Ep #21: The Downside of Being a Capable Woman
episode summary
Ever found yourself buried under a mountain of responsibility simply because you're highly capable?
Being capable is great, and in so many ways it serves us well. But when we want/need to always be the problem solver, it can lead to overwhelm, stress, and resentment. Together, we'll explore how you can still be the powerful, capable woman you are, without succumbing to the pitfalls of doing it all.
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Podcast Ep #03: Stop People Pleasing
Podcast Ep #04: Set Solid Boundaries
Podcast Ep #06: The Art of Saying No
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CHAPTERS:
2:06 - The Good Life Group Coaching
5:14 - The Downsides of Being Capable
7:19 - Case Study: The Coolant
11:50 - The First Step is Noticing
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier, and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hey, friends, today we are going to talk about being a capable woman and some of the downsides to being a very capable woman. Now, you know, we and many, many women before us have worked long and hard to get us to the place where we are, where we have the option to be who we want to be and have the kind of jobs we want to have. And, like in my case, I wouldn't have been able to do this job - this kind of job didn't really exist; having an online business - and I'm able to support my family with it as a single mother. I completely appreciate everyone who's gone before me and has worked hard so that I could have this opportunity, and I know it's not 100% better, but it's much, much better than it used to be. But I think this has put us, as women, in a position where now we can actually do it all, meaning we have the capability to do it all. So we carry on with the traditional roles of being in charge of the family - maybe cooking dinner and doing the laundry and knowing all the ins and outs of what's going on with the kids - and also we have the capability to have the same jobs as men and the same responsibilities, and trying to manage all of those things, because we can do them all, I feel like it's a problem that comes with all the opportunities that we have now. Being capable is amazing and it's fantastic, but I think sometimes the biggest thing that we need to do is when to know how to use that power for good, and by 'good' I mean in a way that's best for you, and knowing when sometimes you don't need to be the capable person who handles every problem. I'll give you some examples and some questions that you can ask yourself to make sure that you aren't adding to your own overwhelm by taking on too much. But before I jump into all the ins and outs of being a capable woman, I want to tell you that I am offering a group coaching program for the first time ever. I've never offered this before. It's called The Good Life. It's a three-month coaching program that is designed specifically for you to take your life from feeling overwhelming and stressful to calm and balanced, and it will start mid-October and go all the way through mid-January. We will not meet the week of Thanksgiving or the last two weeks in December, because we know those two weeks can be overwhelming and this program is taking away your overwhelm and your stress, not adding to it. So we will not meet those weeks, but the rest of the weeks we will meet. There will be video content for you each week to watch that will give you all the steps that you need to change your life from chaotic to calm, and then there will be a weekly group coaching call that will be live with me and a bunch of other fun stuff. So if this sounds interesting to you and you want to join, the first thing to do is to join my mailing list. Go to my website at michellegauthier. com, on the very home page. There's a button there right at the top on the left that says Join my Mailing List. That way you'll know as soon as it opens. I am going to do some early bird pricing and I think this will fill up and I'm limiting the number of people because I want it to be a really intimate group. So if you're interested in joining The Good Life, get on my list right now. It's a good transition to go from talking about joining group coaching in the good life to talking about being a capable woman, because, like I said at the beginning, I think being a capable woman is such a gift and also such a - I don't want to say burden - but it can definitely cause some overwhelm for us. So let's just dive in and talk about what you can do to make your life less stressful by really just evaluating where you are taking on problems and situations that don't really need to be your problems or situations. I come from a long line of capable women. My mom's dad died when she was 14, and so she was raised by a single mom from that point on, and that single mom, my nana, raised six kids on her own. Five of them were girls, and they're all very capable. And growing up, I just had an example of my mom and dad are married - still married - but my dad he traveled a lot for work and, honestly, my mom was just extremely capable. So I grew up seeing her do things that were quote unquote "dad jobs" at the time, like cleaning the gutters and doing the lawn and rounding up all the kids and taking us out for a day on the boat on her own. And she was the coach for my brother's baseball team. I think she was the only mom coach. So she raised me and my siblings to be that same way. So we grew up thinking that we could do anything and I think it worked, like we all do, and I'm super grateful for that. And the capableness - that's not a word but we'll just use it - has served me so well in my life and my career. But sometimes, when we're capable, there are downsides. Number one: when you're capable, you have a tendency to do absolutely everything because you know you can. Number two: we also believe that no one can do it, whatever it is, as well as we do and therefore we should just do it ourselves. I have this thought all the time about things with my kids. It pains me to watch them do some things, sometimes in a certain way, when I want it to be done the way I would do it. We maybe don't take help, even when it's offered. We certainly don't ask for help. We wear our exhaustion like a badge of honor and just keep taking things on. And then, fourth and the last thing is it can build resentment when you get mad at your partner or kids for not doing anything. So you are giving the message of I can or I will do everything, but then getting mad because they're not doing anything. Does any of this resonate? If this sounds familiar, this could be a great episode for you. I think by now you know me well enough to know that I'm not going to say you should become a damsel in distress and become helpless. You probably couldn't do that if you tried, but since the goal of this podcast is to make your life less overwhelming, I'm going to suggest that part of being a capable woman is being capable enough to evaluate if you *want* to do everything. T o become a capable woman who is capable of asking or accepting help or just leaving something for someone else to solve. The first step is the same as any problem, which is noticing when you're doing it and really taking stock of what you're doing in this area right now, you