You Are The Magic
You Are the Magic helps high achievers reignite their passion by tapping into the power they already possess—without adding more hustle to their plate. Hosted by Christine DeHerrera, a seasoned business coach, PR pro, and writer with over 20 years of experience, each episode blends mindset, strategy, and a dash of woo so you can create success that lights you up and makes your wildest dreams feel like your new normal.
You Are The Magic
Breaking Free from Over-functioning--Free Your Magic Challenge #4
You’re not tired because you’re doing too much.
You’re tired because you’re doing too much of the wrong things.
In Day Four of the Free Your Magic Challenge, we’re exposing one of the most toxic patterns high-achieving women unknowingly fall into: overfunctioning. It looks like leadership, it feels like service—but it’s actually self-abandonment in disguise. In this episode, Christine reveals the three hidden ways overfunctioning hijacks your creativity, bottlenecks your business, and keeps you stuck in your zone of excellence instead of unleashing your true genius.
You’ll hear real-world examples, get a powerful journaling prompt, and walk away with one small shift you can make today to reclaim your energy, your clarity, and your spark. This one hits deep—so if you’ve been holding everything together, constantly reacting, or overdelivering just to feel safe… this episode is for you. Click play and take your power back.
Book a call to learn more about how I can help you break free from over functioning in your business. Click here.
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Thank you for listening and just remember, you are the magic!
Welcome to the Free your Magic Challenge. I cannot believe we're already on day four. Are you starting to feel your magic returning? I hope so. Be sure to tell me all about it in the text, in the show notes or DM me on Instagram.
Christine DeHerrera:Today we're talking about something I see all the time with brilliant business owners, especially high-achieving women. It's something that looks like responsibility, feels like leadership, but is actually draining your magic at the root. Let's talk about over-functioning. Over-functioning is when you do too much for too long for too many people. It's when you take on responsibilities that aren't yours, solve problems that aren't yours to solve and make sure everyone else is okay, while slowly disappearing from your own life. In business, it can look like answering emails at all hours and texts saying yes to just one more thing for a client refusing to delegate because it's just easier to do it myself. While it might seem like good customer service, it's really a recipe for disaster for you and your business, because over-functioning is a form of self-abandonment. It feels like control, but it's actually disconnection from your genius, your vision and your creativity, which are the lifeblood of your business.
Christine DeHerrera:Here are three ways over-functioning shows up in business and how it blocks your flow. The first is reactivity. I feel this one deeply because running a publicity and advertising firm is all about reacting all the time Last-minute media requests, deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, not to mention everything else that comes along with all those things Emails, texts, calls. I speak from first-hand experience. When you're constantly reacting to everything in your business every ping, every question, every fire you leave zero space for deep work or creative thought. Creativity doesn't live in chaos. It lives in the calm. It lives in the space you protect. When you're always reacting, you're not creating, especially the cool new things that are what keep your business alive and growing and keep new people coming into your world. Another way over-functioning shows up is as people-pleasing for your clients. Over-functioning was drilled into me and my generation as excellent customer service, always going above and beyond, regardless of the cost.
Christine DeHerrera:When you're over-functioning in your business, you say yes to things that don't feel good. You over-deliver constantly. You hold back on your actual expertise because you don't want to ruffle feathers, and this leads to you feeling resentful, underpaid and exhausted, but still smiling on the Zoom screen Hello, toxic positivity. When you're performing for approval, your true magic stays hidden because you're using your energy for everything else, starting to get scared yet about overfunctioning. Well, the third form of overfunctioning is holding everything in your head. So you don't have systems, you don't delegate, you can't take a vacation because you are the system. And why are you the system? It's because of number two. When you're constantly people policing for your clients, there's no energy left to create systems and ways of delegating or taking a vacation. And while holding everything in your head sounds like control, it's actually fear. Fear of losing clients, fear of not being enough, and it's costing you so much time, so much space and so much creative energy. When your brain is filled with to-dos, your genius has nowhere to land. No one tells you this, but over-functioning isn't noble, it's not sustainable and it's actually not required for success. In fact, it's slowing you down, it's keeping you busy instead of potent. It's keeping you safe instead of sovereign. It's keeping you in your zone of excellence instead of your zone of genius. So be sure to listen to the episode earlier this week about how excellence kills genius.
Christine DeHerrera:Now that you have this awareness, let's start breaking the pattern. We're going to start taking back your energy, using it for good, to get in the flow, to see something no one else has seen, to create your next big thing. Let's start with some questions. Ask yourself where am I over-functioning in my business? Make a list of that and then, next to each of those things, write what is it costing me? It might scare you this list, but becoming aware is always the first step. Next you're going to pick one of those things on your list to stop over-functioning.
Christine DeHerrera:You can keep it simple. At first. It might just mean saying no to a request or delegating that request to somebody else on your team. It might be one place to create a standard operating procedure. Just simply record yourself doing the task on a Loom video and bam, you now have a system that you can give to someone else.
Christine DeHerrera:And if all that seems even like too big of a step, start by just pausing before you react or go wild and crazy and take the rest of the afternoon off. So one tiny shift today, just a couple of minutes, can create a ripple of magic tomorrow. And I should know, because over-functioning used to be a way of life. Instead, after years of migraines and trying to hold too many things all at the same time, I finally had had enough and said no more. I waited too long, and I don't want that for you, because it's required literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of deep nervous system work and deep inward looking to unravel and release my own over-functioning. Now I help my clients create space in their business so they can do this deep work and mastery required for their biggest dreams without over-functioning.
Christine DeHerrera:So if you're ready to achieve more by doing less, you can book a call today. You can find a link in the show notes, of course. You've been doing amazing work here. Thank you for showing up for yourself and your future and all the people you're going to help. I'll see you on Monday for day five, our last day of the Free your Magic Challenge. Until then, give yourself permission to stop doing the most, because you, you are the magic.