I am an oldest child by birth and a pastor by training, which means that I have spent my entire life stepping up and caretaking. I learned early that helping got me attention and praise. Over-functioning is my easy go-to in terms of anxious reactivity.
My life has affirmed my autopilot. Every step along the way, almost every role I have taken has offered the opportunity to take care of others. When my mom went back to school when I was in junior high, in high school when my dad died, in college as a resident assistant, in seminary as a resident director, in ministry as a solo pastor – I learned to over-function and do more for people than they need and sometimes more than they want. This is my autopilot particularly when anxiety rises.
Are you overwhelmed? Let me step in, take something on for you, assist, manage and “help” so you don’t have to function.
Even when I have not been asked, I have overstepped, stepped in and done more than I should or sometimes was asked to do. This way of being is deeply ingrained in me. I don’t do it on purpose, it is my “default setting” for managing anxiety.
When I become anxious, I start looking for more to take on, to manage, to control. I add work, manage other people, expectations, and almost anything else I can find.
It’s rarely intentional. I don’t go looking for opportunities to function for other people. Rather, it is more like breathing or blinking; I just do it and until I learned to start catching myself at it, I was never going to learn to be different.
Learning to see this autopilot has been a decade-plus journey for me. After years of coaching, counseling, and working hard I am learning to disrupt this automatic response of mine.
Learning to see not only my own over-functioning but the impact on the people around me was a profound first step. I noticed that when I over-function, others around me will under-function – their own autopilot reaction to the anxiety in our relationship system.
When I over-function, someone else becomes less capable, does less, is disempowered and I am irritable, grumpy and sometimes exhausted.
None of us set out to relate to one another this way; it is as unconscious as blinking or breathing. But we can learn to disrupt and replace our automatic reactions.
For me, one place to begin was getting present to the impact. What was my over-functioning doing to the system I was in? How often was I doing something that someone else had offered to do? How did I end up resentful about things that didn’t belong to me? How was I using my over-functioning as a way of managing or hiding from my worries and concerns?
Like me, you have an autopilot – a predictable way of reacting and engaging the world, particularly when you are anxious. When you’re reacting and not thinking, what happens to your leadership? What happens when everyone around us is also reacting in predictable ways?
Learning to disrupt our responses, slow down, think clearly, choose a different response – these are keys to leading effectively.
Coaching can be an effective tool in learning to see ourselves and to learn to thoughtfully choose a different way.
