96. Responsibility Hoarding
Many of us were trained from a young age to take responsibility.
This is a useful skill. Taking responsibility for our choices and actions is important.
However, sometimes you may try to take responsibility for things that are actually not yours to take responsibility for.
And I especially see this with high achievers who have really high standards and want everything to be done well.
They begin to take responsibility for others’ work or actions or even emotions, trying to control everything so that they can create whatever outcome they’re hoping for.
But of course this does not work.
Because we can’t control others.
And we can’t actually take their responsibility or their agency away from them either.
This way of doing things, which we’re going to call responsibility hoarding, is also exhausting.
It’s a lot of work to be responsible for everything.
And if you’re anything like me and my clients, you don’t actually want to be responsible for everything.
You just want it all to get done really well and on time.
Sounds innocent. But it’s not.
Because when we think this way, we end up taking over everything, denying others the right to their own responsibility and wearing ourselves out in the process.
And, of course, responsibility hoarding doesn’t just happen at work.
It can occur in all areas of life. Relationships. Family dynamics. Even friendships.
If you feel like you’re always the one keeping everything together, this is a must listen for you.
And even if you don’t think you responsibility hoard, have a listen. We’re literally socialized to do this, so you may be doing it without even realizing it.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What responsibility hoarding is, why we do it, and what to do about it.
The difference between taking responsibility and blaming ourselves.
Where responsibility hoarding has some crossover with trying to control other people.
What responsibility hoarding might look like in your job and how to spot when you’re doing it.
Why it’s not your fault that you feel the urge to take on the responsibilities of other people.
How to take responsibility for your responsibility hoarding and decide what is your responsibility to take.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about responsibility hoarding.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, and happy Wednesday y'all. I hope you're having a lovely day today. I'm having a little bit of a low energy day. I woke up a little earlier than usual. Not on purpose, not because an alarm, my body was just like, “Hello, I am awake.” And I could have gone back to sleep, but I decided to just go ahead and get up because it's been warm. It's summer in Sacramento and if I wake up early like that I have the opportunity to take a walk when it's still pretty cool out, which is really nice.
So I got up and it was a great walk and a nice morning, but I am feeling just a little bit low energy. And that's okay because you know what? We're not going to feel high energy all the time. And there's lots of ways to enjoy a day when our energy is a little bit lower. For instance, later I'll probably be sitting on the couch enjoying some of the Sandman series that just dropped on Netflix that I'm pretty excited about.
I read some of the Sandman graphic novels years and years ago, and I never finished the series. I don't really remember why or what happened there, but I'm pretty excited. It's a cool story, or what I remember of it. I've only seen a few episodes of the series. And I just remember really liking the graphic novel. And I generally like Neil Gaiman stuff a lot. So I'm excited about that. And it's a great thing to do on a low energy day.
All right, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're not talking about high energy versus low energy. Although that may be something interesting to talk about later. Let me know if y'all want me to talk about that. But today I want to talk about responsibility hoarding, which is this phrase that I learned from the wonderful Maggie Reyes, and Maggie Reyes learned it from the wonderful Amanda Hess.
And I talked to Amanda Hess recently, we did a peer coaching session and I asked her about it and if I could talk to you all about it and she said yes. And she actually said that she thinks she heard that phrase from someone else, but she can't remember who it was. So whoever you are out there who originated this phrase of responsibility hoarding, thank you, you're a fucking genius. It's a really helpful phrase.
Okay, so what is responsibility hoarding and how does it pertain to having an extraordinary career and a satisfying as fuck life? Responsibility hoarding is when you take all the responsibility, including the responsibility that does not belong to you. So for a lot of us, we were trained from a very young age to take responsibility. And that can actually be a really great skill set.
It's a good thing to be able to do to take responsibility. To take responsibility for our choices, take responsibility for our actions, take responsibility for the way we're talking to ourselves. Even if we learned those thought patterns from society and culture and our childhood and all that shit. Once the thought patterns exist in our head, we're the ones who can actually do something about them.
And so there is an interesting idea in here too, just with responsibility that taking responsibility doesn't mean blaming. We can take responsibility for stuff without blaming ourselves. We can invite others to take responsibility for stuff without blaming them. That's probably something I'll also want to dig into on another episode.
