54. The Neuroscience of Overwhelm: Shift From Panic to Presence
The calendar is packed, the Slack pings never stop, and yet the loudest pressure isn't coming from the outside - it's the voice in your own head.
You've been told to manage your time, delegate better, use another app, but overwhelm isn't caused by what's on your calendar. Overwhelm starts in your mind and body, and until you learn to command your own thoughts, no system or strategy will free you.
Join me this week as I break down the neuroscience behind why your brain floods with urgency when everything feels important, and how this survival pattern actually shuts down your executive functioning - the very part of your brain you need for leadership and discerning choices. You'll discover my three-step self-empowerment leadership formula specifically applied to overwhelm, plus a simple five-minute breathing exercise that helps you shift from panic to presence.
You're invited to Leadership Lab: How to Be Heard in a Room Full of Men! This is a 2-day live, interactive workshop where high-achieving women stop overperforming and start leading with the presence, power, and authority only they can bring. It’s happening November 7th and 10th, 2025. Click here to join.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why overwhelm is a state of being, not a permanent condition, and how this distinction changes everything.
How survival brain shuts down your prefrontal cortex and keeps you in constant reaction mode.
The "I am here now" box breathing technique that grounds your mind and body in under 5 minutes.
How to apply my 3-step self-empowerment leadership formula to overwhelm.
The simple practice of choosing three things daily to prevent the everything-is-urgent trap.
How overwhelm impacts your relationships and leadership presence when left unchecked.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
If you're a high-achieving woman with a big life, you know this feeling. The calendar is packed, the Slack pings never stop, and yet the loudest pressure isn't coming from the outside. It's the voice in your own head. You've been told to manage your time, delegate better, use another app, but here's the truth: Overwhelm isn't caused by what's on your calendar. Overwhelm starts in your mind and body. And until you learn to command your own thoughts, no system or strategy will free you. Today, I'm going to show you why commanding your mind and body is the first and most critical step to empowerment.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right, hi podcast listeners. Welcome to today's very important episode on overwhelm. If you are like me and my clients, you are feeling lots of overwhelm, especially as we are entering, well, we are really on our way and into Q4. It's the fourth quarter, right? So everybody, whether it's sales pressure, whether it's getting things done before the end of the year, whether you have some goals that you've wanted to do, people are feeling a lot of overwhelm, right? And I'm here to tell you today that I've been feeling lots of overwhelm too, and it's actually inspired me to do this episode because I have been experiencing it, and I've been talking to my clients, and they're talking about overwhelm. And I want to give you a way of thinking about it where you can command yourself, where you can take back control, and I want you to understand the neuroscience behind it as well.
All right, I just have come back from like 2 weekends of travel. I've got 2 young kids that are under 5; they're 2 and 4. And I have a big life, right? I've got my business, I've got so many things going on. I have a husband that has a very demanding job. So, I think we're all in good company, whether you're married or not married, whether you have aging parents, whether you have pets to take care of, whether you have a very demanding travel schedule. You are at the right place if you are feeling overwhelmed.
And I want to share with you just my own personal story. When I come back from these travels, and I am not in command of my mind, and I am just entering spaces without really taking care of myself or slowing myself down, oftentimes, overwhelm happens when your mind is racing and your body is not calm. So, we're probably more likely in some sort of survival brain.
So I want to share what it feels like in my own mind and in my own body when I am more in my survival pattern and how uncommanded thinking creates reactivity instead of presence. So I'm actually, my brain is giving me lots of to-do lists while my kids want to play with me. I have scattered focus, and it erodes influence because I'm just reacting to everything around me. Even little things that typically wouldn't bother me, bother me in that moment. And there's a chronic overwork, which oftentimes leads to eventual burnout if you don't take care of this, right? This overwhelm problem. So for me, I don't really get to that point of chronic overwork. I am at a point in my life where I'm like, okay, my brain is offering that I feel overwhelmed, my body is in almost a panic state.
