207. A Sneaky Pattern That Creates More Work
In today’s episode, we’re diving into a surprising pattern that sneaks up on high performers: overworking because things feel too easy.
Yep, you heard that right!
We’re talking about how overachievers sometimes invent extra work or add complexity because their task load doesn’t feel hard enough to be valuable and satisfying.
I’ll share examples of what this pattern might actually look like in real life, and we’ll unpack why you might feel drawn to make things harder than they need to be.
If you’ve ever found yourself complicating tasks or feeling uneasy when work is a breeze, this episode is for you!
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why you may resist things being easy even if you want more ease.
8 (false) assumptions that make people overwork.
How Puritan work ethic shows up in sneaky ways, even in non-work tasks.
The surprising link between overworking and self-worth.
Real-life examples of how this might show up.
Why you might want to ditch this pattern & how to do just that.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we're talking about a sneaky pattern that creates more work for you.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of Satisfied AF. This is your host life and career coach, Kori Linn. Before we dive into this week's topic, I want to read a letter that one of my former clients wrote in. So this is someone I coached over a number of years and we worked on a lot of different stuff together, but this letter in particular is about parenting a child with different kinds of needs.
She found out about that when we were already working together and we did coach on it because it was something she was struggling with at the time. So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say.
My client writes:
When you get initiated into the world of parenting a kid with different kinds of needs, someone will eventually recommend a particular essay to you to read. It's called welcome to Holland.
I'll give you the skinny. The writer talks about you preparing for a special trip. You're going to Italy, and people have all these great things to say about Italy. But inexplicably, the plane takes you to Holland instead. Holland isn't awful, but it's not what you bought tickets for, and you're disappointed.
You, the parent, are the traveler. In the beginning of my parenting journey, when I was in the full throes of not knowing what to do for my kid and felt abandoned by people whose support I most needed, I wanted to punch that essay in the face. Why? Because the message of the essay seemed to be shame on you for feeling anger, rage, anxiety, fear, and sadness about this.
You should be grateful. Your life isn't awful, it's just different. You don't get to feel bad. You have to suck it up and be positive for the sake of your child.
I know the person who sent this essay to me had really good intentions, but it was the worst thing anyone could possibly have said to me at the beginning of the journey. I will always be grateful to Kori, whom I worked with during the initial discovery of my son's disabilities. I am so lucky that I had her.
She was the one who told me the words I needed to finally get a release. She said simply, it's okay to grieve. You had a dream of a certain kind of life for your child. You took for granted all the ways they'd be able to participate in that life.
You took for granted all the little ways they'd be able to be supported by and fit into society. And the truth is that it's going to be very different and it's going to be hard. It's okay to grieve for that.
I didn't know at the time that this was what grief was. I thought I was raging. I thought I was belly flopping. I thought I was having a breakdown. It took someone who knew what grief looked like to tell me what was happening.
Those four words, it's okay to grieve, made me feel held and seen. The tears I had been trying to hold in finally came out. I felt so much relief and I finally understood. Grief will be one of my house guests from now on. It will come and it will go. Sometimes it will look like anger or fear, but in the end, it's just a house guest, not who I am.
I've come to appreciate grief when it visits me in the form of anger because it gives me the courage to advocate for my child or myself when I need to. I've come to understand grief in the form of fear. It's something that just needs my compassion. The way you'd hold a child really close after a nightmare.
I think all of us, we feel a certain pressure to find the beauty of any situation, the lesson, the happy ending, the balance, the cute montage, the bow that ties it together. We don't want to show anything that's messy. We instinctively avoid it. But the best projects, the work that moves the souls of others, often takes inspiration from a struggle.
What if we allowed ourselves to struggle and feel grief and didn't hide it or fight it? How much more beauty might we bloom?
Whew, y'all. Receiving that letter from my previous client, it made my day and it made my heart ache at the same time. She went through something, and you know is still going through something, that is so difficult and that a lot of people aren't prepared for, and I'm so glad that I was able to be there for her and coach her in those difficult moments and that the coaching I gave her was meaningful and has continued to be meaningful over time.
