Doing Other's Work for Them?
I am an International Coaching Federation-certified life coach at the ACC level, as well as a Professor at Westminster University. I completed my coach training at Coach U, and my PhD in Mathematics at the University of Chicago. I founded Inner Harmony Coaching in 2020. My clients are mostly educated women who wish to make the most of their professional and personal lives.
Wondering Why You Always Seem to be Doing Other People’s Jobs For Them? Insights that may help you stop.
Many of us are not just doing our own jobs, but other folks’ work, too. This can be very exhausting and not leave us enough time to do our own job properly. We feel resentful and angry. So how can we change this? The first step is to figure out why we are doing all this extra work in the first place. Below are some insights and possible reasons.
- Apart from you, nobody has an incentive for anything to change!
- You may feel more valuable when you know that you are central to the success of your team (whether the team is a work team a family, a group of friends, etc). If so, figure out if that feeling is rewarding enough to make it worth it for you. If it is, make an active decision to keep things as they are. You won’t be doing less work, but you’ll feel less resentful. If not, you know it is time for a change.
- Your standards of quality may be higher than those of folks around you. If so, are you sure that your standard is the ‘right’ one? Could it be that you need to let go of some of your desire for perfection and learn to settle for ‘good enough’? Think about what would happen if you were not around. Maybe things would not get done as well as if you were there, but would there be catastrophic consequences? (Other people being inconvenienced or annoyed is NOT a catastrophic consequence, even if it feels like it!). If you have much higher standards than everybody around you and you are unwilling to change them, you will be continually frustrated – consider changing jobs or the people you hang out with.
- Do you have a really hard time saying ‘no’? Many of us have been socialized to never reject a request for a favor. If that is you, practice leaving a bit of time before you give your answer. Maybe say that you have to check your calendar, or that you’ll think about it. That doesn’t feel as rude, and the extra time gives you a buffer that allows you to make a decision that is true to you.
- You may be doing other people’s work because you want them to like you. This is called people-pleasing. Be aware that you are trading long-term respect for short-term friendliness. I’ll post on how to stop people-pleasing next time – that is a whole big topic of its own:)
