Busting Through Entrepreneurial Overwhelm With a Single Powerful Question

I think we are getting ready to put the Information Age behind us. Information’s vastness is beginning to actually mean very little. It no longer dazzles us; it overwhelms us. We struggle now to fully realize the value of readily available information on any possible topic. It’s as if we are on the precipice of exhaling a collective “So what?”

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in as we experience less triumph on account of our ability to “know anything.” Instead we feel increasingly defeated by the fact that the answer to just about any question about anything resides at the other end of a Google search.

A very astute NLP trainer by the name of Gary De Rodriguez teaches that the greatest pain we can ever know is lack of choice. This is so true. Yet lack of choice is something we bring upon ourselves. The ironic flip side of this truism, however, is that much of our suffering comes from the perception of too many choices, or perhaps more accurately, our inability to choose. At some point in recent history the Information Age became the Age of Too Much, the Age of More, or the Age of Supersized-Bloody-Everything. And we happily drank the Kool-Aid.

I’ve been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. In that book Gilbert describes a painful time in her life when she wept on her bathroom floor every single night after her husband fell asleep. She was tortured by the decision in front of her which was whether or not to end her marriage. On one of these nights Gilbert asked God to tell her what she should do. God did not provide analysis or insight. Instead, God simply told her to “go back to bed.”

“True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment…”

~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Author
Eat, Pray, Love, p.16

To the author’s astonishment, knowing she could do nothing but return to bed was a comfort. By literally putting one foot in front of the other, a healing momentum ensued.

Can we as entrepreneurs possibly learn to stop ingesting everything in an effort to come up with a great something?

Might the strategy of taking it all in so as to come up with the best possible outcome be an impotent replacement for simply being present with ourselves, our value, our gifts, our clients and indeed our business?

I believe the answer is a resounding Yes.

To be more present in our business, though, requires we summon the courage to choose only what is possible and real in the moment before us. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is impossible to predict. Today holds the only truth that matters, and you and I have the ability to choose presence of truth or simply continue to gobble up and hoard any and all information that is lying by the roadside. We are certainly hurting ourselves–and those we serve–by choosing the latter.

The most effective way to bust through the overwhelm then is to ask yourself one, single powerful question and hold it close to your heart and mind as  you go through your day:

“What is the only action I can take right now, given what I know today and all that I am (and am not) this minute?”

Indeed this is no small feat for many of us who are accustomed to observing, measuring, and quantifying every aspect of our business operation. But by asking ourselves this one question again and again–especially when we feel suffocated by the everything-ness around us–we can become masters of the moment. For all you can ever do is yield to the moment before you, and I cannot think of another way to potentialize in our businesses.

Can you?

Bust through your own business and marketing overwhelm with a Marketing X-Ray Strategy Session, one-on-one with me, Karri Flatla. 90-minutes of getting to your “this-moment” truth. Let’s untangle what’s keeping you stuck. Book by May 31st and save $100.