I was talking to a client the other day on the phone and it happened again. The same thing that has happened to me and to practically every woman I have ever mentored. I call it “Achievers Amnesia.”
After three minutes of celebrating all of the amazing things she had accomplished since our last session – launching her first blog, leading circles of women, creating financial abundance – the words, “Yeah, but I haven’t yet…” came flying out of her mouth and she began listing the litany of things she had not yet accomplished.
With each “Yeah, but I haven’t…” and “Yeah but I need to…,” the pressure mounted. And like every achievement junkie I have ever witnessed, including yours truly, all the joy, success and satisfaction she had been feeling moments before, evaporated. Leading to the all-too-familiar feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm as she fell under the shadow of the gigantic new mountain she had put in front of herself to climb.
Here is my inner achievement junkie – she loves to fool you into believing there is a magical destination that will indicate that you’ve finally arrived, but of course that day never comes.
There are a lot of us recovering achievement junkies out there in the world. Maybe you are one too?
Here are a few of the signs that you are part of our club. Do you:
- Set really high goals for yourself and keep moving the bar higher – so just as you’re about to reach a goal, you flip the bar higher, and feel like you failed or didn’t hit your mark?
- Think you have to push and work hard to make stuff happen – so you over work and put in way more effort than what’s actually needed?
- Work a lot or are always busy, and have a hard time resting – honestly you think resting is “lazy” and you simply don’t have time for it?
- Often feel like you have not gotten ‘there’ yet – and then pressure yourself to be further ahead?
- Have a hard time celebrating or feeling all you have accomplished – For more than a few hours?
- Achieve one thing – a promotion, more money, a degree, a milestone – and immediately go on to the next thing?
- Feel dissatisfied – You live like a marathon runner who just keeps running marathon after marathon, never quite reaching a finish line where you can finally declare victory?
- Focus a lot on the future – You focus on things you haven’t yet achieved or accomplished, instead of organically growing and tending what you’ve already birthed?
I sometimes joke we really should start a club called Achievers Anonymous to save ourselves from ourselves – lol!
What would we do in this club?
It would be a club where you could go and be treated for ‘Achievers Amnesia:’ – the condition of only seeing what you haven’t done, unable to acknowledge and feel what you have. So you always feel pressured to do more, accomplish more, move onto the next goal and the next, and the next…
We’d be forced to talk about the great things we had already done until we could feel them in our bones.
We’d be put on probation, forced to slow down and revel in our achievements, forbidden to climb the next mountain until we were replenished and rested.
We’d be put on strict orders to do things only for sheer joy and entertainment – forbidden to be productive (can you imagine just doing things for fun!)
We’d learn to love just sitting still, taking in the view from the mountain top, and learn to be more mindful before we just set out to conquer the next mountain.
We’d learn to love the process of reaching a goal, instead of driving ourselves so hard to ‘get there’ that by the time we do manifest our desires, we are too exhausted or resentful to enjoy them.
We’d become not just great achievers, but awesome, masterful receivers.
As a recovering achievement junkie this sounds divine to me! How about you?
Don’t get me wrong. I love being an achiever. It’s the junkie part that I now choose to live without.
I’d much rather be patient with myself every day vs. pressure myself. Think about it. You have enough stress from outside forces that you don’t need to add more stress from yourself!
As it turns out, one of the great things about being an achiever is that our 80% is like most people’s 120%. So you can actually give less effort and still be above average.
When I suggest this new operating equation to other achievers, they usually freak out, because deep inside, in the places we’d rather not look, there are parts of ourselves that we are deathly afraid to deal with – so we keep ourselves busy doing, working and focusing on new goals instead.
These parts left untended, subconsciously make you believe – mistakenly – that if you stop pushing yourself to achieve more, if you stop working so hard, you will become a slacker and fall behind.
Which of course is impossible. Unless you burn yourself out completely, and you simply cannot achieve anymore – it is impossible for you to become a slacker.
Once an achiever, always an achiever, but not always a junkie or addict. @ChristineArylo
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For the past seven years I have been in self-created, self-imposed ‘achievement recovery’ and I have had more impact not less – three published books, reached and taught tens of thousands of women, traveled the world. But I had to learn to do my life a different way. And I’m not an outlier – I’ve taken many women through to find freedom from the achievement addiction.
And I had to learn the “why” behind why I drove myself so hard.
As I dug deeper within, I found my “Inner Achievement Junkie.” Her name is Move the Bar Belinda. She is like an inner mean girl that was trying to protect me from getting stuck in the small minded city I grew up in, but instead became a bully that even after twenty years of being free of that possibility, kept pushing me to keep running and climbing.
Eventually, I reformed this inner mean girl by healing the parts inside of me that were afraid of being left behind, that needed external recognition and that had learned to attach my self worth to external milestones.
I am still in recovery, and have to watch myself during times of high stress and stretch – like with the release of my new book about inner mean girls.
But knowing that I don’t have to push myself so hard, that I just naturally will achieve and excel without exhausting myself, has made me happier, healthier, and more whole, and for that I am grateful.
I love my recovering achievers club – you and your Inner Achievement Junkie are invited any time!
Christine Arylo, m.b.a., is an inspirational catalyst, transformational teacher and best-selling self-love author who teaches people how to put their most important partnership first, the one with themselves, so that they can create the life their souls crave. The popular author of the go-to book on relationships Choosing ME before WE and the self-love handbook, Madly in Love with ME, the Daring Adventure to Becoming Your Own Best Friend, and her newest Reform Your Inner Mean Girl. She’s affectionately known as the “Queen of Self-Love” for her groundbreaking work in self-love, including founding the international day of self-love on Feb 13th. Arylo is the co-founder of the self-love and empowerment school for women, Inner Mean Girl Reform School. You can follow here on Twitter, FB or visit her sites here & here.
