Overwhelm is a common problem experienced by female founders. Leading a high-growth impact business is exceptionally demanding. Prolonged exposure to competing priorities, complex challenges, and crucial, time-sensitive, decisions take their physical and emotional toll if you’re not proactive in how you deal with them.

A founder coach can work with you to address the underlying causes of overwhelm, your triggers, and support you to build robust strategies to prevent it from impacting your life.

For the short term, we’ve shared some helpful techniques to use when things feel too much.

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A path through overwhelm into the distance — Plot your path away from overwhelm using our three founder coaching techniques.
Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

From time to time, even the most resilient leaders feel the effects of burnout, anxiety, and overwhelm. Their physical and mental health declines and they disengage from their work, finding it difficult or impossible to muster the energy, or summon the creativity to thrive in their role. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The first step is recognising the signs - the second is knowing what to do next.

Recognising the signs of overwhelm

Have you uttered these phrases to yourself, a trusted colleague, or friend?

“I’m stuck doing the doing.”
“No one else can do this.”
“I don’t have time to delegate.”
“I’m a bottleneck for my team.”
“I’m second guessing my decisions.”
“I’m trying to stay in control.”

Perhaps you want to make big changes to the way you lead your business, for example, to be more strategic, proactive, and present with your team, but you can’t see a way out of your current situation?

Or – worst of all - you’re experiencing heightened stress levels, and/ or generalised anxiety?

Your body’s response to all stress is the same, irrespective of whether the source is physical or emotional. As a result, you’re likely experiencing physical as well as physiological effects of stress.

The Fight or Flight Response

Your brain is biologically programmed to survive. When you experience overwhelm, stress, or anxiety, your brain responds to the situation as if you’re in danger. Your brain diverts attention (oxygen) away from the parts of your brain that allow you to think clearly, make rational decisions, and control your responses, and sends it instead to your limbs to enable you to escape.

Proactivity pays off

Sound familiar? Now’s the time to reflect on your current practices and embed some good habits into your routine:

1. Ruthless prioritisation

You are the founder CEO. Be realistic - there can only be one number one priority.

Every day, ask yourself:

If I only achieve one thing today, what do I want it to be?

A simple and helpful tool to prioritise is Eisenhower’s matrix. It looks at what’s important and what’s urgent.

Fig. 1. The Eisenhower Matrix, an invaluable tool for founder CEOs.

It’s easy to focus on the things that feel urgent or familiar, at the expense of the things that your company and team require of you. Remember, your job as a founder CEO is to lead, not get stuck in the doing.

Get clear on the time you have available. In priority order, allocate time against each item in your list.

2. Immoveable boundaries

Make a routine of asking yourself how much time a day or week you can give to each area of your life - not only your business.

Allocate segments of time, whether that’s an hour or three hours to your life commitments, work time, and individual pieces of work. Don’t forget sleeping, cooking, exercising, and time to connect with people whose support you value.

If you can only give a task an hour, what will it take to get it done in that time?

Be clear with colleagues how much time you can give them and allow them to prioritise how they use that time.

3. Create mental space

Recognise that when you can’t think clearly things take twice the time they should, and the quality of your work suffers.

Change your attitude towards leisure activities like running, walking the dog, meditating, listening to a podcast, attending a networking event or dancing around the kitchen, singing loudly.

Activities like these give your brain a well-needed rest, change your pace, inspire, and energise you. They’re tools to be used to enhance your performance as a founder CEO.

Schedule these activities into your diary at impactful moments in your working day. For example, when you’ll need to recharge after a tense meeting, or before you start a piece of work for which you need to think clearly or creatively.

The key to embedding a lasting, productive habit is to start small and achievable.

Embed it, and then add to it.

Consider founder coaching

Many founder CEOs come to coaching to work through a specific problem they face in their business, including overwhelm, anxiety, and work-related disengagement.

One-to-one founder coaching with Aata is your opportunity to invest in yourself, gain some fresh perspective, and reset your relationship with the company you created.

See how we can help

Overcome overwhelm as a Founder CEO