Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:36: The Success Myth, by Emma Gannon
00:02:38: Definitions of achievement and overachievement
00:06:10: Overachievement indicators
00:08:22: Risks of overachievement
00:16:03: Ideas for action…
00:16:14: …1: prioritising performance
00:21:00: … 2: don't put all your eggs in one basket
00:24:51: … 3: the rear-view review
00:30:05: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show to help you with the ins, outs, ups and downs of work, where Sarah and I share some insights and ideas for action to help you feel more confident and in control of your career development.  Every week, we put all of the resources that we produce together into PodMail, so you can easily get our PodSheets, which are downloadable summaries of the episode, and our PodNotes, if you've only got one minute to swipe through some stuff, and also the recordings of our PodPlus sessions, which are 30-minute sessions that we do every week, where we have a community of like-minded learners who discuss what we've been talking about on the podcast.  And you can get those all in one place, every week, on a Tuesday morning in PodMail.

So, if you'd like that in your inbox, you can just sign up.  The details are in the show notes.  You can click there and you just put your email in and you will get it every week.  Or, if you can't find that, because it's always a bit funny to find this stuff sometimes, just email us.  We're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, and we can get it sorted out for you.

Sarah Ellis: So today, we're going to be talking about Achievement Overload, and we sort of have a subtitle for today's podcast, which I'm not sure if that's what you're meant to do or not really, probably not, but: Understanding How a Need to Achieve Can Get in the Way of Your Growth.  So, we're just going to explore a bit this idea of achievement, when it can tip into overachievement, and how that can be unhelpful.  And I think we will have all had those moments, where we perhaps get a bit too driven, or a bit too focused on something that's really important to us.  So, we're going to explore this tension between achievement that can be really helpful in your career, and overachievement that I think can be unhelpful.

Before we get started, we just wanted to give a Squiggly shoutout to Emma Gannon, who has a new book called The Success Myth, which you can pre-order now from bookshop.org.  It comes out in May 2023, so not long to wait for it.  And if you've ever read, or listened to Emma before, you know that it will be a really insightful and thoughtful and practical read.  We're lucky enough to know Emma a little bit and she shared with us the cover and what she's going to be talking about, and it sounds brilliant.  I'm hoping to be getting a sneaky pre-copy to have a read through, and we think some of the topics and themes we're going to talk about today will also feel really relevant if you want to dive a bit deeper with Emma in her book.  So, perhaps check that out if that's something you want to spend some time with.

Helen Tupper: So, we thought it would be useful to talk about the difference between achievement and overachievement, because what we're not saying is that if you want to achieve things at work and in your career that that's bad, we're not saying that; it's when it really tips into overachievement that it can become a bit of an issue for you and your development.

The definitions we're going with are that achievement is about being motivated by high performance and getting to a desired outcome.  But overachievement is when you're consumed by the relentless pursuit of more, so that achievement is never, ever enough and you can't appreciate the achievements that you're making along the way, it's always, "What's the next achievement; how can I make this bigger?"

Sarah Ellis: So, I think achievement and overachievement are not two categories where some people are in one and some people are in the other, and maybe some people are in neither of them.  I think it's more recognising what does your drive for achievement look and feel like; does that ever tip over into unhelpful overachievement; and I think for some people, that might be more prevalent than others.  We probably selfishly both find this particularly interesting to spend some time with, because we both have achievement as a value. 

So, if values are things that motivate and drive you, the DNA, what makes you you, Helen and I are almost starting from this place of I guess naturally might fall into the category of people who may end up going into that overachievement, that relentless pursuit of more, where you can get a bit single-minded and you're always looking for the next win.  So, I think it's quite interesting as we explore this today to think about what does this mean for you; do you recognise any of these tendencies; do they ever get in your way; and, what might you do differently?

Helen Tupper: And do you know what we've not really prepared for, but it's just come to me when you said that, is if you work with other people who also have a strong need to achieve, maybe that strays into this territory of overachievement, how does that change the culture?  So, it's not just one person, it's not just, "Everyone else is going to focus on doing their job well, but Helen Tupper's got this overachievement thing going on".  But if a whole team is like that, I can imagine it maybe starts to get quite competitive and combative, because if you're all overachievers, do you start then competing with each other?  So it's not, "How do we come together as a team to do better?" it's, "How can I beat you?" maybe in that context too.

