Emma Lloyd (00:57)
Hi guys. So on today's solo episode, I want to talk about one of the biggest blocks that I see with almost every high achieving client that I work with that really keeps them from reaching their next level of success, whether that's in their career or their lives holistically. And it certainly prevents success from feeling good. And that is the pattern of overfunctioning, of trying to be the hero, of trying to do everything ourselves.
Of holding everything for everyone else rather than shifting responsibility to where it rightly belongs. And in order to create conscious, sustainable, next level success, we simply cannot do it all ourselves. Period. We have to learn how to empower others, how to receive support, how to delegate, how to hold others accountable, and ultimately how to create outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Yet this is actually radical in our culture. So many high-achieving women have gotten to where we are because we've always defaulted to executing ourselves. You know the saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself. Well, this is actually so wrong. Doing everything ourselves, whether at home or in our work, working hard or grinding it out, it ultimately only grinds us down and burns us out.
At a certain point, you're going to want to quit, or you're going to feel resentful of everyone around you for not doing more when you're doing so much. So if you look at your marriage and you feel resentful of your husband for carrying a disproportionately smaller load of the household or childcare responsibilities, even though you bring in a similar income, this pattern is probably playing out. Or if you feel resentful of your direct reports or other leaders in your organization because you feel like
You're always the one going the extra mile. You're always the one jumping in to put out fires or to make sure no balls drop, which they all too happily allow or accept, then this episode is for you. Because while yes, you are incredibly competent, you can do many, many things well. If you want to reach your next level of success and fulfillment, and you see yourself in this pattern, tending to trust yourself more than others.
And then feeling resentful that others aren't doing enough, this episode is for you. This is what we want to talk about today. Because whether you've hit a promotion ceiling or you're drowning in invisible labor, or you're a solopreneur and trying to scale your business, or you're maybe a people leader and managing your first team, it is absolutely imperative to learn how to shift from being the hero in everyone's lives to being the coach. And look.
I used to almost exclusively live inside this hero pattern. In my personal life, I used to be someone who did everything in my past relationships and refused all help and support. Like I remember years ago, back when I was still in the dating world, I would cook a fancy meal for whoever I was dating at the time, and I would set the table beautifully, and I would get wine and flowers, and I would spend hours upon hours cooking up this wonderful meal.
And they'd come over and we'd enjoy it. And then when it came to cleanup, if the guy would offer to do that or help with the dishes, I'd be like, no, no, no, no. Like I've got it. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Or that's a tomorrow problem. Don't worry about it. And what that would ultimately teach this boyfriend is that I didn't want their help. And ultimately they'd stop trying to wash the dishes. Meanwhile, the next day, I would be annoyed as I was working through them.
And fast forward, you know, a couple months or years into that relationship, I would inevitably feel under-supported and I would be annoyed with them and be like, what do you even do around here? And I would get the ick and I would break things off. So hopefully you can hear in this that I wasn't allowing them to support me. And yet I was then feeling resentful when I was not supported. Or another example of how I used to live inside the hero.
role is when I first became a people manager, I was fully in this. I had moved from being this kind of independent contributor, superstar rep into managing a team of salespeople. But anytime one of my reps was struggling to close a deal or didn't know how to deliver a client presentation or how to, you know, ask great discovery questions in a meeting, I would jump in to quote unquote save them.
