the training that they were doing, and everything to do with the recovery, and the fact that their recovery was just as important, sometimes even more important than a training session. And so I started asking myself, How can I become the elite athlete in my role as a pilot? What would that look like? What would I need to do? And one thing that I found was that we often experience overwhelm when we feel we've reached max capacity. And so if we try and purposely keep that capacity bucket as we like to call it as empty as we possibly can, throughout the day, we're able to avoid that situation of overwhelm altogether. And so now I try and optimise my day, so that I am just emptying that capacity bucket giving myself as much capacity as possible. So that when things do happen, that are outside of my control, I'm in a really, really good place to stretch into it, and to have the capacity to deal with it when it comes up. Whereas a lot of people, you see that they're in reactive mode, they're always running at 100 miles an hour, they've probably got a capacity bucket that's like 90% full already. So what happens when a big problem comes, they start to overflow that capacity bucket, and they feel overwhelmed. And so your task really, is to try and find ways throughout the day to empty that bucket. And give yourself as much space and recovery as possible, so that you can deal with the hurdles as and when they come. And so a couple of techniques that I use for this, number one, I block regular breaks. And I mean, every 15 minutes, I'll have a five to 10 minute break throughout the day, so that I can clear the tension that's been built up throughout that work period, I can clear the emotional stress, and I can reset my intention for the next hours work. So I'm not constantly pulling through that emotional state from one task into the next task. I'm actually mastering those transitions between tasks throughout the day. And if you think about this, when was the last time you spent time answering emails and becoming wound up, and then went into a meeting and pulled in that emotional state, and then took that energy state into another thing that you were doing throughout the day, so that you get to the end of the day and you're completely fried. If you take regular breaks to clear that energy state that you've just created to reset, maybe just close your eyes for a few seconds, reduce the amount of stimulus that's coming in, and just reset for the next hour and continue to do that throughout the day. You'll probably find that you end up at the end of the day not worn out or overwhelmed because you've made He slowly just to release that pressure switch a little bit throughout the day. The other thing I like to do is protect my sleep at all costs. Sometimes I literally just down tools and say, Nope, that's the end of it, I've got to go to bed, I've got to wind down. And I will always make sure I have the right amount of sleep when I get the choice. So sometimes when I'm flying, I don't have a choice, I will be missing sleep. But it means the days off that I have or I'm working on other projects, if I've got the choice, I will take it every single time. Because one thing that sleep does, and that's reinforced resilience, and resilience is required. When we're talking about staying out of that feeling of overwhelm. It's our ability to cope with the stresses that are put on ourselves. And so you need to make sure that you start prioritising sleep a little bit more, fuel your body and your mind, get outside in the sun, do whatever it takes for you to clear that energy throughout the day. So that you can become more resilient in the face of those stresses. And those demands that you put on yourself, that will ultimately push you into that feeling of overwhelm. And so here's a reality check guys. Overwhelm is an emotional state. And therefore, because it's based on your perception of your demands, it's ultimately your choice, whether you stay there, or whether you work on getting yourself out of it. We also need to understand that other people's demands urgencies pressures, that's a reflection of their priorities and their emotional state, it doesn't mean it needs to be a reflection of yours. The key is to making space in the moment and creating your own tempo and rhythm. So that you can actually act how you want to act, and not in responsive mode the whole time. And it's not necessarily about the physical workload that others are demanding of you. But it's also about the mental and emotional workload that you're demanding of yourself. And so if you are able to reset your expectations, instead of people pleasing, or dare I say, then you'll probably find that you keep yourself out of that feeling of overwhelm for a lot longer. And guys, I do hope one or two of these techniques might have worked for you. And I'd love to hear your feedback or whether you've got any other techniques that you use and implement into your life to get you out of that state of overwhelm. And I always say high performance is all about the experiment, like what will work for you might not work for somebody else. So give these a go. Your willingness to be curious and create your own operating system is what's going to really make the difference and get you out of overthinking the whole time and back into action taking and perform at your best guys. I really appreciate you being here and listening and really look forward to seeing you again soon on the performance hackers podcast.