Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to The Happy Stack Podcast, where we explore the science and strategies behind creating a happier, more fulfilling life. I'm Teriann Richards and I partner with organizations to address the root causes of burnout, disengagement, and stress, equipping leaders and teams with the tools they need to thrive, both organizationally and personally. Each episode, we dive into practical habits, insights, and strategies to help high performers like you level up from the inside out. Let's get stacking.
[00:00:33] So you were having a perfectly good day, and then you opened your phone and somebody launched. Somebody, somebody learned. Somebody, somebody had apparently figured out how to run their entire business using a tool that you've never heard of.
[00:00:49] Somebody else is training for a marathon.
[00:00:52] Look at photos of people online and their kitchen is clean and their laundry is done, and their children are actually wearing matching clothes.
[00:01:01] And you, my friend, are standing there wondering whether the laundry in your washing machine has been there long enough that it actually might need another wash again.
[00:01:13] And now, somehow, you are behind.
[00:01:18] See, you were making breakfast four minutes ago, completely at peace, and now you're completely questioning your present and your future self.
[00:01:28] Am I right?
[00:01:30] See, nothing about your actual day changed in those four minutes, but the way you were measuring it, the way you were measuring yourself did.
[00:01:40] And suddenly those things that you were planning to do that you were excited about when you woke up this morning, now they don't feel like enough.
[00:01:49] The things that you already did yesterday, last night, this morning, in your mind, they barely count.
[00:01:56] And something you didn't even know existed has become something you should, I don't know, apparently have mastered by last month.
[00:02:05] And that's what I want to talk about today. It's that feeling that no matter how much you do, there's always something else you should have already known, something else you should have already did, something else you should already be doing, some version of yourself you should have already become.
[00:02:27] And so how do you keep growing, moving forward without turning your whole life into a race that you're constantly losing?
[00:02:38] Welcome back to The Happy Stack. I'm Terianne Richards, the happiness architect.
[00:02:43] And today, what I want to do is look at what's actually happening when we say I feel behind. And that's whether or not you say it out loud for others to hear or you say it between your two beautiful ears. Because sometimes there is a real gap that needs our attention. That's the truth. But there's other times we've taken a very specific thing that we need to learn or we want to learn because we see somebody else who has it. And we turn it into a very broad judgment about who we are.
[00:03:18] And those, in my opinion, require very different responses.
[00:03:22] If I need to learn how to use a tool, somebody can teach me. If I've decided that I'm too old or too slow or too scatterbrained or too far behind to figure anything out, well, now all of a sudden, we have a much bigger conversation than how to just use a tool. Right?
[00:03:41] And I, uh, want us to catch the difference there.
[00:03:45] AI would be a good example of this. Right now, you can barely open anything, especially if you're in the business world, you can barely open anything without somebody telling you what you need to learn, what you need to automate, or what's going to happen to you, to your business, to your family, to your finances if you don't.
[00:04:05] And listen, there are useful tools out there. I'm using some of them right now. There are real changes that are existing, that are happening around us, and there are skills that are worth learning.
[00:04:16] We do not have to pretend otherwise. But there's also a lot of noise right now. And, you know, one person tells you to use this tool, and another person tells you that tool is already outdated and too old. And somebody has a list of 47 prompts that you just need to save.
[00:04:35] 47.
[00:04:36] Like, I was just hoping to get up m, do a little work and maybe, you know, have some lunch.
[00:04:42] And somewhere in all that noise, a useful question like, could this help me?
[00:04:51] Becomes a much bigger or heavier question.
[00:04:57] The question starts to become, am I becoming irrelevant?
[00:05:02] Right.
[00:05:03] Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index surveyed 20,000 workers using AI across 10 different countries.
[00:05:11] 65% said they feared falling behind if they didn't use AI to adapt quickly.
[00:05:18] Now, that is a finding about the people in that survey. It doesn't mean that 65% of everybody that you know feels this way. But it does tell us a little bit that the pressure to keep up is showing up in people's work lives, in their everyday lives.