We talk a lot on the podcast about what coaching is and what it can do, but I really think that when you can hear directly from one of my clients what their experience was, there's something very magical about that and something very revealing because the way they think about it is going to be different than the way I, as the coach, think about it.
Obviously, everyone has their own experience in coaching, so it's not that what this client had was typical or atypical, but coaching meets you where you are with whatever is coming up. And a lot of times people hire me for one thing and we work on that and then something else comes up in their life and then they have a resource to be able to move through that.
And the tools and the skills and the support of coaching give them infrastructure and scaffolding that they can use to move through things, both when they're still in coaching with me and even when they've graduated from coaching and they're out in the world on their own again.
I have clients that I talked to months and years after they finished coaching who tell me about the ways that they're using the things that we went over together to continue to improve their lives and help them have better experiences, whether that means something that we traditionally think of as a coaching goal, like saving money, paying off debt, getting a new job, finding love, reconnecting with your sweetie, or whether it's navigating a situation you never imagined you'd be in, like your child being diagnosed with disabilities and differences.
So thank you so much to my client who wrote in and shared that with me and with all of you. Again, she did give permission for me to share it.
And now let's jump into this week's podcast topic. So today we're talking about a sneaky pattern that I see show up for all kinds of high performers. In fact, Alex and I both run into this pattern all the time. Still, even after years of being a coach, I sometimes bump into the same patterns I see my clients in. Of course I do because I'm a human.
If you're someone who's always trying to go the extra mile, this week's episode is definitely for you.
So here's what we're talking about: we're talking about when you overwork because the work feels too easy. Now you may be offended by this idea or want to insist that things are never too easy. And I'm going to invite you to take a minute to hear me out because It's not always obvious that this is happening.
Sometimes it might feel like you're massively underwater. And when we pick things apart, we see that there's extra things going on there, because this is a pattern that often plays out subconsciously. And we're going to dig into in this podcast the reasons why it happens and what it is that's actually happening. Because again, At the conscious level, it might seem like you just have way too much work.
So here's part of it: sometimes people, maybe you, get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of working hard. Sometimes people, maybe you, love to end the day feeling like they gave it their all. Sometimes people, maybe you, like a challenge and feel a little bit of a letdown when things aren't that hard.
This can make sense. Think about doing a puzzle. It's boring, as an adult, to do a little kid's puzzle that's only cut into like four pieces. It doesn't feel like enough of a challenge to be interesting.
Now, the ability to enjoy and take pride in working hard can be super useful when you're tackling a tough problem that's going to require lots of work and next level thinking skills. But sometimes, especially when you're a high performer who spent years honing your skills, the work required to do well isn't all that hard for you.
In fact, it may be quite easy. It may feel like that four piece puzzle and that may feel unsettling, like maybe you're not doing enough. Without even realizing you're doing it, you may look around for some extra work, something you can really sink your teeth into, something that will be challenging and impress people. Or something to keep you looking busy for the remaining seven and a half hours of the work day. Or you may subconsciously find ways to complicate the easy task so that it takes up more time and energy and feels more like what you imagine doing good, important work feels like.
Of course, this can and does show up at work, but guess what? It can also show up in other areas of your life too. The Puritan work ethic, or the idea that it is morally good and satisfying to work hard, is ingrained for many people. And as much as people may want to rest or have ease at their jobs and in their homes, it may not feel comfortable to do that.
It may feel like you need to be working harder so that you can show everyone that you're a good, caring, dedicated worker, parent, lover, et cetera. And for the former extra credit loving kids like yours truly, there can also be this idea that if we're going to either do too much or too little, like we want to go ahead and do too much because that's safer.
I remember I was always doing extra credit in high school, even in classes where I already had an A. Like I wanted my average to just be as ridiculously high as it could be. I think at one point I had a class where like my grade was 105. I wasn't going to get anything extra out of that 5, but it like made me feel safer.
Like, later, if I mess up on a quiz or a test or something, if I have a bad week, I have that to like protect me. But the reality is, if you're doing that all the time, that can actually lead to a lot of overworking,
So maybe what you need protection from is actually the overworking and not that imaginary future week where things aren't going well that you supposedly need so much buffer from.
