Some thoughts on hyper independence

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello. This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go. I was scrolling through Instagram reels a few months ago when I came across this reel that was talking about how hyperindependence is a trauma response. The Reel was talking about that in relation to first generation immigrant daughters who are the oldest. And it made me pause and laugh because I am a first generation immigrant daughter who is the oldest.

[00:00:40] But The term hyperindependence, it got stuck in my mind a little bit, enough to make me look it up later and think about it for many days. Hyperindependence is most commonly defined as an unwillingness to ask for help, a tendency to take on far too much responsibility, and an inability to delegate or trust others with tasks. It can be both a stress response and a trauma response from having to either take on too much responsibility at a time when you shouldn't have had to, or having to meet other people's needs when your own needs were not being met. It's self reliance taken to an unhealthy extreme. Is there a healthy extreme? I don't know. Anyway.

[00:01:26] Some other ways it can show up is as an unwillingness to appear weak and to not admit that you don't know something.

[00:01:34] The Western world, where many of us live, it celebrates self reliance. You know, picking ourselves up with our bootstraps or however that phrase goes. And sometimes it can be hard to recognize it in both yourself and in others.

[00:01:49] But there are two places where maybe this becomes a little more obvious. Uh, one would be romantic relationships when they get serious, and the other would be professional environments where the dynamic turns out so that part of your success is partially dependent on the success of others.

[00:02:12] If you don't trust your partner, You can't delegate to them or be delegated to, if you aren't willing to ask for help or even give help, if you take on too much and then fail. All of these things eventually create problems in any relationship, but especially in a romantic partnership.

[00:02:31] I think at work it's a little tougher to identify, and even tougher to stop or adjust. Yes, you may all be a team, but ultimately your performance is often assessed individually. And you can honestly get away with a lot of individual thinking even in a team environment when it comes to the workplace, sometimes for years and years, and in fact, get rewarded for it even.

[00:02:58] So when you are asked to collaborate or work together. In these environments, sometimes that's really tough, you know. We've talked about how difficult habits are to break. Well, hyper independence is a habit. You know, all those behaviors become habits. And you might be used to having control. You might be used to having full command of your own path, whatever that may mean for you.

[00:03:24] Hyper independent people, I think, also find themselves in leadership positions a lot because of their capacity to get things done, have an opinion, be strong minded, and their ability to control situations. Now, whether hyper independent people make good leaders is an entirely different question to which the answer is probably that it depends.

[00:03:46] But I've been thinking that, you know, we prize self reliance so much in our society that a lot of people take it to the extreme in some really, really weird ways. And it creates an environment that is allergic to collaboration, shared leadership, shared stakes and shared success. And the fallout of that is evident in both the landscape of our personal lives and professional across the board.

[00:04:14] Of course, there are a bunch of other factors, but this is definitely one of them. So, why did I talk about this in this podcast? Well, you can't really create a good life without teammates, without collaboration, without healthy relationships, and hyper independent traits? They don't exactly encourage these things.

[00:04:37] So, it's worthy of some thought, and self reflection, and maybe environmental reflection, you know, in your surroundings, to see if this is something that impacts you.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?