Are You Trying Too Hard? When Effort Becomes Overthinking

What if your overthinking isn't really about thinking too much—but about trying to create certainty through effort?
When you're highly capable and used to taking responsibility, uncertainty can trigger a familiar response: research more, plan more, optimize more, fix more, keep moving.
In this reflective leadership talk, Hawa Kombian explores when movement becomes a substitute for direction and responsibility quietly becomes over-responsibility.
You'll explore:
Why uncertainty can make capable people become more productive
The difference between movement, momentum, and direction
How frustration can become fuel for trying harder
When external signals begin overriding internal knowing
How to distinguish responsibility from over-responsibility
Why discernment—not simply slowing down—is the deeper practice
You don't need to become less ambitious or capable. You may need a different relationship with uncertainty.
Sometimes clarity tells you what you no longer need to keep doing.

Transcript

There's a leadership pattern I know very well. And it can look like ambition. You have a goal, You have a plan, And you're willing to work. So when something isn't moving the way you expected, You move harder, More research, More content, More conversations, Another strategy, Another tool, Another thing to optimize. And because you're capable, You keep doing this for quite a while. That's what makes the pattern difficult to notice. You're not necessarily procrastinating. You're not necessarily even avoiding the work. You might actually be doing a lot of work. But there comes a point where you have to ask, Am I actually moving forward or am I becoming very efficient at moving? Because movement and direction are not the same thing. And sometimes the harder we try to create momentum, The harder it becomes to notice that we may have stopped asking where we're actually going. Hi, I'm Howa Combian, And I'm a Leadership Clarity Advisor. At Executive Intuition, We explore how clarity becomes leadership's time-saving currency. And one of the things I've been thinking about in this cycle is what happens when responsibility becomes a strategy for managing uncertainty. Because when you're highly capable, Uncertainty can be surprisingly uncomfortable. You can respond to it by getting curious. Or You can respond to it by getting busy. And busy feels productive. It gives you something to measure, To complete, To improve, And even to control. So instead of sitting with, I don't actually know what the next move is yet. You unconsciously replace it with. I just need to do more. And this is important to recognize because sometimes the problem isn't a lack of effort, Right? It's that effort has become the way you're trying to create certainty. And that can produce a very interesting distortion. When movement becomes a substitute for discernment. And that's where you stop asking, What am I actually seeing? And you replace it with, What should I be doing? And those are some very different questions. So I know this pattern personally and intimately. In the 2020s, I was in a pretty significant transition. I was leaving home, I was becoming more visible, And I was building my business. And I had a much bigger vision for what I wanted my life and my work to become. So when I found a marketing program that promised all the things, Structure, Visibility, Growth, And momentum, It made perfect sense. I already knew what I wanted. Now I just needed a system that could help me make it happen. And the system was very clear. Contact this many people. Post this often. Create this much content. Show up on these platforms. Track these numbers. Optimize this process. And for a while, It felt good. There was always something to do. Something to fix. To measure, To improve. And I think this is where the pattern gets particularly seductive because if you associate responsibility with safety, Being busy can feel remarkably close to being secure. If something isn't working, Do more. If people aren't responding, Improve the messaging. If the numbers aren't where you want them, Increase visibility. There was always another variable to optimize. And because I was capable of doing more, I kept finding ways to do more. Until eventually I had to really confront something I couldn't optimize my way around. I had confused movement with momentum. I was moving constantly. But I wasn't necessarily moving in the direction that was actually mine. And this is where I usually slow down a little bit, Because I like to use reflective tools and symbolic cards, Not to predict the future, But to surface what may already be happening underneath all of these patterns. And for this piece, Two cards came up. Frustration reversed, And community. So frustration reversed is interesting because the message isn't just simply stop. It's more nuanced than that. It asks what happens when your best efforts aren't producing the movement you expected. And the invitation here is to step back. Release some of that excess intensity. Get Preyful! Try another perspective and consider that the answer may not be another round of effort. And I think that's important for capable people because frustration