The Lava Rock Effect

Why Other People's Emotions Keep Pulling You Away from Your Most Important Work

Have you ever sat down with a clear plan for your day… only to find yourself pulled into everyone else's problems?

In this episode, Erin shares a simple metaphor from the New Mexico desert that completely changed the way she thinks about work, leadership, and people-pleasing. Using the image of lava rock—with all of its tiny holes and distractions—she explores why so many caring professionals abandon their own priorities in order to manage relationships, smooth conflict, and keep everyone else comfortable.

If you've ever finished a workday exhausted without making progress on what mattered most, this episode will help you understand why—and how to begin changing the pattern with curiosity instead of self-criticism.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why people-pleasing is often a nervous system safety strategy—not a personality trait. 
•  How workplace relationships can quietly pull your attention away from your highest priorities. 
•  What this looks like in fundraising conversations with donors and volunteers. 
•  Why mindfulness helps you notice unconscious patterns before they take over your day. 
•  A simple question to ask yourself whenever you feel pulled into everyone else's agenda. 

Resources mentioned

• Playing Big by Tara Mohr

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Transcript

Erin McQuade-Wright 1:33

Welcome to The Brave and Balanced Fundraiser, the podcast I wish I'd had during my 15 years as a professional fundraiser. I'm your host, Erin McQuade Wright. This is your space to breathe, realign, and reconnect with the part of you that chose this work for a reason. Together, we'll explore tools and practices that help you show up less stressed and spread thin, and more grounded, brave, and on purpose. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Did you ever get to the end of your day and feel like, "What did I even get done? I was running around like a crazy person, but what do I have to show for it?" This episode is for you, my friend. I see you, I am you, and I wanna invite you to just ask with curiosity as you listen to this episode. Is this me? If not, discard, go along with your day, enjoy it. But if this is you, if it sounds familiar to you, I want you to lean in and get curious about what you're hearing today and how it might apply to you, and what are the steps you wanna take. What's one thing you wanna do as a result of this episode to step into your power and be more intentional about your life and how you are accounting for your time, h- what you're spending your time on, what you're spending your focus on? Okay, let's do it. I live in the desert, and here we have a thing called lava rock. I don't know if you've ever seen lava rock, but the idea is that it's volcanic rock that cooled really fast. There's all these air bubbles in it, and so you get this kind of Swiss cheese effect. Lots of holes inside the rock. It makes it very light, actually. When you pick it up, you're like, "Wow, that's all this weighs?" 'Cause it's got so much space for air. And I thought of this the other day when I was describing to a friend my experience in the nonprofit sector. Stay with me. My experience in the workplace was that there was work that needed to get done, and then there was all this interpersonal stuff happening at the same time. There were all these people who had sometimes competing desires with me, and who were... You know, they had bodies, and they had disagreements, and they had opinions about how things should be run, and this was all happening around me. And the way I'm made up is to kind of catch what other people are feeling. That's kind of a superpower that I have. So how do you think that went for me? Being around other people who had sometimes very strong opinions about how things should be up against what I was trying to get done. Often, what I was trying to get done fell by the wayside, and I attended to what felt like a bigger fire, and that was other people's stuff And this is not unique to me. This is human beings interacting with each other. This is any workplace anywhere in the world. And it was really easy for me to fall into the trance of something is happening and I'm being asked to take care of it, I need to take care of it, rather than this is what my goal is for the day or the week. This is what I've set out to accomplish, and I'm going to make sure that I create the conditions by which I get that thing done, come hell or high water. So I had the choice of how to deal with that. So I could be a robot, and I could say, "Here's what I have to work on. These are my tasks. I will complete them," and just throw everything else to the side and be laser-focused on getting my work done. And the effect of that approach would've been, you know, I would've looked great on paper and probably gotten the criticism most likely to be levied against a woman in the workplace, which is, "She's not nice. There's something about her. I- she just doesn't seem nice to me. She doesn't seem nice enough. She seems too focused on herself, too driven, too focused on what she wants to do, and not focused enough on other people." If you're a woman, you have either received this feedback or been threatened with this feedback. It's highly likely that you're familiar with this feedback. Or maybe you've been like me, and you've anticipated this feedback coming at you before it was even coming at you, and you contorted yourself into a shape that was telegraphing, "Hey, I am really a nice p- I'm a nice person. Don't worry about me. I'm not gonna threaten your peace of mind. I'm a nice person." You fell over yourself to demonstrate that you were nice so people couldn't get that idea, and that's a really smart safety strategy. You know, if I assume that you're gonna think I'm not nice and not easy to work with, I'm gonna go out of my way to telegraph that I am nice and somebody you wanna be on a team with and thereby creating my own sense of safety around me, right? You're not gonna come after me if you have a feeling of peace around being with me. This is the, this is the math that is going on behind the, the circumstances. It's the program running in the background for a lot of women, and that was certainly the case for me. So it comes down to how we're socialized to look out for others and to be very aware of how they're receiving us. And I really liked how the writer Tara Mohr talked about this in her book Playing Big. It's all about really stepping into your leadership. And she talks about how it was just five minutes ago that women got the ability to own a business, to have the c- credit card in their own name, to go to the bank and get a loan without a s- a husband's signature, without a man's signature. This very recently happened, and so what did we do before that? We made really strong social networks because we couldn't go through systemic things like banks and in lending institutions. So we had to mean something to each other in a way that was currency outside of