What am I actually responsible for, and what am I carrying that was never really mine?

A guided 25 to 35 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not a boundaries quiz. A look at how each thing you carry actually became yours, and what would happen if you stopped.

Two people at a workshop bench at closing time, one leaning in while the other puts a mistake right themselves

If you stopped carrying it, what would actually happen?

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 look at

01What has become yours to manage lately
02Something that became yours without a conversation
03A time you did not step in
04Something of your own you keep postponing

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.

Read my full view ↓

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

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
What is genuinely yours
02
What accumulated
03
What would actually happen
04
What you have left on the floor
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓

01What you are carrying
02What is genuinely yours
03What you chose
04What accumulated
05What genuinely requires you
06What might not require you
07Where somebody else's responsibility begins
08What you may be neglecting
09What happened and what happens next
10What you are responsible for and what you control
11What appears to be driving the pattern
12The rival explanation
13The alternative
14What deserves protecting
15What I think you should do
16What remains uncertain
17Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

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.

See more ↓

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

01
Write down what you are carrying before deciding whether it is too much. Most people have never seen the list in one place.
02
For each significant one, work out how it became yours. A choice, a commitment, an emergency that never ended or nobody ever said anything.
03
Test the ones you assume would collapse without you. There is usually one you have never actually tested.
04
Separate what you are responsible for from what you can control. They get confused, and the confusion is expensive.
05
Then ask the awkward one: while you have been carrying all this, what of your own have you left alone?

Test it

01
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.
02
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.
03
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

Something you do every week that started as a one off favour.
The last time you did not step in, and what actually happened afterwards.
A responsibility you chose freely and have started to resent.
Somebody who has become less capable at something since you started doing it for them.
The thing that is genuinely yours and keeps getting postponed because everything else is more urgent.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 12 MIN

Mine / Theirs / Shared / Outside My Control

TAIU

Four columns for a situation that has become tangled.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

Read this if your problem isn't knowing what matters. Your problem is trying to make everything matter at once.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

Read it if this exercise concluded that a heavy responsibility is genuinely yours. Read the last third rather than mining the famous lines.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A woman in her late twenties in a dark corridor outside a lit private dining room, coat over her arm

Next tool

Your principles

If the argument was about what you owe people

Continue →What should I actually do? →

Further thinking

Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
The Dance of Anger
Harriet Lerner
Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis
Stephen Karpman

See the thinking ↓

Book

Man's Search for Meaning

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

The Dance of Anger

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

Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis

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

Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement

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

Four Thousand Weeks

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.