The other day I found myself in a little bit of a sticky situation. I had two people in my life who wanted different things from me and those things felt incompatible.

No matter what I did, somebody was going to be upset. And I caught my brain kind of

ruminating and thinking back and forth about how I could possibly solve this and who was better to upset and it was

such a reminder of how it used to be in my life when I thought like that all the time.

For me now this is a less common experience but this used to be the story of my entire life.

And in the past, I would have called this people pleasing, and you might call it that too.

But it's actually something called over responsibility.

Over responsibility is when you try to take responsibility

for things you actually can't control and that aren't actually yours to manage.

Responsible seems like such a positive word

and society socializes women

to think that they always need to be responsible

and that being responsible is a positive personality trait.

But women are actually being taught to be over-responsible.

We are being taught to take responsibility for everyone's feelings all at once.

We are taught to take responsibility for all of the

logistical and mental management of our lives, our partners lives, our

children's lives, our families lives, our household, our colleagues, our bosses, everyone around us.

We are taught to hold ourselves responsible for anything that ever goes wrong that we were even

ever tangentially related to. I have coached so many women who were holding

themselves responsible and feeling anxious about how multiple other people

thought and felt about something or about the outcome of an event or a project that had 10 different people

...