Sarah Ellis: I did read an interesting article, which is almost like a subset of overachievers, preparing for this podcast, which was about insecure overachievers and how much organisations typically liked recruiting those people, which if you think about it is in lots of ways a bit Machiavellian --

Helen Tupper: Yeah, absolutely!

Sarah Ellis: -- because essentially, if you get loads of insecure overachievers, they blame themselves for things like burnout and they'll work phenomenally hard and they'll think, "I'm never good enough", and they're on this hamster wheel of achievement; but also, they give themselves a really hard time.  So, I guess it's combining achievement with imposter syndrome, which is almost like if you're thinking about achievement versus overachievement, I think there's probably another level of overachievement.  If you're in that overachievement category, then actually also you can see how that gets to lots of behaviours that could be really bad for you personally as well as professionally.

I don't like the idea that companies would look for those people and seek those people out just because they'd probably work so hard, they would get really good results, but kind of at what cost?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, no, gosh, I don't like that at all.  That's surely a recipe for burnout, companies trying to get high output straightaway and then just move onto the next.  Horrible!

Sarah Ellis: And also, they'll blame themselves for it, so they'll never blame the company!

Helen Tupper: Gosh, that's horrible, that's really horrible!  So, we thought we would put a few questions out for you to listen and reflect on, in terms of whether you might identify as an overachiever.  I mean, you might know right now, you might be like, "This is me and this is why I'm listening to this episode", or it might help you to critically reflect on this a little bit.  So, from the reading that Sarah and I have done, we've got eight overachievement indicators and I'm going to talk them through as questions for you to think yes or no.  And of these eight overachievement indicators, if you're really getting a yes to four or more, it is a good signal that this might be something for you to focus on.

Number one: do you have a goal that you're going after?  Number two: do you worry what failing will say about you?  Number three: do you feel defined by your successes?  Number four: do you want to be the best?  Five: do you prioritise excellence over experimentation?  Six: are you highly self-critical?  Seven: do you prefer to focus on the future, rather than think about the present?  And, eight: do you regularly let work creep into your non-work life?  And, we'll put all those questions in the PodSheet if it's helpful for you.  But, Sarah, what kind of number did you get to?

Sarah Ellis: I think I get to a four-ish, so sort of half yesses, half noes.  I can certainly think of times where that number would have been a lot higher.  I probably think right now in my career, that's the lowest number I would have had; I might even be a three, which for me I take as an achievement in itself that it's not a six, seven or eight, because I think I've definitely had moments where it would have been a lot higher.  But yeah, I think a three or a four at the moment.  What about you?

Helen Tupper: I'm a solid four.  So, a goal I'm going after, yes; do I worry what failings say about me, yes; do I feel defined by my successes, yes; do you regularly let work creep into your non-work life, yes.  That's a solid four!  The other ones are not so solid, I don't think, but those ones, if it's a four or more, then that would be an indicator that I probably do have a sense of overachievement sometimes.

Sarah Ellis: So, just some of the risks, I think some of this is probably obvious in terms of how overachievement can be detrimental to you in your career, but worth just highlighting what they might be, and also you can think about what's the biggest risk for you, because we want this to feel really relevant for you as you're listening.

So, it could be about competition and comparison.  So, if you're really into overachievement, you might always feel like you're competing with your peers, or not as good as your peers, and that is driving you versus your own sense of self and self-worth.  It could drive anxiety and overwhelm, which I guess might be that insecure overachievement that I was talking about; you're always anxious of yourself, what other people are saying about you, what happens if things don't quite go to plan; maybe feeling a real pressure and perfectionism, so you overachieve because everything has to be right the whole time.

It also might mean that you risk becoming very individual in your outlook, so quite self-absorbed, in your own world.  And more generally in terms of outcomes, one of the risks can be that you keep doing things that you actually don't want to be doing, you perhaps don't enjoy something, but you're sort of stuck in this cycle of overachievement, and if somebody magically could help you to zoom out and give you that helicopter view, you might start to question, "Do I actually enjoy my days?  Do I feel like I'm having a positive impact?"  Those sorts of things perhaps haven't come to your consciousness because you're so busy in overachievement mode.

