Welcome, fellow recovering overachiever. If you’re embarking on a life, business, or career change, and you’re holding yourself back from starting because you think it’ll be a “failure” – I have news for you: you don’t have a fear of failure – you have a fear of responsibility.

If you’ve always identified as the “reliable one” amidst your peers, then your success has likely been based on exceeding expectations that others have outlined for you. So, what happens now when it’s only up to you to create those standards? Paralysis. It’s not the fear of failure that holds you back (because you’ve excelled at most things you’ve pursued thus far), but rather, the fear of being responsible for your own growth and sense of accomplishment. 

I want to clarify that if you need external confirmation to be motivated in your career – that is perfectly fine, but the key is to seek out and find that opportunity with clarity and intention. You decided to make a change for a reason, so you owe it to yourself to have some agency as you go about this transition process. 

So, what does that look like? It’s going to be different for each of us, but the three key steps include: Identifying, Reframing, and Taking Action. 

Identify

There are a multitude of ways that people avoid responsibility, but you want to first identify your specific pattern so that you can address the root cause of this cycle. This fear of responsibility usually shows up in one of the following ways:

1. Avoiding leadership positions and/or delegation
   You like to take control of your individual tasks, but don’t want to be left alone with making decisions or delegating to others. Because you want to be assured that things are done “right,” you would rather only handle things where you have 100% control over the outcomes rather than take the risk of either you or a team member being “wrong” or making a mistake.
2. Perfectionism and internalizing external expectations
   This is the bucket that I fall into – I was the “good kid” growing up who got straight As, picked a “safe” major, got a good job, and then dutifully took over the family business. I was constantly bombarded by my family, peers, and society of what the “right way” was to achieve success, that I eventually internalized this as my whole identity. It wasn’t until I took a step back and realized that I didn’t actually want any of these things, that I began to unpack and reframe this thought pattern that I had trapped myself in. 

3. Steering away from long-term commitments
   In this scenario, you frequently jump from project to project rather than committing to a larger initiative where you’d have to get more involved and be challenged to evolve and grow. You like the routine and set of skills you’ve developed, and you don’t want to experience the discomfort that comes with change along with being held accountable for it. 

Reframe

This step in the process begins by unpacking your existing definition of responsibility. For most overachievers, responsibility means being held accountable (or blamed) if certain expectations aren’t met or results aren’t achieved. This explains why they resist change, refuse to delegate, and only stick to the “safe” roles and projects they know they will excel at. 

Here’s an alternate definition of responsibility: “the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization.” Sounds freeing, right? Not for someone who finds comfort in being told exactly what to do. What this DOES help with, though, is allow you to begin to take back some control over what expectations you want to set and hold yourself to. 

Overachievers need parameters in order to be productive, but they don’t know how to come up with their own. That in and of itself is a separate process, but the first step is to acknowledge that you have the ability and the freedom to do so. Responsibility isn’t about avoiding blame – it’s about fully embracing and realizing your innate skills, desires, and abilities. 

Take Action

This final step varies widely depending on your unique situation, but I want to share my own “action plan” that I lean on when addressing my fear of responsibility. 

1. Start small: I choose one item to focus my attention on and set a doable goal that I know I will reach within a set timeframe. Most recently, this was starting and publishing a single newsletter issue for my business (I resisted this for so long because I’m a newbie at online marketing!)
2. Gather data: You can’t set parameters without information to back it up, and this is likely the most difficult part of the process for overachievers. You have to just do something first before you can determine what doing it “right” will mean for you. I lost precious time reading and researching ways to write the perfect newsletter because I was searching for a blueprint that didn’t yet exist for my business’ marketing strategy. 
3. Create your “base” standard & iterate: When you’re taking control of what you do and the results that come from it, you must acknowledge that you will have to update your plan as you evolve. This is arguably the most challenging aspect of embracing responsibility because you are both the enforcer and the executor. It will be incredibly tempting to just go back to a “safe” opportunity where someone else handles these changes, but remember this: by taking control, you get to decide what you are or aren’t responsible for, which means – you’re no longer at the mercy of it.

Let me be absolutely clear that this is not a “one and done” process. This is a life-long journey that will evolve and grow just as you do. It is, arguably, the most challenging work I’ve ever done in my life, but when I think about the alternative (preventing myself from realizing my full potential), it’s absolutely worth the effort. 

If you’re struggling to overcome a fear of responsibility and want to learn about how coaching may help you, please send me an email at [email protected] or click the button below to schedule a discovery session.