But something I see, especially with high achievers and my clients is taking responsibility for other people's things. Taking responsibility for other people's work, taking responsibility for other people's feelings, taking responsibility for other people's actions. And I think this has a lot of crossover also with trying to control other people.
And listen, I get the urge, I talk about the things I need to learn about also. But the real truth is we can't control other people because they have free will. And we can have boundaries, and we can have consequences if those people are our direct reports or our children. Those are the people for whom I would say consequences are appropriate. For everyone else I would say boundaries, right?
But we can't actually control what other people do. And if you're anything like me, your brain is like, “That's just very fucking rude.” And I get that, and I feel it deeply in my bones. And also it's kind of what's beautiful about life, is that we all have freewill. And we also have freewill and can do whatever the fuck we want for whatever reason we want, but so can other people. And that's just the way things shake out.
And again, there may be consequences, but we still have freewill all the same, which is a pretty exciting prospect. Okay, so responsibility hoarding comes up, when we try to take responsibility for other people's shit. And also when we're not willing to let other people have consequences for their own things that they should be responsible for.
So there's lots of ways that this can look, right? Like if someone in your life, whether it's your direct report at work, or your kiddo, or your significant other is making a choice and you don't like it, you may feel the urge to say something about it. You may even say something about it, and they may not want to do what you think they should do. And then they may get some consequences through taking their action.
Not even consequences from you, just like life consequences, like things might happen. And one way we hoard responsibility is to try to like come in and rescue other people and take responsibility when it's actually someone else's business, someone else's responsibility to handle whatever the thing is.
Other ways that we try to responsibility hoard is kind of trying to be the one who's in control and the one who has all the answers. And listen, I get it. A lot of y'all are fucking brilliant and you do have great ideas. And you have thought things through, and you do know a way to do them that would be streamlined and beautiful. And there are certain times when it's the time to tell everyone else about our streamlined and beautiful plan to get shit done.
But there are also other times when that's kind of just not our business. And I think that can be a really hard pill to swallow for some people sometimes. I think some of us get this idea in our heads of like, well, if I have a great idea about how to do it, then I should get to be in charge and tell everyone about it. And I'm all for you going out and trying to find ways to do that.
And also, sometimes we then try to kind of go into other people's areas and territories and take responsibility for their stuff and run it because we have great ideas. And that just doesn't always work. And quite frankly, other people don't always appreciate it. And it's not always our place.
So even if you have a direct report at work, figuring out like how do you manage them? How do you guide them? How do you lead them? And then what is theirs? And when do they get to run with the thing? And when do they get to make the decisions?
For people like me who kind of have a more like anxious inner self, it can be really hard to let other people do things. Especially knowing that those other people may not do things in the way that we want them to. And they may not do them to our standards or our caliber. And one of the things I think that's really interesting is to realize that they're not necessarily supposed to be able to.
A friend of mine had a senior leader one time say to them like, yeah, of course, your direct report can't do that in the amount of time you could because if they could do it in the amount of time you could, they would be in your job. They're not in your job, they're not at your level, and they're not supposed to be able to perform at your level.
And I think about that all the time, I think it's a really killer insight because so often we're looking around our lives, expecting other people to do things the way that we do them when they're not able to do the things the way we do them.
And we look around our lives at other people who can do things we're not at their level, and then we beat ourselves up versus being like, yeah, I'm not at their level, of course I can't do it that way, it's fine. Because lots of people can do stuff at lots of different levels that can still create really amazing results. And we don't all have to be the best and be perfect to do a job that matters.
And I find that for me and my clients, we often struggle both ways with that. We struggle with comparing ourselves to people who can do a better job than us and then feeling shitty about ourselves. And then we also struggle with judging other people who aren't at our level and then having shitty thoughts about them.
And it's interesting because with that setup you kind of feel shitty either way, right? You feel shitty when you're really excellent at doing the thing, and then you feel shitty when you're not the most excellent at doing the thing. So it just doesn't seem like a great setup if we're going to feel shitty either way.
Okay, as ever, this podcast is going in all the directions all the time all at once, and that's fine with me because that's just how my brain works and how I like to talk to y'all about stuff. But let's circle back, so responsibility hoarding is what happens when taking responsibility gets, let's say like maybe over activated, right? It's like too much growth, right? Maybe even too much of a good thing.
