When Competence Becomes a Cage

The thing that made you successful is slowly erasing you.

Your competence. Your reliability. Your ability to handle it all.

It's gotten you far. And it's costing you your health, your presence with the people you love, and your sense of self.

In this episode, Penelope explores what happens when competence becomes a cage, and why the answer isn't to become less capable.

Drawing from her own burnout and recovery, she uncovers the invisible structures that keep high-achieving women trapped: perfectionism as identity, emotional labor that was never yours to carry, and the success debt that never lets you win.

She also reveals the hard truth: recognizing the cage isn't enough. Awareness alone won't free you.

What will? Deciding you're willing to be different.

If you've ever wondered why being strong costs so much, this episode is for you.

This podcast is part of my deeper work supporting women who are capable, accomplished, and exhausted from overgiving, overcarrying, and losing themselves inside the life they’ve built.

If you’re ready to go deeper, here are a few ways to begin:

Take the Burnout Assessment
Explore my book, Claws Out: Thriving in a World That Wants You Tamed
Book a Reset Session with me and get clear on the deeper reason behind your pressure, confusion, or emotional exhaustion.

Transcript

Penelope Magoulianiti 0:08

Welcome back to Loved Without Losing Yourself. I'm your host, Pinelopimaglianiti, and today's episode is dedicated to something I've lived in my own body and something I see over and over in the woman I work with. It's about how the very thing that makes you successful, your competence, can slowly become the cage that traps you. And the thing nobody ever tells you is that you can't just drop competence and expect to feel better. And the reason is that your competence is often tangled up with your identity, your worth, and how people know you. So the question isn't how do I become less capable? The question you want to ask goes deeper. It's what does being good at things cost me so much? So let's talk about this today. I want to start by sharing my own story because I think it matters that I am not speaking from theory here. So during my corporate years, I was the woman who could handle it all. Seriously, I took on projects, I said yes, I delivered, I solved problems, I volunteered for projects that had been working until the early hours of the day. My managers knew I was reliable, so they made sure to capitalize on it. And it was killing me, literally, it was killing me. And at first, I didn't actually realize the cost. I was young, I was single, uh, I was full of energy, I had so many dreams, I was so eager to excel in my career. But the thing is, burnout is sneaky that way. It doesn't announce itself, it just shows up as this low-level exhaustion that you learn to carry. Until it wasn't low level anymore in my case. I was so tired that there were times that I was scared that I was gonna fall asleep while driving, until fatigue became so severe, and my body basically said, Penelope, we are done here. That's it, we are stopping. And when that happened, everything changed. Because I asked myself, then when I nearly collapsed, why did I believe I had to take so much to prove my worth? Because it was that. That was the problem. I was trying so hard to prove that I was worthy. But who decided I had to be the one to handle so many projects simultaneously. And here's what it became very clear. Nobody decided, nobody forced me, but me. I had created a version of myself that was so competent, so reliable, so I can handle it, that I had completely disappeared underneath it. And I had lost my health. I had lost presence with the people I love. I had lost the small moments of joy because I was always on a mission. And my mission was to prove my worth. And the worst part in all this, I had told myself a story that made it okay. I told myself, this is what strong looks like, this is what responsibility looks like, this is necessary for your career. It wasn't. It was just competence turned inward, eating me alive. Now, if you're listening to this, you probably know this feeling in some way. Maybe not the physical collapse part, but the disappearance part. You look successful, your life looks good, and inside you might be exhausted, resentful, lost, angry. You might not even be able to name why. You just know that something's not working. That's what I want to explore today. There's this pattern I see again and again. And actually, it's not one pattern, it's three different ways where competence becomes a cage. And what's important is that all three come from the same place. They come from the belief that your worth is tied to what you produce, what you deliver, and what you accomplish. Let me walk you through them. The first structure is the performance cage. And the performance cage looks like this you've built your identity on excellence, on doing things right, on being the person people trust. And at the beginning, it's powerful. But then excellence becomes perfectionism, and perfectionism becomes non-negotiable. So what does this mean? You don't want to drop the ball, so you convince yourself that you can't delegate because someone else might not do it your way, and your way is the best, eh? Or you can show struggle because that will shatter the image. And the cage, the cage is that your self-respect now depends on flawless execution. And how do you accomplish this? You stop taking risks, you stop trying new things, you just optimize the hell out of what you are already doing. You become smaller even as you look bigger. Structure number two is the invisible responsibility burden. And this one is more subtle, and honestly, is the one I see most often in the women I work with. And the invisible responsibility burden looks like this: you don't take on explicit responsibility, you take on emotional responsibility. Here you manage everyone's feelings, you handle conflict, you anticipate what's needed before anyone asks, you hold the team together, you hold the family together, you make everyone else's