The Strong One

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Some people become the person that everybody relies on.
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They're the one who keeps things moving, the one that remembers, the one who sorts things out, and the one who stays calm when everybody else is flapping.
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At work they take responsibility, at home they organise.
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And when something goes wrong, people look in their direction.
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And over time, being dependable becomes part of who they are.
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The problem is that once everybody gets used to you being the strong one, it becomes surprisingly difficult to admit it when you're not.
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Welcome to Let's Talk About Confidence.
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I'm John M.
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Walsh.
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This episode is about a pattern I've seen in people for years.
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They're capable, responsible, usually very good in a crisis.
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Other people trust them because they know they'll step in when something needs doing.
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Now that all sounds entirely positive, and often it is, but there can be a cost to becoming the person everyone depends on.
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Particularly if you begin to believe that needing help yourself somehow undermines that role.
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This usually doesn't begin with a deliberate decision.
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Nobody wakes up one morning and thinks, I'm going to become the person who never asks for help.
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It happens gradually, but perhaps you were the sensible one in the family, the organized one, the person who got things done.
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Maybe you discovered quite early that being useful got a good response from people, or circum circumstances simply demanding it.
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Something difficult happened and you coped, then something else happened and you coped with that as well, and people noticed.
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They began relying on you.
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Eventually you started relying on you too.
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And there's something rewarding about that.
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It feels good to be competent, it feels good when people trust you.
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If somebody says, ask Sarah, she'll know what to do, or John will sort it out.
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There is a little piece of identity in that I'm dependable, I can handle things, and do you know what?
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I don't fall apart.
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That can become a very strong source of confidence.
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The difficulty comes when the identity becomes too rigid.
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Because eventually life produces something that you can't simply solve by working harder or thinking more clearly.
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You'll sometimes see this in organization as a person who appears remarkably calm.
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They carry a lot, people interrupt them constantly, they're involved in everything and they rarely complain.
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If somebody asks whether they're alright, they'll say, Yeah, I'm fine.
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And because they're still performing, everybody believes them.
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Then they go on for a surprisingly long time.
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The signals are often subtle, they become maybe a little shorter with people, less patient, they stop doing things they normally enjoy.
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They work later, they sleep badly, and perhaps they start making small mistakes that aren't typical of them.
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But because they're still functioning, the overall impression remains, they're coping.
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And sometimes they're not.
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They're simply very good at continuing to operate while struggling.
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Those are not the same thing.
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One of the complications is that highly capable people often make poor recipients of help.
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They can give it easily.
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Receiving it's another matter.
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Somebody offers, can I take that off you?
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And the answer comes back quickly.
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No, it's fine.
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Are you sure?
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Yeah, honestly.
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Five minutes later they're complaining privately that nobody helps.
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Now that sounds contradictory, but it isn't unusual.
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The offer of help creates a moment of vulnerability.
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And here's what they're thinking.
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If I accept, I'm acknowledging that I can't comfortably carry everything.
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And perhaps to them, that feels like failure.
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Perhaps I'm worried you'll do it badly and I'll have to fix it later.
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Maybe I don't want to burden you.
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Or perhaps I'm so used to being useful that I simply don't know how to occupy the other side of the exchange.
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It can also be a more practical issue.
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Explaining the problem takes effort.
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If I'm already overloaded, it can feel quicker to do things myself rather than explain it properly to somebody else.
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So I say, it's easier if I just got on with it.
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And sometimes it is.
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But if that becomes the standard response, nothing ever moves away from them.
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There's something almost unfair about this pattern.
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The stronger you appear, the more people assume you need less support.
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And most of the time, they're not being uncaring, they're responding to the evidence you give them.
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If every time someone asks how are things going, you say fine, they tend to believe you.
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If somebody offers help and you repeatedly refuse it, they eventually stop offering.
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And if you make carrying too much look effortless, other people don't know it costs you anything.
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Then resentment can creep in, you start thinking, why does nobody notice?
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But perhaps they genuinely, well they don't.
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You've become very good at making sure they don't.
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Now this isn't about blame, it's simply part of the pattern.
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People can only respond to what they see.
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There's another layer to this which is more uncomfortable.
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Being needed can feel good.
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Sometimes very good.
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It gives you a purpose, it tells you that you matter.
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People come to you, they value your judgment, they trust you with difficult things, and that can be deeply satisfying.
