Busy and Pissed Off: Why do people need me so much?
A family member needs to vent to you about Aunt Frida’s new toxic boyfriend. Your friend needs to see you because she’s going through a nasty breakup and you’re the only one who understands. Your son’s class project snuck up on you and you need to create an entire science project with him in 2 hours. Yeah, and he’s 5. Your boss just sent you a project that was botched by a colleague because she knows you’re the “yes girl.”
Sound familiar?
Why does everyone need you so much?
Listen, when you’re so good at everything you do, it’s hard for people to not come to you first. I know it’s not easy to say no, but it just might save you and create room for others to step up.
Yours truly was once an overcommitted mess. My family calls me “the survivor” because I’ve found my way out of every mess you can imagine and ended up thriving, until I couldn’t keep that up anymore. No one can keep that up forever, not even me. Not even you.
I remember the phrase that saved me, it is “I can’t.” No explanation, no apologies, no floundering. It’s “I can’t” and that’s it. It started with those that are closest to me. My husband needed me to help him pay a bill online. Since I had always taken care of the details of this, he didn’t even know how to do it. I had made my own nightmare by being indispensable. I was busy doing something else so I said, “I can’t.” At first he was surprised, maybe even a little frustrated, but he started to do it himself. And guess what? He learned how to pay a bill online and I haven’t had to help him since. This created more space for me to not be the one helping all of the time. And it improved our relationship. He didn’t feel so helpless and even offered to take over a few other online family tasks for me. BINGO!
My daughter was old enough to start doing dishes, so I showed her how. There were a couple of times that there was still food on the plates and she didn’t clean so well, but I didn’t have to do the dishes. Now, she’s an expert dishwasher and I take the time she and my son are doing chores to take a luxurious bath with all the good smelling stuff. The bath makes me feel better and my kids feel good about their contribution to how the family needs to get stuff done. Truthfully, they also like the allowance too! My kids notice how relaxed I am to get out of my luxurious bath that now they bring me tea and even set up my bath sometimes. It’s a great perk that came from expecting more from them and less from myself.
What are you going to say “I can’t” to?
I understand that it’s much more difficult when it comes to work. I can’t delegate my blogs because then it wouldn’t be my voice. BUT I can ask for people to give me topics and pick what’s most exciting for me to write about. Just like this one. Ask for help. Collaborate with people who will be fun to work with, pick a project that you are excited about. It makes those mundane tasks much easier to delegate. And others might be really good at those mundane tasks but you might not even know that because you’ve taken over everything yourself. It might be scary at first, but people will most often step up or learn what they have to do.
Pick one thing this week to allow someone else to step up to. And if you can do one thing, you can add on the next week and the next week and the next. Before you know it, you will not be the first to be asked to do things and you’ll have time to yourself.
I promise it’s worth it.
At the same time, are you feeling a pit in your stomach that says, “Yeah Drew, but my situation is different. I HAVE TO do everything or it won’t come out right.”
I hear that. And it begs to do a little deeper work. Who would you be if you aren’t the one to do everything? What are you purposely missing out on by doing everything? What do you get from being the person everyone turns to? These are questions to dig into in therapy. It’s quite possible that being busy or indispensable are ways you’ve developed in response to meeting a need or avoiding a need. It’s what you do, it’s not who you are. If this piques your interest, get in touch. I love doing this work with clients. It’s life changing.
And THAT is something I CAN and love to do.
