32. Toxic Responsibility: Burnout Mini-Series Part 4
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the weight of your responsibilities? Like no matter how much you do, it's never enough? If you're a high-achieving woman, chances are you've struggled with toxic responsibility and the burnout that comes with it.
It’s easy for your self-worth and your responsibilities to become intertwined. But how many times have you disappointed yourself in order to feel responsible? How much pretending do you have to do to be responsible? Who might you be if you were as responsible to yourself as you were to others? This is exactly what we dive into in this fourth episode of our burnout mini-series.
Tune in this week to discover how over-responsibility leads ambitious women straight to burnout. You’ll learn the vital difference between physical and emotional responsibility, and why delegating tasks isn't enough to reduce stress and anxiety. We also discuss how societal messages and perfectionism can fuel toxic responsibility, and offer questions to help you start rewriting the rules.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why high-achieving women are prone to toxic responsibility and burnout.
How taking ownership of your choices from an aligned place reduces resentment.
The difference between physical and emotional responsibility.
Why delegating tasks isn't enough to reduce stress and anxiety.
How societal messages and perfectionism fuel toxic responsibility.
Questions to help you start rewriting the rules and letting go of over-responsibility.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Nina: Hey, hey, Ambitious-Ish listeners, we’re guessing you’re typically the responsible one. When things need to get done, they can count on you. You’re the fixer. So, let us ask you, what’s so amazing about being responsible?
Kelle: Who told you that was important, anyway? How many times have you disappointed yourself in order to feel responsible?
Nina: How much pretending do you have to do to be responsible? Who might you be if you were as responsible to yourself as you were to others? This is where we’re going today in this fourth episode of our burnout mini-series. We’re talking about over-responsibility and what Kelle and I sometimes call toxic responsibility.
Kelle: Let’s unpack how this tendency shows up in your life, and how poking holes in it can help you break free from burnout from the inside out.
Nina: If you’re ready to learn how to separate your self-worth and your value from your responsibilities, what others think of you and what you can control, you are in the right place.
Kelle: Oh, yeah, let’s get going. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. Hello, how was your weekend?
Kelle: It was so beachy. I was at the beach. It was so incredible. A lot of relaxation. I was in North Carolina, completely skirted the storm, so that was amazing. And then we went to South Carolina at the beach and just got so much relaxation time in, so much walking on the beach. I meditated on the beach several times a day. It was just so lovely and the food scene in Charleston.
Nina: Yum.
Kelle: The food is just ridiculous, it’s so good.
Nina: I mean, I love where we live, but there isn’t great food, let me be real. Actually, Salt Lake, there’s pretty good food. Park City, we’re a little behind.
Kelle: Okay, how was your weekend?
Nina: Oh, my gosh, it was the opposite of beachy. It was mountainy, which I love, which I love, I love. I took the boys mountain biking up Guardsman, Kelle. And if you listeners or Kelle, if you haven’t been up yet, it is probably going to peak in the next three days, it’s going to start turning brown. So, get up there, park at Bonanza Flat and do that five mile lap with your kids. It is so awesome. It smells so good. It’s just the golden hour all the time. It was awesome. I mean, it’s like pulling teeth to get my boys on their bikes up Guardsman, but once we’re there, we’re so pumped.
Kelle: I love it. Yes. Okay, let’s jump in here. Do you ever find yourself saying yes to everything even when it drains you? Or do you feel overwhelmed by the expectations you have of yourself?
Nina: So many ambitious women struggle with feeling overburdened by their responsibilities, often to the point of burnout. This happens all the time with the women we work with and we have totally been there, completely. Take our client Amanda, for example, when we met her at first on a consultation, she led with how overwhelmed she felt by her responsibilities and how her previous coping strategies weren’t working anymore. I’m going down, she explained.
Kelle: Yeah, she wasn’t showing up at her work, for her family or herself in a way that made her proud. She was juggling so many balls and was so afraid she had dropped something and what that would mean about her. She wasn’t doing anything well anymore, and she was afraid of losing control.
