Thresholds, Article 5 · August 2026 · 16 min read

The Backpack

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You’ve stopped trying to think your way clear. The overthinking has quieted. You’ve let go of waiting for the map to arrive in full.

You can name what you might do.

You’ve been so diligent.

And yet, the doorway still feels impossibly heavy.

That’s the part people take as evidence against themselves.

I did the work. I’m not confused anymore. So why can’t I move?

Before you decide what that heaviness means, I want you to check one thing.

When a crossing feels too heavy to attempt, we assume the door is the heavy part.

Sometimes it is.

Often, though, a good deal of that weight was never in the door at all.

It’s in what you’re carrying toward it.

What you’re wearing while you stand there

If you’re new to this series, here’s the shape of it. Change tends to arrive as a doorway. You’re standing in a familiar room, your current role, your current identity, your current way of operating. There’s a doorway in front of you, and beyond it a hallway, and the hallway is possibility rather than one fixed destination. You can’t see where the hallway leads while you’re still standing in the room.

What we haven’t looked at yet is what you’re wearing while you stand there.

We all walk around with an invisible backpack.

It carries everything we’re hauling in life and work: the roles, the responsibilities, the shoulds, the emotional labour, the habits, the helping, the proving. Every time we say yes without pausing, something gets added. Every time we don’t release what no longer fits, it stays.

At first the pack matches the life. Then the life changes and the pack doesn’t. If you’re not attentive about emptying it as you go, you end up looking like a Sherpa walking uphill with your backpack and everybody else’s backpack, and all the jobs you used to have, and everything.

And then a doorway shows up. One you actually want.

And you try to judge whether you can get through it while wearing all of that.

“How could I possibly promote you?”

I worked with a leader who wanted a promotion. She was ready for it, or at least she believed she was, and she had said so.

Her boss said to her:

How could I possibly promote you when you’re not even letting go of your old work?

She came into coaching stuck at that threshold.

She wanted the door. She could see the door.

She had no idea how to get her boss to picture her on the other side of it, because her boss could not picture her freeing up the time, the mental space, or the effort to do anything new.

So we started with what she was doing, and why.

Requests would come in from executives, and of course she’d say yes. Then she’d do the work herself. Not because she was possessive about it, but because she believed her team was already at capacity and it was her job to protect them.

She was spinning all of those plates and holding everything up in the air.

Long hours.

Days off that weren’t days off.

Half-attentive in meetings because part of her was somewhere else.

She was working, working, working, working.

Even stopping for lunch felt like something she was taking away from the work.

Here’s what I want you to notice about her.

She wasn’t confused. She knew exactly what she wanted.

The thing standing between her and the doorway was not a lack of clarity, and it was not a character flaw.

It was the pack.

The strain is real. The address is wrong.

There’s a piece of research I keep coming back to on this.

In a set of experiments, people were shown a choice and asked to make it. For one group, the options were printed in a font that was slightly hard to read. Nothing about the choice itself changed. Only the font.

The number of people who put the decision off doubled.

Then researchers told people the strain was coming from the font.

The effect disappeared.

That’s the whole teaching in one small study.

The strain was real. People genuinely felt it. But once they understood where the strain was actually coming from, it stopped weighing on the decision.

I see this constantly at thresholds. Someone is carrying a full workload, a family situation, the residue of a role they never fully handed over, or responsibilities that have quietly accumulated over time.

Then a decision shows up, and every bit of that weight quietly gets attached to the decision.

The door starts to look like the problem.

There’s a second finding worth knowing, because it takes the shame out of a full backpack.

When people are asked to improve something, they add. Across a series of experiments, almost nobody thought to take something away, even when removing was the better answer and cost nothing. The bias got stronger when people were already loaded up.

We rarely decide all at once to carry this much.

It accumulates.

A yes here, a favour there, a role that ended without anybody collecting the work back in.

And because our first instinct is to add rather than subtract, unpacking doesn’t tend to occur to us on its own.

Something has to ask the question.

Consider this the question.

Look in it before you empty it

I’m not going to ask you to make a big move right now.

The first pass is just noticing.

In earlier work I’ve called this the Backpack Pause, and it’s about as simple as it sounds.

That’s it.

You do not need a ten-step plan for how to move any of it yet. Awareness that something probably belongs somewhere else is enough to start with.

Another way in, if the columns feel abstract: if this task were assigned to the right place, what role would it belong to?

Write that down.

Even if you decide you’re going to keep doing it, even if you’re making a deliberate exception, it’s still worth tracking where it actually belongs.

That record is what makes the next conversation possible.

With my client, this was where things started to loosen.

Not because anything moved yet.

Because she could finally see the difference between the size of the doorway and the size of the pack.

Does it belong to you?