Here's an example. Um, actually Alex was telling me about this and she and I decided together that this should be a podcast topic because Alex has had some ports injuries, some of them really old ones from when she was younger that never got, you know, fixed properly. And so she's been doing a lot of physical therapy and sometimes the physical therapy assignments feel too easy to her, and she will invent other physical therapy assignments or she'll do the assignment like way more times than she's supposed to. And sometimes, y'all, that can actually lead to an injury or a problem, right?
So it's this idea that like she would do what the therapist told her to do, but her brain would say like, well, that's not enough. Like that doesn't feel hard enough. I can't feel that my muscles have worked. And so she wanted it to be harder to prove to herself that she was doing something. But of course that doesn't just happen in physical therapy and it can create a lot of problems.
This also is a problem because most of us want to do less, but it feels impossible to actually do that if we have this association that what it means to be good is to do more. Doing as much as we can can become habitual, and stepping away from that may feel uncomfortable or even dangerous.
Many times when people are thinking about doing less, they are afraid of consequences and the consequences will be externally oriented. Like what will others think? Will I get in trouble? Will people think I'm lazy? But what I've seen coaching dozens and dozens of people on this is that it's also about what you believe it means to be a good person, a good worker, a good lover, et cetera and the value you assign to working hard.
Okay, so let's take a look at the assumptions that are at play in this pattern because it's not just one idea that like hard work is better. There's all these other more subtle things going on under the surface.
So assumption number one: if it's easy for me, it would be easy for anyone. Therefore it's easy work.
Two: hard work is more valuable than easy work.
Three: if the work is easy, it's not worth feeling proud of.
Four: if the work is easy or short, it's not enough.
Five: if the work is easy, I should do more of it or more other things since I have time and energy, etc. left over.
Six: if the work doesn't take that long, I must find more work to do or I'm a slacker.
Seven: I should work as hard as everyone else.
And there's also another assumption at play here that we've talked about recently and that's assumption number eight, that your worth as a human being is tied to the effort you put in and the things you produce. In this case, it might sound something like: if the work is easy, I'm less worthy than someone who works hard.
Now you may agree with some of these assumptions, but let's pick them apart a little bit.
If it's easy for you, is it easy for everyone? Like what if you have more years of experience and you're just better at some things and you can do it easily and quickly. Like if you have been a nurse for 20 years, there's probably plenty of tasks you could do asleep with your eyes closed. You've done them so many times, but does that make them any less important or life saving?
No, of course not. Especially if you're in the position of having your life saved. I'm like, uh, I kind of think it would be great if it's easy for the person and they have a lot of practice doing it. I'm also willing for it to be hard for them. As long as like I get the life saving help I need, that's what matters to me. That's what actually creates the value.
Next assumption. Is it true that hard work is more valuable than easy work? Like, I don't know. If you manually add up expenses, is that actually better than letting Excel or a calculator add them up for you just because it's harder?
No, of course not. So that's just interesting to see, like which shortcuts make sense and your brain says, okay, that's the smart way to do things. And which ones will have you questioning if you're not good enough, not doing enough et cetera.
Okay. Third assumption, just because something is easy for you, does that mean it's less worthy of pride? Let's say that you're a photographer and you've photographed hundreds of weddings, and it's easy for you to get all the shots and make them look fantastic. Does that make the photos any less valuable or impressive? Is it any less touching for the couple when they see your work?
Okay, next assumption. If it's easy for you, does that mean you should do more? If you've been hired to copy edit a client's manuscript and you can do it quickly and easily, it does not mean you should start adding cover art or copy edit additional materials just because it's easy for you to do. It's actually probably more valuable to the client that you're able to do it quickly than if it was hard work for you, as this means you can turn it around and give it back to them faster.
They don't need you to do more, and you doing more could actually detract from what you are providing them as far as a service is concerned.
Okay, let's take a look at some non-work examples too.
If you can soothe your child in half the time it used to take, that does not make the soothing any less meaningful or successful. You don't necessarily need to work hard at it for it to work and do the thing it is designed to do.
If you find a clever way to meal prep that reduces time spent cooking from eight hours a week to three hours a week, that doesn't mean you're a slacker or that it's inherently better to work harder and spend more time.
