But if I don’t do it………

How often have you heard yourself say ‘If I don’t do it…..it won’t get done’? Is it usually in reference to household chores? Tasks at work? Or other tasks that require someone to take responsibility?

Your response to these questions will often reveal insights into how you think you MUST be. They offer up information about a script you may have had written for you or that you have written for yourself at some point.

I’ve been privileged to hear many personal stories from clients. While those stories are as unique as sunrises, so many patterns of behaviour and thoughts are the same.

Thinking ‘but if I don’t do it…..no one else will’, is a common pattern.

Whether it’s at work or at home, whether it’s in your own mind or out loud, when you hear yourself say ‘If I don’t do it, it won’t get done’, use that moment to press pause and reflect on what’s happening.

Have an honest conversation with yourself about how you feel. Do you feel tough, harsh, upset, angry, used, sad – acknowledge what you feel. Then take some time to check and challenge your thinking.

Brene Brown, in her research on shame, defines shame for women as: a self-held expectation that we need to do it all and do it all well. Brown explains that when we don’t do it all, we believe we have failed, and then shame swallows us into the abyss of unworthiness.

It’s time we, as women, talk with one another about how we don’t do everything, and how we don’t do everything well. It’s time to share ways to manage, along with our families, all the priorities wrapping us tightly into impossible no-win expectations that we can and will do it all. It’s time to embrace living messy and imperfect lives.

You don’t have to do all of the things, all of the time. It is important to sit back sometimes and allow others to step up, to give ourselves a break and to let some things go.

When I talk this through with clients, it’s not uncommon for women to respond with ‘but they just won’t do it’. In exploring this more, the first point to consider is how we can shift our thinking about the situation and provide opportunities for those around you to help.

There are no easy answers and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this.

A good place to start is to have calm conversations with others and to develop a set of shared standards for how we turn up for one another. Whether your source of frustration is at work, home or in the community we need to focus on finding solutions that are going to best benefit all parties. That requires an open conversation that goes beyond “but if I don’t do it, no one else will.”

For me, suddenly gaining two extra children, working, emotionally supporting our family while also trying to find my own way through grief, required my partner and I to get be honest about where I was – adrift in the ocean and drowning!

I had to really examine what truly served me and where there was room for reasonable compromise. Like many of you out there, I was conditioned to believe that doing everything made me a good partner, colleague, mother, carer, community member. That if I didn’t do everything – I was failing. Where we landed was that we were a team (children included) and we all had skills and talents that could contribute to getting us over the line every week. That it wasn’t all on me.

Turns out the most difficult part for me was sitting back and actively not doing all the things. I felt a strong pull to just get the bloody chore, tasks, job done!

Funnily enough, when I stopped jumping into the gap between asking for help and waiting for it to get done – the world did not stop, nothing imploded. And like any new learned skill, the more I practiced, the more I coped and the more the others stepped in and had a go (not always to my standard – hahahaha).

Remembering there is no such thing as perfect – I still regularly find myself saying “But if I don’t do it….no one will”. But now I can see it, catch it and redirect it. If it serves me to get in and do it, I do. If it creates feelings of resentment in me, I know I’m best to walk away and wait for it to be done by someone else.

For the most part, the most important aspect is to keep talking about it with each other.

Have you reached a point where you decided to make some changes? I’d love to hear the ways you manage all the competing priorities in your life – and so would all the other women who need encouragement to be free of the shame of not doing it all.

Big love

Mel xoxo