I would literally, like I cringe saying this, but I would literally build the deck for them. I would run the meeting. I would ask the questions. I didn't take the time to actually empower them and to push them from the nest and show them that they were capable of flying. I would just jump in and do it myself. And I thought that I was being helpful. I thought that I was being this great manager who was leading from the front and showing our team that she cared as much as they did. But what I was
really doing was essentially telling them, you're not as good as me and never will be. And I was taking their power away from them and I was undermining their confidence. And as a result, they learned that I was going to jump in and save the day. So why even try? They knew that they could sit back and I'd build the deck for them or I'd run the meeting for them. So they didn't actually need to put in the effort or sit in the discomfort required for them to grow. And then eventually
I'd hit the what the fuck are you even doing around here moment of resentment and burnout. And it took me learning the framework that I'm about to teach you to be able to drive results through me instead of by me, so that I could stop being the bottleneck and start empowering others to really achieve success. And look, this hero trap is one that so many high-achieving women fall into. And now, years into coaching,
I know from experience it is not just me. But why is that? Well, in our culture, we women have been conditioned from such a young age to be perfect, to be helpful to everyone else, to be the superwoman who can do it all. We're essentially told and conditioned to override our own needs and to put ourselves last, to be perfect and beautiful and competent and independent. All of these are highly valued in our culture. But
being needy or demanding things of others, being imperfect, requiring support, or even being seen trying are all seen as bad things that negatively reflect on our worthiness. So this is conditioned into us in so many ways from such a young age. And so anyone who identifies with being a good girl or the eldest daughter or a high performer, you can probably
relate to this tendency or this pattern showing up if you're not really intentional and conscious of it. We learn that when we jump in to help others, we're good. When our results are perfect or impressive, we're safe. And we learn that imperfection is unacceptable. And so it feels too uncomfortable to let others try and flail at doing things, we jump in and just do things ourselves.
We stop naming or claiming our own needs and we just rely on ourselves to meet them. And even when people or team members are trying to jump in, trying to contribute, trying to help, we either feel guilty for receiving support or we don't trust that they can do it as well as us. And that discomfort of seeing subpar results or seeing someone else struggling as they learn something new feels so intolerable to us.
Because we don't give ourselves permission to be imperfect. So we jump in to save the day. We think that we're being the hero by saying, no, no, no, no, it's okay, I've got this, and taking the work back and doing it ourselves. But underneath all of this is both a discomfort with imperfection and a discomfort ri with receivership. Because when we don't tolerate imperfection in ourselves,
When we see others building new skills and we're so uncomfortable with the learning curve that requires to ultimately build competency or excellence that we jump in rather than seeing that as a necessary and inevitable part of the learning process. And because we're so uncomfortable with having needs of our own or of being a burden, we don't allow ourselves to receive support.
Whether that's a team member trying to take something off our plate or a friend who offers to drop off food when we're newly postpartum, our default is far too often, no, no, no, no, I've got it. Thank you so much. Not necessary, I'm good. AKA, I can do it all. I don't need support. I'm strong, not weak. But I really want you to hear this when I say running this pattern of heroing.
Is largely based on subconscious beliefs and it has such a dark underbelly in all of our relationships and our success, both personally and professionally. Because we teach others how to be in relationship with us. And when we're constantly overfunctioning, we are setting others up to underfunction
By being overly responsible, the other person goes under-leveraged, underemployed. And after enough time, especially if we're doing this across our kids and our partner and our team and our friends, et cetera, et cetera, it will lead to burnout and resentment. Trust me, I have lived this. I have learned this lesson. Eventually we flip a switch and we hit a breaking point, and then all of a sudden we start to make everyone else around us wrong.
All the people that we have allowed to underfunction, that we've even set up to do so, we then make them the villains in our life. We look at them and say, my God, what the fuck do you even do around here? I'm doing everything myself with no help from you, and we feel so taken advantage of. And in marriages, this creates conflict and it undermines intimacy. In organizations, while heroes may get promoted in the short term, over the long term, this creates
Dysfunctional team dynamics, underfunctioning teams, and burnout. So it is absolutely imperative that in order to reach our next level of feel-good success and relational harmony, that we first recognize when we're in this heroing, overfunctioning pattern and see that it is not actually serving us and learn instead to move into the more empowered role of coach.
So let's talk about how to actually shift from that disempowered, counterproductive role of hero to the empowered and more effective role of coach who's able to drive superior outcomes without burning out or doing everything themselves. Okay, so here's the first thing that coaches know how to do really well. They set clear expectations. They actually take the time to define what success looks like.
They're able to paint a picture of what done looks like. They're clear on the end goal and clear on why it matters. And they actually take the time to communicate that why, to ensure that others are bought in and understand what they're responsible for and how it contributes, both to that person, that individual, and their own interests, as well as the greater success and well-being of the relationship or the organization, whatever that.
greater organism is.
