Does your schedule overwhelm you before the day even starts? Do you feel like you’re not living up to your standards? And instead of feeling in control, you feel busy, anxious, and unproductive?

Maybe you should adjust your standards.

I know that “overwhelm” feeling. And ever since March, literally most of the world does too. It has become so hard to do the simplest things. And more than likely, you were close to feeling overwhelmed before all this happened anyway, so this nudge took you right over the edge.

I was talking with a life coach recently about my struggles to keep it together while trying to maintain the same high-quality standards. I used those same words above: overwhelmed, busy, anxious…. Following my rant, she simply replied to me, adjust your standards. I thought, “No, you never change your standards!” But then I realized she used the word adjust, which has nothing to do with lower. Let me explain…

When she said adjust your standards, she too didn’t mean lower your standards. Unfortunately, that is what usually tends to happen, is that we assume our standards are too high and we forgo quality to increase quantity.

Also adjusting your standards doesn’t mean giving up on your dreams. Overtime when we don’t see our dreams manifest, we think it’s just not meant for us, so instead of adjusting, we give up. We start to focus on the past and live out of our memory instead of creating our future and living by faith.

No more though. I don’t want you to sacrifice another dream, I don’t want you to sacrifice your health, I don’t want you to give up. You are just 4 steps away from seeing the life you want begin to manifest. Let’s dive in!

4 Ways to Eliminate Overwhelm By Adjusting Your Standards

1. Be crystal clear on your goals.

We often don’t get what we want because we don’t know what we want. We go with whatever seems socially acceptable or worse, we go with someone else’s goal because of the success they experience and we want that success too. Our days and lives are so cluttered that we can’t hear our thoughts over the noise.

This is why I always recommend daily journaling and using a written planner or a journal where you keep a daily log of all your tasks. Your brain, specifically the temporal lobe, actually intensifies your focus on information once you have written it down. You have to get stuff out of your head and onto paper. Let the paper be the messy ideas and emotions and you have bottled up inside, not that pretty little head of yours.

2. Look at your calendar.

See if your daily life reflects the goals you had set forth for yourself. Are you making time for what you have deemed important? Your family, your health, your friends, your business, your career? Do you actually know where your time is going?

This is a great opportunity to do a time audit. Set a timer for every 2 hours and write down everything you did in two-hour blocks throughout the day. And yes, I mean everything; from watching TV to fixing breakfast to dressing kids to dressing yourself (please dress yourself every day) to sending emails to playing on social media…All of it!

If you don’t know where you are starting from, you can’t make adjustments. Do this audit for at least 3 days, ideally a week, but 3 days is enough to give you an idea if you waste a lot of time or if you are overscheduled.

3. Time to adjust!

Now that you know your goals and you know how you are spending your time, you can start making adjustments.

For example, are you always up before the kids, but instead of getting up and getting dressed, you lay in bed scrolling your phone until they wake up? Are you always craving something sweet at 3 PM, so you find yourself in the kitchen looking for cookies that are supposed to be for your kids? Do you watch TV for hours or eat ice cream on the couch after your kids have gone to bed? Do you set a goal to meditate every morning and every morning you don’t do it? Or are you just flat out overscheduled?

This is the kind of information you can gain from your time audit. And trust me, I know time audits are zero fun and not the least bit exciting. But they are a necessary evil to learn more about where your time is going, so you know exactly where to adjust. It can also be kind of liberating to see how much time you actually can have if you make those adjustments.

Now, this last step is kind of tricky…

4. Live by faith.

Life is going to happen. Things are going to come up and you are going to get thrown off. You are going to stumble along the path to your goals. But this is where real success lies. What do you do when that happens? Do you give up? Or do you keep going? Are you consistently living by faith and consciously creating your future?

You have to make a choice every day. You either choose you and the life you truly want or you don’t. You have to start looking at it this way or you will continue to get the same results year after year. Not trying to be harsh, it just is what it is. Your future depends on you. You have to start choosing you with a sense of urgency or you will sacrifice precious time living the life you want.

Now over to you! Which strategy can you take action on now? How can you ensure you are living by faith on a daily basis and not fear? Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to share the results of your time audit!

Talk soon,