Nina: She explained that slowing down was too scary, but at the same time she couldn’t find fixes and felt like she was falling short in every area of her life. She was constantly dwelling on the negative, not letting anything productive come in.
Kelle: Yeah, she kept saying, “I’m failing. I’m going down.”
Nina: Retelling this story tugs at my heart. She was in such a painful, stuck place, burnout, yes, and just stuck in some very old painful stories.
Kelle: Yeah. Amanda was telling herself she was responsible for everything. It’s my fault they got an infection.
Nina: Yeah, so PS, Amanda is a badass surgeon, a woman in a male dominated field of orthopedic medicine. She’s not the only client who’s shared this thought with us in a coaching session.
Kelle: Totally. It’s my fault, this thought is shared by any number of clients from doctors and lawyers to stay at home moms and entrepreneurs alike, it’s always their fault.
Nina: Amanda is one of many humans and doctors who tries to take full responsibility for literally everything that happens to their stakeholders and humans around them and their patients.
Kelle: Yeah. She’s always felt like the fate of her patient, whether they healed well or not, rested entirely on her shoulders. If her patient responded poorly to surgery or got an infection, she quite literally felt like she was the reason they were not thriving.
Nina: Even though there are so many factors out of her control. She couldn’t control the human body and chemistry of her patients in the event of possible infection. She could do her absolute best and operate with the highest level of integrity but there was no certainty 100% here.
She definitely couldn’t control what the patient did once they left the hospital and were out in the world on their own. Would they follow the PT recommendations, take care of their new hip according to the RECs from the hospital? And she definitely could not control what her colleagues and nurses did post-op to make her patients comfortable and at ease as they recovered in the hospital before they left.
Kelle: All she could control were her actions and reactions. But like so many of us, Amanda wasn’t doing that, not because she wasn’t smart enough or committed enough. I mean, she was freaking brilliant, but because she didn’t know how.
Nina: And this one painful thought, it’s my fault was at the root of so much of her guilt and regret and self-doubt and overwhelm, so many of her disempowering behaviors, her overworking and overthinking and over-apologizing.
Kelle: Yeah, instead of heading home at a decent hour at the end of the day, she continued to tag patients onto her schedule and check in on their every need post-op. When she went on vacation, she was with her family, physically but mentally she was back in the hospital with her patients, worrying that they weren’t getting the care they needed and feeling guilty that she wasn’t there to care for them herself. And when they came back to see her, angry and frustrated about their pain and their slow healing, she took full responsibility and told herself she was a terrible doctor. I mean, cue the shame spiral.
Nina: Yeah. Amanda’s brain was taking way too much responsibility for the things she couldn’t control, because that’s literally what society had taught her to do. Of course, of course, of course, a surgeon has some responsibility for performing their role properly. They also have colleagues in the OR to support them and to rely on to complete a successful surgery and a post-op team, etc. But what Amanda was experiencing was over-responsibility and she was completely burning out.
Kelle: Yeah. And I just have to say, she would have patients come in and want surgery, need surgery ASAP. And she would accommodate them the best that she could if she could get OR time. And even in the event of making her home life, her family life, her out of hospital life, suffer in the process. And this isn’t just a doctor problem. In fact, all women are taught by our society to consider themselves responsible for everything in their lives and in the world. I mean, are we right, can we all relate here at all?
Nina: You may not be able to relate to the idea of someone getting an infection because of you or being a 10 on the pain scale because of you. But we’ll put money on the fact that you can relate to the feeling of being responsible for things that are out of your control. And this is what Kelle and I call toxic responsibility or over-responsibility and it’s a huge factor in a burnout mindset, in a disempowered mindset.
Kelle: This is where the lie of people pleasing is rooted. We can’t control other people’s feelings or thoughts. No matter what we do, we cannot make someone else feel happy or safe or disappointed or fill in the blank with any emotion. We are not responsible for their feelings.
Nina: But we tell ourselves we are, our clients, our kids, our patients, our spouses’ feelings.
Kelle: And here’s the thing, our thoughts create our feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings. This is the one simple truth of our coaching practice and one we repeat often.