When we instead jump into Hero, so often we're so focused on just executing and doing more, better, faster that we don't even slow down enough to define what success even looks like, especially for this next milestone. We don't know what's actually important. We don't know if we've actually reached our goal. We just start doing, not even entirely clear on what is required of us or how we'll know if it's good enough.
So the first step to shift from hero into coach is to zoom out and get really clear on what we actually want and need to accomplish, what is ours to own, what's ours to outsource and empower others to do, and why it all matters. We need to be able to define what success looks like. Okay, so the next thing coaches do really well that heroes do not is that they teach and empower others.
Rather than just giving someone a fish to keep them from going hungry, coaches actually teach others how to fish so that they can feed themselves in the future. And teaching someone else to fish takes time. At first, it really would be faster just to do it ourselves. But over time, if we can empower others, then the sum becomes greater than the individual parts. What we can achieve together becomes far greater.
Than what we could ever achieve individually. But the process of empowering others, of learning something new, it takes time and intentionality,
Both on the part of the coach and of the student. The first time the student tries to execute is not going to be perfect, not even close. Their first attempt couldn't possibly look like our 1000th. But that does not mean that growth and empowerment is not possible. Good coaches simply understand this and invest the time without blame, shame, or criticism into teaching and empowering others.
And a model I love to use here is tell, show, do. So first, they tell them how they can identify or think about solving a problem, or they bring them in to collaborate and get their ideas on how to solve that problem together. And they together, you know, break it down into a strategy or a framework or how they mutually think about things, how they could respond when X happens. We could do Y and why it's important.
So this really helps get mutual buy-in and it creates a pressure-free collaborative space to ask questions and to come up with ideas and to determine a new way to do something. And then next, if necessary, they show, they demonstrate, especially if they're, you know, more skilled in a certain area, how to do it for the first time. So they give others an example to let that learning land more completely.
So if I was, you know, trying to offload a certain task in my business, I might create a Loom video and share that with my assistant so that she can watch what I did step by step so that she can do it the next time. Or maybe it looks like letting a team member shadow you in a call or a meeting, but it essentially gives the other person a safe space to learn and to actually internalize how they might get from point A to point B.
In a new way. And then step three is do. Then the coach empowers the other person to attempt to do it themselves while also being there to support and to guide and to continue to offer feedback and answer questions. The coach knows that the first time or the fifth time or even the tenth time is not going to be perfect, but they don't jump in and claw the work back. They stay in the passenger seat.
And they let the student driver drive. And then the final thing that coaches do really well is that they hold the bar for what excellence or success looks like. When others are learning, whenever they say, like, I can't do it, I don't know how, coaches don't say, that's okay, here I'll do it. Or they don't say, it doesn't matter, that goal isn't that important. We'll just lower expectations. No, instead, they say, Yes, you can do it. Keep trying. When my two-year-olds, who are right now learning,
How to put on their own underwear, scream, I can't do it, I can't do it. I don't say you're right, that's too hard for you. I'll do it. I say, yes, you can keep trying. Do you see that stamp on the back of your underwear? Okay, that's the back. Can we put that stamp on the ground? Make sure that's on the ground and then put your feet above it into each of the holes. Okay, great. Now pull up your underpants. Right? Coaches believe that building skills and working towards a greater future is possible.
While also understanding that reaching that bar of excellence won't happen overnight. But they believe in others' ability, oftentimes more or before others believe in themselves. Even when others are hamstrung by their own fears and limitations, coaches believe that the goal is possible and that others are capable. So coaches both celebrate progress along the way while also
Pointing out or offering helpful tips about how there's how others could get one or 10% better. They keep providing more coaching, more context, more feedback from a place of collaboration and support and belief and empowerment rather than shame and criticism until inevitably the goal is achieved. And in doing so, the other party is actually returned to their power. They build confidence in themselves and their own skills and they
Feel proud of what they've been able to achieve. So coaches don't accept others' excuses or limiting beliefs. They're not willing to lower their standards or accept subpar work, but they do give others the space, the reps, the time, the feedback to eventually get there, even when growth is uncomfortable. And holding this bar does not require being a bitch. We can be compassionate and supportive.
respecting and believing in others enough to believe that they can meet that bar. And look, if over time there's enough evidence, enough information to conclude that the person, maybe a team member, truly cannot or does not want to put in the effort to meet the bar, that's a separate conversation. Then the leader, the coach also needs to be able to accept that a change is needed. Maybe that person is in the wrong role.
