When Success Makes You Doubt Your Value–Conflating Achievement with Love

“I’ve worked hard to be successful, and now I’m struggling with whether it is taking up too much of my identity. I feel like my strategy may be turning in on itself.”

“Will people like me or want to hang with me….okay, fine, love me, apart from everything I provide for them?”

Sometimes people actually ask these questions; sometimes they are the questions underneath the questions. I’m going to do my best to answer from both an intellectual and emotional framework.

If you are a smart and forward-thinking High Achiever, you probably have multipotentiality—the realized and latent potential to excel across diverse areas of doing and being (ie, you are either doing a bunch of cool stuff or could, and when people ask you what you’re good at, it’s hard to answer the question). While clearly that’s a competitive advantage, it also means you are likely the go-to resource for those around you. What starts out as personal and relational validation can morph into deep questions about your own identity and value to others.

We want to help people because we care and we are generous. Sometimes it’s more painful to watch the problem exist than to solve it. If you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, like most of my clients, you think that anything within your circle of influence is also your responsibility.

This combination of caring, competence, and responsibility makes you an invaluable intellectual or emotional resource to those around you. You are literally an asset.

When we’re an asset, we get affirmation, productivity, impact, and the satisfaction of seeing problems solved—all of it congruent with who we are as people.

That interconnectedness is damning.

Because while being an asset aligns with our personal needs, talents, and intentions, being an asset all the time leaves little room for how we actually feel about ourselves or for assessing how people feel about us if we aren’t producing. Do you have any idea how many times and how hard it’s been to help high achievers create 10 minutes of non-productive time?

Because we are continuous learners, our value to others increases over time. As we grow, the interconnection between asset development and the self-induced pressure of achievement becomes more entrenched and potentially more destructive. The better we get, the worse the trap becomes.

If we had early experiences that taught us to think less of ourselves, the potential for damnable confusion begins to lead us to the edges of hellfire.

Because there, surrounded by applause and grateful people, we may find ourselves empty and emotionally alone.

Not sure if you are feeling heard or completely freaked out right now, but stay with me.

I promise I won’t make you less successful. 

I promise I won’t tell you to slow down. 

I promise I won’t tell you that you are valuable.

 What I will do is give you more work (that feels better, doesn’t it?).

There are two separate but intersecting pieces of work. The first is on your personal belief systems. The second is adjusting your relational equations.

Why do you think people are valuable? Is it their sheer existence? Is it the quality and amount of what they produce? Is it their moral decision-making?

Do you assess yourself the same or differently from how you assess other people? Are there places where you hold yourself to a higher standard of justifying your value?

Brace yourself.

The only way you’ll know if people love you for you is to sometimes do less. I know that makes you cringe, so I have a rubric to walk you through it. First, here are two principles that the rubric rests on.

1. Relationships run on an unspoken scoreboard.

Social Exchange Theory suggests that relationships have an unspoken scoreboard. In my book, I explain how resentment occurs, how to prevent it, and how to resolve it. Succinctly: resentment happens when we give, and we get less back than we expected. Instead of energy netting zero or positive, it’s negative. Instead of ROI on our investment translating into positive emotion, it diminishes and becomes negative.

This concept isn’t about love being transactional. It’s about the difference between loving someone and wanting to be in a close relationship with them, which is the second principle.

2. Unconditional love is not the same as an unconditional relationship.

We all want to be loved without conditions. But we need to differentiate between being loved and feeling loved in a relationship where people actually want to hang out with us.

If we are faith-based, we may believe that God loves us completely and without expectation. We may love family members completely, even if we don’t want to be around them. It’s common for parents and children, regardless of age, to love each other without necessarily having a close relationship. You all know people you love but don’t really like. The love is unconditional. The amount of time you want to hang with them isn’t.

Relational reciprocity is not the same as earning love. Rather, the relationships where you feel like a person instead of an asset are the ones where the scoreboard nets out—and the scoreboard isn’t always about what people give you. Sometimes it’s about what they don’t take.

For me, I want to be around people who don’t drain my energy. The “exchange” can be as simple as having enough in common to relax with each other, rather than performing or giving.

With that frame, look at the relationships where people give back to you. Depending on where you are in your ability to accept help or love, you may not allow people to give to you because owing them feels scary. If you’re in that category, look for the people who try to give back to you. This is a fundamentally different group from the one that values you for what you can give them.

I’m going to walk you through the rubric that I use to protect myself from being viewed only as an asset. Your characteristics and vulnerabilities may differ from mine, but the overall framework generalizes across successful people. 