Nina: We say yes when we might really want to say no, because of our social conditioning. We learned a long time ago that being helpful and responsive and reliable was good and polite and useful. It made the people around us happy. Their emotions were more important than ours. We were rewarded by society for being easy and good. It was our super power for a long, long time.
Kelle: Yeah, this super power could have also been wrapped in our family of origin. You may have had some kind of dysfunctional behavior you needed to scoot around in your family of origin, I mean, who doesn’t? And our brilliant brains learn how to keep us safe in this very specific way for survival. We were immaculate or made sure everything seemed immaculate to sort of fly under the radar, to sort of not exist or have needs or make requests and trigger a caretaker or loved ones’ unpredictable reactions.
We thought we could control them and their behavior by showing up in a certain way and keep ourselves safe in the process. But these survival mechanisms from youth that we use to feel in control aren’t useful anymore. We need to adapt to feel better in our lives.
Nina: The only thing you do have control over are your thoughts, feelings and actions, rock stars. So, if you’re a parent, maybe you find yourself hyper fixated on your kids’ grades. If little Joey doesn’t get A’s, then you feel like a terrible parent because they’re doomed for life and won’t get into college, will likely wind up on the streets selling drugs because they didn’t get A’s in fifth grade and that’s just all your fault. Even though their grades really don’t show anything other than Joe’s proficiency in class, your brain has decided that controlling that one thing will make you feel like you have control of everything, their destiny.
Or maybe you think if you could just stop leaving dirty dishes in the sink after your partner has repeatedly asked you not to, that would fix all your problems, because deep down your brain’s telling you, you’re the problem, it’s your fault. Have you ever had thoughts like this, Kelle?
Kelle: Yeah, all the time. And maybe yours aren’t exactly like one of those, but a time when your brain was trying to convince you that you control it all. Never mind that all these people and circumstances are actually out of your control.
Nina: Yeah. We’ve been socialized to take on the responsibility of everything from a young age and that’s how we learn to feel in control. I can totally relate here, at work, on the playing field, even in my marriage. If I couldn’t get the media placement, the team needed, the story in the New York Times, the impact the campaign did or didn’t make had everything to do with that. It was my fault. And I told myself I could do better and work harder at my own expense. And this is how I learned to feel safe and in control.
If I missed the pass or the assist in the big game and we lost, I told myself it was in a big way, my fault. I could have and should have done better. So, I trained harder, worked harder at my own expense. This also felt safe and something I could control. Oh, my gosh, and in my marriage, if I could blame myself for all of the dysfunctional behavior in my marriage, I mean, his chronic lying and infidelity. I made it all my responsibility, my fault, because that way I could feel in control of something that was actually completely out of my control. I told myself I was the problem and that way I could figure everything out and feel in control.
These are all very big lies, very big lies, because feeling out of control is really hard for high achieving ambitious women like us. When in reality we have very little control of anything on this planet except our own thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. So, check out episode number 21, it’s called The High Achiever’s Guide to Letting go of Control for some killer background here.
Kelle: Yeah. The chronic overwhelm, anxiety and stress you feel is because you’re trying to be responsible for way too many things and people, high achievers, come on, and that’s not your fault. It’s a product of our societal conditioning under the patriarchy.
Nina: See how burnout can actually come from within. It starts with the thoughts we’re thinking and the beliefs we have, old beliefs that have gone unchecked for a very long time.
Kelle: That’s why breaking free from the pull of these social messages and making decisions that are in alignment with your values, brings you back to the driver’s seat of your life.
Nina: When you learn to invest less in what you don’t value and more of what you do, you start to actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create. This inner work allows you to break free from all those patriarchal messages, telling you, you are responsible for how other people think and feel.
Kelle: Exactly. Instead, you start to accept responsibility for the decisions you make, empowered responsibility, aligned responsibility and you are so much less resentful.
Nina: Yeah. Resentment always points to where we’re unwittingly playing the victim. And taking ownership of your choices from an aligned place reduces resentment, because when you accept the role as the leader of your life, the CEO, you feel more empowered to say yes to what you want more of and no to what you want less of.