Meals don't necessarily taste better or have more nutritional value just because you work harder or take longer to put them together.
Another one: if you like micro workouts and they get you moving when bigger exercise goals overwhelm you, that doesn't make the micro workouts any less effective.
Sometimes a super short workout does way more than a longer one. And it certainly does more than the workout you don't do. And actually doing a right size workout is helpful because if you do too much, just so you get that sensation of being hard, you can actually injure yourself as my girlfriend literally has done with her self-invented physical therapy activities.
And here's the doozy: if you spend longer and work harder on something, that does not make you as a person more worthy.
You might spend a long time and do a crazy difficult knitting pattern.
And listen, that's really cool. I've done some crazy knitting patterns myself. It's fun to challenge yourself and make something to keep you warm with your hands and a piece of string.
But that doesn't make you a better person. It just makes you a person who dedicated time and effort to achieve a goal in a certain way.
And if on the other hand, you were the person who designed the knitting pattern, it's possible you could have designed it super quickly, and that the designing of it could have been super easy for you, but it could still be an incredible pattern that delights people and brings them lots of joy and makes them a really cool final product.
I know personally, I've learned a line dance that the instructor told us she designed sitting at a stoplight. And I've fallen in love with songs that the artist has shared took her years to write. The time and difficulty of a task doesn't determine the beauty of the outcome, and the ease or the challenge of the creative act definitely doesn't determine the worthiness of the creator.
Let's also take a look at the flip side. If you think work has to be hard and take a long time to be valuable, what do you think that's going to result in? If someone assigns you a really easy task, one you could do in minutes, are you going to do it in minutes and be super proud of yourself? I've coached a lot of people and I'm going to tell you probably not.
What will probably happen is that you'll either find a way to make it hard, or you'll feel bad about yourself because you didn't work hard enough to feel good.
If you only give yourself permission to feel good about yourself at the end of a workday if you give it your all, what happens when all you need to get done is a presentation that would give someone else hives, but you feel quite confident about? You may find yourself feeling restless or unsettled, or inventing more work to do, or fiddling with the sides that are actually already quite good.
And don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently bad about doing more work or getting ahead in other tasks. That's not the point of what I'm saying here. The point is that if you subconsciously look down on easy work, that may secretly and even subconsciously incentivize you to make things harder.
And here's the real clincher. If everyone around you thinks like this, you'll all be competing to work the hardest and the longest, which will continually ramp things up for all of you.
This is the opposite of efficiency, but I also get why so many of us get stuck in this pattern, because it is everywhere. And for many of us, it's taken us really far in life, because even though it's inefficient, it means we work a lot trying to prove ourselves and do enough to feel good about ourselves. So it does create a lot of work, but it usually also makes us feel bad on the whole.
But listen, you're totally allowed to keep doing things that way. If it's working for you, have at it. But if you, like so many of my clients, want to be productive and do good work without overworking, without burning out, while having plenty of time and energy for your personal life, well, then you may need to replace this sneaky pattern with a new intentional one. Otherwise, all your extra time and energy will be gobbled up by the drive to work hard.
Now, if you're one of those people who likes to work hard, who finds it meaningful and enjoyable, then it's so important that you know you can still do that. There's probably plenty of necessary work that will actually be hard and you can delight in the puzzle and the challenge of it.
The key is to be able to look at your work and know what the easiest way to do it is. From there, it's a question of, do you want it to be that easy way? Or are you interested in making it harder for some reason? If you want to make it harder, okay, but why? Just ask yourself what the reason for that is, and then ask yourself if you like that reason.
Ask yourself if that reason aligns to the way you want to live your life, and especially to how much time and energy you want to have for other things. And if all of your work turns out to be super easy for you because of the level you're at and your skills, you can decide if you want to apply yourself moving up and getting a more challenging role. Or you could also decide to take that desire for challenge and apply it somewhere else like your marriage or parenting your kids or cultivating a hobby.
Here are the key takeaways. Things do not have to be hard for them to be valuable. In fact, zero value is added by them being hard. More often them being hard depletes value, as it takes time and energy away from other things.