Which I think is so interesting because in our culture I think we do often have this idea that like if something's good then more is better, but that's just not actually true. Like one crème brulée is really good, one bite of crème brulée is really good. But like eight crème brulées is probably not going to be great. I'm probably not actually going to be able to enjoy eight and I may feel very uncomfortable.
And even things that are like very good for you, like water. You can actually have too much water. It might sound wild for you to contemplate that but that's a real thing that can happen. And responsibility is like this. The ability to take responsibility is in-fucking-credible, it's actually a really important skill to have. I was going to say as an adult, but I think actually as a child too. It's just a really great skill to have because if you can't take responsibility, that's really going to limit a lot of what you can do in life.
It's going to limit your growth, it's going to limit what you're capable of. It's really hard to grow and improve if you can't take responsibility for the level you're at and for the things you're doing and the results you're creating. But again, too much responsibility taking can backfire. And some of how we're doing that, like I was talking about before, is we're trying to take other people's responsibility away, we're trying to hoard all the responsibility.
This happens a lot in teams at work, but also in family units. And I think stereotypically it happens a lot with moms. And there's a lot of reasons why that is and a lot of it is patriarchal bullshit. And the way that people train girls and women from babyhood to be emotionally responsible for everyone else, but also all kinds of other responsible.
It's like moms are always the keeper of all the things. Not always, but this is like the stereotype, right? Moms always know where shit is. They always have in their like little mental rolodex who needs a dentist appointment, all this stuff.
And so I want to just say that so that you know if you’re responsibility hoarding and if what I'm talking about in this episode, you're like, “Oh shit, that's me.” Again, we can take responsibility for the fact that you're doing that.
We're not going to take responsibility for you learning that from culture, right? It's like culture taught that to you. That part wasn't your responsibility because when we're children, our brains just absorb everything around us. They absorb the culture of our family of origin, they absorb the culture of our learning institutions, they absorb the culture of culture at large, they absorb the culture of books and TV shows and movies and all of that.
I just know there's so much shit in my brain that's because I read a lot of R.L. Stine and there's also so much shit in my brain because I read a lot of like, Sweet Valley High, which I don't remember it all, but I remember reading, and like romance novels. And anyways, stuff like that, we get all these ideas in our head because our brain learns through everything we engage with.
So that was like a meta lesson within the lesson there that we can take responsibility for the thought patterns that exist, but we're not going to judge ourselves and beat us up for those being there because that wasn't something we did. And even if it was something we did by reading a lot of Sweet Valley High, we didn't mean to do this. This is not what we meant. We just meant to read an interesting, entertaining book.
Okay, mini lesson complete. In families and work teams this often happens where one person sort of like becomes the responsibility holder. And the reason I'm saying responsibility hoarding instead of responsibility holding is because I think sometimes when we think about it as responsibility holding, we think about it as like this good thing, like we're doing a good job. And especially because we've been trained to do this and we're culturally rewarded for it, it can be really hard to let this behavior go.
But I see this behavior cause people a lot of suffering. And I think re-casting it through the lens of like you're hoarding everyone else's responsibility and not allowing them to have any is extremely powerful in a way that saying you're holding the responsibility doesn't have the same punch to it, if you know what I mean.
And when we are responsibility hoarding, we tend to be both kind of miserable because we can't actually be responsible for other people. So trying to take on all that responsibility is very stressful and very taxing. And also, we're robbing all these other people of the opportunity to have their own responsibility.
And it'll be interesting too, because we’ll try to take responsibility for whatever they're doing, and then we'll be annoyed at them for not taking responsibility. But it's like we're constantly trying to take that away from them and not giving them the opportunity.
So like what we talked about before, it's like if someone does something and then it doesn't work out, and then you step in and save them because you think it's your responsibility to do that, you are potentially removing them from consequences that could actually be really beneficial to them.
And listen, there's always extreme examples. I'm not saying like don't literally like save a child who's in front of a bus. Definitely save someone if it's like really something where they need saving and that is what you want to do. But there are all these other things where it's like we're trying to save someone else from discomfort. We're trying to save someone else from disappointment. We're trying to save someone else from this stuff and we're not helping them develop any skills.
Like if you want your child to be someone who can take responsibility, you have to teach them how to do that and let them do it even when it's kind of painful and uncomfortable for you. And if you want the people you work with at work to be able to do that, then you need to let them do that too.