Kelle: Ambitious women like you and like us, we also tend to have a pretty close relationship with perfectionism, and that can up-level the sense of toxic responsibility too. We think thoughts like, if we don’t do it, it won’t get done or it won’t get done right.
Nina: Yeah, this is a big one. Highway signs are all blinking, burnout ahead, burnout ahead.
Kelle: And of course, there is the high achievers fear of failure, what we make that mean, what we make that mean about us.
Nina: Yeah. What thoughts come up for you when we talk about failure, doomsday thoughts or more neutral ones? Is failure part of success or the opposite?
Kelle: See, the way we filter our circumstances, how we label them and the stories we tell about them, makes us feel a certain way and show up from that place. So, a failure is something bad, shameful or something to avoid. Well, we are bound to run like hell from anything but success. And this is what it feels like to live on the hamster wheel and eventually burn out.
Nina: Can anyone relate here? When failure is something we see as part of success, something to learn from, we’re less afraid of it. And when we fall short, we’re more resilient knowing it’s part of the process. It belongs. We’re either winning or growing, right, Kelle?
Kelle: Always, always. I just love that so much, winning or growing. There is no losing, people. So, the remedy here isn’t just about delegating your responsibilities though. Let’s talk this through.
Nina: Yeah, delegating helps take the physical responsibility off your plate, but the emotional responsibility is still there. Let’s take an example. Have you ever asked your partner to handle something that was stressing you out, maybe coordinating next week’s school carpool while you’re out of town, or getting the snacks for the Mighty Mites football post-game treat this weekend and then found yourself still thinking about it and following up with them? Oh my God.
Kelle: Yeah.
Nina: It was supposed to be off your plate, but you aren’t feeling any less stressed about it.
Kelle: Yeah. That’s because there is a difference between physical responsibility and emotional responsibility. You can let go of physical responsibility while hanging on to the emotional responsibility and vice versa.
Nina: That’s why just delegating doesn’t stop your anxiety and stress and overwhelm because taking tasks off your to-do list doesn’t stop your feelings of responsibility, high achiever, are we right?
Kelle: Yeah. Say the same partner was supposed to pick up the kids from school yesterday so that you could take the dog to the vet, but as your dog is getting checked out, the school calls. Apparently your husband lost track of time and now you have to rush from the vet to the school.
Nina: It’s not your fault this happened, but you feel like you’re being judged.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s because in those scenarios you’re only addressing the physical responsibility when you hand the task off, not the emotional responsibility that you have been socialized to take on.
Nina: So why is it so hard to let go of all responsibility, emotional or otherwise? When you try to let go of responsibilities, it feels like giving up control and like we’ve said, for ambitious, high achieving women specifically, that’s really hard to do.
Kelle: Yeah. Society has taught us that we need to be perfect and do everything exactly right so we can stay safe. Now we feel like we have to be responsible for everything and everyone to reach that impossible level of perfection.
Nina: And here we are, overwhelmed and spinning with stress and overwhelm and anxiety, headed straight for burnout.
Kelle: Yet no matter how much responsibility we accept, we are still blamed when something goes wrong.
Nina: Yeah. Say, your kid falls on the playground, someone will ask you why you weren’t watching him more closely. And likely you were watching. You watched him fall and ran to help. If you’re in a car accident, someone will ask why you didn’t swerve and you did but the Hummer EV did not.
Kelle: There are so many examples that you’ve probably personally experienced where you took on the shame and blame when you didn’t need to because it wasn’t your fault. That sense of emotional responsibility isn’t something that you can just let go of in a single moment.
Nina: No, it takes practice and time to understand what is in your control and what isn’t, to unlearn what society and maybe your family of origin have shown you is your responsibility.
Kelle: And rewrite the rules.
Nina: This is a big part of what we do with our Ambitious-Ish clients. We help them learn to separate their self-worth and their value from their responsibilities, what others think of them, and get clear on what they actually can control.
Kelle: Alright, so let’s land the plane here with a few fun questions. Alright first, what’s so amazing about being responsible and who told you that was important? How many times have you disappointed yourself in order to feel responsible? And just reading these questions I’m just like, yeah, because I was always the responsible one.
