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Welcome to Episode 113 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and once again, we are going to do story time with Friedman's Fables.

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Today's fable is called "A Nervous Condition," and I am going to get right into it. So without further ado, here is "A Nervous Condition" from Friedman's Fables.

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Please obtain a copy of Friedman's Fables and read "A Nervous Condition."

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And the moral of the story is "beware the insensitivities of the sensitive."

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As you can tell from Friedman's moral of this story, hypersensitive people can actually suck the life out of you. They can be insensitive in the way that they are so sensitive to others. Hypersensitivity is a form of dependency. It is the unwillingness or the inability to take responsibility for one's own feelings.

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In this case, Little John was hypersensitive. But at the beginning, it's not that he is unwilling to take responsibility for his condition, but that the people around him, especially his parents, don't let him. And that's a lesson I think we can learn from this. Protecting other people from the natural pain of life doesn't help them.

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I think of a story that Friedman told in a video I watched where he said that there was a woman who put padding on the corners of all the tables in their house, like the dining room table and the kitchen table, so their toddler son wouldn't run around and bump his head into a table. If he did, then it wouldn't hurt. What Friedman said was when the boy eventually goes to somebody else's house, he's going to actually probably put a hole in his head because he's running around so hard, not watching out for the corners.

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That is the point here, that protecting people from their pain doesn't help them and it actually takes its toll on us. The more that we help other people to avoid their own pain, the more we reduce our own ability to tolerate pain, both that of others and our own pain.

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When we are trying to protect someone we care about from emotional pain, we need to ask ourselves, "What is going on inside of me that I am unwilling to let them experience the pain that will help them grow? What is preventing me from being able to tolerate their pain?"

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A mark of self-differentiation is the ability to tolerate the pain of others, even when it hurts us, because we know that in doing this we enable them to grow stronger. Had Little John's parents understood this, they might not have been so protective from the outset, although the doctors told them to be. But if they had not been so protective, it is actually possible that his nerve endings would have responded in the same way they did at the end of the story. That when they started to experience pain, they might have recoiled back into his skin because that's where they belong.

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What happens with hypersensitive people is that the more they are enabled, the more entitled they feel to expect us to protect them from their own pain.

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This is what happened with Little John, and he used it to his advantage to take advantage of others. When this happens, we may get resentful of the other, but unless we are willing to stand up to them and help them understand that their pain is not our pain, they will do it to us again and again.

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This brings us to Little John's wife. Their relationship would be described as codependent. He was the dependent one and she was the codependent one.

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She defined herself completely through the act of taking care of Little John. Her motto is, how can she help this other avoid experiencing pain? As we can see in the story, she gets resentful and starts having health problems. This type of activity where we help others avoid pain will take its toll on us.

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Little John's wife tried to accommodate this resentment. She tried to get help. It didn't work. Finally, when she saw a mother cat firmly and gently prevent one of her aggressive kittens from taking advantage of others, Little John's wife knew she needed to take a stand.

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At first, she did this in a non-anxious way. But Little John sabotaged. He first tried to manipulate her through being boyish and winsome, but then he finally started screaming at her, "You know, I can't get through! You know, better than this!" That's when she exploded in this flurry of activity, stomping on his nerve endings. Now, in this case, it helped the nerve endings to recoil back into the skin and real life.

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That's probably not the best way to react to sabotage, which will inevitably occur when we are responding to people that we have enabled before and now feel entitled.

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When we finally take a non-anxious stand in real life our better option is not to explode with reactivity, but to be able to say, "I care about you, but I need to take care of myself. I'm no longer able to help you avoid pain. I will do what I can to walk with you and alongside with you. But I am going to give you back responsibility for your own feelings and your own pain."

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More importantly, if we can stay focused on taking care, taking responsibility for our own pain, our own situation, that signals to the other person that we are no longer going to be responsible for them.

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How does this translate into being a non-anxious leader? What I think it means is that when we are acting as a leader, we see clearly that other people, those that work on our team, need to take responsibility for themselves. And when they don't, we need to do our best not to enable them to feel entitled, not to try to take their pain away from them, but to give them back responsibility for their own pain. The way we can do that is by taking responsibility for ourselves and saying something like, "I see that's a very difficult situation for you. Let me know how I can help you work through it."

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This type of signaling shows that you care, but also says clearly that this is something they are going to need to work through themselves. My experience is the more you do this, the more you self-differentiate as a non-anxious leader, the more people will take responsibility for self and the more they will differentiate as well.

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You will get people who will not do that. They will try to sabotage. But ultimately, they either figure it out and start to get it together or they leave. That has been my experience as a non-anxious leader. So give it your best. Take responsibility for yourself. Don't take responsibility for others. And enable people to know that you care for them so much that you want them to grow by dealing with their own pain. That's it for Episode 113. I hope you will connect with me at the nonanxiousleader.com. I look forward to hearing from you. Until next time. Thanks and goodbye.