Do You Suffer From Paralyzing Abundance?

Whenever I get a new member in my Embracing Intensity Community, I always ask the question, “What are you intensely passionate about,” which is also ask all of the women I interview on my Embracing Intensity Podcast.

One thing that has become evidently clear is that intense, gifted, excitable women rarely have one passion. There are many names for this – multipotentiality, polymath, scanner, rainbow person (vs. specialist in one thing).

I believe this, along with our propensity for perfectionism, is what leads to feeling like scattered overachievers, or gifted underachievers. I can say that I, personally, have felt like both at the same time.

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So, when you are passionate and talented at so many things, how do you choose what to focus on? This week I broke out of my usual interview format on my podcast to explore this further – On Paralyzing Abundance.

Obviously you are not going to focus on just one thing for the rest of your life, or possibly ever, but when you have too many balls in the air, your effectiveness on each thing can diminish.

For example, over the summer and early fall I launched multiple things along with my new website and tried to start a local in-person talk series at the same time as I launched my podcast. I rapidly found that trying to do both at once, I could not give them both the energy they deserved. For this year, I decided to discontinue the live talks and focus on my podcast, which has grown considerably since that time and reached a wide audience of people around the world who need to hear my message.

When I start to feel an excess of abundance, there are a few questions I ask myself to help decide where I should focus:

Is it energizing to me? This has been a big one for me recently, as my work load in my “day job” has been draining enough that I’ve prioritized the things that energize me in my business life.

Is it in line with my purpose and vision? In the grander scheme of things, if it doesn’t energize you or move you forward toward your life vision or goals, consider if there is something else you could be doing that would be.

Is this the most effective use of my time? There might be many different things that could potentially move you toward your purpose and vision, but they might not be the most effective use of your time at the moment. This is why I decided to focus on the podcast rather than the live events because while they both energized me and moved me toward my purpose, the podcast had a greater reach and would therefore get my message out more.

As a multipotentialite, these things may shift over time. Some people are more effective at juggling multiple projects at once, while others do better rotating through and focusing on one or two at a time. Whatever your preference, if you start to feel exausted or overwhelmed by all the things you want to do, it might be a good time to step back and reexamine your focus.

This has been a part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page Blog Hop on Multipotentiality.

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Comments (3)

  1. I love the questions you ask . . . in today’s over-filled world I think us multipotentialites can easily get in over our heads and have too much on our plates. Great reminder to keep intentional! Thanks! Heather Boorman, the fringy bit

    • Aurora Holtzman

      Yes! I think it’s perfectly natural to want to take on too much, but sometimes our bodies tell us it’s time to slow down, at least that’s true for me. I also like to remember something I read in a book called "You’re Not Too Much" by Leela Sinha about how we are prone to putting in 100% and while we may think we need to cut it back to 50%, our natural inclination wants to go all in, so just make sure to save 10% so you don’t crash. 🙂

  2. Skpicard

    Good questions to ask oneself…thank-you!

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