And I would just, like I don't usually talk so much about like what's appropriate or not, but I think it's appropriate at work to let other people have their own responsibility and to not always be trying to save and fix and hoard all the responsibility.
Let's also take a minute to think about why you may be doing this. So in addition to you maybe were socialized to do this from a very young age, I think there can also be a certain kind of emotional pleasure that comes from responsibility hoarding. But it's sort of like a I'm a superhero pleasure. It's like, “Oh, I can do it all.” And I get that, and I know the allure of that. And I do think it's a very tempting thing.
And I experienced that a lot in corporate of like, “Oh, I can go above and beyond.” And if I was attaching my worthiness to that, then it was very tempting to be doing all those things. But the problem with it is usually then we're not able to stop. And then we get to this place where we're, like, taxed, and burnt out, and overwhelmed. And we don't have any energy left and we have all these responsibilities that we've collected that really aren't ours. And then it's like kind of a shit show.
Now, I learned this phrase from Maggie, so I think it's also important to discuss, and Maggie is a marriage coach. So marriage is a place where this comes up a lot. And as y'all know I'm partnered with a woman, but I had a very heteronormative upbringing, like most people. And in heteronormativity I do also think there's a lot of responsibility hoarding. So this kind of circles back to what I was saying before about like the mom being kind of like the keeper of the family responsibility.
Even when there's no kids, it can often happen if it's a heteronormative relationship, where the woman is like the keeper of the responsibility. And it can be a very unpleasant setup for both partners, and it can feel very frustrating that other people aren't taking responsibility. And when we're in these situations, we may not even realize that they're not taking it because we have taken it all and we're hoarding it all.
And I think something that this comes up a lot is like that example I talked about earlier about, like of course the direct report can't do it at your level. But in marriages, I also see people will be like, well, I want my significant other to do this, but they do it wrong. And then so the person who thinks the other one does it wrong will like just keep doing it.
And then they wind up with all these tasks and to-dos and they're hoarding all that responsibility for all that stuff. And they don't want to be doing all that shit, and they want their partner to be doing it. But on some level sometimes we're not willing to let the other person do it imperfectly or do it not at our level.
So I think there's something to be said in here too, for like if you are a responsibility hoarder and you try to just stop doing it a lot of discomfort is probably going to come up. There are probably a lot of reasons why you're doing this, and there are benefits too. But I don't think it's a great system overall and from what I've seen, you just can't do it forever.
If you are like loving it and are able to do it forever, fucking do what you feel, have at it. But for most of us I think it is a trap, right? It's this trap of like, well I need to do it because I need it to be this way. And then I need to do this because I need it to be this way. And I need to do this because I need it to be this way and it's just easier for me to do it than it would be to teach someone else how to do it.
And then we just have all these responsibilities. And we feel so weighed down by them. And it gets so overwhelming and then we just want to like check out from our lives and watch Netflix for 20 hours in a row or just like we fantasize about leaving our whole life behind to go live in a hut on the beach or something. Maybe it's just me who fantasizes about stuff like that.
And actually, I do not fantasize about living on the beach because I don't like sand. So I don't even know why I said that. I fantasize about living in a cabin, but on stilts, in the woods. Because everything on stilts is better. It's because I want to live in a tree house, but I don't want to actually have to climb the tree. I need stairs. I need stairs, y'all.
Okay, that was like a whole tangent and a half. You're welcome. So, to recap here, if you feel like you're carrying all the responsibility for a bunch of things, maybe you are and maybe some of that responsibility is not yours. And maybe we can put some of it down.
And I would invite you to do that kind of slowly and incrementally because if you've been holding all that responsibility, it might feel really alien and weird to you to set it all down. And it may also feel really alien and weird to all the other people involved if you just like set it all back down.
Now, if you want to do it cold turkey, again, do what you feel. I just find that a lot of cold turkey stuff doesn't work because it's too jarring and then we revert back to the old thing. So that's that. And while making this change can feel really alien and weird, I think you'll find it's going to give you so much freedom and so much relief.
So many of the people I know want more time, they want more space, they want more energy for themselves. And one of the ways we get that is we stop hoarding all the responsibility for all the things. All the things at work, all the things at home, all the things with our family of origin, all the things with whatever the family we're in now, right? So usually if you have children, that family versus the family you grew up with.
