The Beautiful

Trap Behind

Being Needed

BY JEN LOFGREN
Incito Executive & Leadership Development

SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

In November 2019, I received my first WXN Entrepreneur award.

I remember feeling proud. I also remember feeling tired in a way that was harder to admit.

On paper, so much was working. I had a 12-year-old daughter, a thriving business, a full roster of executive coaching clients, a talented team of coaches, and meaningful board roles, including with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. Incito was growing. My work mattered. People were calling. I was needed.

And yet, standing inside that success, I felt lonely.

Not ungrateful. Not unhappy. Just aware that the very thing I had worked so hard to build was becoming difficult to carry. I was proud of what existed, but I was also quietly worried about how I would keep it all going.

At the time, I did not have the language for what I know now. Being needed had given me purpose, success, and community. It had shaped much of my career and identity. But I was beginning to understand that being needed is not the same as belonging.

That realization came slowly, through exhaustion, decision fatigue, and the gradual loss of joy in things I deeply cared about.

I had always been highly self-reliant. Some of that came from growing up feeling unvalued and learning early that I had to count on myself. I became good at working hard, figuring things out, and being someone others could count on. In my technology career, that drive helped me develop high-demand niche skills. Later, in coaching and entrepreneurship, it helped me build a business rooted in judgment, courage, and deep care for people.

It also shaped how I found community. Through rock climbing and volunteering, I discovered places where I felt accepted and connected. Volunteering gave me communities with shared purpose and allowed me to contribute to something bigger than myself. I rarely asked for anything from others. My orientation was service: to people, to family, to clients, to community, to the work.

For a long time, that served me well. It still does, in many ways.

But strengths have shadows.

By 2019 and into 2021, I was starting to feel the limit of being needed. I was not just busy. I was depleted in ways that were beginning to affect what made my work meaningful.

I was losing creativity in program design. Thought leadership, which had once felt energizing, began to feel heavier. I had been writing Forbes articles monthly and producing a newsletter, yet increasingly, the ideas had to be pulled out of me rather than flowing naturally. Our marketing firm looked to me for direction, and I could feel how much of the business still depended on my energy, my decisions, and my ability to keep imagining what came next.

I had decision fatigue. I struggled to think strategically. I felt less joy at work and less joy at home.

That was hard to admit because the business was successful. Clients were happy. The team was talented. Opportunities were coming. From the outside, the story looked like growth. From the inside, I could feel the cost of being at the centre of too many things.

The very qualities that helped me build Incito, including self-reliance, service, care, and work ethic, were also making it hard for me to let others carry the load with me.

That is one of the complexities of achievement. Sometimes the patterns that create success are the same patterns that eventually ask to be re-examined. Being needed can be quietly satisfying. It can make us feel important, useful, and secure. For those of us who learned early to earn acceptance through contribution, being needed can even feel like belonging.

But it is not the same thing.

Belonging does not require us to be endlessly useful. It does not ask us to hold everything together in order to matter. It gives us places where we can be valued for who we are, not only for what we provide. Once I began to see that more clearly, I started to make different choices.

By 2021, I was saying no more often and stepping back from some volunteer and board roles. I started making more courageous asks of the people around me. I asked for help sooner, shared more of what I was carrying, and became more honest with myself about what truly needed my attention and what could be held by others.

I also began protecting more space for the work that required creativity, strategy, and deep thought, instead of allowing every need around me to become my responsibility.

One of the most important choices I made during that period was to begin exploring what partnership could look like inside Incito. I did not yet know exactly what form it would take, but I knew I could not keep building a business where so much depended on me.

I started looking more closely at the places where I felt connected. Was I there because I belonged, or because I was useful? Was I contributing from choice, or from an old belief that my value came from being needed?

Those questions changed me.

They did not make me care less. I still care deeply about my work, my clients, my family, and my community. But I am learning that care does not have to mean carrying everything. Contribution is meaningful, but it is not the only way to belong.

For many years, being needed gave me purpose. It helped me build a business, serve clients, contribute to my community, and create a meaningful career. I do not regret that. But I can see now that being needed also became a beautiful trap.

Perhaps part of the work of a meaningful life is learning to contribute deeply without confusing usefulness with belonging.