The Cost of Being Capable

There is a quiet punishment that comes with being good at your job. The more you prove yourself, the more you are asked to carry. Tasks that are technically outside your role. Responsibilities that were meant to be shared. Emergencies that somehow always land on your desk, and because you are capable, it is assumed you can handle them. So you do.

But being able to does not mean you should have to. Capability gets mistaken for capacity. Being able to is not the same as having room to. Reliability gets mistaken for limitless availability. And over time, the line between “can” and “should” disappears.

The pressure does not always come from above. Sometimes it comes from within. When you know you are good at something, it is hard not to keep proving it. Especially when you have been told, subtly or directly, that being excellent is the bare minimum. That your value lies in your output. That saying no will look like failure. Excellence becomes expectation; expectation becomes obligation.

It is easy to become the person who fixes things, fills the gaps, smooths over the mess. Not because you are the most qualified, but because you are the least likely to drop the ball. And once people know that, they stop asking whether you have the bandwidth. They just assume you will manage.

I once worked a role where a team decided to launch a new website. I was invited to one planning meeting on my day off and told I would keep it updated once it was live. Months later, I was asked how the build was going. Somewhere the assumption had shifted: I was apparently designing the entire site. I explained that was not my role or remit. Later I was criticised because the site was still not live. When I repeated that it was outside my role, I was told my job was whatever I was instructed to do. Meanwhile, I was already carrying work far beyond a typical admin role.

The result is a quiet kind of erosion. Not dramatic burnout, but the slow draining kind. The kind that leaves you exhausted at the end of every day and still thinking it was not enough. The kind that makes you question whether you are allowed to ask for help when everyone assumes you are the one holding everything together. You start measuring your days in what you absorbed for other people.

Capability is not the problem; the reward structure is.

If you have ever felt like being good at your job only made things harder, you are not imagining it. You are not ungrateful. You are not overreacting. The problem is not your standards. The problem is a culture that mistakes endurance for strength.

If you are ready to stop carrying more than your share, book a free call and we will design a plan that works within your real capacity.