How can CIA help you? aka "How to turn your overwhelm into something more manageable!”
How often do you feel overwhelmed, like you’re drowning in to-do lists, bogged down by the woes of the world, and don’t know how to get started?
I don’t keep a tally of how often this happens to me, but it does. And when it does, one of the tools I reach for is CIA. No, not the US intelligence agency! In this context, CIA stands for Control, Influence, Accept.
Imagine your brain as a snow globe and each piece of snow is a thing-to-do, a thought, a deadline, a global crisis. Now imagine an excited toddler giving that snow globe the most energetic shake it can! What do you see? The snow isn’t falling serenely into place, producing a beautifully symmetrical snowflake. It’s whizzing around in all directions, crashing into itself, going in one direction, then another, taking longer to settle and landing somewhere totally unexpected. It’s hard to make a snow pattern out of that.
I’ve had several neural snowstorms like that. The most vivid crept up on me during one of the Covid lockdowns. Exceptional circumstances, you might say, but it taught me something that I continue to rely on years later.
Now I’m someone who loves a list. Lists are some of my favourite safety nets in life. A list does to my overwhelm what talking does to a worry: it reduces it.
At times of overwhelm, I find it helpful to move into “brain-dump” mode. For me, there’s nothing like pen and paper to help make sense of what’s in my head, so I grab pen and paper (digital variants also available) and open the floodgates. A brain-dump needs no plan, no structure, no filter. You just get everything out of your head, in whatever order it tumbles out.
My 2020 brain-dump felt frenzied, yet cathartic. Everything that was bothering me flowed effortlessly onto the pages in front of me, almost without me having to do a thing. Then I noticed something interesting. I’d started putting different things in different corners of the page. Subconsciously, I must have known it wasn’t right to have “Putin” in the same area as “how will I make a good impression with my new team?”. (NB. Other world leaders are also available.)
You see, the simple act of giving voice (or pen) to my stresses helped me to start categorising them. Without realising it, I was embracing CIA: Control, Influence, Accept (and/or Adapt).
How can CIA help YOU?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with worries, tasks or decisions, it might be time to see how CIA can help you. What follows is how I use CIA, but it’s not the only way. As you’ll see, CIA is a really simple construct and you can adapt it to suit your own needs or ways of working.
Grab a piece of paper (or digital equivalent). “Brain-dump” all your stresses, worries, decisions, options, things-to-do, etc onto the page/screen.
Identify anything that’s not within your personal control. Then ask yourself: “Do I have any influence over this”?
If you have neither control nor influence, cross that thing out! You have to ACCEPT it. You could ask yourself if there’s anything you could ADAPT in order to reduce the impact the thing has on you. But either way, this thing needs to occupy less space in your head.
What can you influence? Looking at the things that you don’t control, but could INFLUENCE, ask yourself… What action(s) could I take to influence that thing? Now you need to be honest with yourself: how likely are you to actually take any of those actions? If you’re not committed, cross the item off the list. It’s not worth your time or energy.
Identify future things: These things are important but you can’t do much about them right now (or they’re just not as time-sensitive as other things on your list). Either strike these off your list, or create a “car park” where you collect things to revisit at a later date. You could even put a reminder in your diary to revisit the car park in X months’ time.
You should now have a much shorter list of things that:
are directly within your control; or
you’ve decided you want to influence; and
deserve your attention right now (or at least in the near future).
Take a moment to appreciate this newer, shorter list. How much more manageable does this version feel?
The bottom line is this: We can’t control everything that affects us. Some things we can’t even influence. So how much of my energy and finite time should I expend on worrying about Putin (or any other uncontrollable entity)?
What if I transferred all my “Putin energy” onto things I have more control over, or that bring me joy or satisfaction? Just imagine…
If you'd like more ideas for how to manage overwhelming to-do lists, click here to receive my "Prioritise Like a Pro" top tips:
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