Stopping starts with noticing the extra. Trying so hard usually means doing a task while also adding a layer of effort so that someone can see you trying. Many people learned that layer as children, when effort that showed kept the adults around them patient, and they still lay it over almost everything they do.
Your teacher plays the phrase on the piano once more.
It's one line from a song you've loved since you were fifteen, and it ends on a note you can hear perfectly in your head. You started these lessons in the spring, in a small studio above a row of shops, because you wanted one hour a week that belonged to nobody but you.
You fix your eyes on the corner of the ceiling, lift your chin a little, and go for it. The note comes out thin and squeezed, a shade under where it should sit.
"Again," she says, gently.
So you go again, and this time you really try. You frown at the ceiling, set your feet, and aim the note at the corner as if it might move. It cracks in the middle. You say sorry. You ask whether you should stand differently, breathe from lower down, start again from the top.
She takes her hands off the keys and smiles.
"You're helping," she says. "I can hear all of it."
You laugh, because she's right, and because until she said it you hadn't heard it at all.
How do you stop trying so hard?
You stop trying so hard by catching the extra layer while it's happening and asking who it's for. Pushing against it adds more of the same effort, so noticing comes first. More often than not, the answer is a person, or the memory of one, whose patience you once needed.
What is all that extra effort for?
Think back over that hour. The lifted chin, the fixed eyes, the apology, the questions about how to stand. Very little of it was about the note. So who was it for?
Partly for her. And partly for everyone, long before her, whose patience you once relied on. Every bit of strain carried the same message: look how hard I'm trying.
Away from any piano, it looks like this. You apologise before asking for something small. You laugh a beat too early when your partner's mother tells a story. You give three reasons for turning down an invitation when one would have done. Your voice rises slightly as you meet someone whose good opinion you'd like. In each case the extra is aimed at whoever's watching, in the hope that they'll see you trying and be kind.
Our free quiz has a title that asks the question for you: Who Did You Become to Survive? Its page describes that version of you in two short lines: "That version is still running the life. And it's tired." Or read on.
Where does the trying start?
For many people, at home, with someone listening.
Picture a child practising scales while a parent cooks in the next room. A note goes wrong. If the child sighs, frowns and starts again with a great show of effort, the voice from the kitchen stays soft. If the child shrugs and plays on, it might not. It doesn't take a child long to work out which keeps things calm. Effort that can be heard buys patience.
So the child makes the effort heard. If the piece goes well, the effort gets the credit. If it goes badly, the effort is cover: at least I tried. Either way the grown-ups stay patient, and for a child who needed them on side, that was worth a great deal.
That kitchen is years behind you now, and the habit came along anyway. It lays extra effort over a message to a friend, a story at Friday lunch and a hello to a new neighbour, just in case someone is listening from the next room.
If most of that effort goes into keeping people pleased with you, how to stop people pleasing picks up that thread.
The careful one, the strong one, the one who keeps the peace: Unbecome names selves like these. The one who tries hard belongs with them. It earned its place a long time ago, and it has kept its post.
You are not broken. You are buried. The voice you laughed with in the studio was yours the whole time.
Why does leaving the extra out feel so wrong?
Send a message with no softening, or say no without the three reasons, and watch your own reaction. It can feel rude, or exposed, or lazy. Something in you insists the extra is simply good manners.
That's the habit guarding the arrangement it made long ago: show the effort, keep the patience. To the habit, the arrangement still feels like the only decent way to be with people. It was a clever arrangement for a child to make, and it has been loyal ever since.
Lao Tzu had a phrase for action that carries none of this extra, which I explored in wu wei meaning.
You don't have to repair the habit. The freedom is in the removal.
The quiz is twenty-one questions long and takes around a minute and a half, and one line on its page reads: "See the contract you signed without knowing you signed it." Few contracts are signed younger than this one. Start the quiz
If you're in treatment, please keep working with your doctor or therapist; what I write about here isn't therapy or medical care. If you're drained and rest isn't helping, see a doctor. And if you're ever in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
How can you hear the extra in your own voice?
This needs two ordinary conversations and a little attention.
- Choose two people. One you never try with: a friend from way back, your sister, whoever you'd call at any hour. And one whose good opinion you'd like: a new neighbour, a relative by marriage, someone you've only just met.
- Listen to yourself with each of them. Next time you talk with each, notice whether you rush, whether your voice lifts, and whether you leave any quiet between sentences. Change nothing yet.
- Bring some of the first voice into the second conversation. How much, and for how long, is up to you.
- Notice how it felt to speak that way. Pay attention to that more than to how it landed.
If you can't hear a difference between the two voices, or step 3 feels like too much, leave the last two steps alone. Nothing is wrong with that. And if something heavy comes up, you're always free to take it to a person you trust or a professional.
The aim is simply to hear the helping out loud, so you know it when it starts.
What should a next step ask of someone who tries this hard?
If you try this hard, you'll try hard at whatever comes next, too, so it should have three things going for it.
- It begins with a story. Following a story asks nothing of you but attention.
- It doesn't count your past attempts against you. You've spent long enough on those already.
- It puts names to the parts you've been playing. A pattern with a name is easier to notice.
Those three are why I'd point you to my book, Unbecome. On its first pages you meet a lion who believes he is a sheep, and the page says you'll "follow him all the way to the water."
From us, the paperback is AED 99, plus AED 50 courier anywhere in the UAE, and it reaches you in two days or less. The courier is free from two copies. On Amazon it's usually cheaper, in paperback or on Kindle, and the Kindle edition arrives instantly. Every copy also carries a personal code for the Who Am I? masterclass; the page puts its worth at USD 297, and it comes free with the book.
I've met the helping in all kinds of people, on five continents. In my experience it nearly always began as a way of staying close to someone.
Here's how one review of the book begins. Anne, Amazon review of Unbecome: "This book is so much more than a read."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. In the days ahead, listen for the extra in small places: an apology in front of a simple request, a laugh that comes early, a voice that lifts a little for someone new. Leave it be for now. When you want the long version of where it came from, start with Unbecome.