And the way I think about overwhelm is that my mind is racing, my body is feeling like lots of stress and fear, and I need to ground down, and I need to slow down. Even saying, "I'm feeling overwhelmed" helps me to slow down instead of saying "I am overwhelmed," right? Overwhelm is a feeling. It's a state of being. And the cool thing about state of beings is that they're not permanent. You can have a feeling. I'm not this person forever, right? It's like when people say like, "I'm grumpy." It's like, I'm feeling grumpy. If you kind of give yourself a little distance with it, it also helps to notice that it's just a feeling, and feelings are impermanent, and they move, and they shift, but we need to be able to process it. We need to slow down.
And so, when we are in that survival brain, it floods our thoughts with urgency. And I love this quote that when everything is important, nothing is important, right? This is just the pattern that happens. I don't want to normalize it. It's not a personal flaw. This is what our brain is doing, right? It's a predictable brain pattern when we've been trained to succeed by overperforming. We live in a very masculine society that's very focused on tasks and getting things done.
When we are in this survival brain, we're scanning for threats, we're feeling flooded with fear. Our executive functioning, our prefrontal cortex, that's the part of our brain that is really good at discerning things, making choices, looking for vision, figuring out stuff, it actually shuts down, and we're in constant reaction. So this is so important because as a leader, as a mom, as a parent, as a woman who has a really big life, true leadership and influence comes from this prefrontal cortex, our ability to use this executive functioning of our brain, the part that zooms out, sees context, makes discerning choices, really is able to see all of that. But when we're in overwhelm, our brain is like focused in, and we oftentimes don't feel in control or in command.
And so my job is helping leaders and myself, right, shift out of this survival loop so that we can think, decide, and lead from command, not panic, right? And so, the first and foremost thing that I have clients do when they're feeling this overwhelm is to say to them, Number 1, you're having a feeling, right? Let's take some deep breaths together. And I know a lot of people are like, "I don't want to take a deep breath." A lot of my clients want to just go, go, go, because our brain is tired, and it keeps thinking like, "I got to get this stuff done." But we're also not using the most powerful part of our brain, right, when we're in this overwhelm. And we're allowing our mind, our thinking at that moment, our survival pattern to run the show versus being in command of ourselves and in our body and having our mind, direct our mind using that prefrontal cortex, right?
So the first step is I'm going to give you a really practical, easy exercise that if you practice this, you will start feeling more and more in command and in control. All right? So first step is awareness. Whoa, I feel overwhelmed. The second step is to say, let's slow myself down. We need to align our brain and our body together so that we're not just doing whatever the survival brain tells us to do. We want to slow down. So, if you're a visual person, I want you to draw out a box.
And in this box, we're going to do some box breathing, but we're going to also align it with saying some words that will help ground us. This is the somatic pieces that will help our mind and our body feel integrated and calm ourselves down. So I want you to put that box down, that square, and you'll write "I" at the top of it. Then you'll write "am" on the side of it, and the bottom you'll write "here," and then on the last side of it, you'll say, "now."
And how it works, it's very simple. You're going to take a deep breath in. "I." Take a deep breath out. "Am." Take another deep breath in. "Here." Take another breath out. "Now." "I am here now." "I am here now." "I am here now."
And then you'll want to roll your shoulders back a couple times and just notice yourself connecting to yourself, to your body. This is literally how we slow down the survival brain. We are reminding ourselves we are not in an emergency room, we're not a surgeon. There is not truly fire drills happening. Our brain wants to tell us that there is, right? But this is how we are able to ground ourselves, really ground ourselves in this moment.
And with that grounding, you can slow down and have a conversation with yourself where you're not yelling at yourself, where you're not giving yourself a huge list of to-dos, where you are not yelling at other people, right? I actually, another piece of this episode is like, I literally came back from my travels and I told my husband like, "I'm so overwhelmed." And, for him, he was just wanting to help me, and he didn't know how to help me.
