Through the Character: competence, responsibility and being the person everyone relies on

Bob fixes things. It is his job, reputation and, to a large extent, the role through which everybody around him knows him. Something breaks, a problem appears, a job needs doing – and Bob is the person expected to know what happens next.

There is something reassuring about characters like Bob. He is capable, dependable and willing to help. When a problem appears, he approaches it with the assumption that some kind of solution can be found. Those are strengths. But there is another psychological question hiding inside that reality: What happens when being capable stops being something you do and starts becoming who everybody expects you to be?

Psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe (2001) describe contingencies of self-worth: areas of life in which people come to stake their person value. When worth become strongly tied to competence or achievement, succeeding can feel like evidence that we are valuable; while struggling, failing or needing help can begin to feel like evidence that something is wrong with us.

We cannot, of course, ask Bob whether his self-worth depends on fixing things. He is an animated character whose occupation quite literally revolves around solving practical problems. But that exaggerated role gives us a useful way into something very human.

Some people become known as the capable one. The reliable colleague, the child who never causes trouble, the friend who sorts everything out, the family member everyone calls when something goes wrong. At first, being relied upon can feel affirming, eventually, though, another question can appear: If I am the person who fixes everything, what happens when I am the one who cannot fix it?

When being reliable also means taking care of everyone else

Bob’s responsibility does not end when the practical problems has ben solved.

The machines around him are not simply equipment. Within Bob’s world, they have names, personalities, fears, disagreements, moments of confidence and moments when things go wrong. Bob is responsible not only for making sure the job gets finished, but frequently for helping the characters around him manage whatever happens along the way.

This makes his role closer to caregiving than his job title initially suggests.

There is a particular kind of responsibility involved in becoming the person who notices what needs doing, reassures everybody else, solves the practical problems and keeps things moving. When somebody becomes consistently good at doing those things, the people around them can gradually stop asking whether they can carry the responsibility and bing simply assuming that they will.

Research on caregiving offers a useful concept here: role overload. Pearlin and colleagues’ (1990) stress-process model described caregiving stress as extending beyond the immediate tasks of providing care. Responsibility can also create secondary strains in other roles and affect how caregivers experience themselves. Later research has continued to associate greater role overload with poorer psychological wellbeing among caregivers.

Of course, Bob is not presented as an overwhelmed caregiver in need of intervention. His relationships with the machines are affectionate, collaborative and often joyful. Being needed can provide connection,, competence and purpose; but that is exactly what makes the comparison interesting.

Responsibility does not have to be unwanted before it becomes heavy. Someone can love being dependable and genuinely want to help. They can take pride in being the person that others trust – and still reach a point where everybody else’s confidence in them leaves very little room for uncertainty, tiredness or needing somebody else to take over.

When the people around you become accustomed to hearing “yes we can,” it may become surprisingly difficult to imagine saying: “Not this time, I need some help too.”

When “I can” quietly becomes “I have to”

There is an important difference between being capable of carrying responsibility and feeling that you are allowed to put it down. Bob’s familiar question “Can we fix it?”, is usually met with confidence. Problems are approached as solvable, everybody has a role, and Bob helps bring the pieces together. There is something genuinely positive in that sense of collective competence – even if it is sometimes with hesitance through Lofty. But outside a cartoon world, being repeatedly identified as the person who can cope can gradually create another expectation: that you always will.

Caregiving research offers a useful idea here. Related work to the above stress-process model describes role captivity: the experience of feeling unable to step away from a role that has come to dominate what is expected of you (Aneshensel, Pearlin and Schuler, 1993). Although, we should be careful not to project that experience onto Bob himself. He generally appears to enjoy his work, care about his team and take pride in what they accomplish together; but his exaggerated reliability allows us to ask a question that extends well beyond him.

What happens when somebody becomes so consistently competent that other people stop noticing the effort involved?

