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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: Welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening, thank you for spending some time here with me. And there's a particular kind of competent person that I wanna talk to today. You're the one who gets called when something's on fire.
Uh, you're the one who doesn't ask for help because you're usually the one who can figure it out the fastest. Uh, people rely on you. Uh, maybe your job even exists in part because you're just really, really good [00:01:00] at it. You're the one in the family group chat who books all the flights or, you know, knows which hotels to go to.
You're the one in the friend group who remembers everybody's birthday. You're the one at work who gets pulled in to fix what other people can't, and you're the one who runs the entire household. You anticipate the carpool issues, the field trip permission slips, the lunch that needs to be packed. Maybe you've even replied to all the emails that everyone else is avoiding.
So if any of that resonates with you, you probably feel maybe a small flicker of pride right now where you're like, "Yeah, yeah, that's me. I, I do that." Um, but maybe there's also a little bit of tiredness there, too, and I wanna kinda address that little bit of tiredness because somewhere along the way, that, that capability that you have stopped being a skill and started to become more of, um, I wanna say...
And I don't mean this in a, in a really demeaning way at all, but it becomes almost like a cage, right? It becomes this, um... It's like a capability trap, if you will, right? It becomes, "I'm so [00:02:00] capable, and yet the ca- the capability that I exert has now become almost like this trap that I'm stuck in." The traits that make you so valuable at work are often the traits that may have started from a survival skill, right?
The hypervigilance that makes you the person who can read the room, the ability to anticipate others' needs before they even ask, the reliability that means you always deliver, the composure where, you know, you're holding steady when people around you feel like they are totally thrown into chaos, and you're able to still stay grounded.
Uh, those, those are definitely skills, first of all. They're also often something you may have learned early on in your life, whether in childhood or somewhere through your experiences, where you needed to track moods or you needed to track emotions or maybe you had to stay quiet so things didn't get worse or you needed to anticipate what somebody was gonna need in order to make sure that there were no waves, right?
So you learned to scan. You learned to [00:03:00] predict. You learned to soothe. You learned to be the easygoing one, the helpful one, the one that didn't add to the, the pile of stuff, the dependable one, because, you know, that kept you safe. Um, sometimes you even learned not to be visible because if you were visible, then that meant potential chaos.
So The, you know, by being the capable one, the fact that you were good at it, you actually got rewarded for it. I think, I know for me in school, teachers would often call me, um, you know, the, such a reliable young lady. Um, and so they, they loved me 'cause I was dependable, and friends learned to lean on you.
And, you know, at work you get promoted and, um, you lead teams and you run groups and all the things, and the system that helped you survive becomes also the system that drives you moving forward in other aspects of your life. And nobody stops to ask whether you've ever been allowed to not be that, right?
Do you ever get a moment to not be the [00:04:00] most capable person in the room? And I'll just say you probably haven't. If you're like me, if you're a high achiever who's been the, the one whose people have been depending on, you most probably haven't gotten a chance to, to stop, right? And what I mean by that is it doesn't matter if it's a weekday or a weekend or on vacation or...
You're, you're always on. You're always the one getting things done So when we're in this capability trap, what's actually happening? Well, your nervous system has learned that the cost of not doing that, the cost of not being the dependable one, the cost of not having all things together, the cost of not, you know, being able to handle all of everybody's problems, that was too high.
You know, somebody would get upset, somebody would be, um, give you the silent treatment. It just felt like that was scarier than being the person who can handle everything or being the easygoing one. And so your nervous system absolutely cataloged that. It absolutely said, "Okay, um, the way to stay safe is to be-- [00:05:00] to, to show up in this very dependable way."
So it constantly scans, making sure that nothing is dropped, making sure that you're anticipating everything that needs to be done. You know, "Did I forget anything? Did I email everybody? Did I sign the things that need to be signed?" You're constantly scanning, and it never turns off. It's constantly running underneath, you know, any meetings that you're having.
It's running underneath what's going on at home. You're just constantly scanning, and you're never really ever able to get to this restful place because you're just making sure, you know, what needs to get done. And so when you finally sit down, maybe to rest, your body actually doesn't know how. And so, I don't know, I, I know this is something I've been working on, is, is really truly just sitting down and resting.
But a lot of times, our nervous system doesn't know how to rest. So the moment we go to sit down, we find something else to do because that's just how we've been trained. And so, you know, it, it-- this isn't about a, you know, push even harder. [00:06:00] This is about recognizing that, wow, my, my nervous system has been attuned to this.
