Episode #397 – When Your Problem Solving Becomes a Problem

This is episode 397 of the Brilliant Balance Podcast. And today we’re talking about when problem solving becomes a problem. So this is for you if you are one of my listeners who defaults to fixer mode and you recognize that sometimes that mode becomes a liability.

And I want to show you today why this happens, including what is the psychology behind it. I want to talk about what it might be costing you and also give you some thoughts on how you could step into a more sustainable role with the people in your life, whether those people are at work or at home, so that you can have a more effective relationship with them. and not default into this fixer pattern like I know I am prone to do.

So this is definitely a place where I am teaching from my lived experience. Before we get into all the good stuff in today’s episode, I want to take just a second to tell you about something that is happening very soon. In fact, it’s coming up on June fifth and that is that I am hosting a live workshop from time to time. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you know that I do these.

And this workshop is happening on Thursday, June 5th. It’s happening at 1.30 Eastern Time. eastern time And this is a workshop that is really designed to help you find clarity.

We are living in such uncertain times right now. There are so many things happening around us that are uncertain, right? That we’re just not sure how they’re going to turn out. And I’ve been hearing from listeners and clients who are facing uncertainty kind of broadly, like globally, as well as within their organizations and within their families. And so I want to help. And one of the ways that I can help is to provide this particular training. So if you are interested in joining me for this workshop, you’re going to head to my website, which is brilliant-balance.com.

forward slash clarity. That’s the place where you’re going to get the registration. And so this workshop is called Clarity and Courage. It’s really helping you find clarity, even in uncertain times, to know what it is that you want and then finding the courage to go for it. So if you want to save your spot and join me for that, um you can go ahead over to brilliant-balance.com forward slash clarity and get yourself registered today.

Okay, so let’s get into all the good stuff I have planned for you in this episode about being a fixer. Let’s talk first about the idea of the fixer reflex.

Okay, so I want you to think about Olivia Pope. If you ever watched the show Scandal, a show that I was absolutely obsessed with when it was on airing, I love Shonda Rhimes, love everything that she’s done, love Kerry Washington. And Scandal just really had my number. But what I was the most enamored with in that show was how Olivia Pope as a character always knew what to do.

Like you gave her any problem and she just had it handled, right? It was actually a classic line from that show. And the confidence and the reassurance that she was giving to people around her, like that she had taken care of it, was so seductive to me. And I think I really related to that desire, that tendency to be somebody who could jump in to handle a problem before anyone even had asked.

So I’m going to ask you to consider that today for you. Are you the one who always steps in? Maybe even when no one has asked you to. Have you become known as the person who knows what to do and can handle the situation?

Because this fixer reflex, I’ll call it, it really is um a tendency. It’s a behavior pattern that we can fall into. And it is a form of over-functioning, right? Over-functioning is a form, is a term from psychology that describes doing for others what they can and maybe should do for themselves.

And most of us have a tendency toward either over-functioning, which is this fixer reflex, or under-functioning. And under-functioning is where essentially we shut down and we wait for someone else to ride in on the white horse and rescue us from whatever situation happens. has befallen us.

So I think you can probably look at your life and see almost immediately who are the over-functioners or the fixers and who are the under-functioners, the people that maybe become a little helpless when something is going wrong and look for someone to come in and take care of them.

And often, this will not surprise you, they pair up, right? So you find pairings of these people either in relationships or workplaces or parent-child. And the pattern can actually start to feel productive.

It can start to feel right to the people who are involved. Like, oh, well, I don’t know what to do. Mom jumps in and fixes it, right? Or I don’t know how to handle this. My wife or my husband will come in and take care of it.

And yet, it actually can be pretty destructive. And so problem solving at its core isn’t a problem, right? I think we all know that it’s valuable sometimes to have someone who is in thought partnership with us or who is able to help us see around a corner and figure out what to do.

But there is a point where that crosses over into being disabling, particularly for the other person in the relationship. And that’s the watch out that I’m giving us today. It can be disabling both for that receiver of your fixing behavior and also for you as the person who has become accustomed to having to do this or feeling like you have to do this for everybody around you.

So when you think about the psychology that is behind fixer behavior or this over-functioning tendency, wanna talk about a few different things that I’ve seen in my work and that I think are backed up by the evidence here of how we develop that tendency.

The first thing that I think is um in the mix is when we have a high need for control or safety, okay? Our brains, the research shows that our brains try to resolve uncertainty quickly, right? And solving problems gives us a dopamine hit, that reward chemical that reinforces our habit. When we say, here’s a problem,

There’s a level of uncertainty, right? We don’t know what to do and we figure out what to do. We like to make plans. That releases that dopamine hit that can get us to a place where we’re like, I got to do that again.