And it made him, or like, of course, he has his own triggers when I say that, right? Because he really wants me to feel calm, and he wants me to feel safe, and he wants to protect me. Like most men want to do this for their wife or their partner. They want to protect us in this way. So when we feel overwhelmed, some men can take it as like a personal indictment, like they need to do more, or they're not good enough, or there's something wrong with them. Obviously, that's some of the things that they can work on, but in a relationship, you want to be aware of how the way that you are being in your family and at work, how it impacts other people.
Imagine running into a room with your directs, and they're just like, "Oh my gosh, our boss is like telling us, yelling at us, telling us to do X, Y, and Z. We're not really following her. There's like a really strong urgency, and they might have questions, they might want to say some things, but they're scared because there's so much emotion and there's so much like talking at them and not talking to them," right? And we do this to ourselves in our own mind. We're like, "Oh my gosh, you're so behind, you're so behind." And it doesn't help us. It's not what I call positive pressure. It's like the opposite. It really creates this overwhelm, this urgency that again has us not leading from a place of command.
But if you do this practice, if you slow down, you do the box breathing, you do other things, and it doesn't need to take a long time. This is one thing that some of my clients are like, "Oh my gosh, I want to meditate, I want to do this." I'm like, literally, this can take like 5 minutes or less. You can practice the skill. But it's catching yourself, it's being aware, and it is making a choice to not allow that survival brain to just keep going, right? Because you're probably alienating people. You're not connected to yourself. I know I don't feel great when I'm in this like overwhelm story. I like to call it a story so that I can have more power over it. And I'm going to say, "Okay, my brain is offering me overwhelm and distraction. And I get to command myself. I get to take control of that."
This is that prefrontal cortex. When you feel like you can take control, you can be in command. This is super important. And you have skills at your fingertips to do that. And you want to use whatever you know works for you. And I'm giving you, I'm offering you this "I am here now" breathing exercise because it's easy and simple and doable. And once you do that and you remind yourself, I'm going to share my 3 steps self-empowerment leadership formula that I teach all my clients. But we're going to use it specifically for overwhelm.
You want to zoom out. You want to be curious and give yourself some context. Notice the story your mind is telling you when you feel overwhelmed. The story my mind is telling me, oftentimes, this is from myself, is again, you're behind, you need to go faster, you're, you know, not doing a good job. And then it starts being kind of harsh with me. And this is where I can take a breather and say, "Okay, that's the story."
And then there's the choice, and it's really about understanding and separating what's urgent from what's truly important. You know, and I think people are like, "Oh yeah, let's go back to vision and purpose." But you actually have to take yourself there with this choice. You have to actually discern. And often times I like to ask myself, like, what are 3 things that I really want to get done today? Today, right? You want to give yourself, you know, some things to really anchor to of like, what must get done today. And those things don't need to just be work-related. They can be work-related, but I also teach you to be really good about taking care of yourself.
So those 3 things, like I just literally did this last night with my day, like I thought about this ahead of time because I didn't want to walk into my Monday with overwhelm, right? So I literally asked myself, what are those 3 things? Number 1, I wanted to record this podcast. Number 2, I am introducing a new masterclass, which you'll hear about soon. And number 3, I wanted to get some of my emails dialed in for this week so that I have more space in my calendar. So those were like 3 things that I wanted to get done.
And then from a personal level, this is like personally me, like things that how I want to feel. I wanted to connect with my kids. I had a lovely morning playing with them. I wanted to connect with my husband. I had a great time connecting with him. And this third one might sound funny, but I get a lot of groundedness from basically kind of cleaning and to set things right in my kitchen and in my house, you know, and I don't overdo it, but I'm like, this is something that will help ground me and just make me help me feel in the moment with myself and to do that in a quiet space after the kids leave.
So you want to give yourself, like, what are those choices? You can also do this with more logistical things, like there are just some things that I need to get done that are for my household or for my work, but they're just on that list, right? But keep it simple. Keep it simple for yourself and remind yourself you have a choice.
