Today, I want to talk about the high-achiever’s curse, and why is this relevant for society. Recently, the Harvard Business Review published an interesting article about What’s Really Holding Women Back? The article is worth mention, simply because it addresses some pervasive cultural traps that are actually holding an entire society back.
They say: “What holds women back at work is not some unique challenge of balancing the demands of work and family but rather a general problem of overwork that prevails in contemporary corporate culture. Women and men alike suffer as a result. But women pay higher professional costs”.
We live in a society that forces us to overwork, to overachieve, to overdo, to overthink. This is the core of the high-achiever’s curse. And this is acultural, in the sense that it permeates the entire world’s mindset. It is what is expected from each one of us, regardless of our culture, or nation, or beliefs. If you try to break with this pattern, you soon are labeled by your peers, criticized by your friends, and judged by your family members. It’s the high-achiever’s curse.
The judgment of others and judgment of self is the worst type of punishment there is because it is a silent (sometimes not so silent), insidious and cruel action and reaction. It stems from society’s beliefs, cultural patterns, and other types of filters and experiences the judger might have.
In the beginning of the book The Four Agreements, the author also correlates judgment with punishment, as a means to gait people like we train pets. And he explains that from the fear of the punishment, we soon “learn” to act as expected from us. And abandon our true selves. This is another hex in the high-achiever’s curse.
This idea ties with the HBR article mentioned at the beginning. What is holding everyone back is actually our society’s mindset. The high-achiever’s curse exists because we are all cursing ourselves and each other. It’s an entire society’s mindset. Women became “free” to work, to vote, to act, but they still have the same mindset they had way before these freedoms were granted. The same goes for men. Women have to take care of their families. Otherwise, they are “horrible.” Men have to be rational. Otherwise, they are not “masculine.” The article is fabulous to shed some examples of how both men and women were actually acting and thinking as society demands, and not being true to themselves. And the excuses and projections they used to cope with their feelings are grounded in our societal’s current beliefs. Therefore, let’s say that this is a self-perpetuating curse because instead of looking deeper and solving the root of the problem, we, as a society, are creating excuses or projecting emotions onto people as a means to avoid the problem. Problems avoided are problems not solved.
The probable course will be that what is holding women (and men) back will keep on going until we raise the world’s awareness of the topic. In other words, until we break the high-achiever’s curse. And until we have strong leaders in all cultures and places willing to make certain changes, the results will be the same. Which means to say – this is not going to be solved soon.
Our roles, therefore, as intellectuals, leaders, educators, is to help raise this awareness and inspire people around the world to make changes. And give some mitigation tools for people to work with meanwhile the change is not happening.
Mitigation tools are meant to mitigate, not solve. In other words, they are band-aids. Band-aids are not meant to last forever. We still have to break the high-achiever’s curse as a society. So I urge you to use them, with the mindset that you are a part of this change. Help make it happen.
“Wait. I am not very clear on what you are proposing here, can you be more specific?” you may say. Sure. Good point. Let’s spell out. I am proposing that we, as a society, review how we are educating our children, and rethink about how we are setting expectations in regards to overworking, overachieving, overthinking, overdoing. These expectations are a curse. And it is a curse that nobody likes, but everybody propagates. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all at fault. It is our society’s self-perpetuating curse. We need to break with the curse of having to be super-everything.
Now that you got what the curse is about, here are some things you can do, while we don’t change as a society:
1. Living in the present moment
Your mind chatters. It chatters ceaselessly. It can be overbearing, bossy, imperious, naggy, and even cruel sometimes. It can be self-righteous, coarse, judging. At any given time, your mind will be chatting about something. And invariably, it will be judging. And while it is at it, life will pass you by. How many times did you realize that you were in your mind, while life was happening outside, and you missed things? You missed your son’s goal in the soccer game; you missed your daughter’s cute smile; you simply did not follow what your boss was saying, and so on.
What does this have to do with the high-achiever’s curse? You are in your mind because it is chatting and judging about how you did not meet or how you intend to meet the unreasonable expectations imposed by the curse. The longer you allow the chatter, the more you are being conniving with the curse. The more you are giving it power.
