In my 2020 TEDx talk, I said something on stage that I no longer believe to be true. I said I never felt overwhelmed.
Looking back – that wasn’t accurate. I just didn’t recognize how it was showing up for me. And that’s exactly the problem with high performers. We don’t think we’re overwhelmed. We think we’re just pushing through.
If you’re a high performer who feels like you should have everything under control – but something still feels off, or heavy, or harder than it should – keep reading. Because this post is for you.
What I Got Wrong About Overwhelm: Where This Framework Came From
When I created the Five Overwhelm Culprits™ framework, it came from a deeply personal place.
In 2018, I lost my partner to suicide. Shortly after, I walked away from a family business I had run as Senior Vice President for over 15 years. I was groomed to take it over. I left anyway.
I was rebuilding everything. My personal life. My career. My identity. Starting completely from zero.
By the time I gave my TEDx talk in 2020, I genuinely thought I had figured out overwhelm. Because I wasn’t experiencing it the way I saw other people describe it. The anxiety. The sleepless nights. The constant rumination. That wasn’t me.
What I didn’t realize was that I was in the middle of the story. Not the end of it.
The 3 Things I Got Wrong About Overwhelm
Mistake 1: I Thought Overwhelm Had to Look Like Chaos
Every person I had ever seen overwhelmed around me looked the same. Highly anxious. Stressed out. Snapping at people. Taking it out on everyone else.
So because I wasn’t doing that, I assumed I was fine.
What I know now is that overwhelm can look like over-functioning. It can look like emotional numbness. It can look like constantly pushing forward without pause. That was me. I was so driven to keep moving that my therapist had to regularly remind me to slow down – so I could actually process everything I was going through.
I didn’t feel stressed. I didn’t feel anxious. I just felt weird. Something felt off. And I couldn’t explain why.
Overwhelm doesn’t always feel like stress. Sometimes it just feels like something’s off and you can’t put your finger on it.
Mistake 2: I Thought Awareness Alone Would Fix It
I was self-aware. Deeply so. I knew exactly what I was going through and what was in front of me.
But my therapist would push back every single time. She’d say: “I know you’re aware of it. But what are you actually doing to process it?”
Because I was always moving so fast that she had real concerns I wasn’t doing the work to process the trauma I had been through. I knew what was happening. I just wasn’t sitting still long enough to do anything about it.
Awareness without action – and without the right systems in place – doesn’t actually change anything. That was a hard lesson to learn.
Mistake 3: I Thought Overwhelm Was a Personal Problem
I thought it was my fault. My issue. That I had lost a partner to suicide and couldn’t handle a 20-hour weekly commute on top of it. That I couldn’t see my son for more than an hour a day. That I had to step down.
I took it all personally. As a reflection of my own inability to cope.
But now I know it’s also about environment. About expectations. About the systems and structures we operate within at work and at home. A 20-hour commute isn’t a personal failing. It’s a systemic problem. And I had been blaming myself for it.
What I Know Now: What I Got Wrong About Overwhelm Led Me Here
Overwhelm is not a time management problem. It’s a capacity and systems problem.
For years I – and many of the women I now work with – thought the fix was better productivity. Color-coded calendars. Tighter schedules. More efficient systems. But that’s not it.
Overwhelm simply means your current strategy is no longer matching your current reality. Something changed. And what worked before isn’t working anymore. So of course you’re overwhelmed.
The fix isn’t to manage your time better. The fix is to identify what’s actually missing – and change your strategy to match where you are right now.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: What I Got Wrong and Then Got Right
This is the framework I debuted in my 2020 TEDx talk, Don’t Give Up, Change Your Strategy.
Each culprit starts with the letter C and represents a lack of one of five things.
- Lack of Clarity: You don’t know what to focus on. So you stay stuck and overwhelmed.
- Lack of Confidence: You hesitate or hold yourself back. You keep yourself stuck.
- Lack of Community: You don’t have the right people around you supporting you, mentoring you and sponsoring you and getting you to where it is that you’re looking to go. You’re doing it alone – and it’s keeping you stuck.
- Lack of Conditioning: You’re physically and mentally depleted. You’re going to feel stuck and overwhelmed because you don’t have the energy and you’re not functioning at a high mental capacity.
- Lack of Consistency: You don’t have habits and routines that support you on your worst days – not just your best. Most people design their systems for peak performance. They should be designing for the worst possible scenario.
When any one of these goes unaddressed, high performers don’t slow down. They push harder. That’s where the real problem starts. That’s exactly where it started for me.
What I Got Wrong About Overwhelm Taught Me the Most Important Thing
Since that TEDx, a lot has changed. I lived through the rest of that chapter. I met my now husband in 2019. I went from being a single mom of one to a married mom of four – all within a year, right in the middle of a global pandemic.
