Why do I always do that?!?

By Edie Lenz

I am an oldest child, a pastor by training and I have spent my entire life stepping up and care-taking. I learned very early that helping got you attention and praise. In systems thinking this means that over-functioning is my anxious response. The affirmation to over-function has been affirmed in the roles I have taken in life: when my mom went back to school when I was in jr. 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. Every step along the way, almost every role I have taken I have had the opportunity to take care of others, to over-function and do more for people than they need and sometimes more than they want. This is my auto-pilot particularly when anxiety rises.

gif of a man gesturing with his hands open, asking "Will you just let me help you?"

You are overwhelmed? Let me step in, take something on for you, assist, manage, “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, 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 + 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. You see when I over-function, others around me will under-function as a response – it is vital to note that this dance is NOT a conscious one on either side. It is simply the way the system works. When I over-function someone else becomes less capable, does less, and I am irritable, grumpy and sometimes exhausted. None of us set out to relate to one another this way, it is the autopilot responses we must learn to disrupt and replace.

Like me, you have an autopilot – a predictable way of reacting and engaging the world, particularly when you are anxious. But what happens in leadership when we are reacting not thinking clearly? 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 key to leading effectively. There are a host of tools and opportunities for learning to disrupt our reactive responses.

For me, one place to begin was getting present to the impact. What was my over-functioning doing to the system I was in? What was I doing and resentful about that someone else had offered to do? How was the church relying on me more than was healthy? How was I using my over-functioning as a way of managing or hiding from my worries and concerns? Our first fall webinar is an opportunity to have a robust conversation about our autopilot and to learn together tools of healthy disruption.