This is the question underneath all of it, and it’s the one that does the real work.

Not can I handle this.

You can.

That’s usually the trouble.

Being capable does not automatically mean you should carry more.

The question is:

Does it belong to you?

And there’s one more question that comes before even that, which almost all of us skip.

Before you work out who should be carrying something, it’s worth asking whether it needs to be carried at all, at least in the form it’s in.

That’s what the funnel is for.

The EASYYA funnel

I use five questions with clients when we’re emptying a backpack, and I run them in order. Eliminate. Automate. Simplify. You? Yet Again.

The order is the useful part. Three of the five come before we ever get to who does the work. That’s deliberate, because it is remarkably easy to spend an afternoon deciding who should own something that never needed doing in the first place.

Eliminate. Can it be eliminated?

Should this still exist at all? I think of the report that gets run every month because something went wrong once, years ago, and nobody has asked since.

I like to open that question with a now that. Now that we’re halfway through the year. Now that the team has changed. Now that I’m standing at this doorway. You can always find a now that, and it’s a gentle way to step into a change.

Automate. Can it be automated?

A rule in a system, a template, a form that fills itself, a tool that does the lift so a person doesn’t have to be present for every step of it.

Simplify. Can it be simplified?

Maybe the report tracks forty things and eight of them matter. What are you actually solving for? What are the vital few?

You? Do you need to be the one who does it?

This is the question this article really lives in.

If it isn’t you, where does it go? What role should hold it? It doesn’t have to be inside your own department, either. Work drifts as organizations change, and plenty of us are still holding things that belong somewhere else entirely now.

This is where I use Responsibility Mapping. Take a pen and a piece of paper and draw three circles side by side. Label them I, we, and you.

I is what you’re genuinely carrying. I’m going to do the research. I’m going to build the report. All I-statements.

We is shared, with the seams visible. I’ll talk to finance and get the numbers. Will you build it from there? You own a piece, they own a piece, and both pieces have a name.

You is theirs, and it lives in questions rather than instructions. What’s the first step? Who are you going to talk to first? What do you need?

When I worked in an office, I used to draw the circles on a piece of paper and hand the person a paperclip. Any time they said something like this needs to get done, I’d hand them the paperclip and point at the circles. Put it where it goes.

Their first instinct was almost always I. Here’s everything I’m going to do.

Then they’d pause, with somebody standing there looking at them, and they’d say: wait. Actually my team could do this. Actually this belongs to another department entirely.

And it would move.

The thing I want you to hear is that it moved without anybody being talked into anything. It moved because somebody asked. A lot of over-carrying isn’t a decision anyone made. It’s a default that never got questioned.

Once you know where something belongs, it’s delegation if it sits inside what’s reasonable for someone else’s role, or a stretch someone actually wants. Or it’s outsourcing, which is a bigger category than people think. My favourite example isn’t from work at all. If you buy your vegetables already cut, you don’t have to cut them. That’s outsourcing. There’s a whole spectrum between doing it yourself and having it done for you, and most of us never look at the middle of it. Someone picks up your laundry. Someone else runs the errand. You borrow, you barter, you trade with a neighbour.

Yet Again. When will you run this again?

This is the one people skip, and it’s the one that turns a cleanout into a practice.

Set a future date to come back and run the funnel again. And while you’re in there, look for what I call negative branches. Those are the side effects that grew out of the changes you made. You simplified a report and now somebody is chasing one of the missing numbers by hand. You handed something off and a small gap opened where the handoff didn’t quite meet. Nothing has gone wrong. That’s just what change does.

Because complexity has a way of growing back. Organizations create rules readily, revise them frequently, and aren’t nearly as good at deleting them. Personal lives can work the same way. Lightening the load isn’t one decision. It’s a practice of noticing what has grown back.

So: EASYYA. Eliminate, Automate, Simplify, You? and Yet Again. Five questions, in that order, run more than once.

The funnel isn’t the teaching. It’s a way of getting a good look inside the pack.

Enough of the guilt

Here’s where most people get stuck, and it isn’t at the sorting.

It’s at the handing over.

My client’s belief was that her team was too busy, and that protecting them meant absorbing the work herself.

She wasn’t wrong that they were busy.

She was wrong about what protection was.

Because she was busy too.

And what her load was costing her was the strategic work, the whole reason she wanted the door in the first place.

She was so deep in the tactical that the strategic never got a turn.

So: put it in the right place first, and then right-size the work.

Those are two different moves, and we tend to collapse them.

Deciding where something belongs is not the same as deciding how big it has to be.

Do the first one, then the second.

And then, enough of the guilt.

Asking somebody to do something that is genuinely within their job is not an imposition.

It’s the job.

If it helps, the math on this is not on your side and it never has been.

