Unpacking Overachievement (Perspectives to Help You Find Balance)
What’s your relationship with achievement? Do you allow your achievements to define your sense of self? Where is most of your energy going? To achieve (driven by the external) or to create (driven by the internal)?
Why does it matter and what’s the difference, right? Lets get into it…..
At first glance you might put these two terms in the same category; they both center around the concept of doing. They might seem one in the same, however the intention behind creating vs. achieving is very different.
They both have their benefits given that they’re used in a balanced and intentional way.
A different intention creates a different result. A result that is born from true, authentic intention will always bring more betterment for all involved.
Creating is guided by the inward makings of who you are, while achieving is driven by the external world. Meaning that, what we are told, what we have to do to get what we want or unconsciously think we should do, is what’s leading when it comes to achieving.
Lets dive into differentiating these two terms and see if clarifying them can help you design a life based on your own truth & terms and from the unique foundation of who you are vs. who you are told or taught to be by others.
TO CREATE
Create: to put into existence; to cause something to happen as a result of one’s actions.
We. Are. Creative. Beings. There’s a freedom in this statement as creativity has no box (unless our man made instincts put one on it.) Creativity comes in all forms, sizes, mediums and expressions. Your way of creating is your unique expression to define.
When I speak of creativity, I’m talking about aspects beyond art. I clarify this because I’ve come across many whom believe that creativity is a word only for the “artists” & “creatives” of the world. (Remember; However you define yourself to be is true, be mindful of how you self identify.)
If you deem that you’re a creative, you will be way more likely to create. On the other hand, having the limiting belief that you are not creative is how you detached from the creative aspects of yourself.
*Tip: Be mindful of putting a creative limit on yourself. Let me remind you that you are creative. We all are. What is required is for you to decode how your unique creativity is to be unleashed. Begin rediscovering how your creativity is expressed by reconnecting to the belief that you are a creative person.
Your creativity is expressed within every choice you make. (Whether you acknowledge this or not.) How you organize your day and what you fill it with is a creative act. Where you choose to live, how you choose to live, what you decide is high priority, the way you think, the way you spend your days and the people you choose to fill them with are all creative choices.
These choices create what is your life. These choices directly align with how you feel. Overtime these continuous micro choices that make up your days make up the essence and energy of your overall life.
As we’ve all heard; You are the creator of your own life. Truly owning this fact is where our outward lives can shift and change in a way that’s aligned with who we are internally.
Creating is very personal. Creating is an inward art. Your creative process is something to protect, practice and hold true to you. It’s your sacred work.
It’s very different than achieving.
TO ACHIEVE
Achieve: to succeed in something, to gain, to obtain, as a result of exertion; to succeed in gaining, to win.
With achieving being outwardly based, the energy behind it tends to be “louder” because it’s less personal and more defined by our society. This is not good or bad; it just is. This is not my attempt to point you toward creating vs. achieving. There’s a time and place for both. They are both needed and productive in their own right.
The key is being able to decipher where the balance point lives within each concept. That has to do with you; What you want. What you desire. What you need to achieve to get to what you want & when to realize that it’s time to listen to your inward callings and create.
Q: Is it time to achieve or create?
Here’s a personal example for you: There was a time in my life where my “achieving” was necessary in order to create the business I have now. My writings, my words, the way I work with my clients, I can confidently say is a creative act. However, I “needed” the degree (achievement) and required amount of training hours & internships to be considered a “licensed therapist” (achievement) to be here now; Creating.
It takes intention and discernment to keep the act of achieving healthy since it’s more aligned with external accolades and outside acknowledgment & validation.
One negative habit I see continually in my work with client’s is the mistake of attaching self worth to achievement. This alignment between being “good enough” and what we deem we need to achieve to be “good enough” is what I recommend that you keep your eye on.
It can be sneaky to detect if you’ve tangled the two up. Knotting these two concepts up is more likely to happen if you were raised in an environment where you were overly praised for doing and achieving; Basically, where there was a lot of emphasis put on what you can (and should) do vs who you are. (Note: This is something to further unpack if you feel that there was a dynamic in your upbringing where you felt only truly acknowledged when you where outwardly achieving.)
Achieving becomes dangerous when it becomes a NEED to validate your self worth vs. a healthy accomplishment.
For Clarity: (*It does feel good to meet a goal and achieve something you have worked hard for; That’s healthy. What’s unhealthy is when your sole purpose of doing and achieving is to mask the fact that you have no self worth unless you are constantly doing, gaining, getting; Achieving.)
When your goals of what you want to achieve begin to drain and exhaust you, it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate the Why behind what you’re doing something for.
Here are some good questions to reflect on to help you evaluate your WHY:
Am I doing this for me or for how I believe I will be received by the outside world if I achieve this goal?
Where is the energy of this desire of mine coming from? My heart (my essence) or my head (my logic)?
Is my desire to accomplish this coming from something true within or from who I think I should, want or was told to be?
Just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with achieving and accomplishing. It’s only unhealthy when it’s out of balance. Achieving is very beneficial when it gets you to where you want to go. The key is to achieve for reasons that are driven by a healthy part of you; not an unhealed aspect of yourself.
In order to keep our relationship with anything healthy, we are required to have balance. To keep your desire for achieving in balance; It’s important to stay intentional about where your need to achieve is coming from.
Keep these 3 points in mind in order to keep your relationship with achieving healthy:
1. Be mindful of maintaining a healthy level of self worth regardless of your achievements.
2. Be aware of believing that checking more boxes in life leads to more happiness or success.
3. Generally, be aware of the meaning you put to the things that you go after in your life. Ex; “I’ll be better when I get (fill in the blank)”
Sometimes when we get so swept up by the endorphins and positive external feedback that we receive from achieving, we become addicted to doing more and more. We can confuse achieving with evolving. When this becomes our way of thinking and functioning, we’ve created a system that never allows us to stop checking the boxes, because if we do, our level of self worth will plummet.