Even with hobbies and friend groups there can often be so much responsibility hoarding. And figuring out where you're hoarding responsibility versus where you are taking responsibility that feels really good to you that you're like, “This is great, and I really like all the results and the costs of taking this responsibility.”
Okay, that's what I got for y'all this week. If you have questions about responsibility hoarding, come and ask them on my Instagram @KoriLinn. And if you want to stop responsibility hoarding, if you want to create more of that delicious spaciousness in your own life, I invite you to either come have a consult with me about working together one on one, or head on over to my website and sign up for the Satisfied As Fuck waitlist. Because that's exactly the kind of stuff we do in our coaching together.
And you don't have to do it alone. I know letting go of responsibilities you've been hoarding can feel really scary and you just don't have to do it alone. And it can help so much to have either a one on one coach or a group coaching community to do that work inside of.
All right y'all, that's what I have for you. Have a lovely week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hello, and happy Wednesday y'all. I hope you're having a lovely day today. I'm having a little bit of a low energy day. I woke up a little earlier than usual. Not on purpose, not because an alarm, my body was just like, “Hello, I am awake.” And I could have gone back to sleep, but I decided to just go ahead and get up because it's been warm. It's summer in Sacramento and if I wake up early like that I have the opportunity to take a walk when it's still pretty cool out, which is really nice.
So I got up and it was a great walk and a nice morning, but I am feeling just a little bit low energy. And that's okay because you know what? We're not going to feel high energy all the time. And there's lots of ways to enjoy a day when our energy is a little bit lower. For instance, later I'll probably be sitting on the couch enjoying some of the Sandman series that just dropped on Netflix that I'm pretty excited about.
I read some of the Sandman graphic novels years and years ago, and I never finished the series. I don't really remember why or what happened there, but I'm pretty excited. It's a cool story, or what I remember of it. I've only seen a few episodes of the series. And I just remember really liking the graphic novel. And I generally like Neil Gaiman stuff a lot. So I'm excited about that. And it's a great thing to do on a low energy day.
All right, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're not talking about high energy versus low energy. Although that may be something interesting to talk about later. Let me know if y'all want me to talk about that. But today I want to talk about responsibility hoarding, which is this phrase that I learned from the wonderful Maggie Reyes, and Maggie Reyes learned it from the wonderful Amanda Hess.
And I talked to Amanda Hess recently, we did a peer coaching session and I asked her about it and if I could talk to you all about it and she said yes. And she actually said that she thinks she heard that phrase from someone else, but she can't remember who it was. So whoever you are out there who originated this phrase of responsibility hoarding, thank you, you're a fucking genius. It's a really helpful phrase.
Okay, so what is responsibility hoarding and how does it pertain to having an extraordinary career and a satisfying as fuck life? Responsibility hoarding is when you take all the responsibility, including the responsibility that does not belong to you. So for a lot of us, we were trained from a very young age to take responsibility. And that can actually be a really great skill set.
It's a good thing to be able to do to take responsibility. To take responsibility for our choices, take responsibility for our actions, take responsibility for the way we're talking to ourselves. Even if we learned those thought patterns from society and culture and our childhood and all that shit. Once the thought patterns exist in our head, we're the ones who can actually do something about them.
And so there is an interesting idea in here too, just with responsibility that taking responsibility doesn't mean blaming. We can take responsibility for stuff without blaming ourselves. We can invite others to take responsibility for stuff without blaming them. That's probably something I'll also want to dig into on another episode.
But something I see, especially with high achievers and my clients is taking responsibility for other people's things. Taking responsibility for other people's work, taking responsibility for other people's feelings, taking responsibility for other people's actions. And I think this has a lot of crossover also with trying to control other people.
And listen, I get the urge, I talk about the things I need to learn about also. But the real truth is we can't control other people because they have free will. And we can have boundaries, and we can have consequences if those people are our direct reports or our children. Those are the people for whom I would say consequences are appropriate. For everyone else I would say boundaries, right?
But we can't actually control what other people do. And if you're anything like me, your brain is like, “That's just very fucking rude.” And I get that, and I feel it deeply in my bones. And also it's kind of what's beautiful about life, is that we all have freewill. And we also have freewill and can do whatever the fuck we want for whatever reason we want, but so can other people. And that's just the way things shake out.