Embracing what's easy for you and letting it be easy - while still seeing it as good and worth celebrating - will add so much joy and satisfaction back to your life, and it will also add time and energy. But you likely have to make a mental shift to allow yourself to access this ease and joy, because so many of us believe deep down that things have to be hard to be good and worthwhile.
If this episode resonates with you and you'd like help letting your work be easy and enjoying your life more, I'd love to support you with that. Reach out and let's have a conversation about working together to get you feeling satisfied AF - because you deserve nothing less.
Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need to. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of Satisfied AF. This is your host life and career coach, Kori Linn. Before we dive into this week's topic, I want to read a letter that one of my former clients wrote in. So this is someone I coached over a number of years and we worked on a lot of different stuff together, but this letter in particular is about parenting a child with different kinds of needs.
She found out about that when we were already working together and we did coach on it because it was something she was struggling with at the time. So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say.
My client writes:
When you get initiated into the world of parenting a kid with different kinds of needs, someone will eventually recommend a particular essay to you to read. It's called welcome to Holland.
I'll give you the skinny. The writer talks about you preparing for a special trip. You're going to Italy, and people have all these great things to say about Italy. But inexplicably, the plane takes you to Holland instead. Holland isn't awful, but it's not what you bought tickets for, and you're disappointed.
You, the parent, are the traveler. In the beginning of my parenting journey, when I was in the full throes of not knowing what to do for my kid and felt abandoned by people whose support I most needed, I wanted to punch that essay in the face. Why? Because the message of the essay seemed to be shame on you for feeling anger, rage, anxiety, fear, and sadness about this.
You should be grateful. Your life isn't awful, it's just different. You don't get to feel bad. You have to suck it up and be positive for the sake of your child.
I know the person who sent this essay to me had really good intentions, but it was the worst thing anyone could possibly have said to me at the beginning of the journey. I will always be grateful to Kori, whom I worked with during the initial discovery of my son's disabilities. I am so lucky that I had her.
She was the one who told me the words I needed to finally get a release. She said simply, it's okay to grieve. You had a dream of a certain kind of life for your child. You took for granted all the ways they'd be able to participate in that life.
You took for granted all the little ways they'd be able to be supported by and fit into society. And the truth is that it's going to be very different and it's going to be hard. It's okay to grieve for that.
I didn't know at the time that this was what grief was. I thought I was raging. I thought I was belly flopping. I thought I was having a breakdown. It took someone who knew what grief looked like to tell me what was happening.
Those four words, it's okay to grieve, made me feel held and seen. The tears I had been trying to hold in finally came out. I felt so much relief and I finally understood. Grief will be one of my house guests from now on. It will come and it will go. Sometimes it will look like anger or fear, but in the end, it's just a house guest, not who I am.
I've come to appreciate grief when it visits me in the form of anger because it gives me the courage to advocate for my child or myself when I need to. I've come to understand grief in the form of fear. It's something that just needs my compassion. The way you'd hold a child really close after a nightmare.
I think all of us, we feel a certain pressure to find the beauty of any situation, the lesson, the happy ending, the balance, the cute montage, the bow that ties it together. We don't want to show anything that's messy. We instinctively avoid it. But the best projects, the work that moves the souls of others, often takes inspiration from a struggle.
What if we allowed ourselves to struggle and feel grief and didn't hide it or fight it? How much more beauty might we bloom?
Whew, y'all. Receiving that letter from my previous client, it made my day and it made my heart ache at the same time. She went through something, and you know is still going through something, that is so difficult and that a lot of people aren't prepared for, and I'm so glad that I was able to be there for her and coach her in those difficult moments and that the coaching I gave her was meaningful and has continued to be meaningful over time.
We talk a lot on the podcast about what coaching is and what it can do, but I really think that when you can hear directly from one of my clients what their experience was, there's something very magical about that and something very revealing because the way they think about it is going to be different than the way I, as the coach, think about it.
Obviously, everyone has their own experience in coaching, so it's not that what this client had was typical or atypical, but coaching meets you where you are with whatever is coming up. And a lot of times people hire me for one thing and we work on that and then something else comes up in their life and then they have a resource to be able to move through that.
