How Your Superpowers are Used Against You

Episode Three

Runtime: 8 minutes 31 seconds

Episode 3: How Your Superpowers Are Being Used Against You

[Watch Episode 3]

Ambition, competence and discipline got you here. They’re also widening The Vitality Gap.

When the demands from your parallel galaxies come at you, these three come to the table. Your ambition is the drive to build the life you want. Your competence is your particular blend of intelligence, innate ability and skills that makes you the person others depend on. Your discipline is the force that gets it all done.

These three have gotten you very far. They also distract you from listening to the signals from your vitality reserves.

Ambition is complicated for women in a way it simply isn’t for men. You learned early it can cost you. It’s in your language. You qualify your goals with “just.” I just wanted to see that painting in the other gallery. I just meant that we should try something different. That word is an apology.

How often do you use the verb “run?” You say you’re going to run to the store, run over to pick something up, run to the next meeting. You’re telling everyone you’re up for fitting into their timeline.

These concessions might sound small. I don’t care that they’re small. I care that they’re constant. They’re evidence of how deeply you’ve internalized a belief that your wants come after everything else.

The systems around you are playing both sides. They penalize your ambition and they run on it. At the same time. Your workplace knows what you want to achieve and counts on your extra hours. The school knows what you want for your child and counts on your volunteering and nightly homework help. The healthcare system offers just enough to keep you managing your mother’s care on your own.

While you put a filter on your ambition they exploit it. They measure your ambition in ROI. What it produces. What it returns. What they can extract from it.

Your ambition is most powerful when it has your vitality reserves on its agenda. That connection has been missing.

Competence is what creates the capacity to do more, to lead, to be the person others rely on. Your competence is running systems around the clock.

Sociologist Allison Daminger broke cognitive labor into four stages: anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring outcomes. When are you not doing this? That’s why time away from work just feels like more work. You’re researching summer camps in January, putting an alarm on your phone for when signups start. You’re reworking the carpool spreadsheet. Tracking who’s growing out of what. Managing your mother’s appointments, her groceries.

And expectations have not relaxed. Pew Research Center found that mothers today are spending more time with their children than mothers in previous generations despite working more hours outside the home.

Discipline keeps everything moving. You set the alarm earlier, you meal prep and get serious about tight agendas for your meetings. Your effort is sincere and keeps the show running. Pursuing all of these goals is distracting. It makes it easy to override the signals from your vitality reserves.

Research shows that non-promotable tasks land with women disproportionately. This is the work that organizations need but don’t value or see as career-advancing. These assignments put women at work for an extra 200 hours annually. The cost is in time and money.

Looking at non-promotable tasks through the lens of ambition, competence and discipline, it’s clear why this happens. Ambition says yes because they look like opportunities. Competence says yes because it’s a complex problem to solve. Discipline steps up to make it happen beyond the work you’re already doing.

All the while, your vitality reserves don’t get a vote. Ambition, competence and discipline plow right over them.

Of the three, discipline is most like a reflex. It’s behind your impulse to work hard and push through. Think of discipline like a generator you use during a storm. It’s just power. It runs without knowing what matters and what doesn’t.

A generator is what you use when you don’t have a functioning system. It’s expensive, exhausting and unsustainable. So is running on discipline alone.

Just because it needs doing and you can do it, does that mean it’s automatically yours to do?

The Vitality Gap is a concept developed by Anne Mara Potts, Vitality Strategist and creator of The Fun Reset.