And again, there may be consequences, but we still have freewill all the same, which is a pretty exciting prospect. Okay, so responsibility hoarding comes up, when we try to take responsibility for other people's shit. And also when we're not willing to let other people have consequences for their own things that they should be responsible for.
So there's lots of ways that this can look, right? Like if someone in your life, whether it's your direct report at work, or your kiddo, or your significant other is making a choice and you don't like it, you may feel the urge to say something about it. You may even say something about it, and they may not want to do what you think they should do. And then they may get some consequences through taking their action.
Not even consequences from you, just like life consequences, like things might happen. And one way we hoard responsibility is to try to like come in and rescue other people and take responsibility when it's actually someone else's business, someone else's responsibility to handle whatever the thing is.
Other ways that we try to responsibility hoard is kind of trying to be the one who's in control and the one who has all the answers. And listen, I get it. A lot of y'all are fucking brilliant and you do have great ideas. And you have thought things through, and you do know a way to do them that would be streamlined and beautiful. And there are certain times when it's the time to tell everyone else about our streamlined and beautiful plan to get shit done.
But there are also other times when that's kind of just not our business. And I think that can be a really hard pill to swallow for some people sometimes. I think some of us get this idea in our heads of like, well, if I have a great idea about how to do it, then I should get to be in charge and tell everyone about it. And I'm all for you going out and trying to find ways to do that.
And also, sometimes we then try to kind of go into other people's areas and territories and take responsibility for their stuff and run it because we have great ideas. And that just doesn't always work. And quite frankly, other people don't always appreciate it. And it's not always our place.
So even if you have a direct report at work, figuring out like how do you manage them? How do you guide them? How do you lead them? And then what is theirs? And when do they get to run with the thing? And when do they get to make the decisions?
For people like me who kind of have a more like anxious inner self, it can be really hard to let other people do things. Especially knowing that those other people may not do things in the way that we want them to. And they may not do them to our standards or our caliber. And one of the things I think that's really interesting is to realize that they're not necessarily supposed to be able to.
A friend of mine had a senior leader one time say to them like, yeah, of course, your direct report can't do that in the amount of time you could because if they could do it in the amount of time you could, they would be in your job. They're not in your job, they're not at your level, and they're not supposed to be able to perform at your level.
And I think about that all the time, I think it's a really killer insight because so often we're looking around our lives, expecting other people to do things the way that we do them when they're not able to do the things the way we do them.
And we look around our lives at other people who can do things we're not at their level, and then we beat ourselves up versus being like, yeah, I'm not at their level, of course I can't do it that way, it's fine. Because lots of people can do stuff at lots of different levels that can still create really amazing results. And we don't all have to be the best and be perfect to do a job that matters.
And I find that for me and my clients, we often struggle both ways with that. We struggle with comparing ourselves to people who can do a better job than us and then feeling shitty about ourselves. And then we also struggle with judging other people who aren't at our level and then having shitty thoughts about them.
And it's interesting because with that setup you kind of feel shitty either way, right? You feel shitty when you're really excellent at doing the thing, and then you feel shitty when you're not the most excellent at doing the thing. So it just doesn't seem like a great setup if we're going to feel shitty either way.
Okay, as ever, this podcast is going in all the directions all the time all at once, and that's fine with me because that's just how my brain works and how I like to talk to y'all about stuff. But let's circle back, so responsibility hoarding is what happens when taking responsibility gets, let's say like maybe over activated, right? It's like too much growth, right? Maybe even too much of a good thing.
Which I think is so interesting because in our culture I think we do often have this idea that like if something's good then more is better, but that's just not actually true. Like one crème brulée is really good, one bite of crème brulée is really good. But like eight crème brulées is probably not going to be great. I'm probably not actually going to be able to enjoy eight and I may feel very uncomfortable.
And even things that are like very good for you, like water. You can actually have too much water. It might sound wild for you to contemplate that but that's a real thing that can happen. And responsibility is like this. The ability to take responsibility is in-fucking-credible, it's actually a really important skill to have. I was going to say as an adult, but I think actually as a child too. It's just a really great skill to have because if you can't take responsibility, that's really going to limit a lot of what you can do in life.
It's going to limit your growth, it's going to limit what you're capable of. It's really hard to grow and improve if you can't take responsibility for the level you're at and for the things you're doing and the results you're creating. But again, too much responsibility taking can backfire. And some of how we're doing that, like I was talking about before, is we're trying to take other people's responsibility away, we're trying to hoard all the responsibility.