the currency that men had access to. So that placed making sure other people were happy with you on a really important scale. That was very, very important because if you were seen as not nice by your fellow women, your social support network was very tenuous, right? So we wanted strong social support networks. We learned, it's in our very DNA to care about what other people think of us and make sure that they're happy and pleased with us. One of the tricky ways that I've seen this play out in the fundraising space is working with donors. Maybe you have a person who's heading up a campaign, you know, the board committee or the development committee, and you're working with them about maybe through a list of names. "Okay, who can we go to? Who do you know who might be interested in supporting our mission?" And sometimes it's, it really flows in through a bunch of the names really flow like, "Yes, this person, I can reach out to them, I can email them." And sometimes the, the energy sort of stops, and it gets kind of sucked out of the room. And you'll hear that volunteer say something like, "I just asked this person. I, I have to wait. I can't ask again, you know, just yet, but let's put them on the list for next year or three months from now," or something like that. You can see them in real time navigating their own relationships, right? They are taking into account what that potential donor would think of them asking at this time. And you can, if you're lucky enough to have a trusting relationship built up with that volunteer, you can kind of see them working through it in real time and saying, "I just asked them to give for this other campaign," or they, "I, I need to give it some space because it's not, it's not time to ask yet." And that is a really good example to me of the math, that program that's running in the background of, of what's it gonna cost me to ask this person? What's it gonna cost me to make this ask of this person? So if you haven't read the book, Playing Big by Tara Mohr, I highly recommend it. The full title is Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. She's got really great tools in there I can't recommend it highly enough. I think of the lava rock as all the things we can dive into, all the little holes we can dive into. What's the interpersonal stuff happening on my team? How can I intervene to get a thing through to smooth a path for an event to happen? And the key for me is just not shaming myself or beating myself up for diving into these holes, these, these things that don't actually move the ball forward for my large goals, for what I'm trying to do. The key is not to beat myself up for getting distracted. The key is to recognize that that's a pattern that I'm doing, and I'm doing it for a reason. But if I'm not curious about that pattern, I'll just get swept up in it, and I'll be thinking, "Oh, this is just my personality. I'm a person that takes care of other people more than I take care of my own goals." Fair enough. But if I look deeper, I recognize, just speaking for myself in this case, that pattern of focusing on others was a safety strategy. What I really needed was to feel safe, that if I take my eyes off of others, I can do my own thing and still be safe. I'm not gonna be thought of as a destructive person or as a person who's not got enough attention on others. So it was out of balance. So the key is not ever... It, it's not practical for us to never get out of balance and expect it, where I'm never gonna get out of balance. No, the key is to notice when it's happening. Ah, I'm doing that thing where I focus on others at the expense of my own goals. Got it. The deeper part for me of that pattern is safety. So how can I get myself some safety? And for me, that usually means pausing on the doing, doing, doing, doing, doing that feels a little urgent, that feels a little desperate, and getting quiet with myself, taking 90 seconds to check in with what's actually happening in my body Bringing myself to notice my breath. This is a mindfulness technique, right? Just coming to this moment. Because if I'm worried about what other people are thinking, that's future, future tripping. I'm thinking in a future that actually doesn't exist right here and right now. And if I'm getting in my way about what I should have said in that case, and what this person said to me, and how dare they, and I should have said this, and they don't appreciate me enough, blah, blah, blah, that's living in the past. That moment is actually not happening right now either. So if I'm able to bring myself to the present moment, that's the best position I can be in for noticing what pattern I'm in. And if I'm not in the pattern of advancing what I wanna get done today Then that's the position from which I can change what I'm focusing on. So I want you to try this as an experiment and look for that pattern. If you have it, just look for it. How does it... When do I abandon my own goals in order to make sure that other people are happy around me? Let me get curious about where that shows up. Or maybe you have the opposite challenge. Maybe you abandon other people so that you can get your own goals done, and you're experiencing the fallout of that. No judgment, it's just feedback. It's just data. Okay, and if, if you don't like where that data leads you, "Gosh, I'm feeling really exhausted at the end of every day 'cause I didn't tend to what was here for me. I tended to other people instead." If you don't like the fruit of that particular tree, then you can change it, but you have to first notice the pattern. So that's what I'm working on over here. I'm not arrived at any destination. I'm simply offering this to you as a lens from my personal experience so that if you do relate to it, if it is helpful to you, you can take it, and you can experiment with it and use it for yourself. Where are you getting sucked into the different holes of the lava rock and, "Ooh, let me focus on this. Let me dive into this and get distracted. Let me see what other people are thinking. Let me see what my phone is blinking about." Hmm, that's a... that's one that I hear about a lot from people. And if you are using distractions as a way to check out, as a way to take a break, and you don't like the way that feels, you can change it, but the first thing is getting to know that it's happening in the first place. Here are your takeaways from this episode. Number one, your biggest distractions often aren't your tasks, they're other people's emotions. Number two, people-pleasing isn't a personality trait, it's often a strategy your nervous system learned to stay safe. Number three, you can't change a pattern until you notice it. Number four, the present moment is where you regain the power to choose your focus. And number five, leadership means caring about people without abandoning your own priorities All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful to you, and let me know your thoughts. You can join our Facebook group. You can join the newsletter. Look for information about those in the show notes. We'll see you next time