How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It’s by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you’re not.

I’m Melody Wilding, bestselling author, human behavior professor, and award-winning executive coach. Get ready, and let’s put psychology to work for you.

If you are tired of being the fixer, the fallback plan, the person who somehow ends up with every dumpster fire of a project; if you want to be thought of for bigger scope instead of the one who is constantly rewarded with more execution and more cleanup, I want you to listen up. That is exactly what we are getting into today. We are gearing up to open the doors soon for Lead From Within on July 15th. This is going to be our final enrollment of 2026. The doors will not open again until well into 2027. And if you are not familiar, Lead From Within is my executive group coaching and advisory program where myself and my team really work hand in hand with mid-to-senior level leaders comprehensively on their advancement strategy—the one that gets them the next title, the broader scope, the comp that finally matches what they bring to the table. And by the way, if that sounds like you, get yourself on the waitlist now; it’s melodywilding.com/lfw. Waitlisters get access to applications before we open doors to the public, which you will want to do. It means you get first dibs on the very limited spots on my calendar for a one-on-one decision call. Those slots, they tend to fill up within a day or so—they have in the past—so even if you are somewhat curious, make sure you get on that waitlist.

Why I’m telling you this today is because I wanna talk about a phenomenon I hear from almost every single person who comes into Lead From Within, whether they are a newly promoted VP, they are a director with 15 years of experience, or they are a head of their function who could have a C-suite role tomorrow if they wanted to. Doesn’t matter who they are, it’s some version of the same story. They say, “I’m the one everyone runs to when there’s an issue. My team is capable, but somehow everything is still coming to me. I want more scope, but I can barely get out of the day-to-day.” And you may hear yourself in that too. You’re the person people come to when something is unclear. You know the history, the context, the players, the workarounds. You want to be operating at a higher level but you’re trapped, and then you wonder why you feel so needed but not as strategic or as visible as you want to—or know you could be. And it all starts to feel less like recognition and more like this ceiling you are hitting up against. Now, there are some situations where a lot of these struggles, frankly, just come down to being green and just being inexperienced at management. You don’t know how to give feedback or delegate at the most basic level. That is a different conversation; that’s not who I’m speaking to today. Many of you, and many of the people we work with in Lead From Within, have been managers for years. They have other leaders reporting to them, and each of those people is running their own vertical or their own part of the business. And on top of that, you are operating inside of an ecosystem that pulls you from every which way, every direction. You’ve got your entire function below you—the people problems, the politics, the performance management, the fires that come with that. You’ve got peers around you who hold leverage over your work. Finance controls the budget, Legal can slow down your timeline, Ops keeps changing priorities. And then you are also influencing up to the tippy-top brass: C-suite, board members, regulators, your organization’s biggest customers and partners.

That might be your reality too, and often you have to make what are very reasonable emotional adaptations to carry all of that pressure at once: the workload, the constant change. You have to balance your own reputation, the perception of your entire team. And the most common adaptation I see is what I lovingly call “hero mode.” This is when you absorb the complexity around you so everyone else can keep moving and feeling as okay as possible. So you, in hero mode, become the fixer, the stabilizer, the interpreter between teams, the volunteer who says, “You know, I’ll raise my hand and do it because nobody else is.” You are the one who carries the burden of seeing where there is a lack of clarity or there is conflict bubbling up, and you reign it in, you smooth it over. You make sure nothing gets too messy or blows up. So here are just a few ways hero mode tends to show up: You are running stakeholder meetings even when your team should be owning them. You are the one redoing the deck, the slides, the memo instead of giving feedback and direction on it. You personally handle the difficult executive on your team—again, when your team should be the one intervening and setting expectations upward. You are joining every interview process for any hire in your function.