Maybe they really don't want to be there or they don't believe in the goal anymore. but they're able to deliver that with compassion, not criticism, and provide that direct and transparent feedback. So as coaches rather than heroes, we really want to do three things that I just described. Step one, define the outcome. Two, empower the person, and three, hold the bar.
And over time, this leads to work and responsibility being equitably distributed. It leads to higher performing teams, stronger relationships, organizations with a greater sense of agency and harmony. Because here's the truth, neither overfunctioning nor underfunctioning feels good to either party, nor leads to the results that we want. When we overfunction, we feel resentful and we burn out.
And when we underfunction, we forget our own power and we fail to believe in ourselves, which leads to low self-confidence and low self-worth. But underfunctioners don't actually want someone else to save them. Even when they cry, help me, save me. I don't know how to do this. I can't. What they want even more than someone jumping in to save the day is for someone to say to them, I believe in you. You've got this. Try this. It doesn't have to be perfect. I know you can do it.
And over time, the underfunctioning parties become empowered and the overfunctioning heroes become supported. And this is truly what unlocks the next level of success and harmony in any relationship or organization. Now, I've done a lot of work on myself over the years to shift from that disempowered and overly responsible role of hero into an empowered and properly responsible role of coach. And yet,
It is a constant and continuous practice. There are still times when I find myself heroing, pulling back work I've already outsourced to someone else just because it's not as good as I think I can do it myself, or believing the lie, it will just be faster to do it really quickly rather than offload it to someone else. I know by now this isn't actually true, isn't actually going to lead to the next level of results, but it often still feels true. But in my personal life, I've
Finally, I learned this lesson largely with my now husband. I have consciously created and continue to iterate and maintain an equitable dynamic and true partnership with him that does not look like the many relationships that, you know, hit the rubble in the past. Now I cook, he cleans.
We both contribute to our home and to a relationship in which we both get to feel supported. And I really recognized how far I've come in this dimension when we went on a couples trip to Palm Springs a couple years ago with three other couples. And two of the partners, my husband Graham, and one other of the men there, were super proactive, seeing what needed to be done and jumping in to contribute. Whether that was running to the grocery store or cleaning up after dinner or just
generally being helpful. Whereas the other two partners, they were essentially just sitting back and watching MMA fights all weekend. They were like getting weighted on hand in foot and not lifting a finger. And I remember at one point I suggested, like, why don't we let the boys cook dinner tonight? We were planning something super simple, like pesto pasta, sausages and roasted veggies. But one of my friends whose partners was watching the MMA fights,
was like, I wish he knew how to cook. He has no idea how to make pesto pasta. Like, you're so lucky, Graham's so helpful. And I remember just thinking, is it luck? Not really. The difference between my relational dynamic and hers was that I had stopped overfunctioning and started empowering my partner to contribute. I recognized that when I don't know how to do something like cook pesto pasta, I would Google it or nowadays ask AI.
And our partners are also capable and empowered to do the same thing. The dynamic in my romantic relationship didn't shift because I got luckier. It shifted because I shifted, both in the partners I chose, but more importantly in how I showed up and communicated and treated them as empowered individuals and allowed myself to receive support as well. But it's never one and done. Look, when Graham and I first became parents, it started to feel crunchy again.
I had to move from hero back to coach. But now when I start to feel those old pangs of resentment or overwhelm, I know how to approach these conversations so that we can continue to have an equitable and healthy partnership. Or professionally, this hero trap still shows up. Recently, it actually showed up not with another team member, but with AI. Until a couple months ago, I would write every solo episode like this one fully on my own.
