Have you ever found yourself overwhelmed by the weight of your responsibilities and passions, paralyzed by the pressure of caring too much? Welcome to a thought-provoking episode where I, Sean, your seasoned performance coach, navigate the tricky terrain of over-caring and its impacts on high performing individuals. We discuss my experiences in coaching, focusing on the reasons behind the excessive concern and pressure it creates. Learn how to understand the root causes of your pressure, and how benefits such as writing down your thoughts can give clarity. Discover the delicate balance between valuing rewards and fearing punishments - striking this balance can boost your effectiveness and productivity.
We then shift our focus to the "over-caring syndrome," examining how it can affect decision-making and leadership capabilities. I'll guide you through understanding whether your caring tendencies are virtuously motivated or born from fear-based concerns. We’ll talk about how you can feel overwhelmed, even paralyzed, and what strategies can be implemented to mitigate these negative effects. Highlighting the fear setting exercise by Tim Ferriss, we explore a powerful tool to overcome the fear of failure. Get ready to reflect on your own caring tendencies and find that perfect balance between your responsibilities and passions. Listen in, and start your journey to managing the pressure of caring too much today.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Have you ever found yourself overwhelmed by the weight of your responsibilities and passions, paralyzed by the pressure of caring too much? Welcome to a thought-provoking episode where I, Sean, your seasoned performance coach, navigate the tricky terrain of over-caring and its impacts on high performing individuals. We discuss my experiences in coaching, focusing on the reasons behind the excessive concern and pressure it creates. Learn how to understand the root causes of your pressure, and how benefits such as writing down your thoughts can give clarity. Discover the delicate balance between valuing rewards and fearing punishments - striking this balance can boost your effectiveness and productivity.
We then shift our focus to the "over-caring syndrome," examining how it can affect decision-making and leadership capabilities. I'll guide you through understanding whether your caring tendencies are virtuously motivated or born from fear-based concerns. We’ll talk about how you can feel overwhelmed, even paralyzed, and what strategies can be implemented to mitigate these negative effects. Highlighting the fear setting exercise by Tim Ferriss, we explore a powerful tool to overcome the fear of failure. Get ready to reflect on your own caring tendencies and find that perfect balance between your responsibilities and passions. Listen in, and start your journey to managing the pressure of caring too much today.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the Reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. Oh hey, there, see me new here of all places. Today, I would thought we might talk about something that seems to affect a lot of my clients, and that is this notion of caring too much so often, and like so many of these episodes, this particular episode is inspired by a conversation that I had recently during a coaching call with one of the executives that I'm coaching, and she was talking about how she puts so much pressure on herself. Pressure in all these different ways Pressure to perform at work, pressure to be the best partner possible, pressure in all these different areas of her life. Even her recreational pursuits are a source of pressure. She can't enjoy it just for the sake of enjoying something. She has to be the best. Now, the tone that I'm taking here is to try to inject a little bit of lightness into this conversation, because it already feels pretty heavy and if you are nodding your head with this notion of the pressure that you put on yourself because you care too much, then you might appreciate having a little bit of lightness in the mix. Now. It's no secret that the individuals that I coach are highly successful and they've risen to positions of authority and power in their organizations, whether that's government, although I coach relatively few of those. Predominantly I coach people in corporate organizations, but occasionally I'll also get some nonprofit organizations, some startups, and in this domain of high performance and high pressure, it is, I think, self-evident that we want to care about what we're doing and that it can be motivating and it can be effective for us to care about getting results. And obviously, if you have been listening to this show for a while, you know that I've talked across numerous episodes over the last gosh, what three years, now four years? I don't know something like that Around this notion that when all we care about are results, then it starts to sour our experience and it starts to become toxic.