life smoother, and nobody asks you to do this. At one point you decided it was your job, and now you find it hard to step back because you are convinced that if you do, everything falls apart. The cage, the cage is that your calm has become everyone else's responsibility, your peace is secondary, your presence is transactional, it only counts if it's solving someone else's problem. Instruction number three is the success debt. Here you've accomplished real things, and because you have now you own more. You have to maintain that level, you have to keep proving it wasn't a fluke. The goalpost just keeps moving forward and forward, and you're never actually winning, you're just trying not to lose. And the cage in this scenario, the cage is that you are trapped in proving something that never actually needs proving. Now, here's what's interesting: these structures are in random, they come from somewhere, maybe from a parent who modeled this, maybe from an early workplace that rewarded it, maybe from a family system where your worth was tied to your usefulness. And these structures made sense once. They protected you, they got you far. But now, at this moment, now they are costing you something you can get back. Your health, your presence, your self-knowledge. And sadly, many of us don't realize this is happening. We just feel trapped, we just feel tired, and we don't see the structure underneath. So allow me to tell you what competence actually costs, because I think we celebrate competence without talking about the price. The most common cost I see it's not burnout, though that's part of it. It's the loss of you. I see women who've achieved real things. And when I ask them, what do you actually want? What brings you alive? Most of them they go blank. They've been so busy proving their competence that they've lost track of what they want for themselves. I see relationships that have eroded slowly without too much fuss. The partner who stops initiating conversation because every interaction is functional. The kids who learn that mom is always working, the friendships that become maintenance. And it was never intentional. It was because competence required presence everywhere. Except we didn't pay attention to where it mattered the most. I see health decline, sleep becomes negotiable, exercise becomes something you squeeze in if there's time. Your body sends signals and you are too busy to listen. And then I see what comes after resentment. Not always directed outward, but often directed inward. Women blame themselves for not being able to do it all, for being tired, for losing the thread. When really they are not weak, they are not failing, they are just human, and they have been running on a structure that was never sustainable. And here's what I want to be really clear about. Competence itself isn't the problem. The problem is when competence becomes your entire identity, when it becomes the price of your self-respect, when it becomes non-negotiable. That's when it becomes a cage. And the cage is invisible. You can't see it from the outside. The person in the cage looks fine, looks capable, looks together. It's what happened inside. Inside you're losing yourself. So as always, before the episode ends, I want to leave you with a question. I don't think the answer is to become less competent. I don't think the answer is to drop your capabilities and pretend they don't exist. That's not the shift that I want you to take. The shift is realizing something that sounds simple, but as always is radical. Nothing. Nothing is more important than your health and being present with the people you love. Nothing. Not the next achievement, not the approval, not the proof that you are strong and capable, not the identity you've built. Nothing. And I know that sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but I also know that most of you have organized your entire life as if something else is more important, as if one more project is, as if one more win is, as if one more delivery is. When in your deepest self, you know that's not true. You know that if you are not healthy, nothing else matters. You know that if you are not present with the people you love, the success tastes like nothing. So the real question isn't how do I stop being competent? It's what if I organize my life around what actually matters and only brought my competence to that? What if you said yes to fewer things, but with your whole self? What if health wasn't something you sacrificed for achievement? It was the foundation for everything. What if presence with the people you love wasn't a reward for finishing your work? It was the point of your work. That's not less competence. That's competence with boundaries, competence with honesty about your limits, competence that knows it's not your job to hold it all together. Before you go, I want you to sit with something. Everything I described today, the invisibility, the resentment, the lost relationships, the health that deteriorates while you are busy being excellent. You probably recognize yourself in it. And that recognition is important because you can't change what you won't acknowledge. But recognition alone isn't enough. Awareness alone won't free you. What frees you is deciding. Deciding and telling yourself, I am willing to be different, even if it means disappointing people, even if it means being smaller in some ways, even if it means admitting I can't do it all. That's the real work. And it's not work you have to do in isolation. If you're ready to look at the structure underneath your competence to see it clearly and decide what you actually want to change, I do that work with people, one-on-one, deep, real. There's information in the show notes if that's something you want to explore. But either way, I'm asking you this week: don't just think about what landed in this episode. Don't just agree with it intellectually. Actually look at your own life, your own structure, your own cage, and ask yourself what am I willing to change? Because the answer to that question changes everything. Thanks for listening. I will see you next week.