Helen Tupper: And we were thinking about in terms of our careers, when has that need to achieve got in the way.  And I think for me, sometimes I can just get really blinkard.  I'll tell you a really obvious time, because I have multiple times, but I think when I was working at BP, definitely that was when I got overachievement, because there was a lot in that environment that fed my need.  I got promoted regularly, I was doing things that on the surface made me feel really successful; and the reason I think it got in my way is because there were lots of other things that really mattered to me, like my relationships and my learning and my development and just having fun outside of work, just stuff like that.

That overachievement bias almost put blinkers on me, and I didn't realise for probably 12 months of being blinkered, then I realised I'm not actually enjoying it.  It was just because I'd got so distracted by the doing and achieving that I realised it wasn't the thing that I really found that fulfilling when I looked at all the things I liked to do.

Sarah Ellis: I think for me, the blinkering thing definitely rings a bell, and what often has been really detrimental for me has been to stop doing lots of other things in pursuit of a very single-minded goal.  I can be very single-minded when I want to be and I now know, and I've noticed about myself, that if I get too focused on, usually it's a goal or an outcome, because for me achievement is about big goals and big outcomes, I can sort of disappear, and then I deprioritise everything else.

For example, when I was doing my MBA, not all the way through my MBA, but essentially I was doing quite well in my MBA and I was thinking, "I've got a chance here of doing really well in this, so I'm going to give it everything I've got", so that's not a bad thing, that's not bad logic to think you really want to dedicate to something you've spent loads of time on.  But it meant I stopped playing netball, I was like, "I'm going to stop stuff outside of work, so get rid of all of that".  It meant that I stopped saying yes to meeting up with friends, it meant that I probably didn't talk to my partner very much during that time, and I got more and more…

I was so committed to an outcome, to something happening that wasn't necessarily all in my control, or you're not sure whether it's going to happen or not, but actually everything suffered as a result.  I don't think I was as good in that moment actually of what I was trying to do in my MBA, like the assignments I was trying to do or the coursework, and I was trying to get started on my dissertation.  And once I noticed that and let all of those other things creep back in that I really enjoyed, funnily enough everything got better.  So, it didn't last very long, because I think it felt wrong very quickly.  I was suddenly, "I thought now I'd be absolutely on fire, because this is the one thing, I'm putting all of my energy into this one thing, so surely I should be incredible", and the opposite happened, and I lost a bit of motivation, I lost a bit of energy.  So, that was a real trigger for me.

Ever since that moment, even when I've been at my most busy or full-on with anything to do with work, I've always tried really hard to not get rid of everything else, because it's so tempting to do that, isn't it, because you just think, "I need more time, I need to say no to things.  I've got no time for anyone else or anything else".  I think I had a real tipping point in my career where that overachievement went too far very, very fast, and I railed back from that.

Helen Tupper: I think it's really easy to get into a self-justification cycle with this stuff as well, because there is no doubt that a strong need to achieve has helped you get certain stuff done and make things happen that you might be proud of.  So, you could justify it, you could be like, "Yeah, but if I wasn't like this, I wouldn't have got that.  And if I wasn't like this, then we wouldn't have had that opportunity", and it's really easy, I think, to just go into this cycle of, "Well, that's just who I am, I'm an achievement-oriented person".

But what we're saying, I think we really want to be clear, there is nothing wrong with being somebody who wants to achieve things.  If that is you and that is what you're driven to do --

Sarah Ellis: We'd be in a lot of trouble if it was!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, that is really positive.  But it's when those blinkers are so firmly on that you don't do other things that make you happy and that you can't see the impact of how you're behaving might affect other people, and that's what we're talking about.  It's when it's gone a bit too far and it's going to get in the way of lots of things that you might really value and want to do, but you're not seeing it in that moment, because you've become so fixated on this outcome that you're oriented towards.