Sometimes the reliable person is given more responsibility precisely because they have handled responsibility well before. They are trusted with another problem, another person’s feelings, another practical task, another situation that “they’ll know how to sort out”. Their competence becomes the reason they receive fewer opportunities to be uncertain, overwhelmed or cared for themselves. Eventually, “I know how to do this” can become tangled up with “therefore, I should be the one who does it” and those are not the same thing.

Being capable does not make somebody endlessly available. Being dependable does not mean they never need reassurance. And being the person who usually knows how to fix things, does not mean they should always have to be the one holding the toolbox.

Who looks after the person who looks after everyone else?

Bob spends a remarkable amount of time noticing what everybody else needs.

A machine is worried, somebody has made a mistake, a job is going wrong, someone needs encouragement, reassurance or a practical solution. Bob’s role repeatedly places him in the position of responding; not only to the work itself, but to the people and personalities around him.

What is less visible, is the reverse question: Who notices what Bob needs?

That question matters beyond Bob’s fictional world because people who become established as capable caregivers can sometimes receive less attention precisely because they appear to need less of it. Their competence reassures everybody around them. They are coping, they know what they are doing and they will ask if they need anything.

Except, being able to provide support and having enough support ourselves are two different things.

A meta-analysis by del-Pino-Casado and colleagues (2018), drawing on 56 studies of informal caregivers, found that greater perceived social support was moderately associated with lower subjective caregiver burden. Interestingly, simply receiving practical support showed a much weaker relationship. What appeared particularly important was whether caregivers felt that support was available to them.

Support is not only somebody occasionally taking a task off your hands. It can also mean knowing that uncertainty is permitted, that asking for help will be met without judgement, and that our value to other people does not disappear when we are temporarily unable to provide what they usually rely on us for.

Bob’s world generally gives him a team. Wendy, the machines and the wider community contribute to getting things done; he is not literally carrying every responsibility alone. But his position as the person at the centre of that team still gives us an interesting way of thinking about the reliable people in our own lives. Sometimes the person who seems least likely to need checking on is the person everybody has simply become accustomed to not checking on. Competence can make need surprisingly easy to overlook.

When asking for help feels like failing

There is an irony in becoming known as the person who helps everybody else: receiving help can begin to feel strangely uncomfortable.

Bob’s competence is part of what makes him reassuring. he usually knows what needs doing, how the team can approach a problem and how to get things moving again. If we imagine that role becoming part of someone’s identity outside of his fictional world, admitting “I don’t know what to do” can begin to feel like more than acknowledging a difficult task. It can feel like contradicting something important about who they are supposed to be.

Psychologists Arie Nadler and Jeffrey Fisher (1986) developed the threat-to-self-esteem model of receiving help, which proposes that assistance can sometimes be experienced negatively when receiving it implies incompetence, inferiority or dependence. Whether help feels supportive or threatening depends partly on what the help means to the person receiving it.

This becomes particularly interesting when competence is something on which a person has come to stake their self-worth. Crocker and Wolfe’s (2001) work on contingencies of self-worth suggests that success and failure have a stronger effect on self-esteem when they occur in areas through which people judge their own value.

For somebody whose identity has become “I am the one who copes”, needing help a therefore carry a meaning that the person offering it never intended. The offer might say: “you don’t have to do this alone”, but the person receiving it may hear: “you couldn’t handle this”.

That does not mean capable people secretly resent support, or that receiving help inevitably damages self-esteem. It means that accepting care can be surprisingly complicated when independence and competence have become central to how somebody understands themselves. Perhaps this is another thing Bob’s exaggerated reliability helps us notice. Being able to fix things is a strength, being able to say “I can’t fix this by myself” may be one too.

Being valuable when you are not useful

There is a subtle difference between feeling valued and feeling useful.

Bob is useful almost constantly. He builds, repairs, organises, reassure and solves problem. His usefulness is visible: when something needs doing, there is an obvious reason for everybody to be pleased that Bob is there.