The five things you’re looking for:

1. The primary ways people view you as an asset
2. The warning flags of someone viewing you as only an asset
3. Your own vulnerability in allowing yourself to be treated as an asset (Damnation Differentiation)
4. How you’ll protect yourself from hellfire (heart loneliness)
5. The safety indicators that show you they value you as a human, not as what you give them

Patterns in the Ways People Value Me – Tricia as a Guinea Pig

1. I make them feel good about themselves.
2. I’m good at problem-solving and slicing through conundrums with real data.

Pattern 1: “I feel better after talking to you”

Damnation Differentiation: The truth is that those statements align with my core identity, so I don’t want them to stop. But the magic is when something comes back to me. It took me years to understand why my clients often give me flowers, cards, or gifts. The pattern remained across business permutations and specializations. I think it’s because they feel the love and understand that it’s personal and unrelated to what they are paying for. So even in the professional context, there is relational reciprocity.

Walking Away from Hellfire: The problem occurs when potential friends reach out only for emotional support or encouragement. If they ask about me, it’s only perfunctory. There isn’t anything wrong about the conversation itself; it’s that the relationship runs based on them needing me. I am a well-loved emotional support animal.

Safe for Engagement: The reciprocity in close relationships is that they are available to validate and encourage me—sometimes with a different skillset, sometimes without complete success. The important part is that they see and accept my vulnerability as a human being. The reciprocity isn’t quid pro quo. The overall feel of the relationship is balanced; we have multiple things in common and lean on each other.

Pattern 2: “You’re so smart—I’d love your take on this”

Bluntly, this is what my clients (both individuals and orgs) pay me for—even if they aren’t thinking about it that way.

Damnation Differentiation: My brain is working all the time and automatically synthesizes a lot of information. However, when I sort and pattern-match data to history, context, and in-the-moment information, I’m working. Because I’m emotionally intelligent and caring, this is usually wrapped in a package that looks like a conversation.

Walking Away from Hellfire: I subvert or hide my skillset until I trust people. Because I care, have the expertise, and love what I do, I can quickly go from a small suggestion to full-on engagement. I’m unaware of the energy use in the moment, but I feel it afterward. Because I’m passionate, some people don’t realize I’m working.

I don’t put a lot of energy into solving problems for people who aren’t my clients or my close reciprocal friends. I care about people, and I’m naturally generous. However, I’ve learned that:

1. a) Unsolicited problem-solving is not valued. b) Free problem-solving is not valued unless it’s in a close reciprocal relationship. c) Non-reciprocated problem-solving leads people to see me as a superhuman widget rather than a human.

Safe for Engagement: My clients get it, and they are amazing. The friends who get it rarely use the skillset. When they do, they say things like “I need you professionally for a moment” or “I didn’t want to put you into work mode on the weekend.”

It’s safe when the person is either at the same intellectual level and can be a sounding board for me, OR they give back in their own way. There have been times when someone wasn’t aligned on those scales, but helped me in a heartbeat if I needed something fixed at my house or another more tangible way. It’s not the actual actions or their frequency. It’s knowing that this person is wholeheartedly available to you, just as you are to them.

The right people are overtly or covertly protective of me. They notice when I extend beyond what’s normal without me having to describe what normal is. They respect my time, don’t take my generosity for granted, and don’t turn my flexibility into a standard appliance that adjusts to their crises.

The upside of creating space and calibrating your responses is that you will be able to identify who can value you for you.

I’m not sure if there is anything more vulnerable than figuring out how to be a high achiever and how to feel completely loved. It’s easy for us to retreat from the process. If you can anticipate some of the disappointments, it will be a little easier to stay in the process.

When you are testing, you’ll find that some people can’t reciprocate. It may be because they have their own ceilings of relational capacity–the depth they can offer, their ability to give, and their ability to be vulnerable. Some may keep you inside the box of who they think you are because changing how they view you may upset their worldview or relational system. 

Alternatively, some friends will love you regardless of your achievement, but that doesn’t mean they will always be able to reciprocate in the precise way you need. Last week, I called a friend and told him I needed validation for a hard decision I’d made. He sucked at giving me what I actually needed, BUT he had called me within 7 minutes of receiving my text because he knew I wasn’t okay.

If you’re still reading, you already suspect that the effort might be worth it, so here are two reminders.

When we’ve learned to value ourselves apart from our performance, there’s more oxygen in the room. We don’t change into a different person. There’s just a little more buffer to be human and adjust to life with less pressure. 

Love fills us and fuels us…both the love and respect we give to ourselves and that which we receive from others. 

The work is worth every second of pain, frustration, effort, and uncertainty. I do understand you need to live it to believe it. It takes practice, and it will get easier.

You’ve got this. If you are successful, and most definitely if you have a high-achieving personality, you’ve already proven that you can do hard and uncomfortable things; you can do this too.

Dr. Tricia Groff is an executive coach, psychologist, confidante, and strategic partner, and author of Relational Genius. She works with high-achieving executives on intersecting systems of personal, business, and emerging change. drtriciagroff.com