You are on call over the weekend for escalations, and that has been happening weeks or months in a row. You are the one shouldering the relationship with a demanding peer that nobody else wants to deal with. You’re the one who, on the down-low, is fixing the dashboard, you’re writing that tricky Slack message, you’re adjusting the tone before some messaging goes out. You volunteer for that unsexy project because nobody wants to, but hey, someone has to, so I’ll be that person. And I wanna be very clear here: hero mode usually starts out with a lot of good intentions. It comes from a good place. It’s not because you are weak; you’re not doing that because you’re not cut out for operating at higher levels. It often develops because you are a “sensitive striver.” That is around here what we call someone who is naturally perceptive, responsible, and highly attuned to risk. You can see where things are about to break; you anticipate that before other people do, and you wanna get ahead of it. You are empathetic—literally, your brain has more active mirror neurons, the empathy neuron, that can sense other people’s behavior—and because of that, you can anticipate political implications from something. You can sense when there is conflict building around an issue and it needs to be released or neutralized. You know which stakeholder will react badly, what deadline can absolutely not slip, which team member is not ready, which issue will spiral if no one steps in. So you do, and at first that works. It creates relief for you and others. It restores the order, and most of all, it gives you a sense of control, especially when things are constantly changing. And other people then experience you as steady and capable, so you become known as the person who can handle a lot.

But you also know, probably firsthand if you are listening to this and nodding along, hero mode is not all sunshine and rainbows. Because the same people who praise you for being dependable also start becoming dependent on you for everything. There’s a difference between those two things, and maybe they take advantage of that. Your team comes to you with half-formed questions because, hey, they know you will help them solve it and think through it. They bring you a terrible draft because they know you will fix it. They ask you to weigh in on the edge case, the awkward stakeholder response, the decision that feels just slightly above their pay grade, so they run to you about it. And if you take each individual ask, it seems small, it seems inconsequential, because it’s five minutes here, 10 minutes there. But you know all too well, by 2:00 PM your brain is mush. You’ve been interrupted 20 times. You have not touched the work you are supposed to be doing. And again, I want to be very clear here that some of what I am alluding to is good mentoring. It is wonderful to support your people, obviously. But the problem is when you over-index on it so much that for you it stops feeling like a choice to do that. It starts feeling like something you are not allowed to not do. It’s almost a compulsion, an obligation. Then there is the emotional labor of you being the one who is propping up everybody’s confidence for them. You’re the one calming down that anxious team member before they have to give a presentation. If someone else is frustrated with a peer, you help coach them to see the bigger picture. You work through a hard conversation with someone.

You become the person who metabolizes and shoulders everyone else’s discomfort so things can keep moving forward. You are the shock absorber. And then from above—we’ve just been talking about your team so far—but from above, your boss is now telling you, maybe for the second year in a row, that you’re “so close” to VP, that you just need to be a little more strategic. And meanwhile, you are being handed every new initiative because, “oh, well, you handled the last one so well.” You absorbed the cleanup of every cross-functional mess, so here is another one. Here is the initiative with no owner, no process, no clear decision-maker, because well, you will figure it out, you always do. And this is how you get pigeonholed into that tactician role instead of being able to elevate to an enterprise-level operator. You will spend your day being that translator between teams—worlds that don’t understand each other. And it is not just that you have too much work. That’s a part of it, that the sheer workload becomes so high. But like I said, the emotional labor of carrying so much that is unresolved—so many open loops and unmade decisions—that starts to weigh on you. Every day feels like this series of ambushes. You sit down to do some strategic work, you get pulled into a Slack thread. You block time to think, and someone is asking for a “quick gut check.” You prepare for this executive conversation, and now you have to review a deck that someone should’ve been able to finalize a week ago without you. And by the end of the day, you have made hundreds of these micro-decisions. You have protected dozens of people from different consequences, but still don’t feel like you have moved the most material, biggest work forward for yourself.

