The wall the rest of me was leaning on
- Christy Slanaker
- Jun 18
- 5 min read
Competence becomes a liability long before it reaches the office. A response to Jessica Wilen, from inside the trap she describes.
For most of my career, being the most competent person in the room was not one of my strengths. It was the only place I felt safe.
I thought of that this week reading Jessica Wilen's piece in Fast Company, When competence becomes a liability. She describes a senior leader, exhausted and resentful, who kept absorbing work that belonged to other people. When Wilen asked why, the woman did not blame deadlines or her boss. She said she was not sure she knew how not to.
I know that sentence from the inside. I was that leader. I led organizations of two hundred people. I ran a profit and loss statement worth million dollars. When a cybersecurity incident threatened to take our biggest institutional partners with it, I held the accounts together. And at one point I had created three of my own jobs, writing the descriptions myself after spotting gaps no one else wanted to own. That is over-functioning at a level most people never reach. When you run out of other people's problems to carry, you manufacture more.
So I read Wilen with recognition, not distance. Her diagnosis is correct. I just think it stops one generation short.
The clock starts earlier than the career
Wilen's frame is that competence becomes identity over the course of a career, that organizations reward the person who always says 'yes' until stepping back feels unbearable. All true. But it treats the workplace as the place the pattern is formed, and for many of us the workplace is only the place it was rewarded.
I wrote last time about the two scripts I inherited: a mother whose world offered her two careers, and a father who told me I could be anything. By the time I had a title and a team, the reflex to be the one who holds everything together was not a professional habit I had picked up. It was decades old. The office did not install it. The office gave it a budget and a bonus.
This matters because it changes what the problem actually is. If competence-as-identity is a career pattern, you can address it with career tools: delegation training, a boundaries workshop, a coaching question. If it is a childhood operating system, those tools are sandpaper on a structural crack. They are not wrong. They are just aimed at the symptom.
What it actually was
Here is the part it took me years to see. Competence was not a skill I deployed when a situation called for it. It was load-bearing. It was the wall the rest of me was leaning on. Being capable was not how I worked. It was how I knew I existed.
That is why none of the standard advice landed. You cannot delegate your way out of a load-bearing wall. You cannot set a boundary against the thing holding the roof up. Every time I tried to do less, my whole sense of self tilted, and I did what anyone does when the house starts to lean. I grabbed the nearest beam and held on harder. The beam was always more work.
Why insight is not enough
This is where I part ways, gently, with most of what gets written about high achievers, including the good version Wilen wrote.
Her closing move is a question she poses to clients: if you stopped proving your usefulness for a week, what would feel most uncomfortable? It is a genuinely good question. It surfaces the truth that the issue is rarely about workload and almost always about control, trust, identity, or worth.
But here is what twenty years inside this taught me. I could answer that question. I could answer it with precision. I could name the control, the worth, the fear, the whole architecture, and then I would close the laptop and open it again twenty minutes later and answer one more email, because knowing why you over-function and being able to stop are two completely different muscles, and almost no one tells you that.
Insight is not a lever. You can understand your pattern perfectly and not move an inch. The recovery industry keeps selling awareness as if awareness were the cure, when awareness is closer to a map. A map is genuinely useful. It is also not the same as walking, and you can starve standing in front of one.
The week the wall came down
I did not choose to test any of this. My mother died, and for a while the machine simply stopped, because there was nothing left in me to run it. I went back to my same patterns. It wasn't until my father died that I stopped and truely reflected.
And in that stillness I learned what the wall had been hiding. When the competence had nothing to hold up, when there was no crisis to manage and no one to rescue, I went looking for the self underneath it. The self I assumed was there, waiting, covered up by all the usefulness.
It was not much of a self yet. That is the quiet, unmarketable truth under all of this. For some of us the usefulness is not covering the person. For a long time, it is standing in for one.
What you actually do about it
So I will not end on a clever question, because I think the question, by itself, is part of what keeps people stuck. They answer it, feel seen, and change nothing.
You do not dismantle a load-bearing wall by understanding it. You build a second wall first. You construct, slowly and deliberately, a self that is not made entirely of being needed. A few things you are without being useful. A few people who get the version of you that produces nothing. And only once that second structure can hold some weight do you start, carefully, taking load off the first.
Insight is the blueprint. It is not the construction. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason competence can run a person's life for forty years while she nods along to every article that explains exactly what is happening to her.
I nodded along for most of those years. Then I picked up a hammer. That part, the part after the insight, is the part almost no one writes about. It is most of what I write about now.
I created ChristySlanaker.com because no one should have to figure this out alone. The same root work that builds a steady daughter also builds a steady executive. The framework is called the SteadyGround Model™, and it starts inside, not on a productivity app.
I learned all of this at forty. The girls who my books are for learn it at five, before the wall ever goes up. That is the other half of the work, and the half I would have given almost anything to have had first.
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