I love the 3 things because it helps you ground yourself. And again, it's the opposite of overwhelm. You are giving your mind something to solve that is bite-size and it's not the whole world. My mind does like to offer me all these things in like the future, but I really say like, nope, I am making a choice right now to discern.
And the third is the commitment. Again, this is a choice because your brain is going to get distracted. It's going to see all the things. But if you made the choice, this is the commitment to the choice. Decide on your command moves that you'll practice. And I literally like will write them on a piece of paper so that I can check them off and feel really amazing when I check them off.
I know these sound really simple, but these tools and tricks will really help you to have your mind and body connected to themselves so that you can use that prefrontal cortex and so that you can be leading from a place where you're grounded and clear and where you feel really embodied into commanding your life, right? How can you expect to command other people or lead other people, right? And when I say command, it's not in this harsh way. It's literally like, you know, a commanding presence with conviction. If you want to lead that way, you've got to lead yourself first, and that's your mind and your body. You've got to take yourself there. These are real experiences, and I have so many clients that, again, come to my coaching sessions. This is the first step that we do together.
So, I've given you something that my clients do all the time that I want to invite you to do, and this is truly about taking time back. This is really about being in command of your life and really consciously choosing the way that you are in your life, the way that your life unfolds around you. And the more you feel in command and the more you're taking care of yourself, the bigger impacts you're going to make, the more full up you're going to be. This is such important stuff because this is the thing that if you don't do, will lead to burnout, will lead you to feel like you're always on the hamster wheel, and will have you in this like overwhelm cycle until you burn out. And I don't want that for you.
All right. I want you in command of your mind. I want you to be the type of leader that is not just learning strategies, but mastering your inner state. That's what makes your influence sustainable. That's what's going to have you feeling the energy to show up in spaces that weren't built for you. You've got to take care of you, Number 1 first. And this is the solution to overwhelm.
Again, Number 1, recognizing and being aware that it is just a state of being and states of beings change. Number 2, giving yourself something to ground to. I am here now. Use that strategy over and over again. And then of course, dive into the 3 steps self-empowered leadership formula: zooming out, being curious and giving yourself context what you're feeling. Two, making that choice, asking yourself what is truly important, what 3 things do I want to get done at work or personally today. And 3, committing to that choice and not allowing your brain to run the show, right? That monkey brain wants to run the show, but the more you're in command of yourself, the more powerful you're going to be.
All right, so that is today's episode. I want you to go out and practice it. I want you to do it right now. If you're feeling overwhelmed, use these steps, keep practicing it, master it, do it over and over again. I promise that your life will change, and I want to hear from you. So find me on LinkedIn, DM me directly, email me. I want to hear how these strategies are helping you. They really can change your life. They've changed my life. They've changed my relationships with my kids and my husband. They've changed the way that I lead and coach women.
And when I was in corporate, they definitely helped me show up in a really powerful, undeniable way because I was more present. We can't expect to influence and command others if we can't command ourselves. So go help yourself out, do yourself this favor, and be in command. And let me know how it goes. Have a wonderful week ahead. I'll see you next week.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right, hi podcast listeners. Welcome to today's very important episode on overwhelm. If you are like me and my clients, you are feeling lots of overwhelm, especially as we are entering, well, we are really on our way and into Q4. It's the fourth quarter, right? So everybody, whether it's sales pressure, whether it's getting things done before the end of the year, whether you have some goals that you've wanted to do, people are feeling a lot of overwhelm, right? And I'm here to tell you today that I've been feeling lots of overwhelm too, and it's actually inspired me to do this episode because I have been experiencing it, and I've been talking to my clients, and they're talking about overwhelm. And I want to give you a way of thinking about it where you can command yourself, where you can take back control, and I want you to understand the neuroscience behind it as well.
All right, I just have come back from like 2 weekends of travel. I've got 2 young kids that are under 5; they're 2 and 4. And I have a big life, right? I've got my business, I've got so many things going on. I have a husband that has a very demanding job. So, I think we're all in good company, whether you're married or not married, whether you have aging parents, whether you have pets to take care of, whether you have a very demanding travel schedule. You are at the right place if you are feeling overwhelmed.
