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Why Am I the Only One Who Does Anything? · RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way

• 0:00
  Kamini Wood: Welcome to Rise Up Live Joy Your Way.
• 0:03
  Kamini Wood: I'm Kamini Wood.
• 0:04
  Kamini Wood: This space is for honest conversations about how we live, love, and meet.
• 0:09
  Kamini Wood: Especially when life doesn't go the way we expect it.
• 0:12
  Kamini Wood: We'll talk about the patterns we fall into, the choices we get to make, and what it looks like to come back to ourselves along the way.
• 0:19
  Kamini Wood: I'm glad you're here.
• 0:20
  Kamini Wood: Let's get into it.
• 0:22
  Kamini Wood: Do you know that feeling when you are surrounded by completely capable human beings and somehow you're still the one doing everything?
• 0:32
  Kamini Wood: You're the one remembering the planning, the following up, the checking, the fixing, you're anticipating issues, you're making the reservation, sending all the calendar invites, remembering the birthdays, catching the mistake before anyone else notices it, making sure everybody has what they need.
• 0:49
  Kamini Wood: And then somewhere in the middle of the night, you are standing there thinking, why am I the only person who does anything?
• 0:57
  Kamini Wood: That sounds even remotely familiar.
• 0:59
  Kamini Wood: We should talk.
• 1:01
  Kamini Wood: Because one of the pressure patterns I see all the time does not look dysfunctional from the outside.
• 1:06
  Kamini Wood: It actually looks really impressive and really capable and responsible and productive.
• 1:11
  Kamini Wood: It's the person who gets everything done.
• 1:14
  Kamini Wood: And I call this pattern the overrider.
• 1:17
  Kamini Wood: The overrider has a pretty predictable response when that pressure shows up.
• 1:21
  Kamini Wood: Do more, move faster, take control, uh, fix it, push through, muscle through.
• 1:27
  Kamini Wood: If there's something that needs to be done, do it.
• 1:30
  Kamini Wood: If somebody's struggling, step in.
• 1:31
  Kamini Wood: If something feels uncertain, we make a plan.
• 1:34
  Kamini Wood: If the plan doesn't work, don't worry.
• 1:36
  Kamini Wood: We have plan, you know, B, C, and D.
• 1:39
  Kamini Wood: And let me say this before you start telling yourself that I'm telling you to stop being competent.
• 1:45
  Kamini Wood: Being capable is not the issue here, okay?
• 1:48
  Kamini Wood: Uh I'm I tend to have some overriding pressure patterns myself.
• 1:52
  Kamini Wood: It's not that at all.
• 1:53
  Kamini Wood: Taking the initiative is not the issue.
• 1:56
  Kamini Wood: Getting things done is not a problem.
• 1:58
  Kamini Wood: Those are incredible strengths.
• 2:00
  Kamini Wood: My question is what happens when you stop feeling like you have a choice?
• 2:04
  Kamini Wood: When helping becomes taking over, when responsibility becomes over functioning and over-responsibility, when leadership becomes control, when being capable turns into being resentful after time, right?
• 2:18
  Kamini Wood: That's when I particularly tell people it's time to start paying attention.
• 2:23
  Kamini Wood: Because most overriders I know do not walk around thinking I'm a controlling person.
• 2:28
  Kamini Wood: Uh, you know, if I want this done, I need to do it myself.
• 2:32
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes is what it sounds like, or nobody else will do this the right way.
• 2:36
  Kamini Wood: And to be fair, you're sometimes right.
• 2:40
  Kamini Wood: Like sometimes people really are genuinely dropping the ball.
• 2:43
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes, for instance, your child in reality does actually forget to bring their lunch to school or get the form signed that they need to get signed, or sometimes your employee doesn't follow through with what they're supposed to do, or sometimes your partner said that they were gonna, you know, pick something up from the store and then they completely forgot.
• 2:59
  Kamini Wood: So I'm not gonna pretend that uh people not carrying their weight is never a problem, because let's be honest, we're all humans, people are people, but I want us to start asking a different question.
• 3:13
  Kamini Wood: Is this mine to do?
• 3:15
  Kamini Wood: Not can I do it?
• 3:16
  Kamini Wood: Because of course you can, but you know, the question starts to become does this actually belong to me?
• 3:24
  Kamini Wood: Because overriders are very good at doing things that they were never asked to do.
• 3:30
  Kamini Wood: Uh, you know, somebody on your team is struggling, and so you just jump right in.
• 3:35
  Kamini Wood: You maybe rewrite the presentation or you um answer the client, even though the question was posed to your colleague, because it's faster, you know the answer, you can handle it, the problem solved, and everybody can move on.
• 3:47
  Kamini Wood: Except when we do that, we step in, our colleague doesn't actually learn anything, and you end up being overworked and overtired.
• 3:55
  Kamini Wood: Or at home, uh, we have a vacation coming up and nobody's backpacked for the trip.