And what I learned through all of it is this: overwhelm doesn’t go away because life gets easier. It goes away when your strategy matches your current reality.
Every time one of the five culprits showed up for me, I addressed it. Strategically. Consistently. And that’s what allowed me to keep performing at a high level – without sacrificing the time and space I needed to actually heal.
You don’t fix overwhelm by managing your time better. You fix it by identifying what’s missing and changing your strategy to match where you actually are.
Find Out Which Overwhelm Culprit™ Is Holding You Back
Not sure which of the five culprits is running the show for you right now? I built a free quiz specifically for this. It’s six questions. It takes three minutes. And it gives you a clear answer and a concrete next step!
Take the free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz here.
Go Even Deeper With the Book
Everything I’ve shared in this post is just the beginning. In my book, I go deep on all five culprits – with full chapters, real stories and a step-by-step roadmap to identify what’s missing and fix it.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now at your favorite book retailer or at the link below.
This is the book for the high-performing woman who refuses to slow down – but needs a smarter strategy to keep going without losing herself in the process.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Here’s what I got wrong about overwhelm. After building my entire framework on it back in 2020, I gave a TEDx talk on what I now call the Five Overwhelm Culprits. If you check it out, the talk is called ‘ Don’t give up, change your strategy’. And at that time, I said something that I no longer believed to be true.
By a show of hands, how many people here have ever felt so overwhelmed and so frustrated that you’ve given up on something that you’ve truly wanted? Usually it’s pretty much everybody. All right, now go ahead and keep those hands up high if any of the following rings true to you, that as a result of giving up on what you wanted, you felt guilty, shamed, angry, resentful.
Don’t hate me for admitting this, but I’ve never felt that way. Um, and I never even realized that this was not normal until I had my therapist point this out to me, but we’ll get more into that in a few minutes.
I said that [00:01:00] I personally never felt overwhelmed. And looking back on it now, this wasn’t necessarily true. I just didn’t recognize how it was showing up for me.
And that’s the problem. Most high performers don’t think that they’re overwhelmed. They think that they’re just pushing through.
If you are a high performer who feels like you should have everything under control, but something is still feeling off or heavy or harder than it should, then this episode is for you.
By the end of this, you’ll understand why overwhelm doesn’t always look the way that you think it does, and what actually needs to change to fix it.
Speaker 2: Hi, and if you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, executive coach, and author who helps leaders transform overwhelm into confident action, even in times of crisis.
So truth is when I created this framework, it came from [00:02:00] a very personal place. I had just lost my partner to suicide in 2018, and I also took a really big step in stepping away from my family business that I had been running for over 15 years as senior vice president. I was groomed to take it over and I completely walked away from it following my partner’s suicide.
So in essence, I was rebuilding my entire life from the ground up. Rebuilding my personal life in terms of romantic partners. I was rebuilding my career in terms of completely walking away from job. I was starting from zero.
By the time I gave that TEDx in 2020, I thought I had figured out, overwhelm because I wasn’t experiencing it in the way that I saw other people describe it.
Most people when they describe feeling overwhelmed, they feel tons of anxiety and pressure and they can’t sleep at night and they are constantly ruminating about everything. That’s not the way that I was [00:03:00] experiencing it.
So while I thought I was free from overwhelm at that time, what I didn’t realize was I was experiencing it. I was just manifesting it very differently than most people around me would. And truth be told, I was in the middle of the story. I wasn’t in the end of it.
So I’d love to know. Have you ever told yourself that you are fine or that you weren’t overwhelmed but if you’re being truly honest with yourself, something felt off?
Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear how this shows up for you.
So here’s what I actually got wrong. I had thought that overwhelm had to feel like chaos. That’s usually the way that I would observe people who were overwhelmed around me. They would be highly anxious, they’d be stressed out, they’d be yelling at people. They’d be taking out that stress on everybody else.
That’s what I had thought that overwhelm looked like. I had also thought that awareness alone would fix it. I was very self-aware as to my [00:04:00] situation and what I was going through, and what I had in front of me. My therapist would always tell me though. She’s like, “Yeah, I know you’re aware of it, but what are you doing to actually process it?”
Because I was always. In motions so fast that she had legitimate fears that I wasn’t doing the work necessary to be able to process the trauma that I had been going through as well as all the different changes.
And then last but not least, I really believed that overwhelm was a personal problem, not a systems problem.
I thought it was my own personal problem that I lost a partner. And therefore that’s why I needed to step down from my role. ’cause I just couldn’t make things like a 20 hour a week commute and only seeing my son for an hour a day. And other issues that were actually systemic in terms of how the workplace was structured and how people typically commute and go to work.
I had thought that it was a personal problem. It was a reflection on me that [00:05:00] I could not manage that in addition to dealing with grief and all the other things that I was going through.
