And What Else?
Welcome to 'And What Else?', your source for thoughtful and meaningful conversations about personal and professional growth. Host Wendy O'Beirne is an internationally recognised coach and consultant with a passion for exploring the layers of topics surrounding self-development. Together, we'll dig beneath the surface of subjects, stories, and possible solutions to uncover new perspectives we may not have seen before. With curiosity and open minds, let's embark on an adventure of self-discovery and uncover the possibilities of 'and what else'. Stay Curious!
And What Else?
Unlearning the Burden Mindset
This episode explores how the hidden belief that we are a burden impacts our behaviour, causing us to hide our struggles while absorbing others' problems. Wendy invites listeners to consider how thoughts and behaviours would change if we didn't believe ourselves to be burdensome, highlighting the value of revisiting self-reflection questions throughout our personal development journey.
• Examining the pattern of hiding our own burdens while absorbing others' problems
• Understanding the underlying belief "I am a burden" and its behavioural manifestations
• Recognising that valuable self-reflection questions reveal new layers each time we revisit them
• Challenging the idea that we need constantly new "advanced" personal development techniques
• Exploring why many people frame asking questions as creating conflict
• Identifying how past experiences create emotional reactions when we ask questions or make requests
I would love to hear your responses to these prompts. Whether you drop me an email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or DM me on Instagram @thecompletioncoach, I'd love to hear what this stirred in you. If you think it might be helpful for somebody else to hear, please do forward it on.
If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.
Welcome to, and what Else, the podcast with me, wendy O'Byrne, also known as the Completion Coach, and today it's going to be based around a question, and it's a question that might not immediately make sense to you or land with you, but I'd still love you to sit with it. And the question is how would your thoughts and behaviors change if you didn't believe that you were a burden and I want to reframe it to if you didn't believe that these words come in I am a burden. And it's a really important question because quite frequently this has not passed anybody's conscious minds. They're not actively thinking every day I'm such a burden, but somewhere, somewhere, at some point, this idea is filtered into the subconscious that you're a burden. And so when things happen in life burdens, things happen, tough situations, struggles, all kinds of things that burden you you don't ask for help with because you don't want to burden other people. And when other people have burdens, you take them on, and I'm bringing this in because I've had some brilliant conversations with people over and over again in different situations, but they come back to these examples I'm going to use in this podcast, and one of them was about intention, and it was how can I set an intention for who I want to be and how I want people to feel if I'm having a really bad time, and the idea was, if I can't be positive, upbeat, helpful, all of the things like how the hell do I set an intention around how who I'm going to be when I'm not being the fixer, the helper? If you're holding everything in and you find it difficult to receive help, there is a great likelihood of that under the current of I'll do it myself. I've got to do this by myself. A lot of that can be. This is my burden. I'll do it myself. I've got to do this by myself. A lot of that can be. This is my burden. I must fix it.
Speaker 1:The same people often are the people that take other people's burdens and absorb them, take them on as if they are their own cannot settle. Until they know the burden is settled, it becomes theirs, and so they have the underlying belief that when they share, other people will behave like that. Other people will try to absorb it. Other people will whittle all the time about it until it is resolved, even though it's not theirs. And that's not true. If you have the underlying belief in some way, I am a burden, and when something feels like a burden in your life, you hold it in. And when someone else is struggling, you try to absorb their burden, try to absorb their burdens. There is an underlying current there in some way that says I am a burden and when I have burdens I must hide them so that other people don't find me more of a burden. And when I see other people's burdens, I should absorb them, because then it reduces how much of a burden I am in their life.
Speaker 1:As always I'm not saying this will be all people at all times, but this is a common thread I have seen amongst people that keep their problems to themselves, keep everything they struggle with to themselves, and yet are all over and absorbing everybody else's struggles and burdens. And so I'm going to ask you again what would change in your thoughts and your behaviors if you didn't believe that you were a burden? And I've sat with this question not just once, but many times, many times, and I'm going to say that it reveals layers, as everything does. I don't think that we outgrow any questions. I don't believe anything is basic or advanced when it comes to self-reflection. I would also ask everybody to start to really think about the areas where, within any self-reflection, you have done it once and moved on, because that's almost you trying to complete it rather than to really sit and see what comes up from it. There are very few things in self-development that are once and done. The questions that helped me 10 years ago are still highly beneficial to me now. The practices I started 10 years ago are still highly beneficial to me now, and I do know in the world of consumption or some idea that some people are more advanced than others, there can be this desire to have new things, new shiny things all of the time.
Speaker 1:I would love you to sit with. How many things have I asked myself more than once, not just for a light bulb moment or to go shit. I do that but to really understand it time after time, not because it's leading your life anymore. For example, when I asked myself this question about being a burden 10 years ago, it was leading my life and I didn't even realize it. It was a fundamental part of how I thought and how I behaved. And now, when I ask myself it many moons later, it's curiosity as to where's this leaking in my life a little bit, or where's it showing me something that I can't see. It's not leading my life anymore, but it's still a super valid question that is worthy of me sitting with. I'm not too advanced for that question, it's just going to show up so differently.
Speaker 1:While I've got you here, I want you just to reflect on something else, and this is probably the most common conversation I've had in the last 10 years of doing this job, but also within my lifetime, one of the most heard phrases and you will have heard this a lot, and that's people saying, including yourself, no doubt. I don't like conflict, conflict. What I really noticed is what those people are framing as conflict are just them asking questions. They've just got some questions, and so, somewhere along the line, the idea that them having questions has been patterned into them to make them believe that if I ask questions, I am causing conflict, if I have questions, I am causing problems, and so I'm going to ask you why do you believe that asking questions creates conflict? Because communication is huge, communication is huge, and we are so afraid on the whole of asking questions on any level that we see it as being, you know, difficult, being stupid, as causing trouble, as causing conflict. So if asking questions creates the idea in your head that in some way, you're creating a difficulty.
Speaker 1:If you believe that having questions is confrontation, what impact is that having in your life? What happens to you emotionally and physically when you have questions? You know I've spoken about this before, but there used to be people that told me all the time that going into interviews or asking for a pay rise could cause their voice to quiver or for them to feel highly emotional, and often it was because they were going to ask a question and they were afraid of the answer, or they were asking for something and that created a lot of emotion within them and they couldn't understand why a reasonable question was causing such an emotional response in them. And the reality of it is somewhere along the way. Asking questions or asking for something has caused confrontation or has caused disappointment, and that is a backlog in the body that hasn't been dealt with.
Speaker 1:I'm'm going to leave that one here today. Thank you for listening. I would love, love, love to hear some of your responses to these prompts. Whether you drop me an email, wendy, at thecompletioncoachcouk, or DM me on Instagram at thecompletioncoach, I would love to hear what this stirred in people listening as well. If you think it might be helpful for somebody else to hear. Please do forward it on. Thank you, thank you, thank you.