Sarah Ellis: And I think in Squiggly Careers, where we are developing in different directions, where there are loads more opportunities and different possibilities, we want to be really open and make the most of all of those things that could come our way.  And if we just get really siloed and you get stuck in overachievement in a way that isn't serving you, I think it will limit your learning and limit your Squiggly career.  You're sort of going back to a ladderlike world where it's like, "Well, I'm going to overachieve and that's going to equal promotion", but that isn't true any more, that really binary, "If I do this, then I get that", isn't happening in organisations.  Organisations are getting flatter, they're creating new roles, they're creating new departments, we all need new skills.

So, perhaps overachievement might have served people potentially a bit better in a ladderlike world.  I'm not sure it's good for you for your sense of self, even in that world, but you can see how it's more connected to that world.  Whereas, I think with the uncertainty and complexity that is the world of work now, I think we've got to decouple ourselves from this overachievement, because I worry; I worry about people being stuck on that hamster wheel that they can't get away from, but then blame themselves for.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, you can see how it feeds a whole load of like stress, burnout, anxiety, all these unhelpful and unhealthy responses to work.

So, what we've got now are three different ideas for action to help you to reflect and respond to this, if you recognise this overachievement in yourself.  The first one is about prioritising performance.  This comes from really understanding that there is a difference between overachievement orientation, all the things we've just been talking about, and a high-performance focus.  So, if you think overachievement is always this relentless "even bigger if", "I could make this even bigger if…", whereas a high performer would respond to that situation and think, "I could make this even better if…", it's the difference between bigger and better.

High performance will help you to reach the goal, so you're still going after the goal, but it's more about how you go after it and how well you perform and what you could differently to get there so you could do it even better.  It's a more healthy focus on that outcome, rather than a slightly obsessive achievement-oriented one.

Sarah Ellis: Also, when Helen and I were discussing this beforehand, you mentioned to me that sometimes when you're in overachievement mode, you're just too focused on the finish line.  I recognise that in myself because I love a goal.  I love a goal, I love planning, in lots of ways I would have been really good in ladderlike careers, let's be honest, it would have really suited me, all predictable and I could just be really in control.  So, I recognise how difficult this can be sometimes to let go of if this is your natural mindset. 

I love a goal; I probably don't question, probably previously in my career too much sometimes, whether that goal is even the right goal, but you'll really go for it then.  But the problem with that now is that with so much change all around us, the likelihood is that that finish line might change, it might disappear.  If you were just thinking, "Really, what I care about is a promotion or a job title", and that is your short-term finish line, well what happens if that job changes, what happens if somebody else gets that promotion?  You're then very attached to a finish line, and almost you're less interested in being work in progress, in that why do you want to get to that finish line in the first place; is that even the right finish line; all of those really important questions that we need to ask ourselves. 

So again, if you're like me, I love a finish line, I'm really attracted to a finish line, because I'm also very future-focused, so back to Helen's questions, I would definitely be a yes to future-focused.  I'm like, "Brilliant, you've given me a future finish line.  Great, off I go, I'm ready, let me go!"  So, I've really recognised for me that I sometimes have to let go of finish lines.  I don't know if that helps people, but if you are like me, that can be quite a hard thing to let go of.

Helen Tupper: So, the action here in order to let go of the finishing line is to think about a goal you want to go after, because again there's nothing wrong with being goal-oriented, but to bring in that performance focus, think about how you will grow by getting there.  So for example, a goal that Sarah and I might be going after, TBC everyone, but let's just say book three.  So, we've written two books; a goal that we could go after might be the third instalment of some career development book that we hope might be brilliant! 

But what we want to do, rather than just go, "Well, it's going to be brilliant, how many books are we going to sell and how many awards are we going to win?" and all those sorts of things; rather than focusing on that, we might think about, "What are our growth goals to go after?"  That might be, "Well, how can we make the book even more useful?  How could we make sure the book is helping a different group of people that it might have helped before?  How could we use this goal to grow how we work better together, how we write better together?"  All of those things would make this more of a high-performance goal, rather than just a target that we're trying to achieve.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm sure lots of you will also listen to the High Performance Podcast.  But one of the things that I always reflect on, when I dip in and out of listening to that, is obviously they have lots of sportspeople on the podcast, and time and time again you hear incredible athletes who've won world cups, gold medals, and they often do reflect on, the finish line is never quite as satisfying as you imagine it might be.