And the tools and the skills and the support of coaching give them infrastructure and scaffolding that they can use to move through things, both when they're still in coaching with me and even when they've graduated from coaching and they're out in the world on their own again.
I have clients that I talked to months and years after they finished coaching who tell me about the ways that they're using the things that we went over together to continue to improve their lives and help them have better experiences, whether that means something that we traditionally think of as a coaching goal, like saving money, paying off debt, getting a new job, finding love, reconnecting with your sweetie, or whether it's navigating a situation you never imagined you'd be in, like your child being diagnosed with disabilities and differences.
So thank you so much to my client who wrote in and shared that with me and with all of you. Again, she did give permission for me to share it.
And now let's jump into this week's podcast topic. So today we're talking about a sneaky pattern that I see show up for all kinds of high performers. In fact, Alex and I both run into this pattern all the time. Still, even after years of being a coach, I sometimes bump into the same patterns I see my clients in. Of course I do because I'm a human.
If you're someone who's always trying to go the extra mile, this week's episode is definitely for you.
So here's what we're talking about: we're talking about when you overwork because the work feels too easy. Now you may be offended by this idea or want to insist that things are never too easy. And I'm going to invite you to take a minute to hear me out because It's not always obvious that this is happening.
Sometimes it might feel like you're massively underwater. And when we pick things apart, we see that there's extra things going on there, because this is a pattern that often plays out subconsciously. And we're going to dig into in this podcast the reasons why it happens and what it is that's actually happening. Because again, At the conscious level, it might seem like you just have way too much work.
So here's part of it: sometimes people, maybe you, get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of working hard. Sometimes people, maybe you, love to end the day feeling like they gave it their all. Sometimes people, maybe you, like a challenge and feel a little bit of a letdown when things aren't that hard.
This can make sense. Think about doing a puzzle. It's boring, as an adult, to do a little kid's puzzle that's only cut into like four pieces. It doesn't feel like enough of a challenge to be interesting.
Now, the ability to enjoy and take pride in working hard can be super useful when you're tackling a tough problem that's going to require lots of work and next level thinking skills. But sometimes, especially when you're a high performer who spent years honing your skills, the work required to do well isn't all that hard for you.
In fact, it may be quite easy. It may feel like that four piece puzzle and that may feel unsettling, like maybe you're not doing enough. Without even realizing you're doing it, you may look around for some extra work, something you can really sink your teeth into, something that will be challenging and impress people. Or something to keep you looking busy for the remaining seven and a half hours of the work day. Or you may subconsciously find ways to complicate the easy task so that it takes up more time and energy and feels more like what you imagine doing good, important work feels like.
Of course, this can and does show up at work, but guess what? It can also show up in other areas of your life too. The Puritan work ethic, or the idea that it is morally good and satisfying to work hard, is ingrained for many people. And as much as people may want to rest or have ease at their jobs and in their homes, it may not feel comfortable to do that.
It may feel like you need to be working harder so that you can show everyone that you're a good, caring, dedicated worker, parent, lover, et cetera. And for the former extra credit loving kids like yours truly, there can also be this idea that if we're going to either do too much or too little, like we want to go ahead and do too much because that's safer.
I remember I was always doing extra credit in high school, even in classes where I already had an A. Like I wanted my average to just be as ridiculously high as it could be. I think at one point I had a class where like my grade was 105. I wasn't going to get anything extra out of that 5, but it like made me feel safer.
Like, later, if I mess up on a quiz or a test or something, if I have a bad week, I have that to like protect me. But the reality is, if you're doing that all the time, that can actually lead to a lot of overworking,
So maybe what you need protection from is actually the overworking and not that imaginary future week where things aren't going well that you supposedly need so much buffer from.
Here's an example. Um, actually Alex was telling me about this and she and I decided together that this should be a podcast topic because Alex has had some ports injuries, some of them really old ones from when she was younger that never got, you know, fixed properly. And so she's been doing a lot of physical therapy and sometimes the physical therapy assignments feel too easy to her, and she will invent other physical therapy assignments or she'll do the assignment like way more times than she's supposed to. And sometimes, y'all, that can actually lead to an injury or a problem, right?