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And because it feels good, we may unconsciously keep creating situations in which we remain necessary.
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We take on more, we step in early, we answer before somebody else has had time to work it out, and we make ourselves available.
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We solve things that perhaps other person could have solved, then we become exhausted by how much everybody relies on us.
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That's a difficult cycle to see from the inside, because the behaviour is usually praised.
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Thank goodness you were here.
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What would we do without you?
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You always know what to do.
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Now these are lovely things to hear, but there's a question sitting underneath them.
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Do I want to be valued because of who I am or because of how much I can carry?
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Those can become blurred.
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The problem isn't really strength.
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Strength is useful.
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The problem begins when strength gets confused with silence.
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You stop saying, I'm struggling, I don't know, I need help, I can't take that on.
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I'm worried about this, I'm not coping particularly well with this at the moment.
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Those sentences start to feel inconsistent with the role you've built.
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You just don't say them.
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And once you stop using them, people around you lose information.
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At work, a senior person can be carrying theme, possible priorities, and never make that visible.
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Then their team assumes the priorities are achievable because nobody has said otherwise.
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And at home, one person may take on most of the organization, the emotional labour, finances, appointments, planning and remembering, while everybody else assumes this is simply how the household works.
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The strong person keeps the system functioning, which is exactly why the system never has to change.
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Sometimes it takes something small, not the big crisis, the cup left in the side, an email that arrives at the wrong moment, somebody asking an innocent question.
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And suddenly the person who's coped with major things without complaint reacts sharply to something trivial, and everyone's surprised, including them.
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But the reaction usually isn't about the cup.
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It's accumulated load.
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The small thing simply arrived after there was nowhere left to put it.
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Think of the straw that broke the camel's back.
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That can be confusing because the person thinks, what in S is wrong with me?
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I can handle serious problems and then I'm losing my temper over this.
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There may be nothing mysterious about it.
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Capacity isn't determined by how important the final event is.
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If the system is full, something small can be enough.
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We often use those two things as though they mean the same thing and they don't.
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Coping mean you're functioning.
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You still get through the day, the work's been done, bills are paid, children collected, the meeting happens and the crisis is handled.
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Being okay is broader than that.
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You can be highly functional and deeply unhappy.
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You can be performing extremely well and exhausted.
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And you can keep everybody else reassured while feeling quite frightened yourself.
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This matters because capable people sometimes use performance as evidence that nothing is wrong.
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I'm still getting everything done.
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Perhaps, but that doesn't tell us what's costing you.
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A car can keep moving with a warning light on.
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That doesn't mean the warning light is irrelevant.
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For somebody who's been strong for a long time, admitting difficulty can feel disproportionately significant.
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Perhaps they eventually tell a colleague, I'm actually struggling with this workload, or say to a partner, I need you to take more of this because I'm exhausted.
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And they brace themselves.
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Then something unexpected sometimes happens.
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The other person says, I had no idea.
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That can produce two reactions at once, relief and irritation.
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How could you know it?
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But the honest answer may be because I made sure you didn't.
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That isn't always true, of course.
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Some people ignore very obvious signs.
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Some environments reward people for carrying unreasonable loads.
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Some families become comfortable allowing one person to do far too much.
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But often there has been a communication problem as well.
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Need has been hidden so successfully that other people believe the disguise.
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I think some strong people resist help because they imagine it means losing control completely.
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And it doesn't have to.
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You can ask for something specific, like, I need you to take responsibility for this meeting.
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I need you to pick the children up on Thursday.
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I need somebody else to deal with this client issue because I haven't got the capacity.
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I need you to listen for 10 minutes.
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I'm not asking you to solve it.
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Now that last one matters.
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Sometimes people avoid talking because they don't want advice.
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They don't need fixing.
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They simply need somewhere to put what they're carrying for a while.
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This is super difficult sometimes because I know from my own experience with people share with me.
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At the beginning of my career, especially the training I got, you wanted to try and solve things for them.
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And you came up with suggestions and ended up in a game of what they call yes but.
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Yeah, but that's not going to work for me.
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Oh yeah, it's a good idea, but that's not going to work for me.
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And I suddenly realized that sometimes people are looking for advice.
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Sometimes a simple question like, What would you like me to do for you?
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Just listen.
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Help me solve it.
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They'll tell you.
