The heaviest things we carry are rarely the tasks. They are the standards we never thought to question.
My morning mental routine: Who is picking the kids up? What are we having for dinner? What time do I need to be at work, and how much is on my plate there? What time do I need to pick the kids up in time to make dinner? Maybe we will just eat takeout today, but what will everyone be happy with? When am I finally going to plan and prep our dinners for the week on the weekend? When I have weekend time to do that, which I don’t have now. Did anyone feed the dog? And did they let him out or will I have a mess to clean up when I get back home? What emails are priority and which can I put on the back burner? What are my short- and long-term goals? How would I know what they are or what they should be? I can’t think past this hour. What meetings do I need to set up? The toilet at home that won’t stop running needs fixing. Need to call the plumber. The car is a mess but I don’t have time to take it to a detailer. We haven’t planned our summer vacation yet and it is already June.
This is the narrative that plays in my head constantly. It is a running list, many of them unanswered questions. They are things I have to remain aware of at all times so I don’t forget anything. And when something is added I fear something else will accidentally drop off. I have a limit to my mental load, but I don’t really know what it is. That’s because it depends on the day, what is being added to it, what I’m able to offload, and what emotions are impacting me. It’s what we commonly refer to as mental load.
My younger self didn’t have this mental load. I didn’t use a calendar. I could tell you exactly what my schedule was, because it was the same every day. And when there was something added to it, I could keep track of it mentally, several weeks at a time.
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When I started coaching I also became a coachee. During one of my coaching sessions, when I was asked what I wanted to work on, my answer was being able to plan and execute more homemade dinners and fewer takeout dinners during the week. At the beginning this seemed a bit silly to me, and I second-guessed spending time on it. However, through the right questions, I was able to recognize that I had the answers. I was expecting someone to hand me a solution, to tell me some secret shortcut to planning meals for the week that everyone would like, from selecting the menu to shopping to prepping. But my coach offered me none of this.
Instead, I came to see that I had expectations of myself so great that any plan I created would be unlikely to succeed. My sense of perfection had held me back from a different version of a plan, one that was actually executable. Instead of planning and prepping the entire week’s dinners over the weekend, I could do it for a few nights and plan to have leftovers.
Nobody told me what to do. They asked the right questions. That was when I realized: Asking the right question can help us subtract an item from our mental load, not add to it. Coming to my own conclusion made me feel proud and accountable only to myself for carrying it out. My agreement wasn’t with my coach, it was with me.
I have learned to ask questions to help others come to their own answers, without offering my opinion or an answer they have no reason to own. Not only in coaching sessions, but also in everyday life: at work, at home, with friends. I have had the opportunity to sit in both chairs, and try to maintain a view from both directions, regardless of where I am sitting.
I have recognized that I use these skills even in my teaching and with my children. Socratic questioning encourages the learner to come to the answer themselves. When my kids ask me a question I don’t know the answer to, I ask them what they think and why. Even if they don’t know the true answer, they are able to reason through it and come up with what is most logical. And for those existential questions that don’t have a known or agreed upon answer, this is particularly easy to do. This is the same principle in coaching. Some argue that the best coach is the one that knows as little as possible about what you do and your everyday life. The less they know about you, the easier it is for them to ask questions and not offer their opinion or solutions.
We don’t all need a coach, and we certainly don’t need a coach for every question in our life, big or small. In fact, many of us can learn to self-coach, to ask ourselves the questions coaches might ask us. It’s certainly not the same. It is closer to talking to ourselves than having a conversation with a teacher or a friend. However, coaching skills can help us start the process, self-reflect, and come to answers we are willing to be accountable for.
What are you carrying right now that the right question could help you put down? Not the logistics. What on your list is actually an expectation of yourself you have never questioned?
I used to envy that younger version of me, the one who held weeks in her head and never needed a calendar. I thought the only way back to her was to have less on my plate. But she didn’t have a lighter load because life was simpler. She had a lighter load because she hadn’t yet learned to demand the impossible of herself. I can’t go back to fewer items on the list. I can stop carrying the ones that were never really tasks at all, just standards I set for myself and never thought to question.
So can you.
You don’t have to wait until your list is shorter to feel lighter. You are allowed to question what you require of yourself. You are allowed to put one down.
Lauren Fine is a board-certified allergist-immunologist and the founder of Permission to Change, a coaching practice for high-achieving women and physicians who feel stuck in lives they built to other people’s specifications. Her work centers on ikigai and the quiet but costly difference between the rules we inherit and the ones we choose for ourselves.
She is an associate professor of medical education and assistant dean of clinical skills education at Nova Southeastern University’s Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Allopathic Medicine, and she still sees patients at the Miami VA Medical Center. She holds a faculty appointment with the Harvard Macy Institute.
She brought her ideas about ikigai and self-authored change to the TEDx stage in “Permission to Change: Finding Your Ikigai,” and she continues them each week on her Substack of the same name, a running exploration of what it means to give ourselves permission to make changes. Her scholarship spans medical education, clinical skills assessment, narrative-based medicine, and physician well-being, with work appearing in Cureus, Academic Medicine, Medical Science Educator, and the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
She writes, coaches, and connects with readers at laurenfine.com and shares updates on Instagram.
