Overdoing Undone
Marty Whelan, host of Marty in the Morning, one of Ireland’s most popular radio programs, discussed The Shift Effect on a recent program from Dublin.
Marty cited some of the personalities featured in the book that develop from overdoing a mindset or a habit. You may know these folks: The Fixer. The Perfectionist. The Rescuer. The Selfless Ones.
I found these tendencies and many others among my 50 clients featured in The Shift Effect. Certainly they’re not all bad. Fixing is great! And you know the other side of the coin. If you have someone in your life who fixes, fixes, fixes, but is less adept at just listening, or chilling, or reflecting on what is really going on, there are occasions where fixing gets tiresome. Or where it deskills an employee or student or volunteer for whom the Fixer is overdoing it. “What makes you good, makes you bad,” as a long-ago colleague often said.
So as Marty says in the clip, “I’ll see if I can get off automatic.” That’s what these 50 clients did, and they made it happen by making slight shifts. Fixers, for example, were coached to use their considerable smarts in asking good questions, rather than being overloaded by being the answer person for everything.
Simple shift, right? Simple, but not easy, if you are a Fixer from way back, with a groove in your brain that says, “I can fix this!” But once a Fixer, or a Perfectionist, or a Selfless One, sees their extreme pattern, a lot of appealing options open up.