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Sometimes I never had to say the question, I would just listen.
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And sometimes you might say, there was a lady just the other week, I remember she shared something really quite important with me about what she had gone through personally.
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And at the end of it, I knew I wasn't there to solve it.
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I knew I wasn't there to say, Oh, you'll be okay, or anything like that.
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And it felt right to say to her, I said, you know, thank you so much for sharing that with me.
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I feel trusted by you.
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And she said, That's great.
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All I want to do is raise awareness of the issue.
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And that was enough.
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I wasn't there to solve it, I was there just to listen.
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And for these strong people, they don't want you to solve it.
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And if you don't make that clear, the other person may immediately start thinking, why are you trying to solve that?
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They may get irritated.
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So sometimes the useful sentence is just simply, I don't need an answer, I just need to walk this through.
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That's from their point of view.
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But that's still asking for help.
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And you hear this a lot.
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I don't want to burden them.
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It sounds considerate, sometimes it is, but it can also deny other people the opportunity to decide what they're willing to carry.
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If somebody you cared about was struggling, would you rather they told you?
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Usually we would say yes, wouldn't we?
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Yet we often assume that our own difficulties should remain private because sharing them would somehow impose unfairly on other people.
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There's a difference between constantly unloading responsibility onto others and occasionally allowing somebody who cares about you to know what's happening.
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Healthy relationships involve both directions.
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If one person is permanently the giver and the other permanently the receiver, something eventually becomes distorted, and the person doing all the giving may discover, too late, that nobody's learned how to support them.
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Organisations can sometimes make this pattern worse.
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The person who always says yes to get more work.
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The person who rescues failing projects gets another failing project.
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The manager who carries the team receives another team.
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The reliable person becomes increasingly overloaded because reliability is rewarded with additional responsibility.
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Often there's no malicious intent, it's simply convenient.
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Who can handle this?
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Give it to the person who always handles things.
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But there is a point where that stops being recognition and becomes dependency.
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Now good organizations do notice that.
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They spread the load, they look for development opportunities with staff who need to develop in certain areas and trust them to do and develop the skills in small steps.
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Good leaders, they do notice it because they pay attention to all our team and they don't fall for the soft option of let's give it to the person who can do it.
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But individuals also need to recognise when their reputation for reliability is starting to work against them.
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You can be dependable without being infinitely available.
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And if you spent years being the person who helps, say no can feel surprisingly uncomfortable, even when the no is entirely reasonable.
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Can you pick this up?
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Normally it's a yes then one day.
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No, I don't have the capacity.
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And maybe a pause.
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And in that pause, your mind fills in all sorts of things.
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They think I'm difficult.
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Look at them, they're disappointed.
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I've really let them down.
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They'll never ask me again.
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Perhaps they simply think, okay, I'll ask someone else.
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Our identity can make a perfectly ordinary boundary, feel like a major event.
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First few times are usually the hardest because you're acting against a pattern that may have existed for years.
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Then something useful starts to happen.
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Other people adjust.
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They learn that your availability isn't unlimited.
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They become more thoughtful about what they ask, and they solve some things themselves.
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And always the world continues.
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There's another version of strength that I think is more sustainable, and it's less performance in it.
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You can be calm without pretending nothing affects you.
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You can be reliable without agreeing to everything.
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And you can support other people and still tell them when you need support.
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You can be an experienced person in the room and still say, I'm not sure.
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I remember that the first time I became a manager.
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I thought I had to have all the answers.
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Turns out I needed to have all the questions, which was way harder to learn.
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But I thought I had to answer everything, I had to solve everything.
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And then you looked at your team and you could see their heads starting to go down a bit because they went, I'm never going to learn anything here.
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And the whole point of if you think about working, the development of work is that we want to be better each, really each year, each month, perhaps even each week or each day, we just want to get a bit better to become more skilled.
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Think of anything you've ever learned.
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You start off pretty rookie at it, and after a couple of months or maybe years, you become good at it.
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But the only time you get good at it is if someone lets you actually practice the skill or put it into action in safe, supported environments.
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So this version of strength about I'm not sure, being able to say that, being able to say no, is less impressive from a distance.
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Nobody looks invulnerable, but it tends to be more robust because it doesn't depend on maintaining an image.
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You don't have to spend energy making sure nobody sees the cracks.
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You can deal with what's actually happening.