That is why hero mode can feel so confusing and conflicting. Part of you might feel proud that people trust you so much, yet the other part of you is resentful that they seem to need you so much. And part of you wants to be generous and available, and part of you wants to scream and shake people, “Why can’t you just get it together without me?” And meanwhile, you’re watching your peers get pulled into those strategy sessions you should be in because they have had the time to think while you have just been delivering. Your boss won’t advocate hard for your promotion because then who would do what you are doing now? And that is why hero mode can be so toxic for your advancement. The more you are pulled into proving everything you can handle at your current level, the less space you have to demonstrate that you are ready for the next one. Because in those upper echelons you are not judged by whether you can personally volunteer for more or fix all of the things; you are judged by whether you can create capacity around you. Can you build a team that makes good decisions without waiting on you? Can you create enough clarity that work moves forward without you having to step in and translate every detail? Can you step out from the center and still have things run well? This is what leaders are looking for when they ask whether someone is ready for more scope.

Now, you will never escape hero mode unless you understand the root of it. And earlier I was alluding to how hero mode is not usually from a lack of skill, but then where does it come from? It is typically an emotional coping strategy, and in psychology we call that underlying pattern that really drives hero mode “overfunctioning.” Overfunctioning is when we respond to stress, anxiety, or uncertainty by doing more than our share. So again, it’s not just simply having too much on your plate that you need to just get better at time management or delegation. It’s more than that. Those things may be involved, yes, but they do not fully explain what is happening here. Overfunctioning is a pattern where your nervous system tries to create safety by doubling down on effort and responsibility in order to control a situation. This is where it can get a little nuanced, because overfunctioning can look like, on the outside, what researchers call “problem-based coping.” So, problem-based coping is, for example: my team is behind on a project, so I make a plan, I clarify the roles, I reset the timeline. And on the outside all of this looks productive, right? “I’ll fix it.” “I’ll take care of it.” “I’ll remind that person.” “I’ll manage feelings so no one gets upset.” But underneath, you may be doing all of this because it helps you feel less anxious, guilty, or afraid of disappointing people. So the real logic is emotional: “If I stay useful, needed, and prepared, I won’t have to feel uncomfortable and things won’t go wrong.” You are trying to regulate your own discomfort. Again, that does not make the behavior wrong or irrational; it’s very human and it’s a very reasonable reaction, especially for a senior leader where the consequences of things going sideways are bigger. Your work is more visible. Everything is more layered. You are not just thinking about whether a task gets done. You have to think about how it will be received, how your team’s performance reflects on you and your boss, and how a stakeholder’s frustration or satisfaction could shape perception.

So of course you become more vigilant and you might feel pulled to stay close to situations. Of course you might tell yourself, “It’s just easier and faster for me to handle it.” It is a bid for safety and it works in the short term because the risk feels contained. People may even thank you, and so your brain learns, “Oh, let’s do that again for next time.” What’s even sneakier though is the terrible seesaw overfunctioning puts you on. When you are overfunctioning, it can lead to people underfunctioning. If you are always the one who remembers everything, other people don’t have to build the same muscle for tracking. If you are always the one who is clarifying a situation, they just wait for you to interpret it and tell them what to do. If you are the one who steps in at the first sign of something being a little off, then other people don’t get as many chances to sit in their own discomfort of having to figure it out. That is the overfunctioning-underfunctioning dynamic. You do more of the fixing and rescuing, and others don’t learn how to step up. And we actually see this in the research on teams. There was a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Applied Psychology and it is literally titled “Harmful Help: The Costs of Backing-Up Behaviors in Teams.” And what they found is that leaders helping their teammates can actually come at a huge cost—that you, doing the backup, neglect your own work and the person receiving too much backup reduces their own effort later. So the more constantly you step in, you may get that immediate relief, but you also create this system that becomes codependent on your help. And that is not what you want, especially if you are a deeply responsible sensitive striver, high-integrity leader.

