Being overloaded is no joke, especially if your sense of self worth depends on getting it all done and making sure everyone around you is happy.  I often think of the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin.  Remember how each morning the pile of straw was spun into gold — and each subsequent night, the new pile was larger?

There comes a point when there’s too much straw to spin.  You just simply cannot.

Of course, there was a point long before that when you just simply should not have tried.  Why is it so hard to draw that line before you’re on the verge of a breakdown?

As I listened to friends and clients talk about this phenomenon this week — and faced it myself at the same time — a common theme emerged.  I began to ask, “If you go through your list item by item and initial who owns each task, how many of them do not rightfully belong to you?’  We experimented with it and found again and again that half of the list or more was made up of other people’s responsibilities.

So what makes us take those on? What makes us drive ourselves crazy over other people’s responsibilities?

Here are some reasons women take on tasks and responsibilities for everyone around them.  See how many apply to you:

• Not trusting their family’s resilience, that is, their ability to bounce back from small disappointments.
• Feeling that being of value is a function of doing it all.
• Fear of anger, retaliation, rejection or abandonment if you say you can’t, or, scarier still, that you’re not willing.
• Fear of being bullied into saying yes.
• An inappropriate sense of responsibility for the happiness of others — and guilt when they’re inevitably not always happy.
• Equating their possible disappointment — if you decline — with depression and desperation.

Life happens at a furious pace, with multiple things always occurring simultaneously, an experience vividly and humorously reflected in the third movement of J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto.  Listen to this as many times as it takes to hear its individual voices converging into joyful chaos.  And if your to-do list is in a tangle like that, take ten minutes now to sit down and untangle it so that each task is unequivocably given back to its rightful owner.

Because unlike the parrots in the photo, there’s only one of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDzXnsBDZU&p=82707B4FE6C73850&playnext=1&index=3