It’s Sunday evening. You’ve actually had a good weekend.
Then you open your calendar and glance through the week ahead.
Monday looks full. Tuesday has those back-to-back meetings. Wednesday, the client call. Thursday, the piece of work everyone comes to you for, because you know exactly how to handle it.
Nothing terrible. Nothing you can’t do.
And yet, as you keep looking, you notice something. A slight churning in your stomach. Your breathing changes. Perhaps your heart is beating just a little faster.
Not panic. Not even what you would call stress. Just a small, unmistakable shift in the body.
And you wonder why, because you know how to do everything on that calendar.
In fact, that may be part of the problem.
We can become extraordinarily good at work that isn’t where our abilities come most naturally. Years of experience will do that. So will intelligence, conscientiousness and necessity. Do something often enough and you develop competence. Do it well and people notice.
Then something interesting happens. You get more of it.
You’re good with the difficult clients, so the difficult clients come to you. You can untangle the complicated project, so another complicated project lands on your desk. You hold your nerve when everyone else is flapping, so you become the person expected to keep holding everything together. You understand the detail, so nobody quite learns to manage the detail without you.
Eventually your working life begins to organise itself around what you have proved you can do.
And this is where it becomes difficult to see. Because learned competence and natural ability can look remarkably similar from the outside. Both can produce excellent work. Both can earn money, recognition and praise. Both can make other people say: but you’re so good at it.
There’s an obvious version of this in acting. An actor plays a particular kind of character brilliantly and becomes typecast — the industry has found something they can reliably deliver, so it keeps asking for more of the same.
You can become typecast by your own competence.
And because you are succeeding, it can take years to notice. If you were failing miserably, you would question the fit. But you’re not failing.
Quite the opposite. People value you. You get results. Perhaps you’re paid very well for it.
So why would you question it?
Because there is another piece of information we rarely put into the equation. Not how well you do it. What it costs you to do it.
Think of two pieces of work from the last month.
The first is the one you are known for. You handled it beautifully, the way you always do, and afterwards you sat in the car, or in front of a blank screen, with nothing left for the evening — over something that, on paper, you find perfectly straightforward.
The second may not have looked important enough to count. Twenty minutes with someone junior, where you watched a thing land. A piece of thinking nobody had asked you for. It took real effort, and you came out of it more awake than you went in.
Competent at both. Completely different effect.
Most of us file that under how the day happened to go. But there is research pointing in another direction too. Effort itself isn’t the whole story.
Studies of motivation at work have found that people tend to experience more energy and less exhaustion when what they’re doing feels genuinely chosen or matters to them, compared with work driven mainly by pressure or obligation.
Which helps explain why the tiredness after work you are excellent at can be so confusing. It isn’t necessarily a failure of stamina. It may be information.
So as you move through this week, you might quietly notice three things.
How good am I at this?
What does it cost me energetically?
Would I choose to spend more of my working life doing it?
The third is the one that matters. The first two are how you get permission to ask it.
The answers may not all point the same way, and that is the interesting part. Because being good at something is useful information.
It just isn’t the whole answer.
If one of those three answers surprises you, I’d like to hear which one. Just reply — it comes to me and goes no further.
Warmly,
Rosaleen
P.S. And on the subject of always being the capable one: the retreat in the Rhodope Mountains in southern Bulgaria runs 5–12 September. A small group, and a week in which nobody needs you to be the capable one — which is rarer than it sounds. Three places left: https://realradiantlife.co.uk/radiant-life-retreat/.
P.P.S. If you’d like to practise with me this week, the free morning breathing practice is at 7am Monday to Friday and 8am at weekends, and the weekly yoga classes are running as usual:
https://realradiantlife.co.uk/weekly-practice/ctice/