When Your Ideas Become Your Burden
You are known as a person with a lot of ideas.
You are a possibility thinker, who is highly creative.
Your leadership loves these ideas. You feel good.
As your ideas keep adding, your to-do list grows. So does your team's.
And underneath both, a quieter list: ideas that never got finished at all.
You feel guilty now because your best skill has become your heaviest weight, for you, for your team, and for every idea still sitting half-built.
These ideas sit in your decks, your backlogs, your "we'll circle back to this" conversations that never happen again.
No one's accountable for closing them. They just accumulate, taking up mental space long after the meeting that birthed them leaving you with the guilt that you are not a finisher.
There are reasons why you let this happen:
Ideas are rewarded in the room that gives the idea giver a high.
Generating ideas feels like contribution.
Accountability is not enforced.
When ideas become your burden, here are a few pointers to get balance the identity between idea generator Vs idea finisher that I have learnt from my clients:
Communicate idea generation Vs idea commitments differently: Ideas must turn into commitments with a conscious will and a different language.
Ask for resources: You cannot keep doign additional work just because you generated the idea. Ask for additional budgets, resources to bring your idea to life.
Say No to execution: Not every idea needs a build. Have a good idea classification mechanism.Clearly articulate which ideas you will say no to as you are above capacity.
Carve time for closing loops: Idea generation opens a new thread. Finishing ideas closes the loop. Carving time for finishing helps you to have optimum ideas on the open loops.
Parking lot: Park your next big ideas for the future.