Living in the present moment means you are aware of what is going on in your head, but is not in the effect of it. It means you are in control. It means you are not letting the curse get the best out of you. You are still present in the moment, focused on what is happening around you.
Dismissing the chatter is not an easy feat. It requires a lot of willpower, concentration, and some mindfulness techniques. A simple technique that works for many people is simply acknowledging that your mind is wondering and telling it to focus on the present moment, as you will give it a proper time to think about these things. Make a note of whatever is going on, and make sure to give your mind indeed a time to go through whatever is bothering you. Core Energy Coaching™ can be very helpful as a set time and space to review the mind’s worries more objectively and productively.
I love this video from happify.com because it summarizes in a very cute and instructional way this whole idea of mindfulness. Watch it.
2. Aligning values with actions
One of my personal favorite topics is aligning values with actions. I believe this alone has the power to break the high-achiever’s curse. If you never worked on your self-development, the chances are that your values are not your own. There will be values imbued by your parents, teachers, caretakers, friends, and so on. If you have ever worked on your values, you will still have limiting beliefs and values that are the aftermath of your experiences. Some will serve you. Some will not.
Exploring values require some shadow work, and everything that meddles with past experiences can be very emotional. And this is one of the reasons why people stay away.
Here is one thing you should ask yourself every time you are numbing yourself instead of reviewing your values: what is this costing me? Does it cost you your satisfaction at work? Does it cost you your authenticity? Does it cost you your joy for life?
Whenever you have actions that are not aligned with your core values, you have dissatisfaction. You might disguise it with excuses, or project your fears and emotions into someone, or numb yourself with liquor, food, and TV, but it does not mean the dissatisfaction is not there.
Here are some steps to help you start with aligning values with your actions. First, select your top five values for life. Second, divide your life into topics or areas, like career, relationship, intimate relationship, fun and enjoyment, family, and so on. Third, ask yourself how the way you show up in each of these categories is bringing you satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Then ask yourself how each of your top five values are being expressed. If you don’t see the expression of your values in that area of your life, ask yourself what values are you expressing. Most frequently and especially if you are dissatisfied, you will be expressing a value that may contradict one of your core values.
3. Consciously choosing based on values
Related to the topic above, making choices based on values simply means you are making the choices that are aligned with your values and not with your fears. If you did the exercise proposed in the paragraph above, you would see that one or more areas of your life might not be aligned with your values. It may mean that you did not make conscious choices. You turned on your auto-pilot, you are doing things just because it is expected from you, or you decided on things to appease someone or a situation.
Consciously choosing means, you know what your values are, and at each life’s decision point, you decide based on what is aligned with what you really want and value. It sounds simple, but putting it into practice is not.
This is very tied with mindfulness, in the sense that the more mindful and aware you are, the more you will be able to tell what type of choices you are making at every given moment. In other words, you are choosing to avoid the high-achiever’s curse.
4. Judging less, especially those close
As mentioned at the beginning, we are taught since our childhood to judge. By the time we are adults, we are absolute experts at judging. No one likes to be judged. Regardless, we keep judging people and situations all the time.
If we just judged in our minds, maybe overall harm would be lessened. But we don’t judge in our minds only. We judge and act on our judgment. We ostracize people, and we make comments about their dresses, we make jokes about sexual orientation, and so on and on. We can write a whole book about things we do when we judge people. Being the target of judgment is not fun. We feel pressed on, we feel frustrated, and we feel suffocated. We are not doing any good by judging people. Suicidal rates are the highest in history because we are imposing expectations that are not attainable by most. We cannot be supermodels, super-rich, super-intelligent, super-popular, and super-productive, all at once. But we are expected to. And it all started with judgment.
At this point, you might be thinking: “ok, mindfulness, I can try that. Aligning values, ok, this is doable. Making conscious choices… I am not so sure, but I can try.” Then you stumble on the “not judging” topic. Here you might be one of 2 people. Either you are that person who thinks you never judge. Or you are the person who knows you judge and knows it is very difficult not to. If the former, it may mean you must work harder on topic one. If the latter work on topic one harder too.
