Carla Miller on how to deal proactively with Overwhelm

Middling Along

This week I delve into ‘the Big O’ - aka Overwhelm, with Carla Miller. Carla is a leadership coach and best-selling author of ‘Closing The Influence Gap: A practical guide for women leaders who want to be heard’ which reached #1 in the Amazon charts for Business Leadership Skills and was a finalist in the 2023 Business Book Awards. Carla was CEO of Tiny Tickers and then Managing Director of Charity People, a leading charity recruitment consultancy alongside founding her own coaching business. She is also the host of the chart-topping podcast – Influence & Impact for Female Leaders

We start with chatting about Carla’s own brushes with overwhelm, and move on to examine how overwhelm and burnout are linked, plus Carla’s experience of early menopause and why menopause can often contribute to feelings of overwhelm.

Carla tells us a few of her strategies for managing overwhelm including:

• Normalising that most people feel overwhelm at some point in their lives. No one is giving 100% all the time.
• Figuring out what we might be able to ‘care less’ about at times we might be struggling.
• Coping with company cultures that have a tendency to keep overloading employees: I love Carla’s suggested wording “that sounds amazing, we are fully committed at the moment, so if we are going to start doing that what are we going to stop, to make the space for that?”
• How to avoid over committing - how many ‘shoulds’ are real and how many are our own expectations of ourselves or perceived expectations of others.
• Unless it’s a ‘hell yes!” don’t commit to things on the spot - buy yourself some time to think about it before saying yes and then regretting it (or worse, resenting them!).

We also cover ‘non-promotable tasks’ in the workplace (aka office housework), as well as the differences in the types of feedback that men and women get in the workplace. Coincidentally, the same day I wrote these shownotes, I came across these stats from a recent report: About 76% of top-performing working women received negative feedback from their bosses compared to just 2% of high-achieving men (according to a new report from management software company Textio, which analysed stats performance reviews for more than 23,000 workers across over 250 organisations). About 88% of these outstanding women workers receive feedback on their personalities, while the same is true for only 12% of their male counterparts, according to the report.

As Carla rightly points out, prioritizing our own needs is not selfish. Many of us feel uncomfortable advocating for ourselves (in and out fo work), but the only person that’s going to be the best advocate for you, is YOU! (I wish I had understood this better in my 20s and 30s…and 40s!).

You can find Carla at https://carlamiller.co.uk/ and if you want to work on ‘how to say no’ then why not sign up for her free 5 day “how to say No” challenge at carlamillertraining.com/sayno

And if you struggle with people-pleasing behaviours, you might also find this episode with Nat Lue helpful: https://middlingalong.com/episodes/middling-along-natalie-lue-helps-us-discover-the-joy-of-saying-no/

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If your workplace wants to become more ‘menopause friendly’ then please let them know about the work I do at http://www.managingthemenopause.com

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