You're listening to the Mental Offload podcast, episode 10.

Welcome to the Mental Offload podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host Ivy League NBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

Hello Offloaders, I have a special episode for you today. Every 10 episodes I want to focus in on some lessons from some thinkers and people who I respect, admire and have learned something from. Today's episode is a great one if you consider yourself a high achiever or like many of my high achieving clients would call themselves over functioners. I call them the overcompetent Moms.

Overcompetent moms are highly skilled and usually very efficient. When they do things, they generally do do them to a higher level than most people around them. But if this is you, you've probably encountered one of the big challenges of being overcompetent, and that's getting others to stay on task, whether it's at home or at work. This is something one of my clients was struggling with.

She was really good at getting shit done and so guess what? Shit kept landing in her lap at work. She became the go to person, which I think was a good thing for her. In some ways.

She found the work stimulating. It came with some extra recognition, but it was also annoying because it was creating a lot of extra work that required extra hours and she was not getting compensated for that. At home though, it was more fraud, so she didn't feel like she had a partner. She felt like she had dead weight that she had to drag along.

She wasn't getting the help she needed. She felt like she was doing it all and she didn't like how she was feeling half the time. She felt like she was so resentful and short tempered and heading toward burnout. And I think this is one of the biggest traps of overcompetence.

Your competence ends up getting used against you when others claim you don't seem like you need help or even blame your high standards as the problem. And I can relate. I have been told I have high standards but for a while I felt like my standards controlled me and now I feel like I'm in control of my standards. I credit my relative chill to two things.

So first is the French school system really broke me down hard. So in French schools, at least the ones that I'm familiar with, parent volunteering in the classroom is generally not a

thing. They don't really invite parents into schools that often, so there are very few volunteer slots. And so at the start of the year, you have to pretty much decide if you want to be present and volunteer in your child's classroom.

It's like, put in, what is your top pick? Is it the library or is it the annual Halloween party? Because you're probably not getting both. So if I were in an American school, I would probably put a lot more pressure on myself to take part in a lot of school activities.

And just the nature of the French system being what it is, I could not be very involved in very many activities. So I really had to make some choices up front. But the second thing that I credit for my relative chill, Tiffany Dufu. Now if you're not familiar with Tiffany or her work, she's an all around powerhouse woman and leader.

A few years ago she wrote a fabulous book called Drop the Ball, which starts off with her as a high achieving, overcompetent mom. She doesn't use that word, but I I will. And she talks about nearly burning out professionally trying to do it all, have the fabulous job, have the perfect kids and marriage and a beautiful home and the whole works. And in her book, she really lays out a road map for how she turned that around and went about negotiating for equality at home, even when she was nervous about dropping the ball.

For me, her book was a revelation because she really clearly made the case for how high achievers start to lose balance at home and how that can have a really catastrophic domino effect on our professional lives. And she also painted a really clear, actionable way forward. So there are many gems in her book, but one that has stuck with me and that I want to share with you is this idea of focusing on your highest and best use. Now, as we get into this, I should just give a little caveat, which is that I'm not going to be quoting Tiffany or her own words.

I'm going to give you my interpretation of how she writes about things. So my interpretation might deviate a little bit from how exactly she would describe things, but I really want to focus in here on how I see the lesson and how I think that you can apply it in your life. So when she talks about your highest and best use, I think of this as being the contrast to feeling like the person who is responsible for everything and has to be doing everything. Your highest and best use, When I think about it, it's really about what are you uniquely positioned to do?

And you can think about your highest and best use in a work context or in a home and family context. So at work, for example, you may be the best person, uniquely positioned person to make strategic decisions for your business unit. So your highest and best used might be focusing on those decisions and not some of the operational detail if that's your role. Now at home, I think about highest and best use in a similar way, but the actual outcome of that exercise looks a little bit different.

So for example, for me, when I think about my highest and best use at home, I think about being able to raise my kids to have a really solid comfort with our different cultural traditions. And here's why that's so magical for overcompetent moms because we want to be involved in everything or we sometimes end up getting dumped with everything. As an overcompetent mom, really focusing in on what is your highest and best use allows you to cut through to the things that are going to be the most important for you to do, the true best uses of your time and talents. It's also really interesting to think about the idea of your highest and best use in the context of what we know about human psychology.

Now, Tiffany doesn't get into this in her book, but it really brings me back to when we think about the concept of loss aversion, which is something that psychologists and even behavioral economists really think about. Loss aversion is just how we are wired as humans. We treat potential losses as a much bigger deal than potential gains. Humans do not like to lose things.

And what does that mean when we're thinking about where we spend our our time, our focus, our talents? Loss aversion is going to make us want to cling to and not give up on things that we are doing, even when it means that we're overstretched. But when we think about our highest and best use, it really reframes what we're doing and helps us get around this phenomenon of loss aversion that otherwise would have us clinging to things that we don't really need to be doing. So what does it really mean to choose things from your highest and best use?

So for example, when I think about my highest and best use at home, about sharing my cultural traditions with my kids, making sure that they feel at home in multiple cultures, it became really easy for me then to think about where I wanted to volunteer in my kids school, right? Because I couldn't do all of them, wasn't an option. So it became really easy for me to decide I want to be involved in the Halloween events, which is, by the way, a holiday that doesn't really get celebrated much in France. So in the American community we make a big deal of it.

And I wanted to be involved there rather than in the library, even though in a perfect world I would probably love to be doing both. This made my choices really easy. And again, when we think about working toward our highest and best use, we can really stay focused on what we are achieving and creating rather than on what we're not doing or what someone else is doing. So I suggest really taking a moment to think about what you consider to be your highest and best use and then check in on major choices of how to spend your time, money, focus and talents and ask, is this supporting my highest and best use or not doing?

This really starts to reveal what do we need to continue doing? What should we stop doing? And sometimes what do I need to start doing right? Because sometimes it's that bunch of little stuff that we're doing for reasons we don't even know why and keep us from getting started on doing the bigger things that would make a real impact.

And if something is not serving your highest and best use, then it becomes so much easier to drop it without the guilt. Like there is a part of me which if left unchecked, would go create the perfect color coordinated outfits for my 4 year old. Never mind that as a four year old she really wants to be able to choose her own outfits and dress herself. But focusing on my highest and best use, I can drop that without feeling at all guilty about it.

So if you find yourself spread too thin and tempted to do it all, I really encourage you to consider your highest and best use. Take a couple moments to think about what it is, what that looks like at work and at home, and allow this concept to guide you on the use of your time and talents, your money, and your focus. Doing this this one small exercise is going to help you make more traction on the things that are truly important, and it's going to allow you to more easily extract yourself from a whole range of things that are not furthering your mission in the world. If you're enjoying the Mental Offload Podcast, there are two things that you can do to help support it.

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