It could be really eye opening to do some work around your specific relationship with what the driving force is behind your need/desire to achieve.
The bottom line is that knowing your self worth comes from within. No amount of degrees, medals, or big, bold letters after your name will make you feel good enough permanently. (Although, it can temporarily.) Truly valuing who you are and honing aspects of self love, self respect and being intentional about what it is that gives you a sense of purpose is where inner peace lies. Ultimately, being able to feel happy with yourself no matter what or who is acknowledging you is a healthy and centered place to be.
Living a lifestyle based on creativity allows for inspired action, which I see as the “true artist” mentality. It’s creating for the sake of creating because you’re being called forth to put something out into the world. This inspired call comes from a very depthful place within.
Living a lifestyle solely based around achieving will keep you very connected to what others’s outside of you are doing, which leads to comparison. A heavy achievement based focus can confuse your relationship with your self worth by placing too much validation on external accomplishments vs. who you are.
Too much emphasis on your inner creative workings can make you overly inward and isolative. Ultimately, the key is balance. It’s knowing when to put the gas on creating and the brakes on achieving and vice versa. It’s also simply knowing when to BE. Meaning to BE in a state of neither.
No external factor will give you life long happiness. Like I mentioned earlier; that can only come from within. We know this; it’s just a matter of reminding ourselves from time to time.
Thanks for reading. I hope this has gifted you with some clarity or food for thought to help you reflect.
*Above image is by photographer Amy Lynn Bjornson.
The Art of Letting Go
As much as I believe in talking something out, I also believe that there’s a time and place where, in order to stay balanced and healthy, a pestering issue needs to be laid to rest. Overly talking about and ruminating over an issue, can easily become more the issue. Meaning, too much attention on the perceived problem becomes the problem itself. Trying to figure out the problem. Trying to understand the problem. Worrying about the problem. Talking in circles about the problem.
This bad habit causes suffering and leads to absolutely nowhere.
Being a natural over analyzer myself, I’ve personally found that after enough healthy introspection has been done around a specific issue, turning toward what’s light, inspiring and fun is an important step toward moving beyond something. When you’re going through something difficult, you have to be reminded that there’s joy on the other side of the issue. You need proof that you can feel good again. You can only find this proof when you allow yourself to be in the space outside the worry.
The other day, I randomly grabbed a magazine to read at the local library. I happened to turn right to an article that impacted me and was the source of inspiration for this blog. It was titled, It’s Time to Graduate From Self-Defeating Habits and Begin Your Glorious Future, by Martha Beck. I thought about the glorious future that I’m going toward and decided to read on.
I loved the simplicity of the author’s message when advising about how to get over a hardship. It was free of any sort of psychoanalysis and headiness, which is an approach that I very much appreciate and believe in as a therapist myself.
Here’s what she said:
“I want you to pick a day when you’ll be over this. It can be in a week or a year, but that will be your graduation day. Once it comes, you’re done with this subject.”
That’s right. Just decide and accept that “it’s done” and let it go. Graduate from the burden of your worry and just decide it’s beyond you. Hell yes! Process your stuff. Feel the emotions and then, please, learn to put it behind you.
Believe me, I get the “How the hell do you even do that? How do you let something go that was so significant, hurtful and the source of so much pain?” I write this post with conviction because (I was-SLASH- can still be) the girl that struggles to let a painful hurt go. It’s been one of my major life lessons that I continue to hone.
With no clue of how to let something go in my past, my over thinking and circling around a painful topic in conversations with friends or in my own head became more my issue. The issue wasn’t what had happened that initially caused me pain, it was how I was coping with it. Attempting to move forward while bringing my past crap into the present put a residue on every new situation. For example, when on a date with a hot new man, it was too bad that all I could think about was my hurt from my past relationship that was also on the date with us. A total set up for a crash and burn outcome. It was like carrying around stinky laundry everywhere I went. I freshened up all I could, but no matter how cleaned up I became, I always had the stink of my past with me. It put a damper on every new possibility.
To give you a picture of my inability to “let pain go,” I remember feeling really pissed off when friends changed the subject on my pain or didn’t hold the space for me to talk about it for the 100th time. I was convinced that, “They don’t care” or “They don’t get it.” Now, if this response from my people occurred when I initially went to them to seek support, these thoughts would have had more validity. However, after months and years of struggling with being caught in my own head, I see how their lack of attention to my perpetual need to talk about what had happened was their loving attempt to help me move forward. They didn’t want to give my obsessive thoughts more energy.
We have all experienced the person who appears to be continually stuck on something or someone. I’m all for processing through an issue so it can sit somewhere within that is more settled, although there’s a tipping point where there’s no more to say or do and it’s time to let go.
Think about what you’re still holding onto and pick a graduation day. Commit in your heart that when this day comes you will be graduated from this problem, meaning it will be officially behind you. The cool concept about graduation is that when you graduate from something, there’s no going back.
“We graduate every time we step forward without moving back.”
You can’t go back to high school because you have already graduated. You can’t redo something that’s done. So be done. Do what you need to do to work through your emotions and give yourself a specific date for the issue to be put in the past with the door firmly, yet comfortably closed. You deserve to walk into your future with light and love in your heart. In order to do this you need to free yourself of the heavy pains and burdens that you’re carrying with you into your future. It’s shading your light.
Free yourself friends by letting go. Your life will improve if you do so.
Above image is by photographer, Amy Lynn Bjornson.