Speaker 1:But when we look at the pressure that we put on ourselves because we care too much, we often see that pressure is typically directly proportional to how much we care about something. However and this is the thing that I think many people gloss over why we care about something really matters and it really informs the discussion that we're having. Do we care about something because we value the reward that comes with the endeavor, whether that's the end result or whether that's the process, or do we care a great deal? Do we care too much because we fear some sort of punishment or cost if we fail? Or is it a blending? And I would say, most of the time in the work that I do with people, they begin to recognize and see that it is a blend. It is a ratio of valuing some future reward or some future state or just the process, and simultaneously fearing some sort of punishment. Enough, whatever that means to you, whether it's not smart enough, not successful enough, not strong enough, not brave enough, not pretty enough, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into exploring virtue versus fear, you can see episode 178, which, conveniently, is titled Exploring Virtue versus Fear Deciphering the motivations behind our actions. But where does that leave us here today If you are the person who cares too much and realizes that it is a painful position to be in and that it is also simultaneously affecting your ability to be effective, to be productive, to get things done that you want to get done, to be powerful in your world, whatever that means for you. Then how do we deal with this? How do we improve our situation? Well, for starters, I recommend that you bust out, yield pen and paper or tablet and smart pencil or stylus and begin to write out. Don't type. Actually make symbols with your hand. Whether it's block lettering or cursive, it doesn't really matter. But to really connect with writing out the idea with a physical action, and not just typing on keys that all feel the same or, in the case of a smart device, often just a flat piece of glass. But to actually, with your hand, make the symbols makes it a little real, more real. Real, or I'm not really sure. We'll just say more real for today, how about that? And tease out what is causing you to care. So let's just say that I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's a project that's a really big project at work. Even phrasing it that way, really big project. What makes it a really big project? Does big convey just the scope of work? Oftentimes, when people tell me that they have a big project at work, it's not just the scope of work, it's not just the complexity of the work, but it's also the perceived value of the project itself To their career progression, to the organization, to the people that report to them. Oftentimes there are monetary bonuses connected to the success of the project. So, beginning to first write out what is causing me to care about whatever it is that I am hung up on, that can be a project, that can be your role in the organization, that could be an identity to which you subscribe.
Speaker 1:Like parent, I want to be a good parent. Why do you care about that? For some people they've had really terrible childhoods and they don't ever want to visit that or revisit that on someone else their own child, obviously. But for other people they have different motivations. You might think, oh well, come on, sean, that's like self-explanatory that you want to be a good parent. I can tell you for a fact that it is not self-explanatory, that I've had way too many clients whose parents did terrible things to them. Now is it debatable whether that individual wanted to be a good parent and just failed miserably? Yeah, I guess somebody could make that argument, but it's not a given that every person who happens to create a child wants to be a good parent. Sometimes there are actual cognitive deficiencies, neurological imbalances that preclude that, or that at least challenge it. I want us to get away from this assumption that every single parent out there wants to be a good parent. For other people they might be so wrapped up in their addiction drug addiction, alcohol addiction, whatever kind of addiction that being a good parent has fallen off the radar Again.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is that you find yourself caring about, and if you notice that you are caring too much and I think I just mispronounced that word a little bit, because what I was thinking in my head was caring too much but then, immediately after that was this notion that you're carrying weight, you're carrying a sense of heaviness or duty, obligation that's being thrust upon you with this thing that you care about. That's the thing that I'm talking about. If you really care about something but it's exciting for you and it feels uplifting and you have just all the warm feels about it, then great, great, trucking with what you got. But if you notice that the care that you're connected to feels heavy and maybe it feels stagnant as well and it feels overwhelming or overbearing, then write out what it is that is causing you to care, the virtuous stuff and the fear and scarcity based stuff. Where do the narratives of oh if I don't care about this so much, then I won't be enough Start to creep in? I'll be a failure. And once you've done that, you can start to look at how you might mitigate the freezing effect of caring too much, because quite frequently that's what happens when people bring this to my attention in sessions or when it's during a discovery call or a debrief of one of the assessments that I do for people.
Speaker 1:It's in caring too much that they psych themselves out. They go from being somebody who is decisive and prone to taking action and moving things forward to being paralyzed, not physically, obviously, but just in their ability to move things forward and take action, to really be a leader. A big part of leadership is being willing and able to make decisions Right ones, wrong ones, bad ones, good ones just making the decision and making sure that the organization continues to move forward. Whether the organization is a big company, whether it's a charity, whether it's just a team, whether it's a family unit, doesn't matter. You can be a leader in all these different settings, regardless of what your title is. So one element that has people frozen in their caring too much is this notion that they're going to fail.
Speaker 1:So one element of getting yourself unstuck is to really go through an exercise of asking yourself will it be that bad? And if you want, you can search and I've mentioned this in past episodes. You can search for Tim Ferriss's fear setting exercise and that exercise is something that he has communicated in a TED talk. It's something that he's mentioned in books and, in case you don't know who Tim Ferriss is, he is a New York Times bestselling author and generally a student of high performance and optimal performance, and a lot of what he writes is very much about how top performers perform, how do they get unstuck, how do they move forward in the face of doubt, in the face of fear, uncertainty, etc. So that fear setting exercise is quite effective if you do it, which I guess is part of the process here.