That felt great, right? Solving that problem felt amazing. I want to do that again. And then we’re in a loop where we’re reinforcing that behavior even though we’re not really wired to do it all the time,

Okay. The second piece of psychology is what I started to reference about over-functioning versus under-functioning, right? This is kind of in family systems when you have one person who’s consistently taking charge and another person who’s consistently just waiting for direction.

That dynamic can create imbalance. It can create frustration really for both parties. Most of the women that I coach within Brilliant Balance veer toward over-functioning.

right This is not surprising because like attracts like and that is my tendency. So in Brilliant Balance, I am often working with the family member who is the person who is the fixer, who is the person that is the overfunctioner.

And we’re kind of saying to ourselves like, who is going to do this if it’s not me? right It always has to be me. and And that can get tiring, but also feel kind of good. right We know that there’s like ah that dopamine hit, that reward chemical that’s coming for being the one who knows how to solve the problem.

And our partners, if we’re asking them or other family members, may also feel frustrated and imbalanced that they never have the opportunity to step up. They second guess their decisions. They lose confidence in their ability to solve problems. They start asking for direction even when they don’t need it because we’ve created this pattern that the family has fallen into.

Okay? So that the tendency to kind of go to your corners around over versus under functioning And that strong desire for control or for safety are two factors.

The third is really social conditioning, right? I think statistically, women are more likely to be socialized into caretaking roles where we get praised for being helpful, right? We get praised for anticipating other people’s needs and tending to those needs. And so when we look at gender roles, there’s pretty strong social conditioning where women step into the role of caretaker, problem solver, fixer for other people in their family.

And you probably don’t have to look too far in your own family to see that pattern playing out, okay? And the reality is, if you are always in that role of rescuer, that can start to feel like love.

It can start to feel like this is how I express love, is by taking care of people, handling their problems for them, right, being the person that they can turn to. But sometimes that crosses a bridge too far and we end up disabling them, right, almost preventing them from learning the skill of how to solve their own problem.

And that’s a really significant cost of this chronic fixing behavior. That’s when I think it becomes less helpful and probably more toxic. So I want to look at, as you are, you know, kind of looking inward and thinking about, is this my tendency?

Am I somebody who I jump in to fix things? I jump in to be the person who handles situations. Do I recognize myself in those psychological tendencies? Am I looking for control?

Did I experience the social conditioning that this is what was expected of me? Have I habitualized the notion of overfunctioning? I want you to consider, if that’s you, the costs of being in that pattern of kind of chronic fixing, okay? Because they’re real.

There are real costs to you and there are real costs to others. The first thing that you’ve probably experienced if you’re in this role is some level of burnout. um And I think that’s kind of underpinned by decision fatigue.

So decision fatigue, which I’ve talked about before on the show, is when the constant problem solving sort of depletes our executive function. We have this sort of finite amount of um an ability to just make decisions and handle things.

And when we’re depleted because we’re doing it all the time, not just for our own problems, but for everyone else’s, then we actually start to diminish our effectiveness, right? That decision fatigue leads to poorer choices over time.

So I think about my own life If things are kind of humming along within my family and within the Brilliant Balance team and people are kind of making their own decisions and being fairly self-sufficient, then I have enough reserve to handle my own decisions for sure and to make really good ones and probably to weigh in on the biggest challenges people are facing.

So if someone comes to me and asks for help and says, I’m stuck on this, right? I’m looking at these three options and I’m not sure which one to take. Or if one of my kids is like, hey, I’m really struggling with this. I’m just, I’m not sure what to do. Can we talk about it?

Man, it feels good to be able to engage at that time and be a part of that solution, right? Of course, it feels good to me. It feels good to them. But when I am depleted because I have made so many decisions for so many people over such a stretch of time, first of all, I don’t even want to engage in the next problem somebody comes to me with.

And I actually start making worse decisions. Like I lose my ability to really think through the options because of this decision fatigue. So decision fatigue is like the canary in the coal mine. And then that leads to burnout.

Right? And burnout is when we are just emotionally exhausted, right? We’re cynical. We’re like, screw it. I don’t even want to help you. And we have reduced effectiveness because we’ve kind of been in this state of chronic over-responsibility. We’re just trying to handle too much for too many people. It’s like a boundaries issue that starts to lead to this level of burnout.

So two of the costs, and they kind of ladder, is decision fatigue, which is the lower level, up to burnout. On the other side, there’s kind of the damage to the relationships.

And I think there’s relationship damage when someone else is robbed of autonomy. You know, they’re robbed of growth. They’re robbed of the learning experience of figuring something out on their own.

And so they become either dependent or resentful. Right? Therapists refer to this sometimes as enmeshment. There’s this, they’re enmeshed with us because they haven’t figured out how to kind of be an independent being who can make these decisions. So it goes one of two ways. They’re either annoyed up to resentful or like, oh my God, get out of my space. Let me just make a decision.