When researchers actually measured it, people underestimated how many others would say yes to a direct request by roughly half.

You’re counting the cost of your ask.

The person you’re asking is feeling the cost of refusing you.

Those are different numbers, and yours is the wrong one.

And if some part of you is thinking but helping is who I am, I’d say you’re probably right.

Helping can absolutely be who you are.

It doesn’t follow that you have to carry.

There’s a version of generosity that includes you in the equation and a version that doesn’t, and only one of them lasts.

Adam Grant calls it being an otherish giver. I’d call it being a well-boundaried giver.

You do not have to be the kind who sets herself on fire to keep somebody else warm.

Two more things I want to say about the handing over, because they’re the objections that come up in every session.

You aren’t taking anything away by handing something off.

I worked with a technical leader who was genuinely worried that if she gave someone else the visible work, her organization would decide she wasn’t technical anymore, and in that company being technical mattered.

So she didn’t hand over everything.

She kept the high-visibility project that showed she could still lead technically, and she handed the lower-visibility work to a team member who needed exactly that kind of stretch to get promoted.

She chose what she carried, on purpose, with her eyes open.

That’s not the same as carrying it all.

And you can walk beside somebody without walking for them.

You can offer guidance, point out the potholes, stay close.

You can’t walk their path.

You can’t eat somebody else’s lunch for them.

You can make the perfect sandwich, you can tuck a napkin in, but you cannot eat it for them.

Setting something down doesn’t mean you’re giving up or failing the people.

Most of the time it means putting it where it can actually be held.

Not only the work

None of this is only about work, by the way.

I worked with a client whose family was seriously considering changing schools.

Not because anything was wrong with the school.

Because they could not keep up with what they were doing there. She was carrying the load of nearly everyone on the parent council.

So I asked her the pair of questions I ask whenever someone is standing between staying and going:

She and her husband worked through both.

What they landed on was that the thing they wanted to change was never the school.

It was the volume.

So they made a plan to reduce what they were carrying on the council for the following year, and the children stayed where they were.

The door they thought they were standing at was change schools.

The actual weight was the pack.

The identity is one of the items

Sometimes what we’re carrying isn’t a task at all.

Sometimes it’s an old version of ourselves.

The Fixer. The Strong One. The Good Girl.

The one who says yes, solves it, shows up.

Often, those started as strategies that worked, and they worked so well and for so long that they stopped feeling like strategies and started feeling like facts about who you are.

Here’s how I reframe it:

Your identity is an item you pack. It is not the pack itself.

That matters, because it means you can look at it the same way you look at anything else in there.

Does this still belong to me?

Did it get me here, and do I want to carry it forward?

Those are two different questions, and the answer to the first one can be yes while the answer to the second one is no.

This isn’t about getting rid of who you were. It’s about choosing what you want to carry forward.

Some things have served you beautifully and still belong. Others may have done their job. You get to decide what still fits and what makes sense for where you’re going now.

Turn the question forward:

My client had a clear answer to that once she was asked.

She wanted to be known as someone who could run a team and a department through constant change.

Someone who could think strategically.

And what she needed to let go of, in order to be known that way, was being the person who was always in the weeds.

Her boss saw her as stuck in the details, because she was.

She had to get out of the weeds.

So if you’re standing at a doorway, a promotion, a career change, retirement, starting something of your own, a change at home, the question doesn’t have to be:

Can I do this?

It can be:

Do I still have to be the person who carries everything?

You get to decide what you carry. That’s the whole point.

Some doors are genuinely heavy

The pack is a contributor.

It isn’t the whole explanation.

Some crossings are genuinely hard, no matter how well you’ve sorted the pack. A big career decision. A change you didn’t choose. A choice where both options ask something of you.

Unpacking doesn’t make those things easy.

What it can do is change how heavy the door feels, and how heavy you judge it to be.

That isn’t a small thing.

For a lot of people, it’s a real share of what they’re up against, and it happens to be the share they can do something about.

Under sustained load, the brain leans away from its planning system and toward its habits. It repeats yesterday. It stops updating.

So staying exactly where you are can feel like a decision when part of what you’re experiencing is the effect of carrying too much.

Which is why we unpack before we decide, rather than after.

Not so the door will be light.

So the door will weigh its own weight, and you can judge it honestly.

She was so light

My client and I did this work over months.

She sorted.

She moved things to where they belonged.

She had the conversations that made her uncomfortable.

She started letting her team carry the work that was theirs.

Then, part way through, a family member got seriously ill and she had to be away for two weeks.

She wasn’t there.

And everything ran.

Her team carried what was theirs, because by then it actually was theirs.

She was able to be with her family and not spend those two weeks worrying about work. She told me afterward that if that had happened a few months earlier, it would have been a completely different story, and a much harder one.