And I want to share with you just my own personal story. When I come back from these travels, and I am not in command of my mind, and I am just entering spaces without really taking care of myself or slowing myself down, oftentimes, overwhelm happens when your mind is racing and your body is not calm. So, we're probably more likely in some sort of survival brain.
So I want to share what it feels like in my own mind and in my own body when I am more in my survival pattern and how uncommanded thinking creates reactivity instead of presence. So I'm actually, my brain is giving me lots of to-do lists while my kids want to play with me. I have scattered focus, and it erodes influence because I'm just reacting to everything around me. Even little things that typically wouldn't bother me, bother me in that moment. And there's a chronic overwork, which oftentimes leads to eventual burnout if you don't take care of this, right? This overwhelm problem. So for me, I don't really get to that point of chronic overwork. I am at a point in my life where I'm like, okay, my brain is offering that I feel overwhelmed, my body is in almost a panic state.
And the way I think about overwhelm is that my mind is racing, my body is feeling like lots of stress and fear, and I need to ground down, and I need to slow down. Even saying, "I'm feeling overwhelmed" helps me to slow down instead of saying "I am overwhelmed," right? Overwhelm is a feeling. It's a state of being. And the cool thing about state of beings is that they're not permanent. You can have a feeling. I'm not this person forever, right? It's like when people say like, "I'm grumpy." It's like, I'm feeling grumpy. If you kind of give yourself a little distance with it, it also helps to notice that it's just a feeling, and feelings are impermanent, and they move, and they shift, but we need to be able to process it. We need to slow down.
And so, when we are in that survival brain, it floods our thoughts with urgency. And I love this quote that when everything is important, nothing is important, right? This is just the pattern that happens. I don't want to normalize it. It's not a personal flaw. This is what our brain is doing, right? It's a predictable brain pattern when we've been trained to succeed by overperforming. We live in a very masculine society that's very focused on tasks and getting things done.
When we are in this survival brain, we're scanning for threats, we're feeling flooded with fear. Our executive functioning, our prefrontal cortex, that's the part of our brain that is really good at discerning things, making choices, looking for vision, figuring out stuff, it actually shuts down, and we're in constant reaction. So this is so important because as a leader, as a mom, as a parent, as a woman who has a really big life, true leadership and influence comes from this prefrontal cortex, our ability to use this executive functioning of our brain, the part that zooms out, sees context, makes discerning choices, really is able to see all of that. But when we're in overwhelm, our brain is like focused in, and we oftentimes don't feel in control or in command.
And so my job is helping leaders and myself, right, shift out of this survival loop so that we can think, decide, and lead from command, not panic, right? And so, the first and foremost thing that I have clients do when they're feeling this overwhelm is to say to them, Number 1, you're having a feeling, right? Let's take some deep breaths together. And I know a lot of people are like, "I don't want to take a deep breath." A lot of my clients want to just go, go, go, because our brain is tired, and it keeps thinking like, "I got to get this stuff done." But we're also not using the most powerful part of our brain, right, when we're in this overwhelm. And we're allowing our mind, our thinking at that moment, our survival pattern to run the show versus being in command of ourselves and in our body and having our mind, direct our mind using that prefrontal cortex, right?
So the first step is I'm going to give you a really practical, easy exercise that if you practice this, you will start feeling more and more in command and in control. All right? So first step is awareness. Whoa, I feel overwhelmed. The second step is to say, let's slow myself down. We need to align our brain and our body together so that we're not just doing whatever the survival brain tells us to do. We want to slow down. So, if you're a visual person, I want you to draw out a box.
And in this box, we're going to do some box breathing, but we're going to also align it with saying some words that will help ground us. This is the somatic pieces that will help our mind and our body feel integrated and calm ourselves down. So I want you to put that box down, that square, and you'll write "I" at the top of it. Then you'll write "am" on the side of it, and the bottom you'll write "here," and then on the last side of it, you'll say, "now."
