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Making decisions from overwhelm can be costly for you and others. Instead, to get distance name overwhelm as it comes. Apply self-compassion. Be suspicious of your impulse to withdraw. Find ways to meet your needs. Tell others about your overwhelm. This may allow more support, connection and trust-building. Plan what to do to meet your needs next time you're overwhelmed. Tweak your plan.

Reducing overwhelm requires you to reconnect with your authentic choice, be present and compassionate with what's happening, heal trauma, and interrupt the trauma response. Read on for ways that may help you reconnect with your choice, presence and more on trauma.

If withdrawal is your stress pattern, you likely want to belong and yet have habits of expression that others find uninviting. Instead, soften, relax, and open your posture and energy. Find something that will bring you to smile. Engage with others -- make eye contact, smile, walk towards others, say hello, and sit in an open posture. Let others know that you're a bit overwhelmed, but want to connect and are glad to be here.

What can we do to bring vitality and resourcefulness back into our lives when we are feeling overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, or frustrated? Read on for a nine step process.

For many people thinking about creating a workshop outline is overwhelming because they focus on the whole thing at once.  Breaking the process down to bite-size pieces eliminates much stress and overwhelm and brings fun and creativity to the process.  here's your step-by-step guide!.

Trainer Tip: Identify one goal and take one small step toward achieving it today. It doesn’t matter how much or how often. The reward is in taking the first step, and then the second and third until you’ve attained your goal.

It's tempting to shut down a heated conversation when it’s painful and overwhelming. What can give us strength to stay open to hearing and being moved, to being open to new possibility, is recalling the “triad of conversation.” The triad is self and other and then awareness on the third side of the conversation. Here we can return to connection, to what we share and need in common, to a searching together for the way forward.

When was the last time you were in a situation with an overwhelming feeling of shame or an unnerving fear of 'doing it wrong'? Sometimes we get sweaty palms or a dry mouth, maybe we freeze on the spot or start an unhelpful internal monologue that makes the situation feel even worse. In this months NVC Life Hack Gesine takes a closer look at her own experience with shame and the fear of doing it wrong.

Anger is a sign that you're resisting what's happening because you perceive an overwhelming threat, not trusting yourself to handle what's happening directly. Vulnerable feelings under anger are usually fear, hurt, or grief. Experiencing and expressing these feelings and connecting them to your needs, gives you access to more skill, insight, compassion, and wisdom. Read on for 3 questions to ask yourself when angry.

Trainer Tip: The surest way to enjoy life is to do things that meet your needs. If you don’t enjoy a particular activity, consider the need you hope to meet by doing it. For instance, for each item you want to do consider the needs you're trying to meet. Connect to the joy of that need. Then for each ask: “How would I feel if I delayed finishing this item?”. Consider which items you want to continue, pause, or reprioritize. This can help increase life enjoyment.

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed – or locked into passivity? This course offers you a way out. Learn to change the way you perceive leadership, and you’ll help yourself respond more powerfully and proactively every day of your life – wherever you are – and whomever you’re with!

Trainer Tip: Overwhelmed with all that you want to do? If so, what are you working to change? Is it a behavior or a consciousness? Where were you with this issue when you first decided to create change? And now where are you? Celebrating your progress can encourage you to keep trying. You wouldn’t expect to jump on a treadmill and jog three miles the first time. Don't have the same expectations for your emotional fitness either!

Ask the Trainer: I feel overwhelmed thinking of writing to someone with cancer. What can I do?

Listen to this short 3 session telecourse recording with CNVC Certified Trainer Christine King, and you will learn how to honor the wisdom that your anger, fear, shame and other BIG emotions have for you.

LoraKim Joyner addresses the sense of overwhelm that can accompany holding the needs of the many. Practicing self-empathy is a pathway to living in the tension of mutually holding my needs and the needs of others.

In our internal conversations, some voices dominate others, which can leave us feeling fragmented or overwhelmed. But when we dive beneath the surface and really listen to our many parts, we connect vulnerably to our full humanity.