So it's this idea that like she would do what the therapist told her to do, but her brain would say like, well, that's not enough. Like that doesn't feel hard enough. I can't feel that my muscles have worked. And so she wanted it to be harder to prove to herself that she was doing something. But of course that doesn't just happen in physical therapy and it can create a lot of problems.
This also is a problem because most of us want to do less, but it feels impossible to actually do that if we have this association that what it means to be good is to do more. Doing as much as we can can become habitual, and stepping away from that may feel uncomfortable or even dangerous.
Many times when people are thinking about doing less, they are afraid of consequences and the consequences will be externally oriented. Like what will others think? Will I get in trouble? Will people think I'm lazy? But what I've seen coaching dozens and dozens of people on this is that it's also about what you believe it means to be a good person, a good worker, a good lover, et cetera and the value you assign to working hard.
Okay, so let's take a look at the assumptions that are at play in this pattern because it's not just one idea that like hard work is better. There's all these other more subtle things going on under the surface.
So assumption number one: if it's easy for me, it would be easy for anyone. Therefore it's easy work.
Two: hard work is more valuable than easy work.
Three: if the work is easy, it's not worth feeling proud of.
Four: if the work is easy or short, it's not enough.
Five: if the work is easy, I should do more of it or more other things since I have time and energy, etc. left over.
Six: if the work doesn't take that long, I must find more work to do or I'm a slacker.
Seven: I should work as hard as everyone else.
And there's also another assumption at play here that we've talked about recently and that's assumption number eight, that your worth as a human being is tied to the effort you put in and the things you produce. In this case, it might sound something like: if the work is easy, I'm less worthy than someone who works hard.
Now you may agree with some of these assumptions, but let's pick them apart a little bit.
If it's easy for you, is it easy for everyone? Like what if you have more years of experience and you're just better at some things and you can do it easily and quickly. Like if you have been a nurse for 20 years, there's probably plenty of tasks you could do asleep with your eyes closed. You've done them so many times, but does that make them any less important or life saving?
No, of course not. Especially if you're in the position of having your life saved. I'm like, uh, I kind of think it would be great if it's easy for the person and they have a lot of practice doing it. I'm also willing for it to be hard for them. As long as like I get the life saving help I need, that's what matters to me. That's what actually creates the value.
Next assumption. Is it true that hard work is more valuable than easy work? Like, I don't know. If you manually add up expenses, is that actually better than letting Excel or a calculator add them up for you just because it's harder?
No, of course not. So that's just interesting to see, like which shortcuts make sense and your brain says, okay, that's the smart way to do things. And which ones will have you questioning if you're not good enough, not doing enough et cetera.
Okay. Third assumption, just because something is easy for you, does that mean it's less worthy of pride? Let's say that you're a photographer and you've photographed hundreds of weddings, and it's easy for you to get all the shots and make them look fantastic. Does that make the photos any less valuable or impressive? Is it any less touching for the couple when they see your work?
Okay, next assumption. If it's easy for you, does that mean you should do more? If you've been hired to copy edit a client's manuscript and you can do it quickly and easily, it does not mean you should start adding cover art or copy edit additional materials just because it's easy for you to do. It's actually probably more valuable to the client that you're able to do it quickly than if it was hard work for you, as this means you can turn it around and give it back to them faster.
They don't need you to do more, and you doing more could actually detract from what you are providing them as far as a service is concerned.
Okay, let's take a look at some non-work examples too.
If you can soothe your child in half the time it used to take, that does not make the soothing any less meaningful or successful. You don't necessarily need to work hard at it for it to work and do the thing it is designed to do.
If you find a clever way to meal prep that reduces time spent cooking from eight hours a week to three hours a week, that doesn't mean you're a slacker or that it's inherently better to work harder and spend more time.
Meals don't necessarily taste better or have more nutritional value just because you work harder or take longer to put them together.
Another one: if you like micro workouts and they get you moving when bigger exercise goals overwhelm you, that doesn't make the micro workouts any less effective.
Sometimes a super short workout does way more than a longer one. And it certainly does more than the workout you don't do. And actually doing a right size workout is helpful because if you do too much, just so you get that sensation of being hard, you can actually injure yourself as my girlfriend literally has done with her self-invented physical therapy activities.
