“No, It’s Faster If I Do It”
Somebody offered to take something off my plate last month and I said “no, it’s faster if I do it” before they’d finished the sentence.
It was not faster.
When competence becomes load-bearing
This is the part nobody warns high-achieving women about. At some point your competence stops being a skill and becomes load-bearing. Everything in your life rests on you being the one who handles it.
Once that happens, handing off a task stops being logistics. It starts being a referendum on who you are. If someone else can do this, what am I for? If they do it differently, was my way ever necessary?
So you keep it. All of it. The school forms, the client follow-ups, the birthday gifts, the thing at work that technically belongs to someone else. And then you call it burnout, like it arrived from outside.
Every woman I’ve coached through this could describe her workload in detail and could not describe what she’d be without it.
The real cost of “faster”
“Faster if I do it” is usually true for about ten minutes. Teaching someone takes longer the first time. Their version won’t match yours. It might even be worse.
But the math only works if you never count the next hundred times. Or the resentment. Or the fact that nobody around you is learning, because you’ve quietly made sure they don’t have to.
Hand off one thing, badly
This week, pick one small task and let someone else do it. Not the most important thing. Something low-stakes enough that a mediocre outcome won’t matter.
Then do the hard part: don’t fix it afterward. Don’t redo it at night. Let their version stand.
Pay attention to what comes up while you watch. Irritation, anxiety, a strange sense of being unnecessary. That’s the load-bearing belief showing itself. Once you can see it, you can start asking whether you still want to carry it.
Send this to the friend who says “I’m fine” and looks the exact opposite. And if you want help with the handing off, a Vortex Activation is forty-five minutes with me on exactly this kind of decision.
Liz
