How Your Hyper-Achiever Saboteur Creates Stress

Have you heard your brain say “I’ll be happy WHEN I get my Masters Degree... and then land that job...and get that promotion...have kids...buy that apartment... afford a vacation home in the mountains... change careers...make x amount of income...or when I’m positively impacting thousands of people’s lives.” The list never ends. 

Say hello to your Hyper-Achiever saboteur - a collection of thoughts and beliefs that lead to self-sabotage and reduce your happiness. We all have one in one form or another.

Your Hyper-Achiever saboteur can cause a lot of stress. Trust me, I know. I was a serial hyper-achiever for a while. I was dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and validation. 

Don’t get me wrong, being an achiever has its strengths. It means you’re likely driven, pragmatic, adaptable, goal-oriented and self-directed. You are capable of self-growth and helping others reach their full potential. All wonderful things.

But when it’s overused and abused, your Hyper-Achiever can have you highly focused on external success in the future versus finding joy in the present along the way.

It also often leads to unsustainable workaholic tendencies and being out of touch with your deeper emotional needs. God forbid your emotions get in the way of your performance.

The Hyper-Achiever lies to you by having you believe that life is about achieving and producing results; portraying a good image to the world; and burying your feelings because they’re a distraction.

As a result, you might find that peace and happiness are fleeting, short-lived in brief celebrations of achievement. Self-acceptance is continuously conditioned on the next success. And those around you might be pulled into your performance vortex and become similarly lopsided in their focus on external achievement (notice if it’s showing up in your kids or the team you manage). 

Self-validation, self-acceptance and self-love are conditional for the Hyper-Achiever; conditioned on continual performance. 

We may not even realize it or question it because our culture is constantly encouraging us to achieve and accumulate more in order to be happy.

The problem is that happiness is an internal state of mind. There is no amount of achieving that will truly make us happy.

Happiness is best experienced every step of the way, not at the final step of the journey. 

So what does happiness look and feel like? You’ll have to define that for yourself but it starts with unconditional self-love, self-acceptance, self-empathy and creatively finding joy in the little steps along the way. 

If you’d like to delve further into this, join my next Positive Intelligence Mental Fitness Program starting January 8th for 6 weeks. We’ll shine the light on your various sources of stress (like the Hyper-Achiever), self-sabotaging tendencies, and how to retrain your brain to better serve you. It will give you an amazing foundation for thriving in 2022. 

Click here or the link below to learn more.