When she came back, that was the moment it landed for her.

Oh my goodness. I emptied my backpack.

She was so light.

And so proud of her team, which surprised her a little.

I think of her as the conductor of an orchestra who taught the music so well that the players kept playing while she stepped away from the podium.

Her boss saw all of it.

Not long after, she got the promotion she had been certain was out of reach when we started.

She almost gave up on ever stepping into that role, because she genuinely could not picture how she’d do it all while still carrying everything she was carrying.

And as her load came down, the threshold came to her.

The doorway of opportunity came back around.

She had a bit of a misattribution.

She thought the heavy thing was getting through the doorway.

It was the pack.

Lighter, not finished

You don’t have to decide anything today.

You don’t have to be certain, and you don’t have to cross.

That’s not what this part is for.

What I’d like you to leave with is a little more breathing room.

Maybe the heaviness wasn’t all the doorway.

Maybe some of it was what you’ve been carrying toward it.

And maybe you don’t have to carry all of that forward.

Some of what’s in there was never yours.

Some of it was yours once and isn’t anymore.

Some of it is genuinely yours and can be carried differently.

And some of it belongs to somebody who would have said yes if you’d asked, which is more people than you think.

Setting something down is not giving up. Sometimes it’s how you make room for yourself again.

You get to choose what you carry forward.

So:

Sit with those for a bit.

Nothing has to move yet.

And then, when you’re ready, notice what shifts.

Because when the pack is lighter, the doorway starts to look less like a leap.

If I’m not carrying all of this, maybe I could actually take a step.

That’s where we go next.

~ Cathy

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Research referenced

A few of the ideas behind this article, if you want to go further into any of them.

Nathan Novemsky, Ravi Dhar, Norbert Schwarz and Itamar Simonson, “Preference Fluency in Choice” (Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2007, pp. 347 to 356). The font experiments, and the finding that naming the real source of the strain takes it back off the decision.

Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales and Leidy Klotz, “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes” (Nature, Vol. 592, No. 7853, 2021, pp. 258 to 261). Why removing something rarely occurs to us, and why the bias grows when we are already carrying a lot.

Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake, now Vanessa Bohns, “If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance With Direct Requests for Help” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 1, 2008, pp. 128 to 143). People underestimate how many others will say yes, by roughly half.

Lars Schwabe and Oliver Wolf, “Stress Prompts Habit Behavior in Humans” (Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 29, No. 22, 2009, pp. 7191 to 7198). Why sustained load pushes us toward repeating yesterday.

Adam Grant, Give and Take (2013). The difference between giving that empties you and giving that sustains you.

Feature photo by Jungsik Kwak from Pexels

Frequently asked questions

Why does a decision feel so heavy even when I already know what I want?

Because you are rarely deciding with your whole mind. Part of it is busy holding everything else. When deciding feels hard, we assume the decision is hard, and sometimes it is. Often the strain is coming from somewhere else entirely and getting attached to the choice in front of you. Naming where it is actually coming from can take that false weight off the decision.

How do I know if I’m carrying too much?

The clearest sign is not how busy you are. It is how much of what you are carrying you actually chose. Load you picked up on purpose, that stretches you toward something you care about, tends to give energy back. Load that accumulated quietly, a yes here and a favour there, tends to take it. Start there rather than with the size of the list.

How do I tell what’s actually mine to carry?

Ask a different question than the one most of us ask. Not “can I handle this,” because you probably can, and that is usually the trouble. Ask “does this belong to me.” I use a simple sort I call Responsibility Mapping: three circles on a page, labelled I, we, and you, and every item goes in one of them. Most people put far more in the I circle than actually belongs there.

What is the EASYYA funnel?

Five questions I run with clients when we are emptying a backpack, in order. Eliminate: can it be eliminated? Automate: can it be automated? Simplify: can it be simplified? You: do you need to be the one who does it? And Yet Again: when will you run this again? Three of the five come before we ever get to who does the work, which is deliberate. It is easy to spend an afternoon deciding who should own something that never needed doing at all.

Isn’t setting something down just giving up, or pushing work onto other people?

That worry is usually the thing keeping the pack full, so it is worth taking seriously. Setting something down is not the same as dropping it. The test is whether it has a named owner afterward. Handing something off with context and a rhythm is not abandoning it, and asking somebody to do something that is genuinely within their job is not an imposition. It is the job.

What if the decision is genuinely hard, and not just heavy?

Then it is hard, and unpacking will not make it easy. Some crossings ask something real of you no matter how well you have sorted the pack. What unpacking can do is change how heavy the door feels, and how heavy you judge it to be. That is a real share of what most people are up against, and it is the share you can actually do something about. You are not aiming for a light door. You are aiming for a door that weighs its own weight, so you can judge it honestly.