Nina: Yeah. How much pretending do you have to do to be responsible? Who would you be if you were as responsible to yourself as you were to others? Can you imagine how different you’d feel in your life if you gave yourself permission to not take responsibility for everything? How amazing would it feel to stop pretending?
Kelle: Yeah, you might inconvenience some people along the way and listen, that is okay. It sounds so simple, but this really does take practice. It takes intention and attention and repetition.
Nina: And a killer coach to help you feel safe along the way.
Kelle: Yes, coaches like us, we’re here for you and listen, we are always cheering you.
Nina: Thanks all. That’s all for today. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you next time.
Kelle: Yeah. See you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
Kelle: Who told you that was important, anyway? How many times have you disappointed yourself in order to feel responsible?
Nina: How much pretending do you have to do to be responsible? Who might you be if you were as responsible to yourself as you were to others? This is where we’re going today in this fourth episode of our burnout mini-series. We’re talking about over-responsibility and what Kelle and I sometimes call toxic responsibility.
Kelle: Let’s unpack how this tendency shows up in your life, and how poking holes in it can help you break free from burnout from the inside out.
Nina: If you’re ready to learn how to separate your self-worth and your value from your responsibilities, what others think of you and what you can control, you are in the right place.
Kelle: Oh, yeah, let’s get going. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. Hello, how was your weekend?
Kelle: It was so beachy. I was at the beach. It was so incredible. A lot of relaxation. I was in North Carolina, completely skirted the storm, so that was amazing. And then we went to South Carolina at the beach and just got so much relaxation time in, so much walking on the beach. I meditated on the beach several times a day. It was just so lovely and the food scene in Charleston.
Nina: Yum.
Kelle: The food is just ridiculous, it’s so good.
Nina: I mean, I love where we live, but there isn’t great food, let me be real. Actually, Salt Lake, there’s pretty good food. Park City, we’re a little behind.
Kelle: Okay, how was your weekend?
Nina: Oh, my gosh, it was the opposite of beachy. It was mountainy, which I love, which I love, I love. I took the boys mountain biking up Guardsman, Kelle. And if you listeners or Kelle, if you haven’t been up yet, it is probably going to peak in the next three days, it’s going to start turning brown. So, get up there, park at Bonanza Flat and do that five mile lap with your kids. It is so awesome. It smells so good. It’s just the golden hour all the time. It was awesome. I mean, it’s like pulling teeth to get my boys on their bikes up Guardsman, but once we’re there, we’re so pumped.
Kelle: I love it. Yes. Okay, let’s jump in here. Do you ever find yourself saying yes to everything even when it drains you? Or do you feel overwhelmed by the expectations you have of yourself?
Nina: So many ambitious women struggle with feeling overburdened by their responsibilities, often to the point of burnout. This happens all the time with the women we work with and we have totally been there, completely. Take our client Amanda, for example, when we met her at first on a consultation, she led with how overwhelmed she felt by her responsibilities and how her previous coping strategies weren’t working anymore. I’m going down, she explained.
Kelle: Yeah, she wasn’t showing up at her work, for her family or herself in a way that made her proud. She was juggling so many balls and was so afraid she had dropped something and what that would mean about her. She wasn’t doing anything well anymore, and she was afraid of losing control.
Nina: She explained that slowing down was too scary, but at the same time she couldn’t find fixes and felt like she was falling short in every area of her life. She was constantly dwelling on the negative, not letting anything productive come in.
Kelle: Yeah, she kept saying, “I’m failing. I’m going down.”
Nina: Retelling this story tugs at my heart. She was in such a painful, stuck place, burnout, yes, and just stuck in some very old painful stories.
Kelle: Yeah. Amanda was telling herself she was responsible for everything. It’s my fault they got an infection.
Nina: Yeah, so PS, Amanda is a badass surgeon, a woman in a male dominated field of orthopedic medicine. She’s not the only client who’s shared this thought with us in a coaching session.
Kelle: Totally. It’s my fault, this thought is shared by any number of clients from doctors and lawyers to stay at home moms and entrepreneurs alike, it’s always their fault.