• 4:01
  Kamini Wood: So it's late at night, and you are the one packing for everybody, while wondering how an entire household of individuals can apparently survive without knowing that they're going to actually need to take clothes with them on the trip.
• 4:15
  Kamini Wood: But everybody around you learns something.
• 4:18
  Kamini Wood: If they wait long enough and don't pack, you're gonna step in and do it.
• 4:23
  Kamini Wood: Enabling them, right?
• 4:25
  Kamini Wood: And that's the thing about overfunctioning.
• 4:27
  Kamini Wood: It can actually train other people to underfunction.
• 4:30
  Kamini Wood: And then you look around and you're thinking, see, I knew it.
• 4:34
  Kamini Wood: I had to do everything.
• 4:35
  Kamini Wood: And that now becomes the evidence to the belief that you've already created, that narrative that you've already created.
• 4:40
  Kamini Wood: And so the cycle keeps going.
• 4:42
  Kamini Wood: So that's why I want to go into the behavior underneath all this because underneath control, there's often something much more vulnerable.
• 4:52
  Kamini Wood: What if something goes wrong?
• 4:54
  Kamini Wood: What if I let go and somebody disappoints me?
• 4:58
  Kamini Wood: What if I trust them and then I have to deal with the fallout?
• 5:01
  Kamini Wood: What if somebody makes a mistake and somehow I then have to be the one to fix it?
• 5:06
  Kamini Wood: What if everything just falls apart?
• 5:07
  Kamini Wood: So for some of us, control feels safer than uncertainty.
• 5:11
  Kamini Wood: And if you spent a lot of your life being the responsible one, letting somebody else carry their own weight can actually feel extraordinarily scary and uncomfortable.
• 5:21
  Kamini Wood: Not because you think that you're better than other people.
• 5:24
  Kamini Wood: It's because you've learned over and over that things seem to just work when you're the one handling it.
• 5:31
  Kamini Wood: So we come back to notice, name, and choose.
• 5:35
  Kamini Wood: Notice what happens when somebody does something that you would do differently.
• 5:38
  Kamini Wood: Do you immediately want to step in and correct it?
• 5:40
  Kamini Wood: Do you jump in before they've even finished the task?
• 5:43
  Kamini Wood: Do you hear yourself saying something like, never mind, I can handle it?
• 5:47
  Kamini Wood: Does your body tighten when somebody else is in charge?
• 5:50
  Kamini Wood: Do you delegate something and then micromanage and check on it a hundred million gajillion times?
• 5:56
  Kamini Wood: Do you ask someone to do a task and then once it's done, you quietly redo it?
• 6:01
  Kamini Wood: Like small side story.
• 6:02
  Kamini Wood: I used to do that with the dishwasher all the time.
• 6:05
  Kamini Wood: I would have somebody else load the dishwasher and then I would come back and redo it the way that I wanted to do it.
• 6:12
  Kamini Wood: So just notice the urge to do that and then name it.
• 6:15
  Kamini Wood: That is that overriding pattern, right?
• 6:18
  Kamini Wood: My reflex is saying fix it.
• 6:20
  Kamini Wood: My reflex is saying take over.
• 6:22
  Kamini Wood: My reflex is saying step in.
• 6:23
  Kamini Wood: My reflex is saying I need to make sure nothing goes wrong.
• 6:26
  Kamini Wood: And then we choose.
• 6:27
  Kamini Wood: What happens if I don't?
• 6:29
  Kamini Wood: Now, not recklessly.
• 6:30
  Kamini Wood: I'm not telling you to completely abandon all responsibility and just see what happens, but what happens if you let another capable person do what actually belongs to them?
• 6:39
  Kamini Wood: So at work, it might sound like, what do you think the next step is instead of giving the person the answer?
• 6:46
  Kamini Wood: Or maybe it sounds like um, come back to me with one or two options instead of again solving the issue.
• 6:53
  Kamini Wood: And at home, it might actually sound like, you know what, you're you're responsible for packing what you need and then actually letting them pack, which may sound simple until you are getting ready to leave the house and you see somebody's computer charger sitting on the kitchen counter and you realize they're not gonna be able to use their computer, uh, but you know they forgot it, you can see it, and every cell in your body wants to jump in and just put it in the bag, but that's the overrider.
• 7:20
  Kamini Wood: Uh sometimes people need the opportunity to manage their own mistakes, and we need the opportunity not to rescue them from every single mistake.
• 7:29
  Kamini Wood: Now, I want to say something here because it's really important.
• 7:32
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes you really are caring too much.
• 7:34
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes the division of labor is completely unfair.
• 7:38
  Kamini Wood: And sometimes you are compensating for poor leadership at work, sometimes you are in a family system where responsibility is genuinely not being shared.
• 7:47
  Kamini Wood: So I don't want you listening to this thinking, great, now I am responsible for being too responsible because that's not what I'm saying.
