[00:00:00] Have you ever found yourself doing something at work, say, doing the rotor or organizing someone's retirement due and suddenly thinking, hang on, when did this become my responsibility? Nobody asked you. Nobody assigned it to you, but somehow it landed on you and now you are the one carrying it. Today I want to talk to you about something I see all the time with doctors, healthcare professionals, and other people in high stress, high stakes work, and it's what I call the responsibility trap.

[00:00:34] This is a, you are not a frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I've chosen today's topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea. Imagine if you will, you're a gp. It's 5:47 PM You've popped into the coffee room and are having a brief chat with a couple of colleagues.

[00:00:55] The duty doctor is out on an emergency visit and a receptionist pops their head in. [00:01:00] She says, can someone call this patient's daughter? She's really upset. She hasn't asked any particular one of you. Nobody asked you specifically. You weren't tagged in the request, but you feel it landing on you. Everyone just pauses.

[00:01:18] No one says anything, but within seconds you're thinking. Well, I better do that. And you volunteer. Even if you are not a gp, I'm sure you could recognize yourself in that. Now I'm doing a series of three quick tip podcast episodes where we're exploring something. I see constantly with doctors and other professionals, and these quick tips are all about default responsibility, and this is where responsibility automatically lands with you, without you consciously choosing to carry it.

[00:01:50] And once it lands on you, you are already carrying it. And as a result, capable, conscientious, really [00:02:00] good people become what I call automatic carriers of responsibility. And they end up burnt out and leaving. And for a long time in the podcast and in many of the keynote talks and masterclasses, I do, I've been teaching how to say no and set boundaries, but there's a group of you that.

[00:02:19] It just didn't land with that say to me, well, you know what? This stuff around saying, no, it doesn't make any sense to me because I never said yes because I was never asked. It just landed on me. I never said yes. It's just that this job is too big because many of us operate with this really deeply ingrained belief that if something needs doing and I can do it, then I probably should do it.

[00:02:48] And if no one else is stepping in, well then that responsibility, that task must be mine and I'll be the one at fault. If it's not done, I'll be the one to blame and I'm the [00:03:00] one that will feel really awful. Now this belief, it feels like professional duty. It feels really like we are caring. It feels like we're being a really good colleague, but over time.

[00:03:15] It just turns all of us into these default carriers of responsibility, and it is exhausting because we don't just see this pattern at work. We see this at home too. We see this in other aspects of our lives. I remember when my children were really, really little. I was attending a toddler group at the local church.

[00:03:37] Now this was a really lovely caring group and we like to provide meals for families when they had babies, so someone would have a baby and they'd get a couple of weeks of, of meals. Now I had two very small children. My daughter, I think was just about two, and my son was a couple of months old and one of the women at the group had just had a new baby [00:04:00] and she was moaning to a group of us.

[00:04:03] Nobody had organized a meal rotor for her. She said, I thought that we were supposed to get two weeks of meals, and I felt terrible. I felt like I had failed somehow, and I immediately went home, got on the email and organized her a meal rotor. And here's the thing. I was in the middle of an extension. I was living in one room with a microwave and two small children.

[00:04:32] My husband was away a lot, and I was barely coping because I knew I couldn't cook anything. I remember going and buying her a takeaway and literally delivering it to her house. Why did I do that? Because I felt that it was my fault. She was talking to the group of us. There were at least five people in that group when she was complaining, and no one asked me to take that responsibility on.[00:05:00]

[00:05:00] I just automatically took it. But why? Why was either one to take it? Well, if you think about the way we are trained, the way we are programmed, the way I think we have been groomed. Doctors, people in healthcare, people who are used to taking a lot of responsibility in their work. We are trained to anticipate problems.

[00:05:22] We are trained to notice things that other people might miss and to intervene really early Now in medicine that can save lives and your brain just learns its rule of right. If there's a problem, I need to act to solve it, and then everything will be okay. Your brain doesn't deteriorate very well between a deteriorating patient and someone moaning that they don't have meals when they've just had a baby or an unclaimed task in a WhatsApp group or somebody asking something on a email that they cc to loads of people.

[00:05:56] And there's a really simple dynamic behind this. You might [00:06:00] recognize this scenario. You're in a meeting. Policy needs writing. Everyone looks slightly concerned about their diary and, and sort of no one's making eye contact. The silence stretches out and suddenly you hear yourself saying, well, okay, I, I can do that.

