From Where I Sit

Like many people, Tina was facing a task that was proving so overwhelming and so daunting that she just couldn’t face it. Each time she remembered the task she broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about the enormity of it. This was enough to push it out of her thoughts, and there it stayed not getting done and not getting any smaller. For Tina the task was three years of unfilled tax returns, but for other people it’s any task that feels so big they don’t know where to start.

As in Tina’s case, these situations can become compound problems, the longer they go on the harder it is to tackle and resolve. In other words Tina originally missed filing a tax return in the first year because it was too daunting, however when it came to the following year she was faced with two year’s worth of paperwork which was even more daunting, and this only became worse when the third year rolled around. Tina knew she had to get this task done, but what she needed even more were the strategies to make it possible.

In helping Tina with a strategy to tackle this enormous task while not feeling overwhelmed, I related the following story: Imagine you were standing in front of a room that contained all the food and drink you were going to consume over the next year. All the food crammed into the room and piled high to the ceiling, and as we are standing at the doorway I say to you “Now eat all of this food”. Your first thought is likely to be along the lines “I can’t possibly eat all of this, it can’t be done”. The thought of eating all that food would be overwhelming and impossible. However, if you think about eating the food one meal at a time, spreading all the meals out over the whole year, it not only becomes possible, it nourishes and sustains you!

The strategy to prevent being overwhelmed by the enormity or challenge of a task is to break it down into ‘bite’ sized pieces. Don’t try and take in the whole picture all at once, just try to imagine the smallest piece that feels manageable and make a start on that. If you identify some small part of the bigger task and it still feels too big, then find a smaller part of that step and begin there. Keep trimming the task at hand until you find something that feels manageable. Don’t worry that this is a small fraction of the larger whole, if you take care of the small parts the larger whole will take care of itself.

In Tina’s situation it meant spending just an hour each week to begin sorting through the mountain of accumulated paperwork to find the documents useful to filing her tax returns. She didn’t even try to sort out which year the paperwork belonged to, that would wait until further down the track. The key was to just tackle one aspect at a time and let go of worrying about all the rest of the tasks.

For Tina the story had a happy ending with a nice little tax refund, but of even more value to her was the freedom from the burden of what had become an overwhelming nightmare.

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