Four Ways to Handle Feeling Overwhelmed

      

By Terry Whalin @terrywhalin

Some days the emails and opportunities pour into my life. I feel overwhelmed with the volume of submissions and wonder how to tackle this on-going and interesting work.

Recently I spoke at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference and have a lot of follow-up work to do with the various people I met. Also while I was away the submissions didn’t stop but continued to pour into my email. From my years in publishing, I understand the importance of following up on the various contacts and people I met at the conference yet I have the tension of these submissions which also require time and need to be processed sooner rather than later. 

These are some of my tensions which are creating a feeling of being overwhelmed. The issues in your writing life will be different but maybe you are feeling overwhelmed. How do you handle it? I have written about this feeling before which is not a surprise since this blog has over 1600 entries. My previous article about feeling overwhelmed was written in the early blog days of 2008 and covers different points. 

In this article, I want to give you four key action steps and help you keep moving forward. 

1. Don’t get stalled and instead chip away at it. One of the worst ways to handle overwhelming feelings is to go into stall and not do anything. If you stall, the work just continues to pile up and those feelings will only grow. Instead I encourage you to take daily action on this work. Maybe you can’t do the same volume as in the past but you can do something to keep moving forward. 

2. Touch base with people and communicate. People will give you grace if you are in communication with them. The lack of communication doesn’t help you. Send a short email just to let them know you are still working on it and moving forward (even if not as quickly as in the past).

3. Reach out and get help. In my view, the best type of publishing is a team effort like we have at Morgan James Publishing. I reached out to my colleagues and let them know I had too many submissions to handle alone. I moved a number of submissions for a colleague to handle instead of feeling crushed under the load of these submissions. It helped me to feel less overwhelmed. I still have a healthy pile of work but it’s not as high now because I got help.

4. Be grateful for the opportunities. I am grateful for each submission and the chance to speak with them about their book and how we publish at Morgan James. I encourage you to seize each day and keep moving forward with your writing and work in the publishing community. Your attitude of gratitude, consistency and persistence will pay off in the long run. 

As I told my class when I taught at the conference, we live in one of the greatest times in human history with vast opportunities all around us. Our responsibility is to be faithful and seize those opportunities. We need to keep our fingers on the keyboard and keep moving ahead--inspite of feeling overwhelmed.

I’ve given you some actions to take when you feel overwhelmed. What am I missing? What steps do you take? Let me know in the comments below. 

Tweetable:

Does your writing and publishing efforts feel overwhelming? Even this prolific writer and editor has those feelings. He gives four ways to handle feeling overwhelmed. Get the details in this article. (ClickToTweet)

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