Not judging is indeed difficult and requires a lot of effort and training. But if you work on your self-awareness and understand your values well, you will be able to accomplish a bit at a time in terms of judging less. And the less you judge, the higher will be your level of satisfaction in many areas of your life and the satisfaction of people around you.
5. Teaching our children that what works for them is best for them
We impose on our kids, many of our wishes, will, and dreams. All of us inherit values and dreams from our forefathers. It’s up to us to explore which one of them we want to keep and which we want to discard.
Discarding is associated with a lot of judgment. How come you don’t have the same religion as your parents? How come you want to be a doctor if all our prior generations were farmers? How come you want to have a different sexual orientation?
Truth be told: what works for us is best for us. Not all things work for everybody. When we put this in our minds, and we detach ourselves from judging what’s best for other people, we will have a happier society.
Everyone must know what’s best for them and what works for them. You may need some experimentation. Experimentation means some discards, as some experiments will fail. We need to teach our children that it is ok to let go if it does not work for us.
However, how many times we insisted that our children should do something based on our dreams, values, or fears? Even though we clearly saw it was not working for them. Or worse, IT WAS working for them, but we were judging it as wrong.
And if you are reading this, it is probably too late for you: you’ve been indoctrinated already. But you can break the pattern and learn for yourself that what works for you is best for you. It’s never too late to break with an indoctrination.
6. Rewarding effort instead of solely rewarding results
Businesses, schools, colleges, and so on mostly reward results and not the effort. It means they set expectations based on a set of objectives, and it does not matter how much effort the individual put in getting those results. Their performance will be rated the same.
The problem with this is that when you reward results alone, you are not rewarding passion and engagement put into something. And when you don’t reward passion and involvement, you are not rewarding values’ alignment. And when you are not rewarding values, you are perpetuating the curse.
We are all cursed to overachieve, overproduce, overwork because certain results are expected from us.
Not rewarding results is not practical, granted. But if we also don’t include reward on effort, results are empty. And if we don’t gauge results to acceptable levels, we will propagate the high-achiever’s curse of overachieving, overworking, etc. And if not, we might be doing things out of fear, which is as worse.
Does it really make sense to have 7-year-old sell 50 boxes of cookies for name-your-kids-organization-here? The idea is to help them learn how to sell and how to be resilient, yes, we all got that. But setting expectations this high just makes winners out of those who have moms and dads who can buy half of these boxes and sell the rest in their offices. How are you helping your kid learn how to be resilient this way? How aligned is this action with your true values? You are doing this because you are afraid of the humiliation your kid will have to go through if they do not make it the 50 boxes. So the question then becomes: what is signing up your kid for this program costing them? What is the subliminal message you are telling them when mom will sell the boxes in her office?
The proposition here is not to criticize programs out there. The proposition is to make sure you take action by applying your kids for things that are reasonable and aligned with your values. And if you think it’s not reasonable but still see value in applying your kid, voice your dissatisfaction to that organization. And once your kids are old enough to decide for themselves, give them the chance to decide what works for them. And then reward based on their effort, not just results.
7. Celebrating the little things
We don’t celebrate the little things enough. We are so focused on overachieving and overworking that we don’t stop to celebrate the small stuff. It can be small. Celebrate that you got to sit in the subway today and read a book. Celebrate that your neighbor greeted you in the morning. Celebrate that traffic was good today. Celebrate that you got on time to work today. Celebrate that your boss was in a good mood. Celebrate that you crossed another topic in your checklist.
We just celebrate promotions, new jobs, marriages, and so on. And celebrations in our minds are usually something fancy. You don’t have to wait for something big to celebrate, and it does not have to be fancy.
The definition of celebration is “the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion by engaging in enjoyable activity.” Well, scratch the “important” word and take the rest. So celebrate by doing something enjoyable that works for you. You can celebrate by stretching, going for a walk, buying a different mocha at your coffee shop, dancing macarena, humming a song, giving yourself star stickers. Be creative. Celebrate in ways that work for you, but celebrate.
The reason why we should celebrate is that we are rewarding effort, and we are being mindful, and we are paying attention to our values when we celebrate them. In celebrating this way, we are telling ourselves a message that we are making progress regardless of other people’s judgment, which increases our overall satisfaction in things.
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