[00:05:35] And I want to take that beyond technology for a minute, because you can recognize this feeling even if you have M like, absolutely zero interest in AI.
[00:05:45] So maybe it shows up around money.
[00:05:47] Somebody your age has paid off their house or specific loans, and you're still figuring out how to make the month work.
[00:05:55] Or maybe it shows up around health. You're trying to build a routine. Somebody else is posting results that you've wanted for years, and you followed them, and all of a sudden they have the results that you want.
[00:06:10] Or maybe it shows up around relationships or education or parenting or just, heck, just starting over.
[00:06:18] See, maybe you thought you'd be further along by now.
[00:06:22] And every new piece of information that you keep getting through that lovely social media channels seems to arrive in your brain with an accusation attached.
[00:06:36] Like you should have figured this out already.
[00:06:39] But my question back to you is, who attached that part?
[00:06:45] Was it actually in the information or did you do it? Did we do it?
[00:06:52] Let me make this real for a second. So imagine you're asked to use a new system at work.
[00:07:00] Okay? You open it and you don't understand what half the buttons do.
[00:07:06] Somebody beside you seems comfortable with it.
[00:07:09] The fact is simple. I don't know how to use this system yet.
[00:07:14] But here comes the commentary between your two beautiful ears.
[00:07:19] Everybody else gets it, everybody else understands it. And I'm always the last person to figure things out. They're going to realize that I don't know what I'm doing, that I don't belong here. I'm going to get outpaced. And now you're trying to learn the system while you're also defending your entire worth as a human being in that space.
[00:07:38] That's a lot to bring to a Tuesday morning login screen.
[00:07:42] Right? And notice what happened. We move from something specific to something sweeping from I need help with this to there is something wrong with me.
[00:07:53] I'm asking you to practice catching that move.
[00:07:57] You do not have to argue yourself into feeling good about yourself.
[00:08:04] You don't have to stand in front of the mirror, look at your beautiful eyes, and announce that you are a technology genius.
[00:08:12] You can simply just get more accurate, more honest, more truthful.
[00:08:17] Right. Like I haven't been shown how this works.
[00:08:21] Anybody else? Remember when we first got phones?
[00:08:24] None of us knew how to do it. Remember you had to hit a bunch of buttons just to get like one letter and then the next letter and you mess it up. You had to back up a whole bunch of things. Like, there was a moment where we couldn't walk, we couldn't run.
[00:08:36] A lot of the things that you do today, there was a moment you couldn't. Is it possible you just don't know how to do it yet?
[00:08:42] Right. I'm new to this.
[00:08:44] And those sentences leave you with something you can work on. I'm useless. Gives you nowhere useful to go.
[00:08:53] And this matters outside of work, too.
[00:08:56] I spent more than I planned this month. Anybody else ever do that? Right. That gives you something to look at, to be curious about, to examine. You know, I'm terrible with money. Is A judgment that still leaves the spending unexplained.
[00:09:13] I haven't exercised in three weeks. That lets you look at what potentially got in the way.
[00:09:19] I never follow through. Well, that turns three weeks into a story about your whole character.
[00:09:25] Can you hear the difference?
[00:09:28] See, accuracy is useful. It helps you find where the actual work is. Because guess what? You and I, we both have work to do. We are not at 100%. We are not 10 out of tens. We are not perfect. There is still work for us to continue to evolve, continue to grow, continue to come, become the people that we want to be. Right? The accuracy is useful.
[00:09:51] So here's the first question I want you to carry with you.
[00:09:54] When you hear yourself say, I'm behind, ask behind on what specifically? Let's get the fog out of it. Let's get our heads out of the fog.
[00:10:05] Is there a deadline you missed? A bill that needs attention? Is there a skill you need for something that you've agreed to?
[00:10:13] Is there a conversation that you keep postponing?
[00:10:16] Name it.
[00:10:18] Because I'm in behind in life is enormous.