Nina: Amanda is one of many humans and doctors who tries to take full responsibility for literally everything that happens to their stakeholders and humans around them and their patients.
Kelle: Yeah. She’s always felt like the fate of her patient, whether they healed well or not, rested entirely on her shoulders. If her patient responded poorly to surgery or got an infection, she quite literally felt like she was the reason they were not thriving.
Nina: Even though there are so many factors out of her control. She couldn’t control the human body and chemistry of her patients in the event of possible infection. She could do her absolute best and operate with the highest level of integrity but there was no certainty 100% here.
She definitely couldn’t control what the patient did once they left the hospital and were out in the world on their own. Would they follow the PT recommendations, take care of their new hip according to the RECs from the hospital? And she definitely could not control what her colleagues and nurses did post-op to make her patients comfortable and at ease as they recovered in the hospital before they left.
Kelle: All she could control were her actions and reactions. But like so many of us, Amanda wasn’t doing that, not because she wasn’t smart enough or committed enough. I mean, she was freaking brilliant, but because she didn’t know how.
Nina: And this one painful thought, it’s my fault was at the root of so much of her guilt and regret and self-doubt and overwhelm, so many of her disempowering behaviors, her overworking and overthinking and over-apologizing.
Kelle: Yeah, instead of heading home at a decent hour at the end of the day, she continued to tag patients onto her schedule and check in on their every need post-op. When she went on vacation, she was with her family, physically but mentally she was back in the hospital with her patients, worrying that they weren’t getting the care they needed and feeling guilty that she wasn’t there to care for them herself. And when they came back to see her, angry and frustrated about their pain and their slow healing, she took full responsibility and told herself she was a terrible doctor. I mean, cue the shame spiral.
Nina: Yeah. Amanda’s brain was taking way too much responsibility for the things she couldn’t control, because that’s literally what society had taught her to do. Of course, of course, of course, a surgeon has some responsibility for performing their role properly. They also have colleagues in the OR to support them and to rely on to complete a successful surgery and a post-op team, etc. But what Amanda was experiencing was over-responsibility and she was completely burning out.
Kelle: Yeah. And I just have to say, she would have patients come in and want surgery, need surgery ASAP. And she would accommodate them the best that she could if she could get OR time. And even in the event of making her home life, her family life, her out of hospital life, suffer in the process. And this isn’t just a doctor problem. In fact, all women are taught by our society to consider themselves responsible for everything in their lives and in the world. I mean, are we right, can we all relate here at all?
Nina: You may not be able to relate to the idea of someone getting an infection because of you or being a 10 on the pain scale because of you. But we’ll put money on the fact that you can relate to the feeling of being responsible for things that are out of your control. And this is what Kelle and I call toxic responsibility or over-responsibility and it’s a huge factor in a burnout mindset, in a disempowered mindset.
Kelle: This is where the lie of people pleasing is rooted. We can’t control other people’s feelings or thoughts. No matter what we do, we cannot make someone else feel happy or safe or disappointed or fill in the blank with any emotion. We are not responsible for their feelings.
Nina: But we tell ourselves we are, our clients, our kids, our patients, our spouses’ feelings.
Kelle: And here’s the thing, our thoughts create our feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings. This is the one simple truth of our coaching practice and one we repeat often.
Nina: We say yes when we might really want to say no, because of our social conditioning. We learned a long time ago that being helpful and responsive and reliable was good and polite and useful. It made the people around us happy. Their emotions were more important than ours. We were rewarded by society for being easy and good. It was our super power for a long, long time.
Kelle: Yeah, this super power could have also been wrapped in our family of origin. You may have had some kind of dysfunctional behavior you needed to scoot around in your family of origin, I mean, who doesn’t? And our brilliant brains learn how to keep us safe in this very specific way for survival. We were immaculate or made sure everything seemed immaculate to sort of fly under the radar, to sort of not exist or have needs or make requests and trigger a caretaker or loved ones’ unpredictable reactions.