It, it actually doesn't mean that you're addicted to work. It just means that there is a safety that has been, um, driven through that, right? And, and I'm, I'm really truly speaking from personal experience with this. Like, I know that I've said, like, I'm a workaholic. Mm, I'm not really. It's been-- That's been the safety mechanism for me, though.
Like, that's-- that was a survival pattern, always doing things, always getting things done. So when we recognize that this is a survival pattern, we can actually shift things around. Uh, and it's really important that you hear this. This isn't something that's wrong with you. This isn't about being shame, you know, focused.
Uh, it doesn't mean that you don't know how to rest. It just means that your nervous system has learned to stay busy. Your nervous system has learned to always have things taken care of. Now, I will say that this, you know, I talk about where does this show up? What's the cost of this? Well, you know, your body's gonna pay the price.
I hear [00:07:00] from my clients all the time about the number of-- I mean, migraines are, and headaches are so constant. I hear about digestive issues constantly. Our shoulders hurt. Our back hurts. Why? Because our body's holding all of this stress, and the f- stress and fatigue, I mean, eventually, our body is going to communicate to us.
You know, we think we can take a vacation, we're gonna feel better, and it doesn't solve the issue because this is a nervous system thing that we've gotta pay attention to. It shows up in our relationships. You know, the people closest to us, they experience our competence. You know, sometimes they experience our competence with a little bit of distance, but sometimes they actually also, um, they, they get, they, they actually, uh, get used to it.
So what ends up happening is they kind of depend on it, and it just becomes this quiet thing that happens where you're just the one who takes care of everything, and everybody in your family kind of depends on it. But then what's happening underneath is this scene back or behind the scenes, underneath all of it is resentment is building within you because your plate is so full.
[00:08:00] All these things are being handled by you, but it's because we've, we've kind of taught people that we're the ones that have it together. We'll handle it. And then what ends up also happening, not just resentment, but you start to feel kind of lonely in it, right? Like, I'm doing this all by myself It's-- And this will have an effect at work too, right?
And, and this is really important because I think that if you are leading teams, what ends up happening too is that your team starts to learn that you're gonna absorb everything, and they actually, they themselves stop growing and developing. And we think about being a leader, we want our team members to grow and to be able to maybe even grow beyond where we are, right?
When we're people leading, we want our people to continue to grow. We want their competence to grow as well. And so if we're constantly doing for them, they don't actually learn how to do it themselves. And the cost really does compound because every time that you continue to operate this way over and over again, year after year, uh, it becomes more [00:09:00] and more part of, you know, your patterns, and it becomes more and more solidified.
So how do you know if you're somebody who is, uh, you know, kind of in this, um, in this survival mechanism? So if it's, if it looks like, um, you know, you just agree before you've even considered something, right? You're just like, "Yep, I got it. Yep, I've got it right here." You literally are just taking care of things before you've even paid attention.
Um, you can't say no, even if you want to. That would be an example. We talk about this with boundaries, like that's an example of not having boundaries, but it's awesome example of maybe over-functioning here. Also, pay attention to the resentment. You know, if you start to feel resentment after you've done something, that could be a little, little, uh, nudge around what's happening inside of you, right?
But if your capability is actually a choice, what it's gonna look like is you're gonna pause before you actually say yes to something. You know, um, you're gonna be able to say [00:10:00] no and not feel guilty about it. And when you do say yes to things, you're not gonna feel so resentful about it. So again, if the reflex is super fast or it's anxious or it's resentful, that's a moment to pause and say, "Wait, wow, I might be in this capability trap.
I might be over-functioning." You know, this is something I talk to my clients about all the time because I think when we're high achievers and we've learned to function this way and we've gotten used to people depending on us, it's actually really scary to do anything differently. And we get scared that then if we don't show up that way with people, now they're also gonna abandon us.
They're gonna leave us. They're gonna reject us. It's the same thing I say about boundaries, which is, you know, if we shift and we make changes for our better and the people in our world cannot adjust to the new way we're showing up and they're not willing to have a conversation around it, maybe, maybe they weren't the best relationship for us to have in the first place.
And I know that's really tough to hear, but sometimes we have to pay attention to what's, you know, best for ourselves in the long run. And I don't mean that in a selfish way. I [00:11:00] mean it in a very self-aware way If you'd like to chat with how coaching could support you on something like this or to move you forward professionally or personally and would like to just discuss how that could look and what it would, what it would entail, 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 listening!