Introducing the Whelm Wheel – Ok so I’ve misled you slightly, you don’t need to cut! Just print, fold, stick and fill. You’ll feel that overwhelm gradually leave your mind and body. We don’t want to feel overwhelmed, but we don’t want to feel underwhelmed either. Is overwhelm your current companion?
Often we feel overwhelmed because it feels like there’s too much to do. Often it’s because there IS too much to do! We try to consider all the things we want and need to do for our business and life. Our heads get full. We end up feeling anxious, and frazzled with no work-life balance. It’s natural that our focus can fall predominantly on our business. Other parts of our lives then get out of whack, parts that are actually really important to us. Overwhelm reigns supreme!
The Whelm Wheel is a simple process. It enables us to get back in touch with what is important to us. It helps us see what will serve and replenish us and enables us attend to our business and life without getting burnt out. It’s a one page representation about all the current good stuff and potential that we’ve got going on.
The Whelm Wheel and how to use it
- Download and print the Whelm wheel – Click here to download (and join my mailing list!) – see you in a min!
- Stick the two pages together to make one Big Beautiful circle of balloons. Make a fold along one of the pages, so you can match up the two halves of the grey balloon outline in the centre. Fold it back, stick them together. Sellotape or a glue stick will work just fine.
- Look at each of the balloons, (except the Vices and Guilty Pleasures one – see point 6.) Grab your pen and write around each balloon what you’d like:
- MORE of in each category.
- More because you would feel good, either in the being, doing or having of it. (For me an example of that would be; self massage – in rest and relaxation and personal care.)
- OR because the ‘having it done’, or under control, would feel good. For me, that would be; ironing regularly. In the home maintenance section. I don’t want more ironing, but I do want the ironing pile finished and under control with more ease more regularly.
- With the Work balloon, you can include your business, paid work, voluntary work, or work in the home. Put just your top priorities so you can easily see where your focus is going when you get to work.
- Notice how all the things you’ve written are of benefit to you. You are telling the Universe how you want your life to look, you’re getting it all out of your head and down on paper. You can see everything that is important to you on one sheet.
- The exception is the Vices & Guilty Pleasures balloon which we treat a little differently; Here we write the things which we know aren’t necessarily good for us, and that we’d probably be better off if we quit. (At the moment for me, it’s reading the Daily Mail Celebrity Gossip! It could be too much chocolate, or wine, or shopping or scrolling or whatever) but that it’s not quite reached the top of the priority list to let go yet. We’re saying, yes I know this is something that I want to let go of, but I’m doing it at the moment for whatever reason and that’s ok. (Often when we allow ourselves to do these things for a time, guilt free, we release the resistance around it and they become much easier to release when the time comes that we’re ready to.)
- Now you’ve got down all that’s important to you right now….. write in the middle balloon how you want to feel when you’re attending to these areas of your life consistently and with ease. (For me it’s always Accomplished, but I usually add a couple of others, at the moment, it’s grounded and calm.)
Give yourself the gift of time to complete the Whelm Wheel. The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, go look at it, and read all the things you’ve written down. Now pick ONE thing that, if you do it, you’ll feel better as a result. DO THAT THING.
You deserve to feel good in every moment and when we’re feeling overwhelmed it’s sometimes hard to see the wood from the trees of what would enable us to feel better. If we’re bogged down in work sometimes the very best thing we can do for ourselves is to step away from our business and shift our focus and energy.
Oftentimes completing this exercise enables us to see just why we were feeling so overwhelmed, it also helps us to see what’s important to us. As we revisit our Whelm Wheel on a daily or weekly basis, we become able to reassess what actually IS important to us, and what isn’t. It becomes clearer which of those important things we’re not prioritising, and how we might want to do so in the future.
The Whelm wheel grows and evolves as we do. We’ll cross things off, and add things on, and sometimes we’ll print off a new one and start again. But if we allow it, it’ll guide us through times of overwhelm, to a better feeling place.
If you’d like to spend 60 minutes being guided through this process, leaving with some implementation tips to get more stuff done with less overwhelm, buy my Whelm Wheel session. https://bit.ly/Whelm-Wheel-Session I’d Love to work with you!!!
I’d Love to here how you get on with this, drop me a message with your feedback.