Do you sometimes find yourself playing a type of “Whack-a-mole” game with your life?
You identify something that you feel is causing the problem and set about fixing it.
That’s it. That’s why I’m so unhappy.
Or exhausted. Resentful. Stuck. Frustrated.
You change something. Have the conversation. Set the boundary. Make the decision.
And for a while, perhaps things feel better.
Then whack.
Something else pops up. Slightly different, but strangely familiar.
And on the cycle goes.
I’ve noticed this in my own life and in conversations with clients. Sometimes it’s not that the solution didn’t work.
Sometimes we were solving the problem we could see, without noticing what was happening underneath it.
“Everyone relies on me.” The one solution is that everyone else needs to do more. But what happens when they try? Can you leave them to it, or do you remind, check, correct, take over and eventually think, “It would have been easier if I’d done it myself”? And you find yourself back at the beginning because you know you can do it simpler, better and faster.
And before long, you’re doing everything again.
Everyone is relying on you again.
And you’re wondering why nobody ever takes responsibility.
Perhaps their reliance on you isn’t the only thing keeping that particular mole popping up.
“I should be coping better than this.”
I knew this one well.
I’d look at other women apparently managing their children, work, homes, relationships and everything else and wonder what I was missing.
Why was I exhausted and short-tempered when they seemed to have their shit together?
Maybe I needed to be more organised. More patient. More disciplined.
Except there was a question I hadn’t thought to ask:
Better than what?
Somewhere along the way I’d acquired an image of the woman who could do it all and still be smiling at the end of the day.
Superwoman.
I was measuring myself against her without ever asking whether that was my definition of a life well lived.
So perhaps the question isn’t always “Why can’t I cope better?”
Sometimes it might be,
“Who decided what coping well was supposed to look like?”
“I overthink everything.”
You make a decision.
Then you think about what your partner will say.
Or your children.
Your parents.
Your friends.
What if they’re disappointed?
What if they think you’re making a mistake?
What if you have to defend your decision?
Suddenly the decision that seemed reasonably clear isn’t clear at all.
We might call that overthinking.
But I’d be curious about something.
What if you’re not trying to find the right answer?
What if you’re trying to find the answer nobody will object to?
Those are two very different problems.
The presenting problem can still be real
A difficult boss can genuinely be difficult.
A partner may genuinely need to take more responsibility.
You may genuinely need more time, money, support or rest.
Identity Alchemy isn’t about turning every external problem into “Actually, this is all about you.”
It’s about asking, “is that the whole problem?”
Because that question takes us somewhere different.
If the problem is simply “I overthink”, I might go looking for ways to quieten my thoughts or make decisions more quickly.
Noticing that my thinking goes into overdrive particularly when somebody might disagree with me, I have something completely different to explore.
If the problem is “everyone relies on me”, I can spend years trying to make everyone else more responsible. If I notice that I struggle to leave things alone when they do take responsibility, that’s worth getting curious about too.
Seeing another part of the problem doesn’t make the first part untrue.
It simply gives you more information.
If you’ve spent years trying to change the thing you can see and keep finding yourself back in a familiar place, there may be something else worth noticing.
This is the territory I call Identity Alchemy.
I’m interested in the patterns we’ve repeated for so long that they’ve stopped looking like patterns.
They sound more like:
“That’s just who I am.”
“I’ve always been like that.”
“I can’t help it.”
“That’s just what I do.”
They can be as ordinary as automatically saying “I don’t mind, you choose” before you’ve even considered what you’d prefer.
Taking over because it’s quicker than waiting.
Explaining a perfectly reasonable decision until the other person agrees with it.
Changing your mind because someone you care about is disappointed.
None of those things automatically means there’s a problem.
The interesting question is whether you’re choosing them, or whether they’ve become so automatic that they happen before you’ve realised there was another choice.
And sometimes they’re so ordinary that we don’t notice them at all.
Until we look at the problem from somewhere else.
The aim isn’t to get rid of every pattern you discover.
It’s to see it clearly enough to decide whether it still gets a vote.
There’s a difference between choosing something because it’s genuinely what you want and choosing it because disappointment, guilt, somebody else’s expectations, an old idea about who you’re supposed to be, or simply years of habit, got there first.
So take the problem you’ve been trying to solve.
The one you’ve talked about, thought about, perhaps argued about. The one you keep coming back to.
And instead of asking yourself for the hundredth time,
“How do I fix this?”
Try a different question,
“What if the thing I think is the problem isn’t the whole problem?”
And don’t rush to answer it.
Just get curious about what else might be happening that you haven’t noticed yet.
Because often, you don’t need another answer.
You need to see the problem differently.