Speaker 1:Another element around caring too much, even for the things that are virtuous, even for the things that are exciting for us, is it distracting so sometimes like, imagine the first time you fell in love and you were so consumed by it and you wouldn't eat and you wouldn't hang out with the friends that you normally hung out with and all you could think of was this other person that you were in love with. It's so consuming, and the rest of your life gets put on pause because you care so much. Now, that can be a wonderful feeling, and for anybody who is in that feeling, ah, I dig it. But we also have to recognize where is it that we are perhaps overindulging in that, and especially for my kind of client? My kind of client has a lot of responsibilities in their life. Now, I would argue that many of those responsibilities could be either delegated or taken down a couple notches at least a couple notches, but even so, they tend to be parents, they tend to be people running companies, people who are concerned about the well-being of their employees, making sure that they get paychecks, not least a witch. So they do have a lot of responsibility and you know, oftentimes when we allow ourselves to be so consumed by any one thing, it takes our eye off of everything else.
Speaker 1:Now, if you notice that you're giving something disproportionate bandwidth or disproportionate attention, again, you can ask yourself what is it about this that is consuming so much of my time, energy and attention? Is there something that is critically out of alignment or misplaced. So, for instance, one example that shows up quite frequently in the realm in which I coach is perhaps there is a person, a team member, who is in charge of something, some sort of project or initiative, but they don't have the requisite skill, expertise, experience, whatever you wanna call it, or mixture to capably handle that project or initiative. They're in over their heads and you, as the leader of that group, might be spending an inordinate amount of time sort of ruminating on that, thinking about it and worrying about it, instead of identifying where the gaps are and then working to close them with the individual. So I'm not suggesting that you have to drop something from your attention, but what I am suggesting is that if you find yourself ruminating on something and it's taking up a lot of bandwidth because it is something that you care deeply about, but then you can't seem to figure out how to move forward, then perhaps you need to write out those elements that are keeping you stuck and then begin to tackle them one by one.
Speaker 1:In the instance that I just gave that example of, perhaps you have a subordinate who was in over their head. They can't really handle the level of responsibility that you gave them, then perhaps you need to step in and do some mentoring. Or perhaps there's some reallocating that has to happen in their job description Maybe there's, you know. You can parcel out some of the responsibilities of that project so that they're not so in over their head and, instead of just fretting about it at night, you actually get involved, right, and you not. You don't just take it over, which is what so many of my clients were prone to do. Oh, you don't have it, they just swoop in there and take it all back. No, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. We still need to master this idea of managing our own over caring and also our own over caring other people's responsibilities. But you, as the person who has more experience, might need to get in there and offer some tutoring, some mentoring, some training and then again some management of workload, potentially what else?
Speaker 1:If you recognize that this caring too much is perhaps a byproduct of the messaging that you perceive from your group, if you notice that you're perhaps too enthusiastic in terms of your own natural predilection on a certain subject, everyone else in the company or everyone else in the group perhaps it's a family right Is super excited about a certain topic and you find yourself worrying about not being accepted If you don't likewise show a similar degree of fervor. How can you ask yourself hmm, what's the balance here? I really don't have the same sense of enthusiasm about this topic that everybody else seems to have. How is it that I can be true to myself? I don't want to come off us as like fake not trying to be fake about how enthusiastic I am about this subject, but I also want to convey that I'm part of the team or I'm part of the family. I'm part of the group.
Speaker 1:Can you recognize that you have a desire to be with the group While simultaneously acknowledging to them and to yourself yeah, maybe I'm not that into this thing that you guys all want, but what I am into is being a team player or being part of the family and just being part of that experience, because I value the relationships. So maybe I'm not quite so into this one thing that the rest of you are into, but I'm into you and therefore I'm willing to go along with the thing, whatever that happens to be, because I value being with you and I value the nature of the relationship that we share, and I think oftentimes clients create these dividing lines that are not necessary and they make their life a lot more painful as a result. But in the end, I think, getting to this place where you really sketch out the areas in which you're carrying and carrying too much weight, you find yourself either in paralysis or you find yourself in some other kind of over indexed, imbalanced state about a certain something. Write all that stuff out and then begin to ask yourself those piercing questions why am I so committed to this? Why am I so wedded to this?
Speaker 1:Sometimes our caring too much relates to a certain perspective or a certain side of an argument, and this is another thing that I think is really important to me. And this is another thing where a lot of my clients end up really tripping themselves up is that they are too interested, too vested or too invested I guess I should say too invested in being right, and that is probably an episode unto itself. So I'm going to cut it off here. If you did enjoy this episode and you found it useful, I would love it, absolutely love it If you would subscribe, share, thumbs up, like whatever the thing is, and that, when you share, share it with people that matter to you, share it with individuals that you think would benefit from having a conversation around this topic, or don't. It's totally up to you. Until next time, take care of each other.