And how it works, it's very simple. You're going to take a deep breath in. "I." Take a deep breath out. "Am." Take another deep breath in. "Here." Take another breath out. "Now." "I am here now." "I am here now." "I am here now."
And then you'll want to roll your shoulders back a couple times and just notice yourself connecting to yourself, to your body. This is literally how we slow down the survival brain. We are reminding ourselves we are not in an emergency room, we're not a surgeon. There is not truly fire drills happening. Our brain wants to tell us that there is, right? But this is how we are able to ground ourselves, really ground ourselves in this moment.
And with that grounding, you can slow down and have a conversation with yourself where you're not yelling at yourself, where you're not giving yourself a huge list of to-dos, where you are not yelling at other people, right? I actually, another piece of this episode is like, I literally came back from my travels and I told my husband like, "I'm so overwhelmed." And, for him, he was just wanting to help me, and he didn't know how to help me.
And it made him, or like, of course, he has his own triggers when I say that, right? Because he really wants me to feel calm, and he wants me to feel safe, and he wants to protect me. Like most men want to do this for their wife or their partner. They want to protect us in this way. So when we feel overwhelmed, some men can take it as like a personal indictment, like they need to do more, or they're not good enough, or there's something wrong with them. Obviously, that's some of the things that they can work on, but in a relationship, you want to be aware of how the way that you are being in your family and at work, how it impacts other people.
Imagine running into a room with your directs, and they're just like, "Oh my gosh, our boss is like telling us, yelling at us, telling us to do X, Y, and Z. We're not really following her. There's like a really strong urgency, and they might have questions, they might want to say some things, but they're scared because there's so much emotion and there's so much like talking at them and not talking to them," right? And we do this to ourselves in our own mind. We're like, "Oh my gosh, you're so behind, you're so behind." And it doesn't help us. It's not what I call positive pressure. It's like the opposite. It really creates this overwhelm, this urgency that again has us not leading from a place of command.
But if you do this practice, if you slow down, you do the box breathing, you do other things, and it doesn't need to take a long time. This is one thing that some of my clients are like, "Oh my gosh, I want to meditate, I want to do this." I'm like, literally, this can take like 5 minutes or less. You can practice the skill. But it's catching yourself, it's being aware, and it is making a choice to not allow that survival brain to just keep going, right? Because you're probably alienating people. You're not connected to yourself. I know I don't feel great when I'm in this like overwhelm story. I like to call it a story so that I can have more power over it. And I'm going to say, "Okay, my brain is offering me overwhelm and distraction. And I get to command myself. I get to take control of that."
This is that prefrontal cortex. When you feel like you can take control, you can be in command. This is super important. And you have skills at your fingertips to do that. And you want to use whatever you know works for you. And I'm giving you, I'm offering you this "I am here now" breathing exercise because it's easy and simple and doable. And once you do that and you remind yourself, I'm going to share my 3 steps self-empowerment leadership formula that I teach all my clients. But we're going to use it specifically for overwhelm.
You want to zoom out. You want to be curious and give yourself some context. Notice the story your mind is telling you when you feel overwhelmed. The story my mind is telling me, oftentimes, this is from myself, is again, you're behind, you need to go faster, you're, you know, not doing a good job. And then it starts being kind of harsh with me. And this is where I can take a breather and say, "Okay, that's the story."
And then there's the choice, and it's really about understanding and separating what's urgent from what's truly important. You know, and I think people are like, "Oh yeah, let's go back to vision and purpose." But you actually have to take yourself there with this choice. You have to actually discern. And often times I like to ask myself, like, what are 3 things that I really want to get done today? Today, right? You want to give yourself, you know, some things to really anchor to of like, what must get done today. And those things don't need to just be work-related. They can be work-related, but I also teach you to be really good about taking care of yourself.