We thought we could control them and their behavior by showing up in a certain way and keep ourselves safe in the process. But these survival mechanisms from youth that we use to feel in control aren’t useful anymore. We need to adapt to feel better in our lives.
Nina: The only thing you do have control over are your thoughts, feelings and actions, rock stars. So, if you’re a parent, maybe you find yourself hyper fixated on your kids’ grades. If little Joey doesn’t get A’s, then you feel like a terrible parent because they’re doomed for life and won’t get into college, will likely wind up on the streets selling drugs because they didn’t get A’s in fifth grade and that’s just all your fault. Even though their grades really don’t show anything other than Joe’s proficiency in class, your brain has decided that controlling that one thing will make you feel like you have control of everything, their destiny.
Or maybe you think if you could just stop leaving dirty dishes in the sink after your partner has repeatedly asked you not to, that would fix all your problems, because deep down your brain’s telling you, you’re the problem, it’s your fault. Have you ever had thoughts like this, Kelle?
Kelle: Yeah, all the time. And maybe yours aren’t exactly like one of those, but a time when your brain was trying to convince you that you control it all. Never mind that all these people and circumstances are actually out of your control.
Nina: Yeah. We’ve been socialized to take on the responsibility of everything from a young age and that’s how we learn to feel in control. I can totally relate here, at work, on the playing field, even in my marriage. If I couldn’t get the media placement, the team needed, the story in the New York Times, the impact the campaign did or didn’t make had everything to do with that. It was my fault. And I told myself I could do better and work harder at my own expense. And this is how I learned to feel safe and in control.
If I missed the pass or the assist in the big game and we lost, I told myself it was in a big way, my fault. I could have and should have done better. So, I trained harder, worked harder at my own expense. This also felt safe and something I could control. Oh, my gosh, and in my marriage, if I could blame myself for all of the dysfunctional behavior in my marriage, I mean, his chronic lying and infidelity. I made it all my responsibility, my fault, because that way I could feel in control of something that was actually completely out of my control. I told myself I was the problem and that way I could figure everything out and feel in control.
These are all very big lies, very big lies, because feeling out of control is really hard for high achieving ambitious women like us. When in reality we have very little control of anything on this planet except our own thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. So, check out episode number 21, it’s called The High Achiever’s Guide to Letting go of Control for some killer background here.
Kelle: Yeah. The chronic overwhelm, anxiety and stress you feel is because you’re trying to be responsible for way too many things and people, high achievers, come on, and that’s not your fault. It’s a product of our societal conditioning under the patriarchy.
Nina: See how burnout can actually come from within. It starts with the thoughts we’re thinking and the beliefs we have, old beliefs that have gone unchecked for a very long time.
Kelle: That’s why breaking free from the pull of these social messages and making decisions that are in alignment with your values, brings you back to the driver’s seat of your life.
Nina: When you learn to invest less in what you don’t value and more of what you do, you start to actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create. This inner work allows you to break free from all those patriarchal messages, telling you, you are responsible for how other people think and feel.
Kelle: Exactly. Instead, you start to accept responsibility for the decisions you make, empowered responsibility, aligned responsibility and you are so much less resentful.
Nina: Yeah. Resentment always points to where we’re unwittingly playing the victim. And taking ownership of your choices from an aligned place reduces resentment, because when you accept the role as the leader of your life, the CEO, you feel more empowered to say yes to what you want more of and no to what you want less of.
Kelle: Ambitious women like you and like us, we also tend to have a pretty close relationship with perfectionism, and that can up-level the sense of toxic responsibility too. We think thoughts like, if we don’t do it, it won’t get done or it won’t get done right.
Nina: Yeah, this is a big one. Highway signs are all blinking, burnout ahead, burnout ahead.
Kelle: And of course, there is the high achievers fear of failure, what we make that mean, what we make that mean about us.
Nina: Yeah. What thoughts come up for you when we talk about failure, doomsday thoughts or more neutral ones? Is failure part of success or the opposite?
Kelle: See, the way we filter our circumstances, how we label them and the stories we tell about them, makes us feel a certain way and show up from that place. So, a failure is something bad, shameful or something to avoid. Well, we are bound to run like hell from anything but success. And this is what it feels like to live on the hamster wheel and eventually burn out.
