E192: Stop Digging Up The Roots

You know the moment: you set a boundary, send the email, start the hard conversation, then your brain demands immediate proof that it worked. You refresh the inbox, reread texts for tone, scan someone’s mood, and call it “being responsible” while your body feels anything but calm. We’re naming that pattern for what it is: digging up the roots before anything has time to grow.

I share a recent coaching story that starts with an employee engagement survey and ends somewhere much deeper. The real issue is not the survey results, it is the hidden belief that we must manage other people’s feelings and protect ourselves from disappointment. From there, we break down one of the most useful distinctions in leadership development and self-trust: care versus control. Care prepares the soil by creating clarity, honesty, compassion, and safety. Control tries to force tomatoes to grow by chasing certainty and needing everyone to leave feeling a specific way.

Then we shift into a cleaner, steadier way to lead: agency over responsibility. Agency keeps your focus on what you can control, your integrity, your listening, your contribution, and helps you release what was never yours to hold, like someone else’s reaction or choice. You’ll leave with a simple practice to build the muscle of trust: a 48-hour no-checking window that reduces anxiety, strengthens boundaries, and makes your leadership feel grounded.

If this hits home, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who overchecks like you do, and leave a review so more people can find the path from control to self-trust.

Transcript

Welcome And The Garden Metaphor

Cynthia 0:06

Hello, hello, and welcome back to Uncharted and Unfiltered, a Journey Back to You. I am Cynthia Jameson, leadership coach, and I am so happy that you have found your way to my corner of the internet. Last episode 191, we talked about how you could change your life one small choice at a time. And today I want to pick up right where we left off because there is a question that follows every one of those small choices, whether you have noticed it or not. What do you do after you have made it? It being the decision or the choice. So today I want to start with a question. Have you ever planted a garden? Bear with me. Maybe you've planted some tomatoes, maybe you have planted some cucumbers, maybe let's just say you have planted some flowers. But just imagine spending a Saturday morning planting seeds. So you're getting everything ready, you prepare the soil, you put them in, you water them, you want to make sure that they get some sunlight and everything that they need to be able to grow. Just imagine for a moment that you wake up the next morning and you dig them up because you're just checking. There's no roots yet. So you tuck them back in, and then Monday comes and you dig them up and still nothing. And then Tuesday comes and it's the same thing. I know it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? And yet I think so many of us spend our lives digging up the roots, not in our gardens, in our relationships, in our business, in our leadership, in ourselves. We plant something, maybe it's a conversation, a decision, a boundary, a new way of leading. And before it's even had a chance to really take root, we are already checking to see if it's working. We want that certainty. We want that proof. We want that outcome. That's why we do what we do. Now, a client of mine recently came to coaching wanting help preparing for a conversation with his team about their employee engagement survey. On the surface, it was about the survey results. And underneath, it was about something else, something deeper than that. It's never about the thing we think it is. He wanted his team to be able to understand how the survey worked and

When We Check Too Soon

Cynthia 2:55

how much that survey could impact leaders above them without steering their honesty. And somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I realized he wasn't really asking me how to have a conversation. He was carrying responsibility for an outcome that wasn't his to own. He wanted to make sure that people responded well, that leaders weren't unfairly judged, that everyone understood. In other words, he was digging up the roots, trying to manage something that could only grow through trust, through honesty, through time, right? And maybe your version doesn't look like a survey, whatever your version is. Maybe it looks like you set a boundary with your teenager last week and now you're reading every mood and every silence and wondering if it landed, right? Or what you're making it mean about you, or what you're making it mean about them. Maybe you have sent a pitch for something and you've refreshed your inbox 10 times today. Maybe you had the hard conversation with your partner and you have reread the last three text messages because you're checking for tone, wondering if you have said too much or if you haven't said enough. Different gardens, same shovel. But it reminded me of one of the greatest shifts that we can make as leaders and as humans, which is learning the difference between care and control. Care says, I will prepare the soil. Let me create the conditions so that this can grow here in this space, in this place, right? I will tend to you. And control says, I need to make the tomatoes grow. Care says, I'm going to show up with honesty, with some clarity, and with some compassion. And that might sound like different conversations around people can't really be honest to complete a survey here, or they can't be honest in a way that they don't fear repercussion, right? Control says, I need to have everyone leave this conversation feeling exactly the way that I hope they do. One is leadership, and the other is anxiety dressed up as responsibility. And to be clear, checking is not the enemy here. A good manager, a good leader follows up. A good coach asks how last week's homework went. Good parents ask how their kid's day was, right? The question isn't whether you check in, it's why you check in. Are you checking in because it's genuinely a part of how you support someone, or because you don't feel okay until you hear the answer that you're hoping for? It's the same action, but a completely different route. And this is where so many of us unknowingly outsource ourselves. Not because we're handing the decision to someone else, although we might be doing that, and that would be different, but because we have attached our peace to an outcome that we don't control, right? Like if I get that outcome, then I can feel at peace with the situation. Listen, surveys only come once a year. We put way too much, this is