Or they’re paralyzed because we’ve trained them to be so dependent on us that they can no longer make those decisions on their own. Neither one of these is good, right? We don’t want the people in our life to feel resentful and we don’t want the people in our life to feel utterly dependent on us. We’re trying to have everyone be interdependent where there’s perspective that can be offered, but not that level of like, I’m paralyzed unless you can tell me what to do next, right? Or unless you rescue me or you save me from this situation, right?

So that’s the damage to the other person, but there’s also a cost to us as the fixer, which is a kind of loss of self to some extent, right? We can lose our own sense of what we need or what we want because we’re so busy managing everyone else’s needs.

When I think about how many mothers in particular, and I work with a lot of mothers at Brilliant Valens, not all, but a lot, and how many mothers feel like, I don’t even know what I want anymore.

I don’t even know what I need because 100% of my available headspace is going to meet other people’s needs and navigate them through their challenges. And I’m going to be honest, I think this heightens as their kids get older.

So younger moms are really um affected by meeting the physical needs of their kids. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting in young parents. And as those kids hit adolescence and early adulthood, this emotional load of parenting really spikes.

And that’s where I see that if those kids haven’t been equipped to make decisions on their own and to come to us only when they need perspective, we are so busy and depleted and pulled into every small decision they’re trying to make along the way. So I’m going to invite you today to just check in with yourself if you are a mother.

How deep is that going for you? you know How much of your time are you spending kind of doling out text advice or advice over the phone on things that you’re like, I feel like they could maybe make that decision on their own, right? And then in conversely, is it being reserved for the biggest decisions, which is where I think there’s a healthy role for parents to play, maybe well into adulthood?

So the reframe of this is if you are chronically a fixer, right, and you’re noticing that you’re hitting decision fatigue or maybe even burnout, your relationships are starting to fray, you’re noticing like these um symptoms of that, or you’re starting to just lose your sense of self.

you may be solving some problems, but you’re also unintentionally creating these new ones. And that’s what we want to avoid. We don’t want to fix one set of problems only to create a new set of problems, okay?

And it’s not easy to course correct this. This is a pattern that’s so easy to stay stuck in. And I think people, even when they can recognize that there is a problem here, if you look at, you’re listening today and you’re like, this is a problem in my life, it’s not the easiest thing to change because sometimes fixing becomes a part of our identity, right? We get a reputation for being the capable one, the responsible one, the one people can turn to, the one who knows what to do. And that feels so good as an identity, right? We love to be helpful that we don’t know how to disentangle that

practice from our identity. okay and Also, I think the habit of solving people’s problems becomes, um it gets wired into almost like a default pathway in our brain, even when it’s not needed, because we’ve repeated it so often.

So you know neuroscience is we form habits when we repeat things and have them rewarded. Anything that we’ve done over and over again, That turns out well that people are rewarding us for. and we’re getting and that dopamine hit. We’re going to keep doing that thing.

And so we’re breaking a pattern that actually at the beginning feels good to us and that we’re getting a lot of reward for because it’s just not needed all the time.

And breaking that pattern can bring up the fear of what happens if we let go. you know that There’s this kind of famous quote of, if it is to be, it’s up to me. I think that could be like the fixer’s credo, right? We think if it is to be, it is up to me. What if no one else steps up?

What if no one else is there to kind of handle the situation? So we get this like, learned responsibility bias, right? That’s kind of the term in workplace psychology where competent people get assigned more tasks because they’re capable.

You know, like the phrase, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. This is sort of like, if you want something done, give it to the person who’s proven they can handle anything. That’s learned responsibility bias. So we, as the person who gets handed a lot, we kind of love that, right? And then we start thinking, oh my gosh, I’m the only one who can do this.

If I don’t do it, like, quote unquote, the world’s going to fall apart. And it’s not true. What often will happen is someone else will step up and they will have a learning experience.

And maybe it won’t go perfectly, but they’ll have the opportunity to try and to learn and to course correct. And I think this is certainly important in parenting. And I’ve used those examples today.

But it is also very important in workplaces. right If you are a leader in your organization, and I know most of my listeners are, if you are a leader, think about how critical it is that the people you are leading have these experiences where they get to solve their own problems.

Where at a minimum, they’re bringing you a slate of options and a recommendation, a strong reco of what they think should be done. I grew up in a corporate culture that was very recco-driven. So we were trained from day one to look at a list of options, go to our leader with like, hey, I looked at three options and this one’s my recommendation and here’s why I didn’t pick the other ones.

And that little model, like I have taught that model to so many clients over the years who are trying to disentangle themselves from making all the decisions themselves. If you can equip the people who work for you to evaluate options and bring you a recommendation, you can keep that final check step of like, let me see around a corner and help make sure we’re not we don’t have a disaster here.