For people who become accustomed to being valued for what they provide, however, usefulness can begin to feel uncomfortably close to worth.

Crocker and Wolfe’s (2001) work on contingencies of self-worth helps explain why. When people stake their self-worth on particular domains, including competence, successes and failures within those domains can have a greater impact on how they evaluate themselves. If being capable has become part of the evidence we use to decide that we are worthwhile, periods in which we cannot perform, achieve or help may feel threatening for reasons that go far beyond the task itself.

Research on self-compassion offers an interesting contrast. Neff and Vonk (2009) found that self-compassion as associated with more stable feelings of self-worth and was less dependent on particular outcomes than global self-esteem. rather than requiring someone continually to demonstrate competence before treating themselves as worthy, self-compassion allows room for limitation, mistakes and difficulty without turning them into judgements about the whole self. That distinction feels particularly important for the person who is always relied upon.

You do not stop mattering when you have nothing useful to offer.

You do not become less deserving of care because somebody else has to carry the problem for a while. Rest does not have to be earned by reaching the bottom of the to-do list and needing support does not cancel out all the times you have been able to provide it.

Bob’s usefulness is an obvious part of his character, but if we reduced him entirely to what he can build, repair or organise, we would be doing something remarkably similar to the problem running throughout Through the Character: taking one highly visible role and allowing it to become the whole person.

Bob is a builder. He is also a friend, teammate, somebody who encourages others, somebody who makes mistakes, and somebody whose place within his community should not logically disappear on the first day he cannot fix what it broken.

Perhaps the challenge for the reliable person is not learning that competence does not matter, it’s learning that their worth does not depend on being competent every moment of every day.

More than the person who fixes things

Bob’s reliability is one of his greatest strengths. He approaches problems with confidence, works collaboratively, cares about the people and machines around him and, and keeps going when a job becomes difficult. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about being capable, dependable or proud of being someone others can trust. The difficulty begins when a strength becomes an expectation with no room for anything else.

When “you are good at this” quietly becomes “therefore you must always do it”. When being the person who helps makes it harder to be the person who needs help. And when usefulness becomes so closely tied to identity that putting the toolbox down begins to feel like letting everybody down.

Perhaps the lesson Bob offers us is not that reliable people should become less reliable. It is that reliability works best when it remains something a person can offer, rather than something they are never permitted to withdraw.

The capable person is still allowed to be tired. The caregiver is still allowed to need care. The person who usually knows the answer is still allowed to say “I don’t know,” and somebody who has spent years being valued for what they can fix should not have to wait until something becomes completely unmanageable before discovering whether they would still be valued if, for once, they could not fix it.

Bob may always be the builder, but, like every character in this series, and every person outside of it, he contains more than people know him for.

Next month in Through the Character

On December 1st, we turn to a character who is rarely asked to become anything other than exactly who he is:

What Eeyore Knows About Being Loved Without Being Fixed.

A look at sadness, acceptance, belonging – and why difficult emotions do not have to disappear before somebody is worthy of friendship and care.

References & Further Reading

Aneshensel, C. S., Pearlin, L. I., & Schuler, R. H. (1993). Stress, role captivity, and the cessation of caregiving. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 34(1), 54–70.

Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.

del-Pino-Casado, R., Frías-Osuna, A., Palomino-Moral, P. A., Ruzafa-Martínez, M., & Ramos-Morcillo, A. J. (2018). Social support and subjective burden in caregivers of adults and older adults: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 13(1), e0189874.

Nadler, A., & Fisher, J. D. (1986). The role of threat to self-esteem and perceived control in recipient reaction to help: Theory development and empirical validation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 81–122.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Pearlin, L. I., Mullan, J. T., Semple, S. J., & Skaff, M. M. (1990). Caregiving and the stress process: An overview of concepts and their measures. The Gerontologist, 30(5), 583–594.