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So another side to this episode, you may not be the strong one, you may live or work with one, and because they seem so capable, you have stopped checking, not asking.
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Are you okay as a reflex?
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Actually noticing what they're carrying.
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Whether the same person's always organizing or who remembers everything, or every time something goes wrong, they step in.
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Whether they tend to bring their problems more often than solutions.
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The danger with capable people is that everyone assumes somebody else would notice if there were a problem.
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And sometimes nobody does.
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Not because nobody cares, because competence hides quite a lot.
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So no old idea that confidence means appearing certain.
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I don't think that survives much contact with real life.
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Some of the most insecure behavior I've seen comes from people desperately trying to appear completely in control.
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They can't admit doubt.
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They can't ask a question that might expose what they don't know.
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And they can't tell anybody they're struggling.
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Everything has to be managed.
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That isn't confidence, it's dependence on an image.
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Real confidence can tolerate some exposure.
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You can say I need help with this without concluding I'm helpless.
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You can say I don't know without it becoming I know nothing.
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You can say I'm struggling at the moment without turning that into a permanent judgment about who you are, and that distinction matters.
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But the first time you say it, it's hard.
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But like any habit, say it in small steps, admit something small, and build from it.
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We don't need to rush in and say no to everything.
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What we need to do is think about things and why we feel the need to say no.
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Because there's normally, especially if you're a capable person, there's normally a perfectly good reason as to why you're thinking it.
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And it's normally to do with workload, or perhaps sometimes it's like you haven't got the stretch left in you to learn the new twister technique that this new thing brings, which normally you would.
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So start off small, start off with safe, easy decisions to say no to, and build it.
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I just want to do a quick thing here from the other person's point of view.
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Sometimes when you say no, they go, Yeah, that's fair enough.
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I remember this time it was Friday night late.
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The managing director of the bank I worked for phoned.
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I was in the room with my director.
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He was on a you know speaker phone so we could hear both, and he knew I was in the room.
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And he was asking, he was saying, Look, I need a report for Monday morning for a particular client.
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Is any chance we could get that?
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So my boss looking at me and he's saying, What do you think, John?
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I said to the two of them, yeah, we could do that.
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I probably need to get some of the people in on Saturday morning to help with that.
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Might take the whole day Saturday, but yeah, I'm sure we can get that information.
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So we hung up, agreeing that we would work out a way to and we'd phone him back.
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He was in the car.
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So me and my boss had a chat.
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My director looked to me and this was like weird for me.
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He goes, We're not going to do that.
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I said, Why?
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He said, I think he's in the car, and he's thinking that'd be a good report to have, but it's probably not crucial.
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I said, How do you know that?
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He said, Well, I worked with him for quite a few years in different companies, and he always wants to be super, super prepared.
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There's nothing wrong with that, John, but this feels like it's maybe you know copper plating it.
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How difficult would it to get that together?
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I said, right, okay, a scale of one to ten, it's about nine because we need to go and manually draft through some reports that we've got.
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We'd actually need to go and find some paper.
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Now think about it, most things are electronic.
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We were going back to some paper surveys that had been filled in, which we'd use to load up on the spreadsheets, etc.
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So the data should be there.
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But because of the question asked, we need to go check it, anyways.
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We have a chat for a few minutes, and the boss says to me, John, don't do it.
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I'll phone them back now.
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So we it was probably about a 20-minute conversation we had.
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I was thinking who I could ask, you know, who didn't, families they relied on, etc.
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and all that.
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So anyway, phoned him back in the car, he says, Hi, it's it's us.
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We've had a chat, but uh we wouldn't be able to get that before Monday morning.
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And the boss's reply, the managed director's reply, is what made me go, Wow.
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He went, no worries.
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I just thought it might be good to have it in my back pocket.
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I don't think I'll need it, but I thought it would ask you guys.
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Have a great weekend.
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See you later.
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Bash hung up, on he goes.
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Boss looks at me and says, I told you.
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What it taught me was this.
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Often when we think saying no means my career, my I'm letting people down, I'm always the one that does stuff.
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I've got a can do attitude.
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Often we think, oh, this is going to go badly, the guy's going to remember it.
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Being my next appraisal and it'll stop me getting the next job.
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The managing director, fast as anything said, don't worry about it, I just want it in my back pocket.
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I if I asked him now, I still see him, you know, like 20 years later.