Care Versus Control In Leadership

Cynthia 6:10

my personal opinion, we put way too much stock in what an employee engagement survey says. We tell ourselves things like, I will know that I'm a good leader if the survey scores improve. Maybe. Or maybe the responses are just going underground. We tell ourselves, I know that I've handled the conversation well if everybody agrees with me. Maybe. I'll know that I've made the right decision if no one is disappointed. Again, maybe. Do you hear it though? How our confidence, our peace, our sense of worth is handed over to something outside of ourselves. That is outsourcing, not a task. Ourselves. It's very different to outsource a task versus outsourcing ourselves. And we need to, one of the things that I think about often is the Spider-Man quote, right? With great power comes great responsibility to resource oneself and to be conscious and intentional about how we do that, and also be conscious and intentional about when we might need to resource ourselves in a way that we need support from someone else is very different than outsourcing. So I want to be careful here because caring, caring, let me say that again, about your results isn't the problem. Wanting the survey scores to improve, wanting the pitch the land to land, or wanting your kids to thrive, that is not outsourcing. That is just caring. The shift is not caring less. It is noticing when your piece has become dependent on the outcome landing exactly the way you hoped. So a question that I asked my client was what would leading this conversation from agency instead of responsibility look like? Responsibility says, I need to make this turn out well. Agency says, actually, I need to show up and lead well. Responsibility obsesses over the outcome, and agency focus on focuses on the contribution. Responsibility clings and agency trusts. The energy is very, very different, and you can feel that. So here's how you can use this for yourself starting today. The next time that you feel a tightness in your chest before a hard conversation, before you hit send, before you walk into the room, I invite you to pause. Just take a moment, take a breath and ask yourself one question. Am I about to lead from agency or from responsibility? It's enough to be able to catch yourself before you start digging up the roots. Now I know some of you work in roles where monitoring the outcome literally is the job. So if you are a surgeon watching vitals, if you are someone who runs compliance, if you are the one that is accountable for whether a deadline gets hit, I'm not telling you to stop tracking results. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm talking about is the outcomes that were never yours to control in the first place. How someone feels, what they decide to do, how they decide to respond, whether they change or not. Track what's actually yours to track. Release what was never yours to hold. And here's the beautiful part of releasing our attachment to the outcome. It doesn't lower our standards. Everybody thinks that it does, but it doesn't. It raises them. Our measure of success then becomes something that

Agency Over Outcome Attachment

Cynthia 10:05

no one can take away from you. Did I tell the truth? Did I listen? Did I create safety? Did I lead with integrity? Those things are within my control. Whether someone agrees with me, whether they change, whether they like it, whether they don't, that's not mine. It's none of my business. It's not mine to own. And I want to be careful here because this isn't a permission slip to avoid a hard look in the mirror when something goes badly. But I showed up with integrity. Only counts if it's true. If you actually told the truth, if you actually listened and actually led well. This isn't about excusing a bad outcome. It is about being honest enough to know the difference between the outcome that reflects something you need to own and an outcome that has simply been never yours to control. So this week, I want to leave you with an invitation. Whether you where in your life are you digging up the roots? Where are you checking, controlling, worrying, trying to force something that simply needs consistency and trust? Or maybe it needs to die. And I want to leave you with more than a question. I want to leave you with a practice. Pick one thing that you have planted this week. Could be a boundary, could be a conversation, could be a decision that you have made. And then give yourself a no-checking window. 48 hours, no follow-up text, no rereading the email, no checking in to see how it landed. Just let it sit. Let the roots do what roots do in the dark where you can't see them. And notice what it feels like not to check. That feeling, that's the muscle that we are building. Now, I also want to be clear about what this isn't. This isn't permission to go quiet on somebody who's waiting to hear from you, or avoid a follow-up conversation that you actually owe them. If someone has asked you to check back in, or if your silence would leave them hanging,

No Checking Practice And Invitations

Cynthia 12:25

that is not taking up the roots. That is abandoning the garden. This practice is for checking. That's about soothing your own anxiety, not the checking that's genuinely part of showing up for someone else. So if this resonates, I would love to invite you to join me this coming Thursday inside the porch light, an hour to slow down, reflect, ask better questions, and remember who you are beneath the pressure to perform. We will keep exploring what it means to stop outsourcing yourself and start creating the conditions for the life and the leadership that you actually want. The porch light will be on. I would love to see you there. Bring snacks, bring your lunch, bring your beautiful self. And in the next episode, we will go even further into this actual pause between the urge to check and the choice not to. Until next time, remember self-trust is learning to create the conditions without demanding the outcome. You don't have to control the outcome to trust yourself. Sometimes your only job is to prepare the soil and trust that the roots are growing, even when you can't see them yet. Take care, have a magnificent week. Talk to you soon. Bye. I hope that you're walking away feeling more aligned with your true self, more confident in the choices ahead, and ready to leave the safe path behind, knowing you've got everything you need within. Remember, the journey to you isn't about finding one perfect direction. It's about trusting yourself enough to explore all of it. If you're ready to dive deeper, join me for the next episode and don't forget to subscribe so that you never miss the next step on your path. I invite you to join my mailing list at www.cynthia Jamisoncoach.ca, where we'll deepen our relationship and you can claim your copy of your inner compass, a guide to charting your course to authenticity. Until next time, stay unfiltered, stay true, and most importantly, stay you.