October 2021

The Role of Doing

A gentle reminder to my fellow ‘doers.’

Your people don’t need you to be perfect. They just need you.

I was recently having one of those mornings where I was running late (if you know me this isn’t surprising!). I was trying to quickly get Cal ready, get myself ready, and get us where we needed to be ‘on time’ to not disappoint whomever we were meeting. Meanwhile, the whole time I was thinking, “If I’m late now, I’ll be late to start work, and if I’m late to work then I won’t be prepared for my meeting”. And on and on the thoughts went, with growing anxiety in my chest and impatience with Cal.

Maybe you don’t have kids, but maybe you can resonate with the feeling of being spread thin, the anxiety is growing inside and you’re asking yourself: “how am I going to get all this done? & will people be okay with me if I don’t?”. Maybe you can think of a recent time you found yourself stuck in this type of anxiety spiral. What was it like for you? What did you do?

While standing in my room, as I was getting lost in my anxious, negative thought spiral, Callahan reached up for me. He wasn’t falling for my “Look at that cool toy over there! Now go play while I finish getting ready” move. He didn’t want the toy. He didn’t care about my hair or wardrobe. He just wanted me.

Friends, your people want you. They don’t want the stuff you can do for them. They don’t want you to get it exactly right. They want to feel connected with you, important to you, trusted by you, safe with you. They want your presence.

And truthfully, being present with each other is what we were created for. Body and soul, we are created to thrive through genuine emotional connection. It’s a biological need for our survival and it’s a way we inhabit the nature of our relational, connected God.

But for many of us, ‘doing’ feels safer than presence. We believe we will feel more connected and therefore more safe if we do more, be more, achieve more… if we forego our humanity and simply ‘do’, then we’ll be connected.

Or sometimes, we fall for the lie that “if only so-and-so (insert important person to you here) did it right, we would be happy.” We want our partners to not mess up, because then we won’t be angry, and all will be well. Right?

Maybe not.

As people, we are wired to fight for our connection. And in our important relationships, when we focus on doing and hold back our presence from each other, it doesn’t lead to real connection. Instead, it leads to two typical response patters - one person with a “desperate need for an emotional response that ends in blaming” and the other person with “a desperate fear of rejection and loss that ends in withdrawal.”* We blame and we withdraw because we’re protesting the emotional connection. For some reason, it doesn’t feel secure. And this makes sense - we don’t want to be connected to robots or to threats; we want to be connected with the comforting, grounding presence of each other.

And of course we do! It’s what we are created for.

So when we find ourselves focusing on ‘doing’, we’re missing the point. We’re protecting ourselves from an important reality - our emotional connection with others.

Can you take that in? That your focus on ‘doing’ is often just protection from what’s more important, your bond with the people who mean the most to you?

It can be scary to slow down and reflect on this, but it reminds me of something my good friend says - “We are human beings, not human doings.”

It’s really easy to believe we need to ‘do it right’ - or even the other person needs to ‘get it right.’ But really, we all just want each other. We want to be present and feel the presence of our people.

Reflection Questions:

What’s it like to read about ‘doing’ vs. ‘being’?

Do any relationships come to mind right now? If so, how is that relationship affecting you?

Do you find you identify with being someone who ‘blames’ or ‘withdraws’? What’s it like to read that you blame or withdraw because your emotional connection doesn’t feel secure?

Reflect on the reality that we all need emotional connection with the important people in our lives. If you sometimes focus on ‘doing’ instead of ‘being’ you aren’t alone. It’s normal and it makes sense, because people mean so much to us. We are created to need each other.

*Excerpt taken from “Created for Connection” by Susan Johnson, pg. 59.