So those 3 things, like I just literally did this last night with my day, like I thought about this ahead of time because I didn't want to walk into my Monday with overwhelm, right? So I literally asked myself, what are those 3 things? Number 1, I wanted to record this podcast. Number 2, I am introducing a new masterclass, which you'll hear about soon. And number 3, I wanted to get some of my emails dialed in for this week so that I have more space in my calendar. So those were like 3 things that I wanted to get done.
And then from a personal level, this is like personally me, like things that how I want to feel. I wanted to connect with my kids. I had a lovely morning playing with them. I wanted to connect with my husband. I had a great time connecting with him. And this third one might sound funny, but I get a lot of groundedness from basically kind of cleaning and to set things right in my kitchen and in my house, you know, and I don't overdo it, but I'm like, this is something that will help ground me and just make me help me feel in the moment with myself and to do that in a quiet space after the kids leave.
So you want to give yourself, like, what are those choices? You can also do this with more logistical things, like there are just some things that I need to get done that are for my household or for my work, but they're just on that list, right? But keep it simple. Keep it simple for yourself and remind yourself you have a choice.
I love the 3 things because it helps you ground yourself. And again, it's the opposite of overwhelm. You are giving your mind something to solve that is bite-size and it's not the whole world. My mind does like to offer me all these things in like the future, but I really say like, nope, I am making a choice right now to discern.
And the third is the commitment. Again, this is a choice because your brain is going to get distracted. It's going to see all the things. But if you made the choice, this is the commitment to the choice. Decide on your command moves that you'll practice. And I literally like will write them on a piece of paper so that I can check them off and feel really amazing when I check them off.
I know these sound really simple, but these tools and tricks will really help you to have your mind and body connected to themselves so that you can use that prefrontal cortex and so that you can be leading from a place where you're grounded and clear and where you feel really embodied into commanding your life, right? How can you expect to command other people or lead other people, right? And when I say command, it's not in this harsh way. It's literally like, you know, a commanding presence with conviction. If you want to lead that way, you've got to lead yourself first, and that's your mind and your body. You've got to take yourself there. These are real experiences, and I have so many clients that, again, come to my coaching sessions. This is the first step that we do together.
So, I've given you something that my clients do all the time that I want to invite you to do, and this is truly about taking time back. This is really about being in command of your life and really consciously choosing the way that you are in your life, the way that your life unfolds around you. And the more you feel in command and the more you're taking care of yourself, the bigger impacts you're going to make, the more full up you're going to be. This is such important stuff because this is the thing that if you don't do, will lead to burnout, will lead you to feel like you're always on the hamster wheel, and will have you in this like overwhelm cycle until you burn out. And I don't want that for you.
All right. I want you in command of your mind. I want you to be the type of leader that is not just learning strategies, but mastering your inner state. That's what makes your influence sustainable. That's what's going to have you feeling the energy to show up in spaces that weren't built for you. You've got to take care of you, Number 1 first. And this is the solution to overwhelm.
Again, Number 1, recognizing and being aware that it is just a state of being and states of beings change. Number 2, giving yourself something to ground to. I am here now. Use that strategy over and over again. And then of course, dive into the 3 steps self-empowered leadership formula: zooming out, being curious and giving yourself context what you're feeling. Two, making that choice, asking yourself what is truly important, what 3 things do I want to get done at work or personally today. And 3, committing to that choice and not allowing your brain to run the show, right? That monkey brain wants to run the show, but the more you're in command of yourself, the more powerful you're going to be.
All right, so that is today's episode. I want you to go out and practice it. I want you to do it right now. If you're feeling overwhelmed, use these steps, keep practicing it, master it, do it over and over again. I promise that your life will change, and I want to hear from you. So find me on LinkedIn, DM me directly, email me. I want to hear how these strategies are helping you. They really can change your life. They've changed my life. They've changed my relationships with my kids and my husband. They've changed the way that I lead and coach women.
And when I was in corporate, they definitely helped me show up in a really powerful, undeniable way because I was more present. We can't expect to influence and command others if we can't command ourselves. So go help yourself out, do yourself this favor, and be in command. And let me know how it goes. Have a wonderful week ahead. I'll see you next week.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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