The Competence Trap Nobody Notices

Being competent is how most of us first announce ourselves at work.

It's our PR campaign. The thing that says — I belong here, you can rely on me. It builds reputation and gets us promoted.

And it can work so well that, somewhere along the way, it stops being a thing we do and becomes a thing we are.

I didn't notice it happening in myself for a long time. The things I worked on went well. My instincts were proved right. So more and bigger things came my way and I said yes. I was having a ball. I was good at it and people needed me.

What I didn't see was that I'd arranged my life so that everything went through me. Not something I did consciously but I enjoyed being central to things. The running of them, the sense of ownership.

I believed, and the results seemed to tell me, that things succeeded because I was that involved. So I stayed involved and it worked very well. Until it didn't.

Repeatedly: when my kids (twins) were born; when I was exhausted; when a family member died unexpectedly. I couldn't do it. Not all of it. Maybe none of it for a time.

And time and again, two things happened that I didn't expect.

The first was that things kept going. Not perfectly. Not exactly the way I would have done them. But people stepped up. Decisions got made. The world I presumed I'd been holding up, turned out to have more structural integrity than I'd given it credit for.

That should have been a relief. And part of it was.

But underneath the relief was disappointment. Because if everything didn't actually have to go through me, then who was I in all of this?

Competence had become an identity so thoroughly that the discovery I wasn't as essential as I'd believed felt less like liberation and more like losing my footing.

That's something nobody warns you about.

Competence starts as a tool. Becomes a reputation, an identity. And once it's an identity, it stops protecting you and starts trapping you.

I couldn’t refuse the next thing because refusing it meant asking who I was if I’m not the person who handles it. I stalled progression because progressing meant letting go of the version of myself that got me here. And I struggled to slow down because slowing down felt like disappearing.

The armour that gets you here is the same armour that keeps you stuck.

Because the thing about competence is that it points backwards. It's the proof of growth that's already happened. It's a comfortable place to be but things don’t grow there. Not you, because you're not at your edge. Not the people around you, because you're occupying the space they'd grow into.

The choice that comfortable place hides is this: you can keep being excellent at what you already do. Or you can find out who you become when you stop holding everything together. You can’t do both at once.

The Competence Trap Nobody Notices