So, they've won this incredible thing and they're going, "It's not about that, it was about the process, it was about the team that I was part of", and actually sometimes this real sense of emptiness of, "What now?" when you do get to that finish line.  I think the more you listen to people who've had these incredible finish lines that you can't even contemplate, because they're so out of your world, but the more you hear people talk about that, you hear it's a really consistent thread that that's not the achievement bit; it was all the hard work, it was all the training, it was the group of people who you were surrounded with.  If you really want to dive into performance and you haven't discovered that podcast, definitely have a look through that, and they have quite a wide range of guests, so you don't have to go into sports, there's lots of other people on there too.

So, the second action is about not putting all your achievement eggs in one basket.  So, when your need to achieve only focuses on one area of your life, we think that's often where you do become blinkered and less balanced, as Helen and I have both described; we have both experienced that.  So, it's recognising that if you're someone who does really like to achieve, it's really important to you, it's really important to Helen and I, that's not going to change, and we both run the risk of overachievement, just recognise if you think, "I am setting a lot of stall about whether I'm going to get this promotion, or whether I'm going to get this role or get the opportunity to do this project".

Just basically think about how you can balance your baskets, if it doesn't take the analogy too far, but it helped both of us to think about it!  For example, how are you helping other people to achieve?  How can you achieve in terms of things to do with your health?  How can you have achievements that might be more about your hobbies?  So, we thought help, health and hobbies are quite good additional categories to have, as well as thinking about, "What am I doing in my Squiggly Career; how am I getting achievement from that?"  What are all those complementary other baskets that you can have around you?

Also I think, as I was reflecting on this, if you're not getting achievement from one of those baskets, it also means that you can look elsewhere because sometimes there might be moments at work that you don't quite get the achievement that you're seeking, so you feel you're underachieving, the opposite of what we're talking about today, and some of these other areas can provide you with a really good source of achievement.  Again, that has definitely proved true for me in the past. 

So, when I was on maternity leave and I wasn't working, I really missed the achievement that I got from work.  And it's no surprise that that's the only time in my life where I started running and managed to run 10Ks, not very fast, but I did go from not running at all, and actually I loved getting the medals!  You see, this is the problem, I do like the finish line!  Even though I was really slow, wasn't even that good, but just this thing of going from nothing to 10K, and then yeah, you get that sense of satisfaction, I essentially needed a different basket to get some achievement from.  And that was a bit about health, a bit about hobby. 

But funnily enough, as soon as I went back to work and started going back to some of the things that I did before maternity leave, I was like, "Yeah, I'm done with the running now".  So, you don't have to do all of these things consistently all of the time, but I think it is just recognising particularly how you're helping other people to achieve, I think is probably often under-valued as a source of, we know that when we help other people, we also help ourselves.

Helen Tupper: I think as well, these different baskets of achievement feel quite different.  So, if I think about achieving something at work, definitely gives me that rush.  I get a rush of energy if I've achieved something at work.  But if I achieve by helping other people achieve, that feels warm, it's a warmth kind of feeling, it's not the rush that I get from work; it's a very different type of energy I get back from that.  And health, I get quite proud because I'm like, you've made time to do that, that feels more of a feeling of pride.  And hobbies, I get quite excited, I enjoy it.  It's almost like you start to see achievement can feel different, whereas if you're only getting it in one way, you're only getting one type of reward, I suppose, from it.  That's my reflections when I think about the different things I'd have in those baskets.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it, it's how you can connect different feelings with different types of achievement, like pride versus enjoyment versus energy.  And the more we get those range of different things, they're all good emotions for us to feel.  And again, it's just moving away, isn't it, from being too binary.

Helen Tupper: Which probably again goes back to resilience, doesn't it, like filling up your bucket.  Those positive emotions are really helpful for us when we need to draw on our resilience.  So, there's probably quite a nice link between those things as well.

So, our third idea for action is all around the rear-view review.  What this is really about is understanding that sometimes the goals that we are going after are not always the things that make us proudest in the long term.  So let's say, I don't know, a promotion or something like that, you might be really, really focused on getting promoted.  But if you think about the achievements that you've had over the last five, ten years, was it a promotion that you were most proud of, or was it something else that was really meaningful and mattered, because sometimes we can just get distracted by achievements that might look quite shiny, by achievements that might be a challenge.  Sometimes, I just like the challenge; it's not really an achievement, I'm just like, "I want it because it's hard"!  You can get quite obsessed about that stuff.