[00:10:22] You can't put that in your calendar. You can put call and ask about the payment options in your calendar. You can put ask someone to show me how to use this feature in your calendar. You can put spend 20 minutes reviewing what I need for the application in your notebook. A specific problem can still be hard.
[00:10:44] It may still need money, support, practice, a, ah, difficult choice, effort. But at least we can see it, we can touch it, we can make it tangible. And sometimes when you ask what you're actually behind on, you'll discover there isn't a mess deadline at all. There's just an expectation that you or somebody has put on you.
[00:11:04] Like you thought you'd own a home by this age, or you thought you'd have a bill paid off by this age or this date. You thought you'd have more certainty. You thought you would be the person who gets up early and drinks greens and knows where all the important documents are.
[00:11:20] That last one actually sounds kind of lovely.
[00:11:24] Chaos right here. Chaos right here, y'. All. But an expectation deserves a closer look before it becomes a sentence that you serve.
[00:11:36] Where did it come from?
[00:11:38] Did you choose it?
[00:11:40] Does it still fit in your life?
[00:11:43] And what would pursuing it actually require from you right now?
[00:11:50] So that brings me us, uh, to comparison.
[00:11:54] Now, I'm not going to tell you to never compare yourself with anyone. That's some bs And I know it's you're still going to do it because I still do it we learn from other people, right? Like, that's actually how I have been able to do some of the things I've done. I've been inspired, and I have aspired to be like folks that have been in my peripherals, right?
[00:12:14] We see something that somebody else is doing, we think, oh, huh, Uh, I didn't even know that was possible, y'. All. That's useful, right? Research on social media comparison is more complicated than looking at other people. Makes you feel bad, okay? Some studies have also found links between comparison, like I said, and inspiration.
[00:12:38] Experiments with, um, certain kinds of Instagram posts have shown that looking at someone else's experience can leave people feeling inspired.
[00:12:47] So the question isn't just whether you're looking at other people.
[00:12:52] It's what you're taking from what you see. Are you noticing something that you want to explore?
[00:12:59] Or are you collecting reasons to demean or dismiss yourself?
[00:13:06] Imagine seeing someone who has built a skill that you would like to have.
[00:13:11] And one response could be, I wonder how they learned that.
[00:13:16] And another is, look how far ahead they are. What's wrong with me? See, the first response opens a question.
[00:13:25] It expands your curiosity. And the second one, hands down, a verdict. It snaps it right back down at you.
[00:13:32] And we don't always know much about the person we're comparing ourselves with. We don't know their story. We don't know what their Monday look like, their week and look like. We don't know what pains they're feeling. We may not know how long they've actually been in the learning. We may not know what support they have or what they stopped doing, sacrificed to make room for this thing that we now see and we now want.
[00:13:56] We might not know what their actual life looks like after the photo or the video was taken.
[00:14:02] So that doesn't mean that their achievement is fake. It just means our information is incomplete.
[00:14:08] Right? Like, uh, are you getting that it's incomplete? We're making a judgment with a very small amount of information. Even if you've been following them for years, it is impossible to know everything about them unless you are closely connected to them.
[00:14:19] So when something catches your attention, try asking yourself, what exactly do I admire here? Is it their skill? Their freedom? Is it their consistency? Their determination? Their willingness to try and fail and get back up?
[00:14:32] That answer tells you more than, I wish I had their life. Because maybe you don't want their life. I'm going to bet some money that you don't. Maybe you want to learn how to do one thing that you see in Their life that you want, too.
[00:14:45] Those are very different projects.
[00:14:47] Another question I think we need to ask is, who says I need to do this now? Who says? Because useful information and immediate responsibility are not the same thing, y'. All.
[00:15:00] You can learn that something exists without adopting it. This week, I've got 1, 2, 3, 4 whiteboards in this room, and I've got one of them dedicated to what I call my parking lot. I got a whole lot of audacious ideas. And yes, I scroll sometimes and I see something that somebody else do. I'm like, oh, that looks cool.
