You know the feeling. That sense of being so caught up in the swirl of busyness around (and within) you, it’s like clinging to the back of a running tiger.

This notion of tiger riding can be heady stuff…until it hits you: you don’t remember the last time you got off the tiger.

Then you realize – as the exhilaration wears off and fatigue sets in – it’s a pretty scary place to be, especially if you can’t see how to get off.

There you are, too busy hanging on to marvel at the ride, breathlessly chanting to yourself, “Don’t-fall-off, don’t-fall-off.” Because as scary as it is to perch on top of 500 pounds of sharp-toothed, razor-clawed predator, it’s suck-the-breath-out-of-you terrifying to imagine being on the ground beneath it.

As long as you can hang on – you reason to yourself – it can’t eat you.

But here’s the thing: you can only hang on for so long.

And this is a problem because tiger-riding, or at least the metaphorical equivalent, has become the accepted norm. It’s now the default instead of the occasional theme park adventure.

The primary question I hear from corporate leaders? Often cloaked in the window-dressing of how to develop people, the underlying query is: how to get more work out of fewer people or how to get people to do more, often with fewer resources and in less time.

The most frequent request from the busy women I coach? To help them find time for themselves while feeling pulled in ten different directions all day long every day.

And from financial professionals and solo-preneurs working to expand a business: how to manage the dizzying dance between maintaining an existing business while allocating time and energy to business expansion.

It’s no longer just go-go-go, do-do-do. A culture of urgency tells us we must go faster and do more.

Heaven help you if you take time to catch your breath because that just puts you farther behind.

Elephant Eating in the Culture of Urgency

The culture of urgency tells us to push or risk complete, abject failure (and the humiliation and rejection that go with it). It tells us deadlines are more important than people, and “winning” is transitory, so you must always keep moving toward the next win.

The culture sings its relentless siren song of “go, do, more, faster,” and we become both slaves and sacrifices to its voracious hunger.

The culture of urgency shapes our thoughts, feelings and responses, and we have learned to accept breathlessness as our normal way of living.

While the state of breathlessness may have become normal, it is far from sustainable. Bottom line: the culture of urgency may be a stimulating place to visit, but it is not a healthy place to live.

For starters, it engenders a chronic anxiety. True, for many people it is low-grade and below the level of awareness, but that makes it more dangerous. The effects of anxiety are cumulative and inflict considerable wear and tear on your body and psyche.

Living in anxiety, however low-grade, colors thoughts and decisions with a survival mindset. Choice goes out the window and you live increasingly from the gotta-gottas: I “gotta” do this, have that, accomplish xxx, show up as yyy…..

As a result, you take on huge, unrealistically heroic tasks or live with a never-ending mountain of tasks. You become an elephant eater, not in service to fulfilling a higher purpose, but because you can’t risk not doing so.

You’ve likely heard the old story that if you drop a frog in hot water it will jump out. But if you put it in cooler water and raise the temperature gradually, the frog will acclimate and boil to death without sensing the danger.

We’re doing that with the pace of life today just in terms of the sheer amount of stimuli coming toward us. We ask ourselves to take in – and respond to – an ever-increasing amount of information.

One immediate example springs to mind: the sheer scope of what we ask ourselves to assimilate daily in an ever-increasing deluge of emails and text messages.

Is it any wonder our brains feel fried from the barrage of stimuli we experience – and try to manage?

Like frogs being boiled unknowingly to death, we’ve acclimated to a faster, fuller pace of life. With that acclimation comes an entire host of unrealistic expectations about what we should be able to accomplish.

When your brain is fatigued, everything, including small daily tasks, seems larger and more complex. Critical thinking shuts down. Creative resourcefulness goes AWOL and takes your personal choice and empowerment along for the ride.

When you are tired and rushed, pushing to get through a mountain of tasks, it’s like trying to eat elephants while riding tigers. The truth is that gets messy. Most likely resulting scenario? The elephant steps on you and the tiger laps up the little greasy spot left behind.

If you can’t see how to get off the tiger OR how to maintain your seat on the tiger, that’s a precarious place to be. Stressful.

If you gag at the thought of eating one more bite of elephant when you’ve built your success on the ability to whittle your way through mountains of metaphorical elephant meat – possibilities diminish.

When the tiger riding and elephant eating success strategies that got you this far are no longer working or workable, and your creative thinking is offline because you’re depleted, that’s more than stressful. It’s hopeless.

The result?

Over-doing because you don’t know how not do over-do.

Overload that you no longer notice because it’s the norm.

Overwhelm on such a grand scale that you disconnect from the ability to create, to imagine possibilities or even to hope.

You cease to grow, expand or flourish. And a soul that cannot expand is one that withers.

The Hidden Dangers of Overwhelm

Overwhelm is a stressful state of being. You are likely familiar with the cumulative effects of long term stress which include, among other things, serious health implications: hypertension, impaired digestion, and even immune system disorders, just to name a few.

What you may be less aware of is the incredibly damaging effect of overwhelm on your psyche. On your relationship with yourself.

Consider this: when you feel overwhelmed, the underlying response is that of being inadequate. Not up to the task at hand. Not enough.

This “not-enoughness” is built in to the definition of overwhelm. (Seriously. Look up the definition.)

For example: The rising water overwhelmed the reservoir’s dam because it was not built to withstand a flood of this magnitude.

Inadequate means not enough. And anything that is overwhelmed is automatically inadequate.

The problem occurs when we think there is something wrong with being inadequate to all the culture of urgency demands of us. As a result, we judge ourselves and each other as being inferior.

Where this gets really, really sticky is what we do with the not-enoughness: we go into shame.

So what we’re doing is shaming ourselves (and each other) for the inability to live up to the unrealistic expectations fostered by a culture of urgency.

But wait….there’s more.

Overwhelm also erodes a sense of worth and self trust. The shame triggered by feeling inferior negates worth. How worthy or worthwhile do you feel when you are in shame?

At the same time, overwhelm is the experience of not being in control, including not in control of:

1. Events and schedules (this one still makes me crazy at times).
2. Other people’s actions, responses, perceptions, or what they think (including what they think of you.)
3. Forward movement in the face of a flood tide of distractions and competing priorities.
4. Your own swirling thoughts and churning emotions in response to the aforementioned items 1-3.

If you base your self trust on how well you can control things and therefore predict outcomes (and frankly, who among us does NOT do this to some degree???), when you come face to face with the out-of-control-ness precipitated by overwhelm, self trust will become non-existent.

To bottom line: the experience of feeling overwhelmed points out where inadequacies, either real or perceived, lie. If you are tying “inferior” to “inadequate” and judging the inadequacy, you make yourself and the state of overwhelm wrong, adding insult to injury and further eroding self worth and self trust.

The result is a painfully vulnerable and isolating place to be. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? On what do you build any sense of stability and reliability in your life?

Many of us have used tiger riding and elephant eating to shore up what gets torn down by overwhelm. After all, these are patterns that do work to move toward accomplishment and through that, add to a sense of personal worth and self trust.

However:

The belief that you must be held hostage on a run-away tiger and continue to take on bigger portions of elephant stems from the “shadow side” of tiger riding and elephant eating. Both involve a lack of personal choice and empowerment. Both involve giving your power to something or someone outside of you.

But it does not have to be this way.

What if you could intentionally harness the power and exhilaration of tiger riding? What if you could, in fact, take on elephant-sized portions without destroying your appetite or hurting yourself in the process?

Maybe we need to look at why anyone would ever want to ride a tiger or eat an elephant.