[00:06:14] And later on that evening, you think, why on earth did I say that? And my colleague, Dr. Sarah Coop, who I worked with, wrote a brilliant article about this on LinkedIn. We'll link to this in the show note, she has described the silence gap. This is when a problem appears. Everybody notices that nobody volunteers.

[00:06:35] And so you've got this silence that goes on and on, and often the person that steps in isn't the person who has the most capacity. Often it's someone who has absolutely no capacity at all, but the person who steps in is often the person with the lowest tolerance for that silence. Why do we have a low tolerance?

[00:06:57] Because we've got these [00:07:00] accusations logged in our brain, these stories of I ought and I should. This happens at work and at home with our families, and instead of naming what the problem is and discussing it with everybody so we can solve it together, we take it on ourselves. We volunteer. Or start asking other people if perhaps they could help like it's ours to sort out in the first place.

[00:07:25] And then when we start asking other people, everyone assumes it was ours in the first place. And you get this vicious cycle and underneath this is something a lot deeper because why are we heaving those stories of I should or I ought to in our head? Well, it's a question of identity, how we see ourselves.

[00:07:42] Because underneath I should or I ought to, is this question. What kind of person would I be if I ignored that? What kind of doctor would I be if I ignored that? But listen, there is a difference between driving past an accident where somebody's [00:08:00] seriously hurt and not volunteering to stay late at work just because someone else is running late for their schedule's appointment, right?

[00:08:08] But when we just automatically carry this responsibility, we're not just deciding whether to do a task or not. We're deciding who we are. Listen line, am I a responsible person? Am I helpful? Am I a good colleague, a good doctor, all try to do that, and that's why the responsibility trap works so well. It's just a massive hook into who you are, into your professional identity.

[00:08:38] What is wrong with this? I mean, everybody needs people that are gonna step up, that are gonna take responsibility. Yes, society needs it, right? But the problem with the responsibility trap is that over time you just accumulate more and more work that you never consciously chose. Extra projects, extra patience, extra emotional labor, [00:09:00] extra admin, and eventually.

[00:09:03] This leads to something really uncomfortable, and that is resentment. You start resenting people. You start resenting the work, not because what you're doing is wrong or it's work that you shouldn't be doing. It's you never chose it. And here's the real issue and the real difficulty that once you've automatically taken on that responsibility, you've automatically carried it.

[00:09:30] It becomes very hard to put down. And it isn't a question of saying no, because you were never asked in the first place. You just took it on. And so putting it down feels much bigger than saying, no. It's dumping on your colleagues or shirking your responsibility. And at its worth, it feels like abandoning your professional duty, letting people down and not being the kind of person you [00:10:00] believe you should be.

[00:10:01] And so we reach a point where you've got a couple of choices here. You could carry on being the automatic carrier of all that responsibility, so it keeps landing on you. You either keep really quietly picking it up, or you keep volunteering for everything and your workload keeps expanding. The emotional load expands, and over time you end up carrying far more than you ever consciously chose.

[00:10:27] You end up resentful. And exhausted. And this is a really quick route into burnout. And you find yourself questioning well, I love my work. I like what I do, so why am I feeling so exhausted by it? But there is another path that you could choose, and it's not about caring less about stuff, and it's not about abandoning responsibility altogether.

[00:10:47] It's just becoming much, much more deliberate about what you are going to choose to carry. So here's a couple of phrases that might help. And I suggest that this week, you just notice when you are really tempted [00:11:00] to volunteer or to just take that unclaimed task, that unclaimed responsibility, because unclaimed problem will stick to people who are really responsible, who fall into the responsibility trap, who think that because they could do that, they really should do that.

[00:11:21] So your mantra is just because I could, doesn't mean I should. Here's a simple question that you can ask yourself. Next time you find that you are automatically carrying some sort of responsibility. It says, did I consciously choose to carry this or did I step into the responsibility trap here? And this week, give yourself permission not to get involved, not to volunteer, not to automatically carry things.

[00:11:49] So in this quick dip, we've looked at how we can fall into the responsibility trap. When nobody's asked, when we are just assuming responsibility, we're either volunteering or stuff's just landing on [00:12:00] us. The next quick tip, exploring how responsibility lands the moment somebody asks for help and why that makes saying no feel morally impossible.

[00:12:10] Now you may know somebody who really needs to listen to this episode, so do forward it to them. And if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you'll be notified when the next episode comes out.