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Why We Anxiously Focus on What Others "Should" Be Doing

And how this can shut down progress.

Kathleen Smith

Oct 28

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Rookery of King Cormorants at Beagle Channel islands. Source: Shutterstock

Carol really wanted to her husband Simon to clean out the basement. Every night she brought it up at dinner. She picked weekends where they were going to tackle the job, but Simon kept making excuses. He stayed uninterested in getting the job done, and she stayed frustrated by his lack of motivation.

Last week I wrote about how our anxiety lives in how we perceive problems. I think it’s very easy to put our anxiety in an unanswered email, a child’s unfinished homework assignment, or a spouse who won’t clean out the basement.

Anxiety tends to live in “why” questions. Questions like, “Why won’t he clean out the basement?”

But there are more interesting questions for this anxiety.

Questions like:

How do we make decisions about where to put our energy with weekend projects?
What are the projects that are interesting and meaningful to each of us?
When am I more focused on what my spouse should be doing than myself?
What is the potential impact of my anxious focus on the other?

Look friends. I’m not staying that a person can’t ask another to do something. However, looking at process is just as important.

Processes of:

A) How decisions are made.

B) How people focus on each other.

When we anxiously focus on others, they may do what we want, because they want to avoid our upsetness. Or they may shrink from the intensity and start to underfunction. There’s no agency in either of these moves.

When multiple brains are thinking together, people are more likely to become curious about challenges and their part in them.

So do you want someone to do something, or do you want them to become more responsible for themselves? These are two different things.

There are times when it’s useful to be direct, and say, “I think this has to get done.” But more often than not, there’s a hidden invitation to think about how we begin to direct others when we are stirred up.

Maybe Simon cleaned out the basement, and maybe he didn’t. Maybe there was another way he wanted to be responsible for their home in the short term. Maybe the basement stopped bothering Carol because she was managing her anxiety differently. Maybe they decided to work on it together, and he got to choose the next project.

You become a leader in your family or organization when you start to consider how your anxiety sets up camp in one particular issue. Zooming out to see the process, and asking thoughtful questions, frees people up to get interested in the challenges.

And a person who is interested is a little bit steadier. Their anxiety isn’t so contagious. They’re making space for the thinking and the individuality of others.

Questions:

Has your anxiety camped out in a particular issue lately?
Where are you making to-do lists for others, instead of engaging their thinking?
Where are others trying to manage you, and how to you want to respond to that?
Is there a process question that can be considered when you are very focus on someone’s behavior?
How have your attempts to manage gotten in the way of people becoming more interested in their responsibilities and challenges?

News from Kathleen

Listening to: Father Greg Boyle on You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes.

Reading: My daughter has recently become obsessed with Mount Everest and Nirmal Purja of the Netflix 14 Peaks documentary. We just finished reading his memoir for young readers. This guy is unbelievable.

It doesn’t get more fun than Halloween on Capitol Hill.

Buy my books True to You and Everything Isn’t Terrible for more in-depth stories of people working on their relationships and themselves. If you love them, consider giving them a review on Amazon so other folks can find them. If you haven’t gotten the free digital workbooks for them, email me.