Nina: Can anyone relate here? When failure is something we see as part of success, something to learn from, we’re less afraid of it. And when we fall short, we’re more resilient knowing it’s part of the process. It belongs. We’re either winning or growing, right, Kelle?
Kelle: Always, always. I just love that so much, winning or growing. There is no losing, people. So, the remedy here isn’t just about delegating your responsibilities though. Let’s talk this through.
Nina: Yeah, delegating helps take the physical responsibility off your plate, but the emotional responsibility is still there. Let’s take an example. Have you ever asked your partner to handle something that was stressing you out, maybe coordinating next week’s school carpool while you’re out of town, or getting the snacks for the Mighty Mites football post-game treat this weekend and then found yourself still thinking about it and following up with them? Oh my God.
Kelle: Yeah.
Nina: It was supposed to be off your plate, but you aren’t feeling any less stressed about it.
Kelle: Yeah. That’s because there is a difference between physical responsibility and emotional responsibility. You can let go of physical responsibility while hanging on to the emotional responsibility and vice versa.
Nina: That’s why just delegating doesn’t stop your anxiety and stress and overwhelm because taking tasks off your to-do list doesn’t stop your feelings of responsibility, high achiever, are we right?
Kelle: Yeah. Say the same partner was supposed to pick up the kids from school yesterday so that you could take the dog to the vet, but as your dog is getting checked out, the school calls. Apparently your husband lost track of time and now you have to rush from the vet to the school.
Nina: It’s not your fault this happened, but you feel like you’re being judged.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s because in those scenarios you’re only addressing the physical responsibility when you hand the task off, not the emotional responsibility that you have been socialized to take on.
Nina: So why is it so hard to let go of all responsibility, emotional or otherwise? When you try to let go of responsibilities, it feels like giving up control and like we’ve said, for ambitious, high achieving women specifically, that’s really hard to do.
Kelle: Yeah. Society has taught us that we need to be perfect and do everything exactly right so we can stay safe. Now we feel like we have to be responsible for everything and everyone to reach that impossible level of perfection.
Nina: And here we are, overwhelmed and spinning with stress and overwhelm and anxiety, headed straight for burnout.
Kelle: Yet no matter how much responsibility we accept, we are still blamed when something goes wrong.
Nina: Yeah. Say, your kid falls on the playground, someone will ask you why you weren’t watching him more closely. And likely you were watching. You watched him fall and ran to help. If you’re in a car accident, someone will ask why you didn’t swerve and you did but the Hummer EV did not.
Kelle: There are so many examples that you’ve probably personally experienced where you took on the shame and blame when you didn’t need to because it wasn’t your fault. That sense of emotional responsibility isn’t something that you can just let go of in a single moment.
Nina: No, it takes practice and time to understand what is in your control and what isn’t, to unlearn what society and maybe your family of origin have shown you is your responsibility.
Kelle: And rewrite the rules.
Nina: This is a big part of what we do with our Ambitious-Ish clients. We help them learn to separate their self-worth and their value from their responsibilities, what others think of them, and get clear on what they actually can control.
Kelle: Alright, so let’s land the plane here with a few fun questions. Alright first, what’s so amazing about being responsible and who told you that was important? How many times have you disappointed yourself in order to feel responsible? And just reading these questions I’m just like, yeah, because I was always the responsible one.
Nina: Yeah. How much pretending do you have to do to be responsible? Who would you be if you were as responsible to yourself as you were to others? Can you imagine how different you’d feel in your life if you gave yourself permission to not take responsibility for everything? How amazing would it feel to stop pretending?
Kelle: Yeah, you might inconvenience some people along the way and listen, that is okay. It sounds so simple, but this really does take practice. It takes intention and attention and repetition.
Nina: And a killer coach to help you feel safe along the way.
Kelle: Yes, coaches like us, we’re here for you and listen, we are always cheering you.
Nina: Thanks all. That’s all for today. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you next time.
Kelle: Yeah. See you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
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