When a compliment doesn’t feel like a compliment
You’re just better at organising things, so I’ll let you do that, or you can multitask and I just can’t cope with that, or nothing seems to faze you.
If you’re familiar with these statements, and so many more like them, do you hear a compliment, or do you hear a weighty burden?
Perhaps the final one you often hear is something like, It would all fall apart without you, or I just don’t know what I’d do without you doing all this stuff.
Maybe part of you feels appreciated. You’re good at what you do, people rely on you and you know you can get things done, but perhaps another part of you is tired.
When being useful becomes who you are
You work harder than everyone else to make yourself valuable because somewhere along the way you probably learnt that being useful and being valuable were the same thing.
You became the person who could be relied on. The one who remembered everything, organised everything and made sure things happened. The one who stepped in when something needed doing. Suddenly you’re so useful that you’ve trapped yourself in a place where everything would fall over without you.
You don’t want it to fall over, but you also don’t think you want to keep holding it all, all of the time, forever. So you’re a bit stuck.
Being really good at something can be a trap. The thought of changing something, letting people down or stepping away from being useful can be pretty scary.
Because if you stop being the person who holds everything together, who are you? And what happens if people no longer need you in quite the same way?
These are not always easy questions to sit with, particularly when you’ve spent years being the person everyone else depends on.
The crossroads: What if you stopped measuring your value by how much you carry?
Sometimes the things you’ve always done, and the roles you’ve always occupied, start to feel different. You might find yourself questioning your career, your relationships, or the expectations you’ve carried for years.
Maybe the question isn’t whether you can keep holding it all together.
It could be what might happen if you stopped measuring how valuable you are by how much you can carry?
If nobody was depending on you to hold it all together, what would you do or be or want?
Not, what are you good at? You already know that. But what do you actually want, now?
Perhaps you’ve spent so long looking after other people, meeting expectations and being the capable one that you’ve lost sight of what matters to you.
You might not be ready to make any big changes. You might not even know what those changes would look like and that's ok.
You don’t need to know what you want next
I often get asked how I worked out I wanted to become a counsellor after 30 years in corporate HR. I always answer honestly. I didn’t know.
It took a little while, but I began to listen to the little voice that I had been trying to ignore. The one that kept asking, “Is this what you want to keep doing?” I didn’t really want to work in corporate HR anymore but I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I felt I was supposed to have a clear plan or goal.
Looking back, it would have helped me to hear someone say that they didn’t know either and that it was okay not to know what you wanted. When you’ve spent years being capable, organised and good at getting things done, not having a plan can feel uncomfortable. You might be used to finding solutions, making decisions, and knowing what needs to happen next. Working out what you want for yourself is a different kind of process because it doesn’t necessarily respond to a plan or a deadline.
Sometimes you need a bit of space to notice what you’re feeling, what has changed, and what no longer fits.
Feeling stuck in life? Start with what you know isn’t working
You can start with knowing what you don’t want, rather than what you do want and try a few things and decide that some of them aren’t for you. It’s also ok to say you don’t know, because when you don’t know, you create a bit more space to be curious and notice what interests you.
You don’t have to turn every thought into a decision or every interest into a new direction. You can simply notice what feels different, what you find yourself drawn towards, and what you might like a little more of in your life.
Perhaps you know you don’t want to keep working at the same pace or be the person who always steps in or you’re tired of being needed for what you do, rather than feeling valued for who you are.
You don’t need to have the answers to all of these things, recognising them can be a place to start.
You can take a step without knowing the destination
Maybe you don’t need a clear destination to plan a path towards, you could just take a step and see what you discover.
Maybe for now, that means allowing yourself to question some of the things you’ve always been good at. Not because you’re no longer capable of doing them, but because being capable doesn’t mean you have to keep doing them. You can still be organised without being responsible for organising everything. You can still be someone people rely on without being the person who takes care of it all and you can be valuable without having to prove it by how much you carry.
Perhaps the question to sit with isn’t what you should do next, but what you might want if you gave yourself permission to want something different. You don’t have to know the answer just yet.
