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Kamini Wood works with high achievers on letting go of stress, overwhelm and anxiety that comes with trying to do everything, and trying to do it all perfectly
Voiceover: [00:00:00] Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Kamini Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit. Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live. Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way
Kamini Wood: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening, thank you for taking some time to spend here with me. And t- today, there's a particular kind of leader that I want to address. You're the one that people lean on, your team, your family, your friends, your partner.
You're the one with the steady voice when everyone else is shaking. You're the one who shows up every time no matter what's going on, what's underneath. You're the one who holds the space. [00:01:00] People call you the rock. They say you're unshakable. They say y- they just don't know how you do it. And here's the thing about being the rock.
A rock does not get held. That's what I wanna talk about today because there's a version of strength in our culture that is, if you look at it close enough, a particular kind of unreachability, if you will, a capability so total that nobody can offer you anything. It's a self-sufficiency so complete that there's no opening for someone else to potentially bring something to you to support you, and this is the leader that I refer to as the one who can't be held.
It's not always you who s- it's not the you who you may have set out to be, but for most people that I end up working with in this position, it's the who that they had to become for whatever the reason is that they were f- they were pushed into becoming this version of themselves. And the cost of staying in that role longer than it serves you is the cost that I wanna actually [00:02:00] name and talk about today because there's a specific kind of loneliness that comes with being the strong one, and I don't know that a lot of people really talk about it or really name it 'cause here's what almost nobody names about your strength.
Being uncontainable is not in and itself a personality or trait or virtue. It's a stance, and stances are learned. They're learned where the cost of needing was too high, right? If you grew up in a home where there wasn't a reliable adult for you to bring things to or, you know, for you to ask help from, you learned early that needing was a problem, and maybe the needing was met with irritation or, uh, frustration.
Maybe it was met with absence or, um, you know, the person that you asked for kinda collapsed when you brought them something, and you had to take care of them instead of them supporting you. Maybe you learned that being a low-maintenance child was- The best way to stay safe, to keep away from conflict, so [00:03:00] you stopped needing things visibly.
You handled things yourself. You became the kid who didn't add to the pile of things that had to be addressed or managed. You read every adult in the room, and you figured out which version of you could they tolerate, and so you became that version, and you learned to be self-contained. You learned to self-soothe.
You learned to process things alone. You learned to not let it show on your face or on your being that something hurt or that you were needing support, and the world actually rewarded you for it. You know, you were told by teachers, "Hey, you know, this, your child..." You, you were, maybe you weren't told, but your parents were told, "Oh my gosh, your child is so easy."
Friends liked the supportive friend, and then you get older, and bosses like the employee who doesn't escalate. Partners liked the partner who didn't need much, you know? They were the easygoing partner. Eventually, you became the leader who absorbed the team's hard stuff and never asked them to absorb any of your stuff, and this is the part that nobody recognizes when they call you strong, right?
You're not strong because you don't [00:04:00] need things. You're strong because that's what you learned you needed to be. At a very early developmental age, that needing things was not safe And so your pressure pattern, your survival pattern became that you're not gonna need things. You're gonna be the strong one.
And I wanna say, I d- I'm not disputing that that being strong is not... It- I'm not saying that it's a bad thing at all, but it can become a, a cage in and of itself. So I wanna just name what's happening inside of a person who can't be held by others or isn't allowed to be held by others. When someone tries to offer you something, maybe support, comfort, attention, help, your nervous system actually doesn't know how to even interpret it.
It c- it doesn't know how to interpret that as a gift. It almost interprets it as a demand that if y- if they offer you something, you're gonna have to give something in return, and you have to figure out what to do with that offer. So y- you think about, do I accept it? D- what does it really mean? Um, are they capable of helping you?
Are you gonna owe them something after [00:05:00] you accept this? Whether you're gonna have to manage their feelings about your acceptance. And so in the end, you end up just declining, or you accept it as a small way that you can manage, or you redirect their offer to help you back towards them, and you've become super good at this.
You can take any moment of someone trying to support you and turn it into a moment of you supporting them, and they don't even notice that you've pivoted, right? So here's the thing that's happening underneath. Your nervous system never lets anything in. The co-regulation, that felt sense of being held by another person's care, doesn't actually reach you because you don't know how to accept it.
Like, there's not a part of you. You don't have, like, an opening for that, um, because one was never really built. And this is the part that most people don't realize. Co-regulation actually is a skill. It's developed. It requires you to be able to receive from another person, right? Just as you co-regulate somebody else and they're able to receive your calmness, it's about you being able to receive it, letting their set steadiness affect you, their care to [00:06:00] hold you.
And if you have never co-regulated as a child, you don't know... Y- you don't actually even have a neural pathway for that. And that pathway has to built, be built o- on its own. And it's built slowly. It's built in safe relationships where receiving is allowed. And you can start small And build incrementally.
And most leaders that I end up working with in this position have never had a pathway built. They've spent their entire lives in a one-way loop where they're co-regulating everybody else, but nobody's able to co-regulate them. And the system never restores because that restoration requires receiving, and they can't.
And this isn't a willpower thing that I'm talking about. This is just truly your, your body, your nervous system doesn't know how to do that. And the cost of showing up is, you know, first, in your body. You don't have a way to discharge what you carry. So most people when they're stressed or sad or scared, they get a small amount of relief from being seen by someone that they trust.