I'd spend hours journaling and brain dumping and outlining and drafting and redrafting until I finally got it to a place where it was something that I was proud of and felt ready to record. And look, I like to write. I like using writing as a way to flesh out and sharpen my own thinking. You guys know I'm a big journaler. My goal was never to avoid needing to write these solo episodes or create thought leadership content. However, I was also able to recognize that time is my most precious resource.
And it was constantly the biggest impediment that I was running into in order to be able to grow or do more in my business. And in this season of having young kids, I'm just not interested in working more than 30 hours a week. I am clear on that. That is not something I'm available for. However, with a full client load and releasing a podcast episode every week and just, you know, keeping the business running.
I would get to the end of every week having done all that, but not having the time to focus on new projects or grow the business in new directions that I really wanted to. So when I did a time audit, I could see that five plus hours each week were going to creating this podcast. And in a 30-hour week, that's a significant percentage of my time. So I started to think creatively about okay, how could I leverage AI to help me draft these solo episodes?
More effectively. So I could go from an idea to recording more quickly. However, it was equally, if not more important to me that that efficiency not undermined the quality. I wanted to spend less time drafting, but I did not want that to in any way negatively impact the output of these episodes. So I started by building a new skill in Claude Code. And I basically
Ask it to help me flesh out my thinking around solo episodes. I gave it kind of the general structure I like to use to streamline the teaching. And I provided it with a couple past examples of solo episodes to learn my voice. And then basically ask it to draft an episode transcript that then I could edit. But here's the thing. The first few times I tried to co-create with AI like this, the output was not good.
It didn't sound like me. It sounded like AI slop. It was missing all of the magic. And I would end up spending even more time rewriting every line that the AI had drafted than it would have actually taken me just to write it previously from scratch without the help of AI in any way. And I found myself making AI the villain. I found myself thinking, it's just not sophisticated enough to help me write quality content. Like
I should just go back to doing it all myself. And at first that thought sounded so convincing. But then I was like, wait, wait, wait. I'm in the pattern. I'm overfunctioning because it feels safer and it feels more familiar to pull work back and do it myself rather than to get creative about how I could empower AI to partner with me more effectively. And so the truth was, I needed to shift from heroing to coach, even in this circumstance.
I wasn't setting AI up to win. I had created a V1 skill to help me write the solo episodes. I hadn't really defined what success looked like. And then when the output wasn't perfect, I was ready to scrap the whole thing rather than coaching it and training it and giving it more feedback until I could find a process that would lead to an output that was both superior in quality and more efficient.
I was just ready to take back the work and do it myself and believe the story that the tool wasn't capable. But once I could see that I was blaming AI and telling myself that familiar story that no one can do it as well as I can, then I was able to ask myself, okay, what else here could be true? Because AI is able to do far more complex workloads today than drafting a solo episode of this podcast. The problem is not the technology. It was how I trained it or failed to do so.
So rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, I went back to iterating on the skill I initially created. I told it, I want you to be my thought partner. I want you to help me think more critically, to pressure test my ideas.
I want you to push me for real life examples and stories to make these concepts grounded and tangible. I want you to keep asking me questions until I have fully spoken out and fleshed out all of the content for the episodes. And I'm really a verbal processor. So this actually felt so much easier and so much better to just have AI ask me questions and challenge me with follow-ups rather than just jumping straight into writing an episode with a half-baked idea.
And after interviewing me for the better part of, I don't know, 30 or 45 minutes, I basically ask it to leverage this voice to text that I'd been going back and forth with it and take all of that and create an outline based in my own words and the solo episode structure that I had given it. So drafting, essentially organizing all of the thoughts into a draft rather than writing it for me and trying to match my voice. And guess what?
After I trained and iterated on this skill more, it actually made my solo episodes better, clearer, more easeful to create, not just faster. I didn't outsource my thought leadership to AI. I leveraged AI to help me clarify my own thinking and to capture and organize my own ideas so that I could then get them to a point that was ready to record in a more effective and efficient way.