You are not stepping in because you want to make your people smaller or you want to decrease their capability. You are stepping in, I bet, because you do care. You want the work to be good. You want the team to feel supported. You want to create stability. But what you are doing by overfunctioning and getting into hero mode is working against the very things you are trying to build. There’s another psychology concept; it’s called self-determination theory. It is also useful here. And the basic idea is that people tend to do better when their work supports three core needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. They need room to make choices, enough challenge and support to grow their skillset, and a sense of connection. So there have been many studies on this. One was done in 2018; it looked at 72 workplace studies—that’s a lot—and it found that leaders who prioritize autonomy, that is positively related to employees’ motivation and better outcomes for the team. So people tend to perform and feel better when you as a leader are guiding them and not just taking over. So when you overfunction you may be unintentionally taking away the exact conditions people need to grow. Because if you are making every call, they get less autonomy. If you clean up every messy situation and rough edge, they are less competent. If you absorb every hard emotion and just smooth it over for them, they don’t get that practice at building confidence in themselves. And again, I am not trying to say you should just abandon people or throw them into the deep end with no support. This all requires an advanced level of leadership discernment and emotional intelligence to find that line between supporting someone’s growth and creating dependency on you.

All right. We have talked a lot about hero mode—what it is, how you can identify it, the root cause of where it comes from (which is overfunctioning). So now the question becomes: how do you begin to unlatch yourself from hero mode so that you can truly scale your team’s capacity and your own career growth with it? Of course, this is the work we coach, we consult on with you inside of Lead From Within. It’s also what I’m going to be teaching at my upcoming class to kick off the final application period of the year. That class is called “Top of Mind and Tapped For More.” This is an advanced training. It is really geared towards senior managers, directors, VPs, seasoned ICs, leads, and heads of who want to stop being the bottleneck. They wanna land those coveted roles, scope, and the comp they know they deserve. Before any tactic I could give you during that training or here on this show could work, things have to shift at an emotional level. Otherwise, you will keep hitting a wall. You will keep trying different actions but the same underlying programming, the same fears and impulses, will be in place and just keep blocking you. So I wanna go beyond the “just delegate better” and “just get control of your calendar” type tips here and talk instead about how to emotionally let go of overfunctioning so you can clear the path for the type of visibility and advancement you want. Number one: the first thing you have to let go of is resigning yourself to firefighter mode and telling yourself, “Well, I guess this is just what leadership is. The higher you go, the crazier it gets. This is the price I pay for responsibility and a better paycheck.” And yes, I’m not gonna lie, you are being compensated for handling more; that’s part of the deal.

But complexity is not the same as being in constant emergency. Having seniority does not have to automatically equate to living in a permanent state of triage and panic. And if you normalize that this is just the way it is too much, you start finding every little thing to confirm that story. Within this you are also letting go of an identity that has served you for decades. It’s kind of this little mourning of who you were. You can honor that version of yourself who got you here without letting them run the next chapter of your career. It almost reminds me a little bit of that transition from middle school to high school where you realize, consciously or not, “I don’t want to be the same person.” So you almost reinvent yourself. You intentionally start creating a new version of yourself, and that’s what you need to do here. Number two: second, let go of trying to hire your way out of this. It is very easy to start feeling endlessly annoyed with your team: “Why can’t they just figure it out? Why do I have to explain everything again? Why is this coming back to me half-baked for the second time?” And sometimes yes, there may be real performance issues that you have to tackle. Sometimes you genuinely do need more capacity or a specialized skill set; I’m not dismissing that. But often that’s the first conclusion people jump to: “I just need better people.” So they start fighting for headcount. They make the case for another manager or chief of staff, another senior hire who they think will finally take things off their plate. And then if they hit resistance getting that headcount approved, they feel even more trapped, and you may think, “See? I am stuck because I can’t get the resources I need around here.” Or when you do get the headcount, you bring someone in; a few months later you realize, “oh, the same pattern is happening,” and now you’re worse off because you have burned social capital advocating for those resources and you are no further along.