And the body stress lowers just a little bit in the presence of that safe person and that safe, that safe, [00:07:00] um, that safe space. That's all about what psychological safety creates. But you don't get a release because nobody's offering it to you because the system can't take it in. So the stress that you're feeling just continues to accumulate in your body, and it comes out in things that, that you don't even know how to name, right?
And, and that's what ends up happening, is your body ends up holding onto this. And you can't put it down because the only way to put it down is to let someone c- help you carry it, and again, you don't know how to do that. The second part that or way that this shows up is in your relationships. The people who love you, you know, live with the fact that, you know, you're constantly carrying things.
They, they can see that you're carrying things, but they can't actually help you. They can't reach you. Their, uh, their desire to help you actually bounces off. They've tried to bring support to you, and then they watch that it doesn't land. And so sometimes what ends up happening is they stop offering it, right?
They just, they stop trying because it's not that they don't love you, but they also recognize that it hasn't landed before. And so it's kind of like the idea of if you keep asking somebody to hang out and they keep saying [00:08:00] no to you, eventually you're gonna stop asking them to hang out. It's kind of what happens in our relationships, too.
I mean, some people will stay close to us and continue, but a lot of people will just kind of back off. And then another place where this shows up is in your leadership. You know, you come... You become alone in a way that you can't articulate. You're surrounded by people. You're respected in the role that you have, but you're, you're alone because nobody can actually be with you.
Nobody can support you. There's not that, that support structure in place because, y- you know, you can't collapse in front of anybody. You can't actually ask for help And so what ends up happening is you have a mask on that you've got this, you're the strong one, and then maybe you go to your office and collapse behind closed doors.
Maybe you find yourself numbing in different ways, whether it be, yes, I... definitely with some of my clients, we've talked about the overuse of alcohol. Sometimes it's, "I'm gonna numb out by watching, you know, Netflix." Um, sometimes it's eating. You know, those types of things. So this is what happens when we are the leader who cannot actually be helped.
So how [00:09:00] do you know if you're independent versus this idea of being uncontainable? Because they kinda look the same on the outside, the self-sufficient person and then the unreceiving survivor both kinda handle their own stuff. So here's what the uncontainable looks like from the inside. The offer of help, when somebody actually offers to help you, it produces this tightening rather than softening.
When someone says, "What can I do?" your body actually braces instead of opening and, and feeling softer. You actually can't think of what to ask for. Even when you need something, it's really hard for you to name what you might need. Even if somebody's sincerely offering, you, you truly just cannot generate a request.
Or you offer them kind of, like, this little tiny fake task just to make them then feel better. Or when someone insists on doing something for you, you feel a flicker of resentment, not because they're wrong that they're asking you to, to help you do something, but because the receiving makes you feel like you owe them something, it's gonna cost you something, and you feel safer alone with the problem than being supported through it.
[00:10:00] So here's what genuine independence looks like. If you're genuinely independent, the offer of help produces a softening. You know, you might decline, but the decline is completely clean. It's... There's no bracing. You can name what you need. If somebody asks you something, you can say, "Hey, this is what I really need," um, or, "This would be helpful."
You can receive without the feeling of guilt, right? You can actually receive from somebody and genuinely feel grateful and thankful, and you don't feel like you owe them something. And you feel safer connected through hard things than trying to, you know, muscle through them alone. Uncontainable braces, um, against support, right?
Independent releases support cleanly, right? So again, if you're uncontainable, you're gonna brace against that support. It's gonna feel, mm, kinda icky. If you're just... If you're actually more independent, it's gonna feel Fine. It's gonna feel soft. So if your default has been bracing, that's information. It's not something to judge yourself for.
It's just, "Oh, now I have a w- an [00:11:00] awareness." So here is what I want you to consider. This is not about being less capable. This is not about being less strong. This isn't about trying to get you to be weaker or needy, uh, or any of that. This is about building a m- a throughway where you can receive support, right?
Just because you didn't receive support when you were s- when you were younger doesn't mean we can't change and build a new neural pathway. It w- We wanna build a new neural pathway that allows you to accept someone else's care, and it's built slowly. It's built in safe ... And when I say safe, I'm not talking about just physical safety.
I'm al- I'm really talking about psychological and emotional safety. It's built in tiny moments of letting yourself be supported in things that don't feel like really high stakes, right? Like, maybe it's letting a friend pay for dinner, or letting your partner make you a cup of tea at the end of the day without you feeling like you owe your partner something now, or letting a colleague handle the thing that you would normally rescue.
It's [00:12:00] built by surviving the discomfort of receiving and learning in your nervous system that receiving does not cost you anything. Receiving does not mean that you owe somebody something, and that the person, you know, that is offering something to you might genuinely be wanting to support you. You absolutely can learn this.
The pathway can be built. It's not too late. We always have the ability to pivot. If you'd like to talk about how coaching could support you with this or anything else in terms of your professional and personal world, feel free to book a time with me anytime at coachwithkamini.com, and until next time, stay well.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Rise Up Live Joy Your Way. For more information, Book a chat with Kamini at www.chatwithKamini.com, or visit her website at www.kaminiwood.com. You can also find Kamini on Facebook or Instagram username, it's authentic me. Thank you for [00:13:00] listening!