“Baby, are you OK?” my wife asked me in the darkness.
I was lying in our sprawling family bed, which manages to hold my wife, our two small children, and me. Usually feeling their warm little bodies next to mine and listening to them breath brings me a great sense of joy and deep peace. Not tonight. Tonight, I was feeling tense, agitated, and miserable. It was late on Thursday and I had just completed my coaching, teaching, and training calls for the week. Instead of feeling satisfied, fulfilled, and proud, I felt scared and uneasy.
“I feel so guilty,” I replied. “Like everyone wants something from me and I’m letting everyone down.”
“Oh... Like who?” she asked in a whisper.
“I feel like everyone in my mastermind program wants more of my time and attention during the group calls, and the coaches on my team want more supervision and training calls.” No one had stated this. In fact, people were often expressing gratitude about their wins and progress. I knew what I was saying was distorted and inaccurate, but I was completely lost in the story.
“And I feel like I’m letting you and Zaim and Arman down. You guys want more time with me and I’m letting you down too. My kids are growing up and I’m missing it,” I added, on a dramatic note.
“You’re awfully involved for a dad who’s missing it,” my wife replied. Funny and sweet. Just two of the two hundred reasons why I love her.
Now that I’d gotten the stories out, I was able to feel my feelings more. We talked late into the night, enjoying a rare opportunity for uninterrupted adult conversation, even if it meant less sleep.
During our conversation, I realized how much of my stress and guilt was coming from taking too much responsibility for everyone in my life. It was my job to make sure everyone felt completely comfortable at all times. No missing, no wanting, no frustration. In fact, I needed to anticipate their desires and preemptively satisfy them before they became upset. Because if someone was upset with me for any reason, it was my fault and I was a bad guy who needed to fix it instantly.
This is Over-Responsibility, one of the many curses of the nice person. I’m no stranger to this one, and I have actively worked to let go of a vast majority of my care taking of others. Yet, as evidenced by the story above, it’s still there. Especially when I take on more, step outside of my comfort zone, and reach a new level of impact and influence. The more people I interact with, the more opportunities there are for that nice guy programming to pop up and start running amok.
Over-Responsibility is another pattern we learned in childhood. As young children, we would see Mom or Dad get angry, anxious, or sad, and instantly assume it was our fault. When we are very young, we are unable to understand that others are separate people, with their own experiences, feelings, and desires. This capacity doesn’t come online until we’re older, but by then we may have already made some strong decisions. We figure out the best way to respond when we “make Dad angry” or “make Mom anxious.” We might decide to hide, approach, console, hug, act out, try to be funny, or become completely quiet and still.
Flash forward twenty, or thirty, or fifty years, and we may be doing the same thing. You walk into your office on Monday morning of the successful business you own. Rock star. You’re navigating all the challenges of your industry, making tough decisions, and have steadily grown your business for five years in a row. Yet, when you walk through those doors and the first employee you interact with seems tense, irritable, and short, your mind starts to spin.
What’s going on with him? Is he pissed at me because I was out of the office on Thursday and Friday last week? Was it too much work and he didn’t like it?
Beneath these worried thoughts is anxiety. There’s fear, tension, and discomfort in your body. A sense of threat. All is not well. I must figure this out and solve it in order to be safe, to be at peace.
That’s exactly what Over-Responsibility does to us. It makes us feel completely responsible for everyone else’s feelings, with a strong compulsion to make sure everyone feels happy, relaxed, content, and generally good in all scenarios. This might sound impossible and problematic. It is. It becomes even more so as you interact with more and more people, whether it be in business, your love life, or socially.
This tendency to take too much responsibility for others’ feelings creates large amounts of anxiety and guilt (as well as hidden resentment). In fact, the rules from your list that are causing you the most guilt are likely ones that demand you don’t “cause” any negative feelings in others. The nicer someone is, the more guilt they feel about this.