can become fuel. You know, You start thinking, I'm frustrated because this isn't working. And the immediate response becomes, Then I need to work harder. But frustration doesn't always mean try harder. Sometimes it means, Look again. And then there's community. At first glance, This might seem like an unusual card for a story about individual ambition. But what I hear in it. . . Is a challenge to the idea that being capable means being completely self-sufficient. We need other people. We need relationships. We need environments that give us information. And places where we can think differently. So sometimes the belief that I should be able to figure this out myself can make it harder to recognize what is already supporting us. Not because we aren't capable. But because really capability isn't the same thing as discernment. And that's why I think these two cards and these two perspectives meet. Because frustration says, Reconsider the way you're moving. And community chimes in, Don't assume you have to figure out the next move alone. So this is also where a particular leadership pattern becomes visible, And I call it the driven achiever. And the driven achiever doesn't necessarily experience themselves as anxious, Right? They often experience themselves as responsible, Right? They think, I'll handle it. I'll figure it out. Let me get ahead of this. If I solve it now, It won't become a problem later. And for real, Sometimes that works. That's why the pattern survives. It creates results. It creates the momentum. It gets things done. The problem begins when responsibility stops responding to what is actually happening and starts trying to prevent everything that might happen. Then your attention starts living slightly ahead of your actual life. You're solving problems before they exist. Preparing for convos that haven't happened, And optimizing things before you know whether they need optimizing. And soon you're carrying a whole collection of possible futures. And that's exhausting. But there's also another cost that's even more important. You start outsourcing your discernment. You might follow someone else's strategy because it worked for them. You might adopt someone else's definition of success because it appears proven. And you might measure your progress against external signals because they're easier to see than internal alignment. And that's when questions start changing from, Is this mine? To, Am I doing this correctly? And that's a very subtle shift because once you start focusing on correctness and that becomes your measure the external starts outranking everything that you know to be true. And I don't think the answer is to reject structure. It's not to become anti-strategy. It's not to stop having goals. And it's certainly not to romanticize doing nothing. But the deeper shift is in learning to distinguish responsibility from over-responsibility. Because responsibility kind of sounds like, This is mine to respond to. Whereas over-responsibility might tell you, If I don't manage this, Something will go wrong. And those can feel almost identical. Which is why slowing down isn't necessarily the lesson. Discernment is. So knowing the difference between what is actually asking to move versus what am I moving because I'm genuinely called to move it. Right? Or what am I moving because standing still would make uncertainty harder to feel? So for me, That eventually became a different relationship with responsibility. Not less responsibility. But something closer to stewardship. I don't need to make everything happen. I need to understand what is actually mine to move. So if you're recognizing yourself in this pattern, I don't want you to immediately create another action plan. That would be slightly ironic. Instead, Just notice, Where does uncertainty make you want to become more productive? Where are you trying to solve something before you actually know that it needs solving? And perhaps the most important one, Where have you confused effort with evidence that you're moving in the right direction? So here's one behavioral observation. Notice what happens immediately after you feel frustrated. Do you pause? Or do you automatically add something, Another task, Another strategy, Another conversation, Another improvement? Because that moment can tell you a lot. Frustration doesn't necessarily mean you're failing, And difficulty doesn't necessarily mean you should stop. Sometimes resistance is asking you to grow. Sometimes it's asking you to realign. Or it could also be asking you to release something you no longer need to carry. The work is in learning the difference. So if this pattern feels familiar, I explore the deeper personal story behind it in my writing, Including what I learned about the difference between movement, Direction, Capacity, And discernment. And if you want to work with this experience more directly, I also take these kinds of questions into my Insight Timer Live sessions, Where we can slow down enough to notice what happens when you don't immediately turn uncertainty into action. Clarity doesn't always tell you what to do next. Sometimes it tells you what you no longer need to keep doing. Thanks, And I'll see you on the next one.