might have such a pattern of just taking care of business - your business and everyone else's - that you're just on autopilot and just do this without thinking about it. So my biggest goal for today is for you to just have awareness of what's going on with you. One time my handsome man friend and I were in Costa Rica and we rented this car and we were driving from one city to another and it was like a 60 mile drive, but the roads are pretty rough and often not paved. So we were going slow and the weather was hot and all of a sudden it was like a million degrees in our car and we realized that the AC had stopped working. I know, first world problems. Neither of us knew what the problem was, but we knew we were hot and there were just like some red lights flashing on the dash telling us that something was wrong. So, even though neither of us knew what the problem was, we pulled over at the next gas station and I went in and tried to figure out what to do, while he was going to Google ideas on his phone. A nd I don't speak Spanish, so I did my best to communicate the issue and came out with oil that the car hopefully needed. So I added the quart of oil and we started the car and hoped for the best and my handsome man friend's like "I'm so impressed, babe, how did you know what to do? And I was like how did I know what to do? I don't know what to do, I really don't know what to do." And he said this was like, so impactful to me. He said, "seriously, you're just so capable. I assumed that you had it under control and you knew what to do, and that's why you went into the gas station." And that just hit me with a ton of bricks because, without even meaning to, I wasn't trying to pretend that I knew what to do and, like, keep it from him. I just immediately took ownership of the problem, and somehow gave him the idea that I knew what to do. And I mean he even speaks Spanish, kind of. I mean, a lot better than I speak Spanish, and I was the one who went into the gas station, the Spanish speaking gas station. So this is a perfect example of where you can build resentment in your relationship. So he just assumes I've got it and I assume I've got it, but then I'm mad at him for not trying to handle it, even though I wouldn't have actually let him handle it, because I needed to be the one to manage it. Do you see that little circle I created for myself there? Because he offered to come in with me and I was like, "t's okay, I'll figure it out why. Why did I do that? I put myself in a worse situation and in the end, you know, we talked through it and we laughed and went back to figuring out what to do, like we didn't have resentment that stuck around, but it sure can, you know, over time, be something that causes resentment in a relationship with your spouse or your kids or the people who work for you or whoever you're doing all these things for. So, finally, we got to a place that had cell service and I called my dad which is the best answer to many problems, especially when relating to cars, and he told us we needed to add water because it was the coolant that was out, and some nice locals stopped and gave us a gallon of water and everything turned out to be fine. But let's just go back and relook at the situation. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to do some noticing or acknowledging what's going on with you. So let's look back at the points that I made at the beginning, where I said there are some places where being a capable woman is not helpful, and see how many of those boxes I checked. So, number one yes, I took on the problem without even noticing that I was taking on the problem or thinking about it. Had I thought who's the best person to solve this problem, it would have been the person who could speak Spanish. I honestly probably know more about cars, but why couldn't we have gone in together? I could have absolutely asked for that. Number two I believed I could solve it better than he could for no actual reason, just part of being capable. I didn't ask for help from him and I took a guess at the oil, like based on trying to talk to the guy in the gas station, and maybe I could have asked for better help if I spoke Spanish. But I didn't ask for help from my handsome man friend. I kind of asked for help in the gas station, but I was really trying to figure it out on my own. And then, as far as resentment, yeah, I did feel kind of resentful, like I'm in here, I'm trying to figure this out, what's he doing, even though I don't think I would have accepted help at the time. So if I look back now at how I could have done this differently, the main thing would have been pausing to think" am I taking charge of this problem, and am I the best one to solve this problem? Nope, neither one of us know what to do and one of us spoke Spanish, we could have gone in together and tried to piece together a solution. I could have set up front, "Hey, can you come in with me? I don't know what to do either. All of that would have led to me feeling less resentful, which would make it more likely to solve the actual problem. So think about where in your life you might be doing this. Are you the person at work who is the "only I'm using air quotes only person who can do certain things, or do you do things for your kids and your family that you don't need to, just because you're capable of doing it? If you take one takeaway from today, it's just to notice, without judging yourself, where you are doing this and set a goal to be a capable woman - you're probably already a capable woman, so you don't have to become one - but to be a capable woman who can decide that she doesn't have to be in charge of every problem. Be a capable woman who can ask for help when she needs help. Or, be a capable woman - - sometimes this is the hardest one - who is just not picking up the problem in the first place. There are lots of times at work or in other situations where there might be a problem and you're like I can take care of it because you can, but you don't have to. Sometimes you can just let the problem sit out there and let somebody else solve it. That makes me feel uncomfortable, even to say, which tells me - anytime something feels really uncomfortable, it always tells me - yes, that is an area that I still need to work on. If you need a refresher or haven't heard these episodes yet about how to say no or how to set boundaries or how to stop people pleasing, I have episodes earlier on all three of those, so those could be very helpful to you too. These are all kind of in the same vein of deciding when you want to do things and when you don't want to do things and saying no and setting boundaries and people pleasing - just trying to stop people pleasing. Okay, my capable woman friends, have a great week and don't forget to get on my mail list as soon as possible if you're interested in doing my group coaching program, The Good Life. Come and live The Good Life with me! It's going to be so much fun. I can't wait to get started. Again, just go to michellegauthier. com. There's a button on the top of my homepage that says get on my mailing list, and that's all you need to do. All right, have a great week. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier. com. See you next week.
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