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If I asked him now and said, You remember that fool?
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He wouldn't even remember it.
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But to me, major lesson.
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So think about it from the other person's point of view.
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Sometimes when you say no, it doesn't matter to them.
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Now let's think about a strong person and a family.
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Families can create their own version of this.
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Perhaps one person becomes the organizer.
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They know the birthdays, Christmas, remember appointments.
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They deal with a difficult relative, they know where the documents are and they sort the insurance.
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On the holiday, everybody else gradually stops thinking about those things because somebody already does.
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Then the organizer becomes angry that nobody helps.
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Again, the anger may be completely justified.
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But if the arrangements have existed for years, changing it requires more than hoping people will notice.
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Tasks have to move, responsibility has to move with them.
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Some people need to learn how to do it.
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And whoever's been carrying everything may have to tolerate the uncomfortable experience of somebody else doing it differently.
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And that can be harder than it sounds.
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This is another trap.
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A strong person finally hands something over and then watches closely.
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The other person doesn't do it the same way, they're slower, they forget something, they organize it differently.
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The strong person thinks and sometimes even says, This is exactly why I do everything myself.
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Why are you doing it like that?
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Sometimes that conclusion is fair.
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Someone may genuinely be unreliable, but most of the times the standard's not.
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Was it done?
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It's was it done exactly the way I would have done it?
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If that's the requirement, sport becomes almost impossible.
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You remain overloaded, but you also remain in control.
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There's a trade-off there that's worth seeing clearly.
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Underneath a lot of this, the fear that many highly responsible people recognise.
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Letting people down.
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Not a failure in the grand sense, just disappointing somebody.
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They asked, you could probably do it.
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So you feel you should.
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The difficulty is that capacity is finite.
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Every yes uses something else, some other time, some other energy, some attention, some patience that you've got, and eventually the yes you give one person has to be funded by a no somewhere else, which you don't like doing.
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So you end up taking it all on.
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Sometimes the person receiving no is you.
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You cancel the runner, you skip lunch, work late, whatever.
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You put off something that's important at home, and there's no visible refusal because you keep absorbing the cost personally.
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That can work for a while.
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It's not an unlimited resource.
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We only have so many hours in the day, so much energy, so much mental capacity.
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Confidence in this situation is probably quieter than people imagine.
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It may look like saying, I can help you this, but not by Friday.
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I don't have capacity for that at the moment.
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I'm not sure what the answer is.
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I need somebody else involved, or I've taken on too much.
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Sometimes saying I'm finding this harder than expected.
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Because let's be honest, you take on a task, you don't know how hard it's going to be, you think, oh, that'll take me no time.
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Then you start it and there's complications.
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Now none of those sentences make someone less capable.
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It's just about making decisions.
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In the right circumstances, they're evidence of judgment.
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Knowing your limits is part of competence.
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So is knowing when another person knows more.
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So is recognizing when continuing to absorb more will eventually make you less useful, not more.
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The real cost isn't simply exhaustion, it can alter relationships.
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People stop asking what you need because you never seem to need anything.
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They bring you problems because you always solve them.
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They assume your capacity is greater than it is, and you become quietly resentful of people who genuinely believe the arrangement suits you.
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Sometimes you become trapped by your own reputation.
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Everyone knows you as a person who copes, so now you feel you have to keep coping, and that is a very lonely version of strength.
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And it's unnecessary.
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You don't have to stop being reliable, you don't have to become less capable, and you don't have to hand every difficulty to someone else.
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The shift is smaller than that.
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It's allowing the people around you to see a more accurate version of what things cost.
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But remember, one small step at a time.
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There are people who are remarkably good at carrying weight, and they do it for years with work, family, responsibility, even other people's worries and their own.
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And because they carry it well, everybody assumes it isn't heavy.
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Sometimes they start assuming the same thing.
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But strength doesn't have to mean pretending the weight isn't there.
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There are moments when the sensible thing is to put something down, to let somebody else carry part of it, or simply to say this is heavier than it looks.
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That doesn't erase the years of evidence that you're capable.
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It might feel like it, but it doesn't.
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If anything, it adds another piece.
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You know when to step forward, and you also know when carrying everything alone has stopped being the strongest option.
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I'm John M.
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Walsh.
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This has been Let's Talk About Confidence, and I'll see you next time.