102 Ending Overwhelm Why Successful Women Feel Miserable and How to Reclaim Agency
Perfectionism can sound responsible, but it often keeps women confused, afraid, and stuck. In this episode, Liz Jolley explores how the inner critic uses perfectionism to avoid shame, regret, uncertainty, and failure — and why real self-confidence comes from being willing to feel any emotion and take imperfect action anyway.
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Welcome to the Great Leader Great Mom podcast, where we trade in mom guilt and burnout for courage, calm, and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolly, engineer, life coach, mom of three, and founder of the School of Courage. Each week I share practical tools so you can be your grounded self no matter what room you're in.
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This week is the first in a series on ending overwhelm. This is the week for those that think I just have too much to do.
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If someone looked at your resume, they'd see a woman who appears to have it all figured out. Maybe you're the leader that people turn to for the high stakes conversations, the complicated problems the team challenges that nobody else seems to be able to do.
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You do incredible work. You walk into any room where the tension is thick and you make the room breathe again. You are, by definition, a high performer,
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but the moment you pull into your driveway, that version of you somehow just melts away and suddenly
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you're standing in your kitchen, staring at
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a pile of mail, the dishes in the sink, a half empty frigerator, and you feel a level of panic that just doesn't make any sense.
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You can manage a multimillion dollar budget, but the one question that remains with what's for dinner feels like the weight of the world. And you want to cry. I get you. You're organized at the office, but at home, the laundry feels like a personal failure. You beat yourself up and you think, how can I be so smart out there?
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but I'm falling apart. And here you assume you're failing at your own life. But I'm here to tell you you're not a hot mess. You're not incapable. Nothing has gone wrong. You've just been taught how to solve an internal problem with external tools. And it doesn't work. It can't work. So let's talk about the math of this misery.
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When I ask you why you're overwhelmed, you're going to give me a list. So many of my clients do, and they say, look at my calendar list. Look at all my inbox emails. They're just like hundreds every single day. There's so much to do. And then I have to take care of, like my family or my kids and the school and my spouse doesn't do as much.
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All the things you tell me like it's a fact. But the single sentence I have too much to do is the actual cause of your misery. I love reading Steve Chandler, and he says that overwhelm isn't about your to do list. It's about how much you're thinking about your to do list.
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When you tell yourself, I have too much to do. You're literally building a case for your own misery. You're just perpetuating it. We think overwhelm is a math problem, right? Like there's the task. And then if I subtract the time I have,
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it equals stress. So you try to solve the math problem, you buy a better planner, you try to fix your husband's contribution.
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You try to get your mother or your mother a lot of help. You try to make your kids do different things or fix their schedule. You try to organize the pantry. You assume if you become more, the feeling will go away. But it doesn't because too much isn't a factual limit. If it were a fact, we'd all have the same breaking point and everyone would know it.
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We'd all have the exact same 13 task. And then the human brain would snap.
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but we know that's not true. You and I both know women. The with half of your workload who are twice as stressed. And we know people.
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Maybe it's a mentor or a CEO, or a high level manager who can manage ten times what
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you do, and they move with a sense of calm.
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So let's debunk this capability myth. So your brain is going to argue with me. I can just hear it. Many of my clients do this with me and they say, well, Liz, they're just different from me. Those managers, they were born more organized. They have more help. They have a more capable spouse or assistant or all the things.
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Nope. That is the lie, the story your brain tells you to keep you as the victim of your story. These women are not more capable than you. You are already capable right now as you are. We see that in the job you're in. Look at the amazing job you're in.
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Look at all the things you've done to this point.
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The difference between you and her is the thought she has about her list, about her calendar.
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let's talk about an example. Imagine there's two women looking at the exact same Saturday morning.
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Three loads of laundry, a grocery run, child's birthday, and you want to go work out. Woman thinks this is just too much to do. I'm never going to get it all done. Why can't my spouse help more? Why am I the one only doing this? It's always left to me and she feels terrible. She snaps at her kids.
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She snaps at her husband. She spends 20 minutes procrastinating scrolling on her phone because she's too overwhelmed to even take any action and start. Whereas woman B thinks
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there's four things to do today. Here is my plan for the day. Here's the times I'm going to go do them. Here's what I need when I go.
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And let me just go ahead and communicate with the family what's happening. She feels steady in her day. She does the laundry. She's present at that kid's birthday party.
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She works out and her mind is not elsewhere. The scenario is identical, but their results are so different. One is a victim of her list and the other is the creator of her day.
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You think you're probably miles away from feeling better. And you're so fed up, you think you need a sabbatical, a vacation, a new career, a new boss to find that peace, that calm you really crave. But you're actually only one thought away from this relief. Truly,
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every time you say to yourself, I have too much to do.
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You're white knuckling your life. You're acting like a hockey goalie who's just standing there with their gear on, reacting to every single puck, flying at your face and you're spending so much energy resisting those pucks that you have no energy
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left for your day, for your
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kids, for you. But what if you stopped believing that sentence was a fact?
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What if instead of too much, you just looked at the list and said, these are the things I'm choosing to do today? Now let's get going. How are we going to make these things happen? The moment you can question that unconscious thought, you've created more space. You move from reacting on default to acting with conscious presence.
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You move from being the goalie to being the one who actually owns the rink. And there's a famous quote by Viktor Frankl, which you've probably heard me say before, and it talks about between stimulus and response. There's a space,
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And in that space is your power to choose your response.
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This is what this is all about.
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My whole methodology to help you be Your Grounded Self
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Centers around the power to create space. And it helps you find that gap between stimulus and response, between circumstance and how you show up. Because in that space, you stop being a victim of your schedule, of your to do list of your meetings, and you start being the creator of your day, of your whole life.
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let's reclaim your agency.
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The framework that I use to help women stop reacting and start leading their own lives. It all starts with this emotional window. And this is that moment where you feel the emotions show up in your body, like the overwhelm or the panic
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shows up and vibrates within you. That's your signal to look at your thinking. Because those unconscious thoughts are driving right now.
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And if we can look at our thinking and we can examine it and question it, we can take that sentence like, I have too much to do, and we can in a sense, put it on trial. We can stop calling it a fact and we can start seeing it as a choice. You don't need a new life. You don't need a new spouse or a new job, or all the things to get to where you found this magical myth of balance.
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You have the ability right now to manage your mind, not fake positivity, your mind that doesn't work, but making the unconscious thoughts in your brain more conscious. You can decide how you want to show up in that kitchen or that meeting room today, regardless of all the mail on your counter or the laundry stacked up on your couch, or
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how upset your bosses at something that happen.
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if you're ready to slow down and create more space in your life to look at, what are the thoughts I'm thinking and how is it creating the results I have right now? That just leaves me miserable?
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I want to help you do this and dismantle those thoughts so that you can choose consciously how you show up, and to be your grounded self.
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I am hosting live workshops starting
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next week. Unending overwhelm, and we are going to do this work together.
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check out the link in the show notes or go to Liz [jolley.com/overwhelm](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://jolley.com/overwhelm).
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I have a vision that all of you would no longer be overwhelmed in your life,
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that we could all be our grounded self. With that, I'll see you guys in our next episode on overwhelm. Take care everybody.