[00:15:17] That looks fun. I want to do that. I want to be like that when I grow up. But it's not a right now. Right. You can be interested in something without making it a goal. Put it on your parking lot, you can recognize an opportunity and still decide. You don't have room for it right now. You don't have the capacity for it right now.
[00:15:35] Let's use AI Again.
[00:15:37] You m. See, man. And this is my feed. Definitely on LinkedIn right now. You see a demonstration of a tool, right? And before you know it, you're watching a tutorial about how to connect it to another tool, right? So now you need an account, you need a subscription, and then somebody mentions an integration, okay? So you've spent an hour building a solution to a problem you weren't having when you sat down. And maybe you were, but maybe it wasn't a priority. Number one, we've all got to be a little honest here.
[00:16:06] Sometimes we're learning something useful, okay? And sometimes we're following just noise.
[00:16:12] Before you add another thing on your plate on your day, ask what. What would this help me do?
[00:16:20] And try to answer that question in a plain sentence. It would help me organize my notes, or it would help me understand my spending, or it would help me prepare for a conversation.
[00:16:30] Good. Okay, so now we have a possible purpose. But if the answer is, I don't know, everyone in my industry is using it. Uh, everyone says I need it.
[00:16:42] That deserves a pause, because there may still be a reason to learn it. But let's find the reason before we hand over the afternoon, the lunch hour, the day you have a life with actual needs in it. Every single day, your attention has somewhere that it needs to go. You get to ask whether a new demand belongs in those precious minutes that you have now.
[00:17:09] I want to be careful. I'm not going to tell you that every feeling of being behind is just a story you made up, okay? Some people are dealing with real gaps and real consequences.
[00:17:20] You may need a qualification to keep doing your work. You may need to learn something because your role has changed. You may have bills or care responsibilities or relationship issues or a, uh, deadline that cannot simply just be reframed away. And sometimes the expectations around you are unreasonable. You're asked to learn a new process, will doing all of your existing work, or you're being told to ask questions, but people act annoyed when you do. You're expected to be available all the time and somehow find uninterrupted time to learn.
[00:17:56] We need to look at that too. In my work, I talk about what is happening inside us and around us, because both matter. Inside, you might be tired and worried and distracted and unsure, um, where to start. And around you, there might be unclear instructions, too little time, limited money, or nobody available to help.
[00:18:16] You can take responsibility for your part while also being honest about those conditions.
[00:18:22] So before you decide you need more discipline, ask a few real raw questions, like, do I know what is being asked?
[00:18:31] Have I been shown how? Do I have the tools, the skills?
[00:18:35] Where is the time supposed to come from? There's only 168 hours in all of our weeks.
[00:18:41] What support would make this more workable?
[00:18:44] Those are useful questions, and sometimes they need to become a conversation with another person. Like, I can learn this, but I need some protected time. I can complete this task, but I need you to clarify which deadline takes priority. I've watched the training. I need someone to walk me through an example. Show me. That's a different response from quietly struggling and hoping like nobody notices.
[00:19:10] And so let's talk about being new, right?
[00:19:15] Because I think this is one of the uncomfortable parts we don't always name.
[00:19:20] You can be experienced in life and still a beginner at something.
[00:19:24] You're not always advanced in all aspects. You can be fully capable and still need someone to slow down and explain it.
[00:19:32] You can have raised children, ran a household, built a business, managed hard situations and still be looking at a screen thinking, what happened? Like, where did the document go? It was there, I saw it.
[00:19:47] And now, apparently it lives in a cloud somewheres. That's something I've heard recently.
[00:19:52] And could the cloud maybe send it back literally? Somebody said that to me recently, so funny. Being new can feel uncomfortable, especially when you start getting up there in age.
[00:20:05] But it's not even an age thing, right?
[00:20:08] You're used to maybe being the person who other people ask for help.