And hopefully, if you're listening to this, you don't know the difference between a past episode that I would have done entirely on my own and an episode that was prompted by AI. But also, it's because AI didn't write it. I did. I was just using it in a way to drive those better results. And in doing so, I've opened up new time in my week without needing to work more than 30 hours.
I can now work on new projects and with more clients and create more content for different platforms. It has become additive. It has become an accelerant because finally I've learned mostly how to break free of trying to overfunction and do everything myself and learned instead how to coach and empower others, whether that is other people or AI, to receive support and create more holistic success. So
Here's what actually shifted when I moved into coach in this example. I defined the outcome. I stopped expecting AI to magically know what I wanted it to do. I had to tell it what success actually looked like, which in this case with the podcast, it was: I want to be able to move from idea to a recording ready draft in 25% of the time that it normally takes me. And I want you to act as a thought partner to help me clarify my thinking and capture my best sound bites.
As I speak them out loud and help to organize that into a draft in my own voice around the framework structure that I use for solo episodes. The goal is not to outsource the writing to AI, but for it to coach and capture to improve the output and efficiency. So I define that. Next, I needed to empower the other person, or in this case, AI. I had to give it the structure I wanted it to consolidate my thoughts into. I had to feed it context.
And I had to show it what success looked like. I had to tell it to prompt me with questions and to challenge my thinking until I was clear and to ask me about real world stories and examples. It wasn't gonna just do that on on its own. And I told it, do not just draft this, take my, exact quotes and put that down on paper and let me then edit from there. And then lastly, I had to hold the bar. I couldn't give up after one bad output.
After I created V1, I couldn't say AI is not good enough to do this. Instead, I had to invest in continuously training and iterating and giving that AI skill more feedback so it could learn and get better every time, rather than repeating the same mistakes. I had to treat this as an iterative process, believing that a future state where this was more efficient and more effective was possible, but know that it was gonna take time.
And not expect that to happen in one skip hop and a jump. And I needed to not revert to the hero pattern of AI sucks, I'll just do it myself. I had to really invest in the learning curve, trust the process while also not lowering the bar on quality that I was willing to accept. And now the process is more easeful and efficient. The output I think is superior as well, because I decided I was going to fully step into coach, not fall into the trap of hero.
So wherever this hero pattern might show up in your own life, whether that's with a team member, your partner, your kid, an AI tool, the traps and the moves are the same. Define the outcome, empower the person, hold the bar. So this week I really invite you to start paying attention to anywhere you feel resentful or under-supported in your life. Then pick one dynamic where you recognize that you're heroing and try to move through these three steps.
Clarify or write out what would success actually look like. Really see and define that future state that you ultimately want to get to. Then determine how else you could approach it to better empower others than doing everything yourself. What would you need to communicate or collaborate or teach them? How can you kick off that growth process, that learning curve, so that you can start moving in the right direction? And then lastly, stick with it. Hold the bar, hold the belief.
That's a better future is possible. Keep providing feedback. Don't expect perfection or transformation overnight. But also don't just default to accepting the status quo. Keep at it, keep collaborating until you achieve the results that you know that are possible in a way that actually works for all parties involved. Because here's what I really want you to walk away with from this episode. Doing it all is not the way to have it all. It is the way to ensure that you never do.
Your next level of success is not on the other side of working harder. It is on the other side of shifting from hero to coach, to empowering others, receiving support, and driving better results. So I hope you will apply this at least one place in your life right now. And then I hope that it becomes as transformational for you as it has been for me. And as a reminder, before I wrap up, if you are currently building a business or working on a side hustle of your own.
And you really want to do so in an intimate community of inspiring women, then I invite you to check out and apply for my upcoming mastermind, the Second Mountain Mastermind, which will kick off in December on the other side of my maternity leave. You can get all the details in the link in the show notes. And if you sign up before the end of June, you'll also get a bonus one-on-one coaching session with me. So make sure to check that out.
And thank you as always for spending your precious earbud time here with me. I will see you in the next episode.