But you’re really moving into the role of coach, okay? And it is a much healthier role to move from fixer to facilitator. And ultimately, that is the evolution that I’m gonna invite you to make here, right? This idea of becoming a facilitator, like a calm, centered presence, right?

who can empower the people around you to think and to act for themselves, where it’s not just, you come to me and I’ll solve all your problems, honey. right Instead, it’s, hey, how can I support you to think this through? What do you think we should do? right So we’re moving from rescuing to coaching. And just pause for a second here. If you are in a workplace where you are lamenting that all you are doing is handling everybody else’s problems all day, and want you to ask yourself, is that a conditioned behavior?

Are they coming to you because they know that you’re just gonna solve it and tell them exactly what to do? Because this intervention that you can make to move from rescuing to coaching, right? Instead of telling them what to do and saying, I got this, I’ll do it, it’s handled, you move to what do you think?

What do you think we should do? Right? You move from urgency, like everything is an emergency and I got to handle it right now, to trust. Hey, I trust you. You’re going to figure this out.

How can I help? So those subtle shifts from rescuing to coaching, from I’ll do it to what do you think we should do, from this is an emergency, it’s urgent, to I trust you, you’ll get through this.

Those shifts are part of the shift to being a facilitator or a coach instead of a fixer. And you really want to learn when not to intervene.

right When do I not intervene? Where is there an opportunity to create space for others to grow? And I was thinking, as I was saying this just a second ago, about watching a really good coach of like youth sports. All of your kids, if you have kids, ah you’ve probably watched them kind of grow up through youth sports.

I think the best coaches are the ones who do not coach during a game. They coach during practice, they teach, they equip, and then they go, you got this. And I want to see what you can do. And then we’re going to turn it into a learning experience after the game. And then we’ll go back out there and try again. So similar to the very best leaders, right? I’m going to teach you. I’m going to train you. I’m going to equip you. And then it’s go time. And I want to say, what do you think we should do?

Go try it, right? And then we’re going to kind of clean it up and kind of learn from it and take the next swing at it. So that ability to really create space for other people to grow, whether it’s on your team at work, whether it’s in your household, whether it’s in a community organization, requires you to practice delegation right, really learning how to get those results through others. It requires reflective listening where you’re really hearing how far they can take it and then just tweak in that last 10%.

And also sitting with discomfort when something isn’t immediately resolved, right? We have to make the shift from I’m here to fix everything to I’m here to foster growth.

Right, I’m here to equip this individual to grow. And I want to nurture that and I want to coach that. I want to facilitate that. I want to support that. That’s never going to happen if I am rushing in to just do it for them.

So I think these patterns can be so deeply ingrained. They can be so hard to shift if we’re not, first of all, aware of them, right? The first step is just, oh, this is me.

You know, I see myself in this situation. I recognize that I am exhibiting this pattern of behavior. And then we have to be able to be guided and supported and held accountable in making the change. So you know I kind of cut my professional teeth in a very large, multi-level organization.

So no matter where you were in leadership, you still had a boss who was coaching you on how to be a leader. um Not everybody has that, right? Some of your workplaces are like you’re either the worker bee or the leader, and that’s it.

And there’s not a lot of leadership coaching coming your way. But these skills that I’m talking about today, these are leadership skills. And again, whether you’re leading at home or whether you’re leading at work, it’s still leadership skills. So having some guidance and some support and some accountability to make these changes is important. It’s very difficult to do this entirely on your own because you’ll fall back into those kind of well-worn pathways of how you’ve always done it.

So I think coaching in particular here is a really valuable asset. And you may have it in your workplace if you do, great. And lots and lots of the women that I coach in Brilliant Balance don’t. And so we get to provide that level of coaching for them.

Because unlearning these lifelong reflexes on your own, you know, it’s kind of like trying to do surgery on yourself. It just doesn’t work very well. right you’re Even if you would be great at it on someone else, it’s too hard to do on your own. So these kinds of behavior shifts are really, really common territory inside of my community. So um the community that I run for women leaders is called Bold. If you want to explore what being in that community is like, um you can also go to the website brilliant-balance.com. It’s forward slash bold.

And you can kind of take a look at what we are doing there? Does this sound like your kind of people? Are these some of the skills that you might be interested in growing in? um And I would love to talk to you about that if that is intriguing to you.

Definitely also share this episode with a fellow fixer um who might need to hear it. Or if you’re like, hey, this isn’t me. But this is so-and-so in my life, and they really need to hear this episode. I would love it if you would forward this on to somebody that you know would benefit from the ideas that I have shared today. um Again, I said this at the beginning. I think it kind of takes one to know one. This is definitely a tendency that I have and that I have spent um a lot of effort trying to refine, right, so that I can use this capability when it is helpful, and useful, and then I can also hold it back when it’s not so that other people have the opportunity to grow and to learn. That is what I have for you today, my friends. Until next time, let’s be brilliant.