So the good news is you have more power here than you might realize because you as a leader are shaping norms and behavior. So when you start changing how you operate, the expectations for others, the precedents you set and enforce—all of that trickles down. And no, that is not immediate. It is not painless. You may have to tolerate work coming back less polished than you would like. You may have to let someone sit with uncertainty longer than feels comfortable, but you will start to see them taking more ownership and stepping in. And third: you have to let go of the dopamine rush that makes you feel productive and valuable. There is deep satisfaction in checking things off a list—I get it. The brain loves completion. We get a huge boost from it. The execution-oriented work, it keeps you in hero mode because you get immediate feedback and a payoff from it. You know you did something. At the end of the day you can say, “I got this, this, and this done.”

But at a certain level the work that actually advances you starts to look a lot less concrete. It’s a lot of thinking, talking with stakeholders, sitting with gray areas long enough to see a pattern instead of just impulsively acting on solving a symptom. And this is where many mid and senior level leaders trip themselves up because intellectually you may know that some of that intangible work matters, but it is so much more satisfying to do the task that produces the concrete thing—a deck, an artifact, the thing that gets crossed off your list, that people say, “Thank you so much for getting that to me.” But as you get higher in an organization, the work that actually matters is increasingly relational and judgment-based. Yet you have probably watched C-level leaders in your own organization and thought, “What the heck do they do all day? They just talk to people. They go to lunches and dinners.” And you might feel a little resentful because there you are busting your butt to deliver. So now when your own role is evolving and starts to require more of that relational focus, you may resist it at first. That is why you feel more called to the tangible production/execution side of it. What all of this points towards is a complete recalibration in how you define your own productivity. One small tool I like to give our Lead From Within clients is when you catch yourself thinking, “I sat in meetings all day; I got nothing done,” I want you to train yourself to think beyond the first-order effects of your actions. So beyond just the first order of, okay yes, first order is you sat in a meeting all day. But what are the second and third order implications of that? Did you guide an important decision? Did you make sure people were on the same page about priorities so now work is gonna move faster? Those wins, they don’t necessarily come with a dopamine hit in the moment, but those second and third order effects—that is what compounds over time and is more valuable in the long run. Because the feedback you gave to one of your managers today might mean an increase from 65% to 85% in terms of your performance next quarter. The way you challenge someone on your team could give them confidence to take a bolder approach—one that helps them secure a major account worth $100,000 in a couple of weeks from now.

What I want to leave you with today is that at your level, a high work volume and priority overload, that is par for the course. The higher you go, the more you are going to be dealing with so many demands, imperfect information, emotional people, and political tradeoffs. The goal here is not to create some fantasy version of leadership where everything is calm, you have all of the perfect resources you need, and your team is always knowing what to do. That world does not exist; I hate to break it to you. And honestly, if you are aiming for everything we’ve been talking about today—more scope, authority, influence—it will be more complex. That is part of the bargain. But here’s the part I do not want you to gloss over: complexity does not have to make you a victim. You will never eliminate pressure and stress completely, but you can completely change your relationship and your impulses around this. And if you are listening to this and realizing, “This is exactly where I am and I am tired of being the fixer, the rescuer; I’m tired of living in hero mode; I want more but I don’t want more if it means this,” then you need to make sure you’re RSVP’d for that free class I’m teaching July 15th: “Top of Mind and Tapped for More.” All you have to do is head to melodywilding.com/training; link is also in the show notes. Now, during that event as I mentioned, we are opening enrollment for our premier career accelerator, Lead From Within, for the final time in 2026 with the best enrollment package I have ever offered if you are a fast action-taker. We are talking over $7,500 in bonuses alone, including nine months of private coaching. That is a steal! So if a sophisticated, in-depth executive readiness strategy and advisory is what you want, do not miss this. Last time spots to talk with me personally filled up within 24 hours. So be at that class! Come live, come ready to apply for Lead From Within. And that is all for today; I will talk to you in the next episode.

including nine months of private coaching That is a steal So if a sophisticated indepth executive readiness strategy and advisory is what you want do not miss this Last time spots to talk with me personally filled up within 24 hours So be at that class Come live come ready to apply for Lead From Within And that is all for today I will talk to you in the next episode 


Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of Psychology At Work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self-assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.