So in analyzing what I had gotten wrong, I had thought and truly believed that overwhelm had to feel like absolute chaos or stress or visible burnout, and this isn’t the way that I was showing it. What I know overwhelm is now is it can look like over-functioning or emotional numbness or constantly pushing forward without pause.
And this was definitely me during this phase in my life. I was such an over-functioning, high performing, crazy woman that my therapist had to keep telling me that I needed to slow down so that I could effectively process everything I was going through. And the thing was I knew what I was going through and I knew that it was traumatic and that it was a lot and it was stress, and I had believed awareness alone would help me fix it.
But awareness without action and most [00:06:00] importantly without the right systems in place doesn’t actually change anything. I thought that overwhelm was an individual problem to solve. It was my issue that I was going through a suicide loss, and it was my issue that I couldn’t handle, my career or my job, and I decided to step down.
But now I know it’s also about your environment. It’s about expectations, and it’s also about the roles that we’re operating within in our work, as well as at home.
So contrast this to what I know now. Overwhelm isn’t a time problem. It’s a capacity and a systems problem. So a lot of times, and I even believe this too many years ago, to solve it, you needed to solve your productivity issues.
You needed to manage your calendar better. You maybe needed to color code things. You needed to, have different systems to help you be more productive.
And truth is, it’s not that it’s a capacity and a systems problem. So overwhelm simply means that you need to change your strategy to [00:07:00] accommodate your current reality.
The reason that you’re overwhelmed is because something changed and what you were doing before is no longer working, so therefore you’re getting overwhelmed.
So this shows up differently depending on your overwhelm culprit. And I’m gonna roll through them really, really quickly. I talk about them a lot on this channel and have for many years. They were originally debuted in my 2020 TEDx.
So go through them really quickly again, the Five Overwhelm Culprits, they all begin with the letter C and they’re lack of any one of these five things.
The first one is Lack of Clarity. So when you have lack of clarity, you don’t know what to focus on. So it would make sense that you would say stuck and overwhelmed.
If your culprit is Lack of Confidence, you hesitate or you hold yourself back. Therefore, keeping yourself stuck and overwhelmed.
If your culprit is Lack of Community. You don’t have the right people around you supporting you and mentoring you, and sponsoring you, and getting you to where it is that you’re looking to go. You’re doing it all alone, so you’re gonna stay stuck and overwhelmed.
If your overwhelmed culprit is Lack of [00:08:00] Conditioning, and this is your physical and your mental health and wellness. You are so physically and mentally depleted. It is impossible for you to not be stuck and overwhelmed. You can’t, ’cause you don’t have the energy and you’re not functioning at a high mental capacity. So you’re gonna stay stuck where you are.
And the last one is Lack of Consistency. So you don’t have habits, systems, routines that supports you on your very worst days as well as your best days. So many people that design their systems for your best performing day, where really you should be designing for the worst possible scenario.
And when any of these Five Overwhelm Culprits™ go unaddressed, high performers don’t slow down, they actually push harder. And that’s where the real problem starts. That’s where it started for me, that I started like double downing on everything I was doing and pushing harder and trying to over perform.
And that’s where it really created issues for me. And I describe it in my book, it’s I felt ‘ [00:09:00] weird.’ It wasn’t that I felt stressed out. It wasn’t that I was anxious. It wasn’t that I was showing those typical signals of overwhelm. It was just that I felt ‘weird’, something felt ‘off’.
Overwhelm doesn’t always feel like stress. Sometimes it just feels like something’s ‘off’ and you can’t explain why.
So it’s come full circle since then, because since that TEDx. I’ve not only lived through the rest of that chapter. I’ve helped thousands of high performers, especially women, navigate this in their own lives and careers. And since that TEDx, I went from being a single mom of one to meeting my now husband in 2019 to then becoming a married mom of four within a year, right in the middle of the global pandemic.
That actually happened within a couple of months after my TEDx talk. So very, very quickly my situation changed, from before the TEDx to after. And what I realized through all of it is that [00:10:00] overwhelm doesn’t go away because life gets easier. It goes away when your strategy actually matches your current reality.
And that’s very much what I was doing during that timeframe. Where I was seeing such quick results, it was because I was really addressing every time one of those five culprits would pop up for me. I was very strategic in how I would navigate them and that allowed me to continue to perform at a high level while still being able to have time and space to process what I was going through without sacrificing my success or my performance capability.
So to recap, you don’t fix overwhelmed by managing your time. You fix it by identifying what’s actually missing and changing your strategy to match your reality. So if this resonated with you, this is exactly what I break down in my new book. The Five Overwhelm Culprits. Where I walk you through each of these in detail as well as show you how to fix [00:11:00] them.
It’s officially available now and you could grab your copy in the show notes or at your favorite book reseller. And if you have a question that you would like for me to answer in a future episode, please feel free to drop it in the comments. I would love to feature it. And in the meantime, thank you so much for being here and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
See you then.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.