This happens a lot in teams at work, but also in family units. And I think stereotypically it happens a lot with moms. And there's a lot of reasons why that is and a lot of it is patriarchal bullshit. And the way that people train girls and women from babyhood to be emotionally responsible for everyone else, but also all kinds of other responsible.
It's like moms are always the keeper of all the things. Not always, but this is like the stereotype, right? Moms always know where shit is. They always have in their like little mental rolodex who needs a dentist appointment, all this stuff.
And so I want to just say that so that you know if you’re responsibility hoarding and if what I'm talking about in this episode, you're like, “Oh shit, that's me.” Again, we can take responsibility for the fact that you're doing that.
We're not going to take responsibility for you learning that from culture, right? It's like culture taught that to you. That part wasn't your responsibility because when we're children, our brains just absorb everything around us. They absorb the culture of our family of origin, they absorb the culture of our learning institutions, they absorb the culture of culture at large, they absorb the culture of books and TV shows and movies and all of that.
I just know there's so much shit in my brain that's because I read a lot of R.L. Stine and there's also so much shit in my brain because I read a lot of like, Sweet Valley High, which I don't remember it all, but I remember reading, and like romance novels. And anyways, stuff like that, we get all these ideas in our head because our brain learns through everything we engage with.
So that was like a meta lesson within the lesson there that we can take responsibility for the thought patterns that exist, but we're not going to judge ourselves and beat us up for those being there because that wasn't something we did. And even if it was something we did by reading a lot of Sweet Valley High, we didn't mean to do this. This is not what we meant. We just meant to read an interesting, entertaining book.
Okay, mini lesson complete. In families and work teams this often happens where one person sort of like becomes the responsibility holder. And the reason I'm saying responsibility hoarding instead of responsibility holding is because I think sometimes when we think about it as responsibility holding, we think about it as like this good thing, like we're doing a good job. And especially because we've been trained to do this and we're culturally rewarded for it, it can be really hard to let this behavior go.
But I see this behavior cause people a lot of suffering. And I think re-casting it through the lens of like you're hoarding everyone else's responsibility and not allowing them to have any is extremely powerful in a way that saying you're holding the responsibility doesn't have the same punch to it, if you know what I mean.
And when we are responsibility hoarding, we tend to be both kind of miserable because we can't actually be responsible for other people. So trying to take on all that responsibility is very stressful and very taxing. And also, we're robbing all these other people of the opportunity to have their own responsibility.
And it'll be interesting too, because we’ll try to take responsibility for whatever they're doing, and then we'll be annoyed at them for not taking responsibility. But it's like we're constantly trying to take that away from them and not giving them the opportunity.
So like what we talked about before, it's like if someone does something and then it doesn't work out, and then you step in and save them because you think it's your responsibility to do that, you are potentially removing them from consequences that could actually be really beneficial to them.
And listen, there's always extreme examples. I'm not saying like don't literally like save a child who's in front of a bus. Definitely save someone if it's like really something where they need saving and that is what you want to do. But there are all these other things where it's like we're trying to save someone else from discomfort. We're trying to save someone else from disappointment. We're trying to save someone else from this stuff and we're not helping them develop any skills.
Like if you want your child to be someone who can take responsibility, you have to teach them how to do that and let them do it even when it's kind of painful and uncomfortable for you. And if you want the people you work with at work to be able to do that, then you need to let them do that too.
And I would just, like I don't usually talk so much about like what's appropriate or not, but I think it's appropriate at work to let other people have their own responsibility and to not always be trying to save and fix and hoard all the responsibility.
Let's also take a minute to think about why you may be doing this. So in addition to you maybe were socialized to do this from a very young age, I think there can also be a certain kind of emotional pleasure that comes from responsibility hoarding. But it's sort of like a I'm a superhero pleasure. It's like, “Oh, I can do it all.” And I get that, and I know the allure of that. And I do think it's a very tempting thing.
And I experienced that a lot in corporate of like, “Oh, I can go above and beyond.” And if I was attaching my worthiness to that, then it was very tempting to be doing all those things. But the problem with it is usually then we're not able to stop. And then we get to this place where we're, like, taxed, and burnt out, and overwhelmed. And we don't have any energy left and we have all these responsibilities that we've collected that really aren't ours. And then it's like kind of a shit show.