• 7:55
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes the situation itself needs to change.
• 7:58
  Kamini Wood: But even when that's true, the pressure pattern still matters.
• 8:01
  Kamini Wood: Because if your response to an unequal situation is to silently take on more, that inequality may never become in may never become visible.
• 8:10
  Kamini Wood: If you absorb every dropped ball, nobody else ever feels the impact of that drop and ball.
• 8:16
  Kamini Wood: The only person who does is you.
• 8:18
  Kamini Wood: So maybe the move is not to do more.
• 8:22
  Kamini Wood: Maybe it's saying, I'm already carrying all these pieces I can't take on anymore, and we need to redistribute this.
• 8:29
  Kamini Wood: Or I can help you think through it, but I'm not going to fix this for you.
• 8:34
  Kamini Wood: And that can feel really, really uncomfortable if a lot of your identity and your reflexes have been tied to being the capable one.
• 8:43
  Kamini Wood: And I think that's the piece that gets missed.
• 8:45
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes we become so attached to this role that's actually exhausting us.
• 8:49
  Kamini Wood: You know, we get attached to being the strong one or the dependable one, or just the idea that people need me or I hold everything together because we actually take some pride in that.
• 8:57
  Kamini Wood: And that can also be a lot of pressure because what happens when what happens when being the strong one as that person, you also need help?
• 9:05
  Kamini Wood: What happens when being the dependable one uh actually says, I, you know, you say I can't do this?
• 9:11
  Kamini Wood: What happens when you let someone else do something poorly or slowly or simply different from how you would do it?
• 9:20
  Kamini Wood: And that's the work.
• 9:22
  Kamini Wood: It's not becoming less capable, it's realizing that your capability does not automatically make you the responsible one for everything.
• 9:31
  Kamini Wood: And though that is a very different thing.
• 9:33
  Kamini Wood: And it shows up in leadership all the time.
• 9:35
  Kamini Wood: A leader will say, I wish my team would take more initiative, but then every time somebody tries something different, the leader steps in and changes it.
• 9:43
  Kamini Wood: Or a parent says, I want my child to be more independent, but then every time the child is trying to be independent or struggles, the parent steps in and fixes it.
• 9:51
  Kamini Wood: Or a partner says, I wish I got more help around here, but there is also one very specific correct way to load the dishwasher back to the dishwasher again, right?
• 9:59
  Kamini Wood: Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, am I actually creating room for people to step up, or am I so uncomfortable with how they do it that I'm not giving them room to do it?
• 10:08
  Kamini Wood: And that can that can kind of sting because we have to see what our part in the situation is.
• 10:14
  Kamini Wood: So it's about staying curious.
• 10:16
  Kamini Wood: And this week I want you to notice one particular thing.
• 10:19
  Kamini Wood: Notice if you ever say to yourself, this or a version of it, it's easier if I just do this myself.
• 10:26
  Kamini Wood: Because when you hear that, I want you to pause.
• 10:28
  Kamini Wood: Because sometimes it is easier.
• 10:30
  Kamini Wood: I'm not gonna argue with that, but easier right now is not always better in the long term.
• 10:34
  Kamini Wood: So then I want you to challenge yourself to say, is this mine to do?
• 10:38
  Kamini Wood: If it is, do it.
• 10:40
  Kamini Wood: Again, we're not getting rid of like if we're responsible for something, we're gonna own it.
• 10:44
  Kamini Wood: But if it's not, can you leave it where it belongs?
• 10:46
  Kamini Wood: Can somebody else handle it?
• 10:48
  Kamini Wood: Can somebody else figure it out?
• 10:50
  Kamini Wood: Can somebody else maybe be uncomfortable?
• 10:53
  Kamini Wood: Because honestly, that's kind of the growth part for you.
• 10:57
  Kamini Wood: The overrider does not need to become passive.
• 11:00
  Kamini Wood: They do not need to stop leading because sometimes leadership does require us to own it.
• 11:06
  Kamini Wood: Notice, name, choose.
• 11:10
  Kamini Wood: Lead yourself.
• 11:11
  Kamini Wood: If you're hearing this and want to get a better sense of which pressure pattern tends to be the one that shows up for you, I'm gonna go ahead and put my pressure pattern spotting tool in the show notes below.
• 11:21
  Kamini Wood: It gives you a place to start noticing your own automatic responses when the pressure starts to rise.
• 11:26
  Kamini Wood: And next time we're talking about another pattern, not one that takes over, the one that kind of backs away.
• 11:32
  Kamini Wood: You know, the conversation you need to have, you know something is bothering you, you know you're avoiding it, it's not actually making it better, and somehow today is never quite the right day to say the thing that you need to say.
• 11:44
  Kamini Wood: So if you've ever said it's fine when it was really not fine, come back for the next episode.
• 11:49
  Kamini Wood: And until next time, stay curious.