Or, maybe because it's what other people might expect of you, so you're going after it because other people are saying this would be a good thing to do.  But actually, back to Sarah's point about the finish line might not feel that fulfilling, it's not the thing sometimes that you're proudest over in the long term.  So, when you do a rear-view review, what this is really about, it's about thinking back, and you can pick the time period, you can say, "Over the last five years", and really thinking about what are the achievements that you're really proudest of, and almost comparing that sense of pride that you got from those things with what you're actually going after at the moment, and making sure that those things are connected and you're not being distracted and disconnected because of some of the stuff that might be going on for you right now.

So practically, we would suggest almost treating this as a two-part action.  So, part one, just maybe create a mind map, or just get a pen and paper, and just reflect on the moments that you feel most proud of over the last five years; what has really given you that sense of achievement?  So, when I did this, it was things like my friendships, because I'm really proud my friendships are really long term and they really matter to me; and my home, I'm really proud of my home, because it's a source of stability for me and my family and a lot of work has gone into getting here and I'm proud of that consistent effort; and I'm really proud of Sarah and I pivoting our business in the pandemic.  It's one of my most proud moments, is how we've grown our business out of adversity; I feel really proud of that.

You can then take those moments that you're really proud of and think about, what do those moments really mean; what do they tell me about what I find meaningful about achievement?  Then, you can take that understanding and that awareness and just compare it to the goals you're going after right now, and just make sure that the things that really matter to you are part of the goals that you're going after.

Sarah Ellis: I've done this recently where I've listed all my achievements, and I am quite like you, I am quite self-centred, I was like, "My achievements", the things that I felt most proud of achieving over the last couple of years.  So, I just wrote them down actually in a list, not even a mind map, and I looked for what do those things have in common.  What was really interesting for me, and it's something I was talking to Helen about recently, what achievement always look like for me is whenever Helen and I are working on something hard together, for usually quite a long period of time, and then we create the thing, but it's never necessarily the thing. 

So, although I'm very proud of our TED Talk and our books, they're the outcomes, I suppose they were the finish line.  But what was interesting for me, when I thought about where the achievement came from, the achievement came from the process, very specifically the process of Helen and I working together on things that are hard.  So, when we were thinking about how we spend our 2023 and beyond, one of the things that I talked to Helen about was, "In the last year, we've had less time to do that, because for lots of reasons, we've been doing lots of other things".  So actually, it's really important for me, and we need to decide if it's important for Helen, because otherwise we've got a problem --

Helen Tupper: Oh, no, it's not a problem!

Sarah Ellis: -- to actually think about what are those hard and important things that we're going to work on together; what does that look like; and how do we create time for those?  And then it's created really practical actions. 

So actually, we've looked ahead to 2023 and realised previously, it was a bit easier for us to spend time together, we'd got less commitments, we'd got a smaller business, we were creating stuff from scratch, didn't really know what we were doing.  Now, we are a bit bigger and we're growing, we need to be more intentional about creating that time and space to achieve together.  So again, that just looked like really practically looking at our diaries and making sure that we'd got seven days together over the next seven months, which might not sound like a lot.  But full days together, when it's our space to create, and that probably won't include other ties that we would find to be together, makes a real difference.

I found that really interesting when I started to then really think about listing those achievements, what do they have in common and then what does that mean for me today, in terms of how I spend my time, or changes I might make, or things that might be missing, because actually I realised that had been missing for me, that I might want to bring back again.

Helen Tupper: So, we hope you have found this a useful listen.  We hope, if you recognise that you are an overachiever, you're not beating yourself up too much, because please don't, but just think about some of the different things that you can do.  So just in summary, the ideas for action we've talked about are about prioritising performance; don't put all your achievement eggs in one basket; and then do the rear-view review. 

As we said at the start, all this stuff is summarised for you, including those questions to help you assess your overachievement orientation, and all of that will be in the PodSheet.  Links are always in the show notes, or email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, and we will send it to you.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you so much for listening, and we're back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.