Who carries the poop bag?

The people-pleasing pattern that's stealing your creative dreams

Dec 11, 2025

A coaching client—one with creative dreams she barely lets herself talk about—was eager to tell me about her morning dog walk. What she discovered was a people-pleasing pattern she couldn’t unsee.

Her husband picked up after their dog. She immediately said, “I’ll carry the poop bag.”

He looked at her, confused. “Why? I got it.”

She stopped walking.

Why did I just offer to carry the poop?

And then it hit her: I am literally offering to carry the shit for other people.

Not just with the dog. At work, she volunteers to take things off her boss’s plate before he asks. At home, she jumps in to handle things before anyone else even notices. Everywhere she turns, she’s offering to carry other people’s shit. She hadn’t learned the power of saying no—of boundaries—and it was costing her everything.

The dream she whispers

This same client mentioned—voice dropping low—that she wants to write a children’s book.

Her whole face changed when she talked about it. She has books on illustration. She loves to doodle. On vacation, the first thing she wants to do is draw and write.

Recently, she felt a lump in her throat. She recorded a voice memo to sort it out. What came out? A children’s book.

“I’ve been wanting to write this book,” she said. “But I can’t quit my job.”

I stopped her right there.

The false choice

“You don’t have to quit your job to write a children’s book.”

She paused.

“But you have to stop carrying shit for other people.”

She laughed. “Yeah. You’re right.”

We talked about where her time goes instead of toward her book. Emails, she said. Hours spent wordsmithing emails.

“The robot can do that,” I told her. “That’s a Claude or ChatGPT thing.”

Then I told her about a concert I attended last winter.

The surgeon who conducts

My son’s orchestra teacher performs in an amateur orchestra. I went to hear her play. When I opened the program, I was stunned: the orchestra director is a surgeon.

This person performs surgery during the day. And in his spare time, he directs an orchestra.

If he can be a surgeon AND direct an orchestra, you can do your job AND write a children’s book.

But you have to stop offering to carry the shit. And you have to let the robot help.

Not offering

I’ve written about saying no. And I’m learning that there’s something else just as powerful:

Not offering.

Another client learned this when she got promoted. She’d been trained—as an Afro-Latina mother in predominantly white institutions—to make her voice heard. So she spoke up in meetings reflexively. Then she realized: every time she added her voice, she gave herself work.

“Not everything needs my voice,” she told me.

Because if you offer to carry the poop—if you offer to take intellectual or emotional leadership on something—people will say yes. Nobody wants to carry the poop.