Sustainable Excellence for Forward-Thinking High Achievers
“Dr. Tricia, I’m scared that you’ll tell me to slow down. Everyone tells me to just slow down, and it’s not particularly helpful.”
Most High Achievers want to feel like they are killing it, but also crave a sense of ease in doing so. Hustle culture assumes a linear correlation between consistent effort and results. Pop psychology (and many relatives) focus on relaxation. Rather than working at either end of the spectrum, sustainable excellence means protecting the asset, optimizing energy, and prioritizing a multi-faceted identity.
Protecting The Asset
The Story of the Goose & The Golden Eggs
You know the fable: the farmer kills the goose to get all the golden eggs at once. Gets nothing. Loses everything.
Stephen Covey’s insight: You are the goose. Your production is the golden eggs.
The number one mistake I see in high achieving clients: they don’t view or treat themselves as an asset. They kill the goose slowly through ignored physical limits and depleted energy. The breakdown is gradual—and thus ignored until symptoms are bad.
Like the goose, we are bound by physical laws of nature. When people ignore the boundaries of energy, they compromise the asset both physically and emotionally. The breakdown to the goose is gradual, and thus often ignored until the symptoms are bad.
Buffer
Buffer is the amount of emotional energy in our reserves. How much more stress can you handle without screaming horrible things at your family, walking out on your job, or developing chronic headaches/stomach aches? The answer to that question tells you how much buffer you have.
No energy = no drive. Many High Achievers assume that drive is based on personality. It is, but a High Achiever personality needs emotional and physical energy to support the drive. People fear that lower motivation means they are losing themselves. That’s not what’s happening. The buffer is depleted; the tank is empty.
High Achievers can increase their awareness of energy demands by creating a chart of responsibilities with weighted values for the amount of energy gained or lost.
Client Chart of Energy Fuels & Drains
The Personality-Biology-Energy Loop: Sleep, Anxiety & Depression
Sleep
High Achievers are often processing and problem-solving while they are sleeping. Further, their analytical approach tends to create a blindspot about the actual amount of stress they carry. Both cognitive processing and stress increase physiological arousal, disrupting sleep.
Anxiety
High Achievers often assume they should be able to think themselves out of emotion, but even strong people have anxiety. Both clinical and situational anxiety create an immense strain on coping resources, such that the experience itself and the energy used to deal with it depletes energy.
Feeling in a Funk & Depression
Both clinical depression and feeling in a funk create a sense of lethargy and feeling trapped. The combined emotional and physiological impact decreases High Achievers’ ability to perform, which further drains energy. High Achievers are often unaware of what is happening until it catches up to them.
From Dr. Tricia:
In the middle of writing about anxiety and depression, my friend texted me. She expressed frustration that she can’t remember happy memories, saying she only remembers the negative.
I responded that she’s dealing with a mix of trauma, depression, and anxiety, so of course, her brain won’t remember the happy things right now.
She responded, “Yeah, well, my brain better shape itself up.”
I laughed, but this response is typical for High Achievers. There is a sense of frustration and impatience because anxiety and depression feel outside of one’s control. Pick up all the tools and resources to obtain optimal emotional wellness as best you can. BUT, try your best to give yourself the space to heal rather than adding more stress on top of your expectations of what you and your brain should or shouldn’t feel.
Focus & Energy: The High Achiever Vulnerability
Forward thinking High Achievers have two characteristics that make them especially vulnerable to fragmented focus and energy drain.
1. High Aptitude
High Achievers confuse the number of things they CAN do with the number of items they SHOULD do.
2. The “Go-To” Person
High achievers, because of their intelligence and reliability, are often sought out to problem-solve or put out fires. Their dedication to others makes them inclined to help. Together, these characteristics result in tension between the desire for focused execution and the needs of others.
Contrarian Strategies to Protect Energy & Increase Focus
Strategic Under-Performance
“If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.” Okay…but how well? Should we do everything with excellence? It sounds great in theory, but this strategy conflicts with the reality of limited time, energy, and finances.
When I was in my PhD program, I realized that I had no idea how to differentiate the amount of effort to get an A versus a B. I had always done everything to the absolute best of my ability and had gotten A’s as a result. But what if I could learn the same amount of information, and still get an A with 75% of my capacity instead of 100% of my capacity? I systematically varied my efforts until I figured out the point at which additional efforts yielded diminishing returns. The real-life application of this is knowing the result we want and how much effort we need in order to get it. Without that knowledge, we put ceilings on our success because we inadvertently waste time and/or money on items in which additional investment will not get us closer to our goals.
The Mendoza Line
Most people have heard that we are able to get more mileage out of honing our strengths than we do by remediating our weaknesses. The Mendoza line refers to the minimal performance on our weaknesses that will allow us to continue playing in the game. It is a baseball reference to an excellent outfield player with a low batting average. The batting average was just high enough to allow him to continue playing professional baseball. The friend who introduced me to this concept said that he seeks to hit the Mendoza line for his weaknesses but puts the majority of effort into honing and stretching his strengths.
Befriend FOMO
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) interferes with focus as we chase opportunity. If you are focused, you absolutely will miss out on information and opportunities. On the other hand, accepting that fact allows us to hone in on what we really want to achieve.
The Benefit of Multi-faceted Identity & Work-Life Tension
Paradoxically, what fragments focus also protects the asset.
A Multi-faceted Identity for a Strong Table of Resilience
Have you ever felt singularly focused on one dimension of life?
It’s cleaner and easier to run this way–fewer distractions or competing priorities.
However, a singular identity creates vulnerability.
What happens when a businessperson invests her heart and soul ONLY into a business and the business is irretrievably lost through tragedy or litigation?
By contrast, if she has several nonwork relationships and feels good about her fitness, she knows that at least there are two areas of her life that are still intact. This is the difference between super-stressed but still standing…. and SPLAT.
Imagine a table that is strongly supported by multiple legs, rather than just one. A person may have a work identity, a sports identity, a family identity. These identities sometimes make High Achievers feel MORE stressed in the moment, but they foster long-term resilience and fulfillment.
As with many important disciplines, it is difficult to fully realize the return on our investment in the moment. We notice it when a stressor hits. Or maybe our primary identity is threatened, but we still feel grounded. Our table is strong.