Tool 10 · Develop yourself
Not a boundaries quiz. A look at how each thing you carry actually became yours, and what would happen if you stopped.
A guided 25 to 35 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Not what are you afraid would happen. What would actually happen?
Sometimes the answer is that something serious would happen. That is a finding too.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have met plenty of people carrying too much. I have also met people who have become very good at explaining why something is not their responsibility. Neither is particularly healthy.
There are people who become the person everybody calls. The problem solver. The one who sorts the family out. The founder who gets involved in everything. The friend who always picks up. The person who lends the money and fixes the mess.
At first that looks like strength, and sometimes it is exactly that. But something strange happens. Everyone starts organising themselves around the assumption that you will carry it. And you can end up angry with people for relying on you when you have spent years teaching them that they can.
There is another side to this that people mention less often. Sometimes we become so occupied with everybody else's problems that we have a very convincing reason not to deal with our own.
That is where this exercise gets interesting.
What you'll get
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What is genuinely yours
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What accumulated
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What would actually happen
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What you have left on the floor
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
A plain list of what you are actually carrying, in concrete terms.
02 · Test it
Take one responsibility that may not genuinely require you. Do not drop it quietly. Have the conversation, agree who owns what, and then watch what actually happens.
Before you act on it
Nothing involving a child, a vulnerable adult, a legal duty or somebody's immediate safety should be reduced on the strength of an exercise. Where those are involved, this is a conversation to have with the people concerned, not a decision to take alone.
If the conclusion was that your load is genuinely heavy and genuinely yours, that is a real result. The useful question then is what support is missing, not what you should care about less.
What I would do
Write down what you are carrying before deciding whether it is too much. Most people have never seen the list in one place.
For each significant one, work out how it became yours. A choice, a commitment, an emergency that never ended, or nobody ever said anything.
Test the ones you assume would collapse without you. There is usually one you have never actually tested.
Separate what you are responsible for from what you can control. They get confused, and the confusion is expensive.
Then ask the awkward one: while you have been carrying all this, what of your own have you left alone?
Test it
For a fortnight, write down every time you step in to sort something out. The list is usually longer than people expect and the pattern is obvious by the end of it.
Say out loud to one person: here is what I can do, and here is what I am not going to do. Then hold it for two weeks and see what happens.
Put the thing you have been postponing in the diary before anything else goes in. Notice what tries to displace it.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are carrying too much and need a boundary. Sometimes that is exactly right. But the evidence often points elsewhere: not too much, but the wrong things. A responsibility that is genuinely yours and the real problem is resentment towards something you chose. A legitimate duty carried in an unsustainable way. Something you keep doing that another adult could learn to do. A situation that needs a conversation rather than a boundary, or the surrender of control over how somebody else does it rather than the surrender of the responsibility itself. Occasionally the load is simply too large for the hours in a week, and no change of attitude will touch that. Sometimes nothing material needs changing at all.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
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Next tool
If the argument was about what you owe people
Further thinking
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
The Dance of Anger
Harriet Lerner
Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis
Stephen Karpman
Book
Viktor E. Frankl
Frankl spent three years in the camps and came out arguing that a life is held together by what a person answers for, not by what they are spared. The useful part here is not the survival story. It is his insistence that freedom without responsibility is only half a life, which is the exact counterweight to the modern habit of treating every obligation as a burden to be renegotiated.
Book
Harriet Lerner
Lerner writes about families as systems, where one person steadily doing more quietly arranges for somebody else to do less. It explains the pattern most people notice late: you become competent, then indispensable, then angry with people for depending on you in exactly the way you taught them to.
Article
Stephen Karpman
The original seven page paper that introduced the drama triangle, free to read and much less confident than the workshop version of it that followed. The Rescuer position is the part worth your attention: help that solves a problem the other person could have solved, and so removes the occasion for them to learn.
Article
Julian B. Rotter
Rotter's monograph is where the internal and external control idea comes from, and it is more careful than the pop version. An internal orientation predicts persistence and initiative, but it also carries a cost when someone applies it to outcomes nobody could have controlled, which is where responsibility turns into self blame.
Book
Oliver Burkeman
The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.