Now, I learned this phrase from Maggie, so I think it's also important to discuss, and Maggie is a marriage coach. So marriage is a place where this comes up a lot. And as y'all know I'm partnered with a woman, but I had a very heteronormative upbringing, like most people. And in heteronormativity I do also think there's a lot of responsibility hoarding. So this kind of circles back to what I was saying before about like the mom being kind of like the keeper of the family responsibility.
Even when there's no kids, it can often happen if it's a heteronormative relationship, where the woman is like the keeper of the responsibility. And it can be a very unpleasant setup for both partners, and it can feel very frustrating that other people aren't taking responsibility. And when we're in these situations, we may not even realize that they're not taking it because we have taken it all and we're hoarding it all.
And I think something that this comes up a lot is like that example I talked about earlier about, like of course the direct report can't do it at your level. But in marriages, I also see people will be like, well, I want my significant other to do this, but they do it wrong. And then so the person who thinks the other one does it wrong will like just keep doing it.
And then they wind up with all these tasks and to-dos and they're hoarding all that responsibility for all that stuff. And they don't want to be doing all that shit, and they want their partner to be doing it. But on some level sometimes we're not willing to let the other person do it imperfectly or do it not at our level.
So I think there's something to be said in here too, for like if you are a responsibility hoarder and you try to just stop doing it a lot of discomfort is probably going to come up. There are probably a lot of reasons why you're doing this, and there are benefits too. But I don't think it's a great system overall and from what I've seen, you just can't do it forever.
If you are like loving it and are able to do it forever, fucking do what you feel, have at it. But for most of us I think it is a trap, right? It's this trap of like, well I need to do it because I need it to be this way. And then I need to do this because I need it to be this way. And I need to do this because I need it to be this way and it's just easier for me to do it than it would be to teach someone else how to do it.
And then we just have all these responsibilities. And we feel so weighed down by them. And it gets so overwhelming and then we just want to like check out from our lives and watch Netflix for 20 hours in a row or just like we fantasize about leaving our whole life behind to go live in a hut on the beach or something. Maybe it's just me who fantasizes about stuff like that.
And actually, I do not fantasize about living on the beach because I don't like sand. So I don't even know why I said that. I fantasize about living in a cabin, but on stilts, in the woods. Because everything on stilts is better. It's because I want to live in a tree house, but I don't want to actually have to climb the tree. I need stairs. I need stairs, y'all.
Okay, that was like a whole tangent and a half. You're welcome. So, to recap here, if you feel like you're carrying all the responsibility for a bunch of things, maybe you are and maybe some of that responsibility is not yours. And maybe we can put some of it down.
And I would invite you to do that kind of slowly and incrementally because if you've been holding all that responsibility, it might feel really alien and weird to you to set it all down. And it may also feel really alien and weird to all the other people involved if you just like set it all back down.
Now, if you want to do it cold turkey, again, do what you feel. I just find that a lot of cold turkey stuff doesn't work because it's too jarring and then we revert back to the old thing. So that's that. And while making this change can feel really alien and weird, I think you'll find it's going to give you so much freedom and so much relief.
So many of the people I know want more time, they want more space, they want more energy for themselves. And one of the ways we get that is we stop hoarding all the responsibility for all the things. All the things at work, all the things at home, all the things with our family of origin, all the things with whatever the family we're in now, right? So usually if you have children, that family versus the family you grew up with.
Even with hobbies and friend groups there can often be so much responsibility hoarding. And figuring out where you're hoarding responsibility versus where you are taking responsibility that feels really good to you that you're like, “This is great, and I really like all the results and the costs of taking this responsibility.”
Okay, that's what I got for y'all this week. If you have questions about responsibility hoarding, come and ask them on my Instagram @KoriLinn. And if you want to stop responsibility hoarding, if you want to create more of that delicious spaciousness in your own life, I invite you to either come have a consult with me about working together one on one, or head on over to my website and sign up for the Satisfied As Fuck waitlist. Because that's exactly the kind of stuff we do in our coaching together.
And you don't have to do it alone. I know letting go of responsibilities you've been hoarding can feel really scary and you just don't have to do it alone. And it can help so much to have either a one on one coach or a group coaching community to do that work inside of.
All right y'all, that's what I have for you. Have a lovely week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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