[00:20:12] You're the one who knows. You're the one who handles things. And now you have to ask the question you think you should already know the answer to. So you don't ask, you nod, you say, yep, I got it. And then you go home and you try to work that along.
[00:20:26] And if that sounds familiar, here's something I want you to practice.
[00:20:31] Ask a smaller question, a smaller, clearer question. Instead of, can someone teach me everything about this? Maybe say, can you show me how to do this one part?
[00:20:42] Instead of I don't understand any of it. Try, I followed you right up until here. Then I got lost. Can we go through what happens next?
[00:20:51] You do not have to understand the whole thing before you're allowed to ask about the next thing. And if someone.
[00:20:57] How dare they. Makes you feel foolish for asking a reasonable question. That is information about the interaction and the person. It is not proof that you were wrong that to need help.
[00:21:10] So that's a lot. What do we do with all this? Let's bring it down to one thing you can actually work with this week. Choose one area where you just feel a little behind. Just one. And please don't choose your entire personality. And please don't write get my life together. That's not a task. That is the title of a notebook that you will be afraid to open. Okay. Choose something specific enough that you could describe it to another person, to your bestie, to your spouse. I need to understand the new booking system. Um, I want to get back into cooking a few meals and meal prepping. I need to know what's happening with my bank accounts, with my money. I want to stop having these repeat hamster wheel conversations.
[00:21:51] And then I'm going to get you to ask yourself three questions. Okay, what do I need to learn?
[00:21:57] What would help me learn or do it?
[00:21:59] And what can wait while m I give this some attention?
[00:22:05] So let me walk you through an example. Imagine you want to get a clearer picture of your money. Your first answer might be, I need to be better with my money. Okay. What does that mean in practice to you? See, maybe you don't know what leaves your account each month. Then your first task is to find that out. You don't need to solve your entire financial future before opening that statement.
[00:22:32] And what would help?
[00:22:34] Time without interruption. Access to your accounts. Maybe someone who can help explain what you're looking at.
[00:22:41] What can wait? Possibly the three articles you saved about investing. When you don't know yet what your monthly bills are and what you have available to invest, you're choosing an order that fits an actual problem, and that's something you can work with.
[00:22:57] And then give that next step a place there's an entire body of research on what are called implementation intentions. And that sounds way more complicated than it needs to be. But it means deciding in advance when a situation happens, what you will do, and if that if then this plan and research across many studies has found that these kinds of plans can help people follow through on their goals.
[00:23:25] They don't remove every barrier. They don't give you money or childcare or permission that you don't have. But they can make a chosen action clearer. So instead of I need to learn this sometime, you might say, after lunch on Wednesday, I'll spend 20 minutes practicing that one thing. Or when I finish supper tomorrow, I'll put my statements on the table and list the regular payments.
[00:23:48] Or if I get stuck on the first step, I'll write down my question and ask X person who can help.
[00:23:56] Notice the last one. The plan can also include needing help, asking for support.
[00:24:02] It doesn't have to assume that the more organized version of you will suddenly know everything and choose a practice that matches the skill. If you're learning a tool, try using it on something suitable. If you're learning to ask for what you need, practice saying the request.
[00:24:21] Give yourself a chance to find out, uh, what happens when you try and then review it without putting yourself on trial.
[00:24:29] Did you do what you planned? If you did, what helped? If you didn't, what happened? Was the step on clear? Was the time unrealistic? Did something important interrupt it? Were you avoiding it because you were worried about what you might find?
[00:24:47] Be honest with yourself.
[00:24:48] Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable.
[00:24:52] Maybe you did spend, like an entire hour scrolling, and that's worth noticing. But you can notice it without deciding you're incapable of change.
[00:25:03] What got in the way is a question.
[00:25:06] I always ruin everything. Closes the point, closes the conversation.
[00:25:12] And if you tried the thing and it went badly, get specific about that, too. What part went badly? What would you do differently? What could give you useful information?
