How do you eat an elephant?

(Originally published 5/18/2016)

I’d been working with a new client for a couple of months. One day she came in and said “I need to talk to you about something. It’s got me totally overwhelmed, and it’s very hard to talk about.”

“Sure,” I said gently. “What’s going on?”

She told me that the condition of her house had gotten out of control and that she found it both to be very stressful and embarrassing. The result was that she didn’t like being at home and was very reluctant to invite people over.

“It’s totally overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start,” she said, looking down at the floor.

“How do you eat an elephant?” I asked her, doing a my best to channel 'cool Zen master' energy.

She looked at me quizzically.

“One bite at a time,” I replied.

(This was a long time ago. I still use this one with clients, though most of them know the answer, which is fine. The metaphor is the point. )

We live in a fast paced world that's constantly feeding us (highly curated) visions of 'ordinary' people doing BIG THINGS. The result? We try to go too fast and take on too much at once. That's both overwhelming and a recipe for failure and/or burnout. Like so many human states, overwhelm is one that’s easy to spiral downward in - as we get more overwhelmed, our ability to focus and be productive declines, causing us to be more overwhelmed, and ... well, there you go.

(While it’s not a great place to be, this is a place we all end up on occasion. It's also very solvable. So, if you're there, don't worry, and don't be at yourself up, k?)

If you try and eat something that's too big, you'll have a hard time chewing it an could well choke on it. The answer? Cut it into smaller pieces.

My client was overwhelmed in part because the way they were visualizing the task made it so big that it was effectively 'choking' them. So, we started looking at ways to cut it up into smaller pieces, such as breaking up the project. Focusing on individual rooms in the house was a natural place to do so, and that's what she decided on as an initial approach.

It was a start, but still felt overwhelming to her. (In fact, she’d tried that before and it hadn’t worked out. I, in my impatience to be helpful and appear wise, hadn't asked enough questions before diving into solution with her.) So, we talked about different ways to tackle each individual room – either by breaking the room into sub-parts or by identifying specific tasks to do within each room. The core concept: keep breaking the project into smaller and smaller pieces until your brain says "oh, yeah, I can do that."

I started to see a shift in my client; I could hear energy and hope emerging in her voice. We talked about ways to take the different sub-projects and organize them outside of her head. She wrote them down on a series of index cards. This seems so simplistic, right? But it's powerful for two reasons: it gets the stuff out of your head and it puts it in a structure where one part can easily be pulled out and focused on, and where the overall plan can easily be reorganized. (If you've tried doing that in your head, you no doubt know how challenging it is to do there. Post-its work great for this, too.)

The next time I saw my client, she entered my office visibly happier, excited to share an idea she’d had and implemented for her project. As someone who often found that external structures felt rigid and oppressive, she didn’t really like the idea of planning the order of the whole project. So, she made the decision that after she finished one part of the project, she’d choose the next one randomly. That element of randomness and uncertainty brought a sense of play and spontaneity to it which was energizing to her. (I, and many of my clients have benefited from this over the intervening years. At that point in my own journey, I never would have thought to suggest that idea. But it worked, and that's the important part. Workability wins.)

As she continued working on her house, she felt increasingly empowered – not just because of her progress, but because she’d seen that she could create a solution that fit her personality and got her the result she wanted: “My house hasn’t looked this good in years!” my client said one day with a broad smile.