And here's the doozy: if you spend longer and work harder on something, that does not make you as a person more worthy.
You might spend a long time and do a crazy difficult knitting pattern.
And listen, that's really cool. I've done some crazy knitting patterns myself. It's fun to challenge yourself and make something to keep you warm with your hands and a piece of string.
But that doesn't make you a better person. It just makes you a person who dedicated time and effort to achieve a goal in a certain way.
And if on the other hand, you were the person who designed the knitting pattern, it's possible you could have designed it super quickly, and that the designing of it could have been super easy for you, but it could still be an incredible pattern that delights people and brings them lots of joy and makes them a really cool final product.
I know personally, I've learned a line dance that the instructor told us she designed sitting at a stoplight. And I've fallen in love with songs that the artist has shared took her years to write. The time and difficulty of a task doesn't determine the beauty of the outcome, and the ease or the challenge of the creative act definitely doesn't determine the worthiness of the creator.
Let's also take a look at the flip side. If you think work has to be hard and take a long time to be valuable, what do you think that's going to result in? If someone assigns you a really easy task, one you could do in minutes, are you going to do it in minutes and be super proud of yourself? I've coached a lot of people and I'm going to tell you probably not.
What will probably happen is that you'll either find a way to make it hard, or you'll feel bad about yourself because you didn't work hard enough to feel good.
If you only give yourself permission to feel good about yourself at the end of a workday if you give it your all, what happens when all you need to get done is a presentation that would give someone else hives, but you feel quite confident about? You may find yourself feeling restless or unsettled, or inventing more work to do, or fiddling with the sides that are actually already quite good.
And don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently bad about doing more work or getting ahead in other tasks. That's not the point of what I'm saying here. The point is that if you subconsciously look down on easy work, that may secretly and even subconsciously incentivize you to make things harder.
And here's the real clincher. If everyone around you thinks like this, you'll all be competing to work the hardest and the longest, which will continually ramp things up for all of you.
This is the opposite of efficiency, but I also get why so many of us get stuck in this pattern, because it is everywhere. And for many of us, it's taken us really far in life, because even though it's inefficient, it means we work a lot trying to prove ourselves and do enough to feel good about ourselves. So it does create a lot of work, but it usually also makes us feel bad on the whole.
But listen, you're totally allowed to keep doing things that way. If it's working for you, have at it. But if you, like so many of my clients, want to be productive and do good work without overworking, without burning out, while having plenty of time and energy for your personal life, well, then you may need to replace this sneaky pattern with a new intentional one. Otherwise, all your extra time and energy will be gobbled up by the drive to work hard.
Now, if you're one of those people who likes to work hard, who finds it meaningful and enjoyable, then it's so important that you know you can still do that. There's probably plenty of necessary work that will actually be hard and you can delight in the puzzle and the challenge of it.
The key is to be able to look at your work and know what the easiest way to do it is. From there, it's a question of, do you want it to be that easy way? Or are you interested in making it harder for some reason? If you want to make it harder, okay, but why? Just ask yourself what the reason for that is, and then ask yourself if you like that reason.
Ask yourself if that reason aligns to the way you want to live your life, and especially to how much time and energy you want to have for other things. And if all of your work turns out to be super easy for you because of the level you're at and your skills, you can decide if you want to apply yourself moving up and getting a more challenging role. Or you could also decide to take that desire for challenge and apply it somewhere else like your marriage or parenting your kids or cultivating a hobby.
Here are the key takeaways. Things do not have to be hard for them to be valuable. In fact, zero value is added by them being hard. More often them being hard depletes value, as it takes time and energy away from other things.
Embracing what's easy for you and letting it be easy - while still seeing it as good and worth celebrating - will add so much joy and satisfaction back to your life, and it will also add time and energy. But you likely have to make a mental shift to allow yourself to access this ease and joy, because so many of us believe deep down that things have to be hard to be good and worthwhile.
If this episode resonates with you and you'd like help letting your work be easy and enjoying your life more, I'd love to support you with that. Reach out and let's have a conversation about working together to get you feeling satisfied AF - because you deserve nothing less.
Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need to. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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