[00:25:21] And I'm gonna call out the elephant in the room. I, uh, know you're all looking at this, and it sounds like work, but change is work. If I want to do better and be better, it requires effort.
[00:25:32] The point of trying something is partly to learn what you couldn't know just by thinking about it.
[00:25:38] You're allowed to come back with information. Instead of a success story like M, you might have to get up to bat a few times before you actually hit the ball. You know what I mean? And you're also allowed to discover that something needs more time than you expect it. Sometimes we Think it's going to take X time. And it really took.
[00:25:55] You know why?
[00:25:57] 20 minutes might help you start, but it also might show you that you need more time, more instruction. That's useful information.
[00:26:06] So let's talk about what you're going to stop adding. Because even a sensible plan can become another demand piled on top of an already full life. If you decide something matters this week, where's that room gonna come from?
[00:26:20] Maybe something waits. Maybe you ask for help. Maybe you lower a standard that doesn't need to be so high. Maybe you have an honest conversation about what you cannot take on.
[00:26:33] You might say, I'm interested, but I'm not adding that this month. Or I can help with this part, but I can't take responsibility for the whole thing.
[00:26:41] And sometimes the answer is you just. There isn't enough room, right? Like you're dealing with needs that all matter.
[00:26:48] So then the conversation may need to be about support or resources or changing an expectation.
[00:26:54] I don't want to hand you a lovely planning exercise and pretend it solves the situation when you're being asked to do the impossible.
[00:27:01] But I also don't want you to assume that every request deserves an automatic yes.
[00:27:06] Pause long enough to check. Does this need to be done? Does this need to be done by you? Does it need to happen now?
[00:27:13] Think back to the person at the beginning of this episode, the one making breakfast, the one who opened their phone and suddenly felt late for a life they hadn't even chosen. Imagine the same moment going a little differently.
[00:27:27] You see the new tool, you notice the feeling. There it is. And I feel behind.
[00:27:31] And then you ask, well, behind on what?
[00:27:34] Maybe there's something useful to learn there. You save one reliable explanation and you choose a time to look at it.
[00:27:41] Maybe it has nothing to do with what you need right now, and you close it. Or maybe it brings up a real worry about your future and you give that worry a proper question. What do I need to understand? Who could help me? What is one step I can take?
[00:27:56] And it may feel uncomfortable and uneasy. That is okay. The aim isn't to make every uncertain feeling disappear before you continue your day. The aim is to give yourself a more workable response, one where a piece of information doesn't automatically become another reason to tear yourself down or tear yourself apart. One where learning is allowed to include being new, being wrong, not having time. One where the conditions around you are part of the conversation.
[00:28:28] Before we finish today, I want you to think of that thing that has, uh, been making you feel behind the one that came to mind when you were listening and ask yourself what is the actual need here? And try to answer it without insulting yourself.
[00:28:42] And then what would help me take the next step and be willing to include another person in that answer? And finally, what can wait? You don't have to abandon all your goals. You don't have to stop wanting more for your life. You can want to grow and still be thoughtful about how you do it.
[00:29:00] You can acknowledge a gap without turning it into your entire identity and your personality and your character. And you can say this matters, I need to work on it. And then give yourself something clearer and more clear, I should say, than try harder. Like a skill. You need to learn a question to ask, a condition to change, a step to practice.
[00:29:22] That's the work building the person who can meet the moment with the skills and the support the moment actually requires.
[00:29:30] So this week when you hear yourself say I'm, um, behind.
[00:29:33] Get curious before you get cruel. Behind on what, according to who and what would actually help.
[00:29:41] I'm Terianne Richards and this is The Happy Stack. If someone came to mind during this conversation, send them this episode and follow the show for more conversations about building yourself from the inside out. For now, choose one useful next step, give it a place and let yourself learn.
[00:29:59] Hey, thanks for listening to The Happy Stack podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe. Subscribe, Leave a review and share it with someone who could use a little extra happiness in their life. Let's keep stacking those wins together. See you next time.
