The plight of the over-achiever

I coach many women who are high achievers. I consider myself a reformed over achiever, so it makes sense they connect with me. I have walked a similar path. Often what we find through coaching is that a lot of their excessive productivity, their overachieving, their excessive exercising, their busyness, is a response to trauma. A way of soothing their nervous system. I was reminded of this last week when a friend of mine ,who is a somatic experiencing therapist, put up a post about it. I thought hmm I have to write a blog post about this because I see it all the time. Hell I lived it for 30 years.

The thing that is most challenging about this disposition is that we live in a culture that values and promotes it. Productivity and On 24/7. Many organisational cultures are supported by capability models and values that reward behaviours such as team player, reliable, staying power - which is styled as resilience, focused and determined. Behaviours that simply reinforce this behaviour and often backed up by financial bonuses that reward it. Productivity is valued over rest and periods of quiet. We learn to push up against our window of tolerance in our nervous system and feel ok in a constant state of hyper-arousal. This often leads to burn out physically and in some cases some pretty ‘crazy’ behaviour. I put crazy in inverted commas because it is often perceived as crazy by others and may cause some distress, but is just a sign of a person not coping.

“So much that we do is not logical on the surface. Walking on beaches, growing flowers, lavishing attention on a dog. But it’s actually the very heart of what makes life work”

Steve Biddulph, Fully Human - a new way of using your mind

So where does this over-achieving drive come from? My husband and I met in one of the large global consulting firms and we always laughed and said the place was full of insecure over-achievers. It is true that that is the behavioural model of what they recruited. Often this comes from a strong need to please emanating from an individual’s inner child. From deeply unconscious feelings of unworthiness, or that they do not deserve what they are receiving in life and are constantly seeking to prove that they do. It often begins as a way to be noticed and rewarded by a parent, but over longer periods of time, becomes a way of coping, feeling loved and acquiring a sense of belonging. Stressed out over a conversation; sit at the desk and work. The part of ourselves that needs love, safety or belonging receives that by ‘doing’ stuff and ticking off boxes. The race against the clock to get stuff done.

So how do we stop this pattern? Well the first place is recognising that maybe you have it. I think for me in my twenties I used to work super hard for a couple of years and then take off for a few months and go travelling. Well you can only do this for so long. I got to the point where I realised that the way I worked was not sustainable and that I needed to take on less work, I found this challenging because I have “big shoulders’ and what I mean by that is I can carry a lot mentally and emotionally when it comes to load. I find this quality to be also there in my coaching clients. Also most over achievers are pretty smart, they can talk themselves in or out of most things in life. They talk themselves out of listening to their body, its calls for help whether it be pain for illness and learn to just push through.

For women, I think getting back to the natural rhythms of your menstrual cycle can be a huge help because for one week, give or take, every month, you have a period, it is a time of winter, a time to rest. It will not matter if you do not go to the gym much that week. Your body needs to rest and rejuvenate. I have found this form of relating to my body, beneficial on so many levels. In my experience taking this rest time every month is playing the longer game. It is looking after your energy levels long term. It gives your body recovery time. Acknowledging and accepting that the feminine body is a cyclical one and our energy levels go up and down and are meant to change is a huge step. Choosing to live this way in line with your natural rhythms is truly a blessing. If you no longer have periods you will probably find if you explore, that your energy levels line up with the cycles of the Moon. Check out when the full moon is around, you are often full of energy, when it is a new moon, it is time to rest.

Acknowledging that your energy is not there forever is very important. According to Taoist Tantric theory we are only born with a certain amount of energy - or Qi as the Taoists call it. We have to learn to nourish and replenish it. Mindfulness practices are great but they are not focused on the body. For women in particular, our body facilitates our growth through rites of passage, we are movement. Gentle body based practices that forge a mindful connection with the body are very beneficial. Such practices would include Qi Gong, a Jade Egg Practice, Sensual movement, restorative forms of Yoga, some aspects of Pilates.

Learning to listen to your body and really listen to what a YES and NO feels like inside of your is exceptionally important. It is important for boundaries and it is important for your health and wellbeing.

Ultimately it is also about exploring practices and choosing relationships that nourish and lift us up. Practices that allow the body to recover, so we shift out of that constant state of hyper-arousal, survival mode of fight and flight, and into a state of regulation. Relationships that foster this are vital. When you look at the circle of relationships in your life: immediate family, broader family, close friends, community friends, work friends, what are those that sustain and support you, that allow you to be in that place of nervous system regulation? Review your work culture; is it supportive of your longer term growth away from these survivalist patterns?

Choosing practices that stimulate your five sense and bring pleasure to your life, that bring you back to a place of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, and to celebrate that you are alive, are incredibly nourishing and offer an incredible doorway to calibration of your system.

My personal tip, when I feel my ego kick in and I get in a frenzy to get something done, I just slow it down and take a rest or go for a walk. The drive for me now comes from creativity and I am a very creative person. So when it feels in flow I do it. When it feels tiring or like I am pushing through, I stop.

It is never to early to choose you. To say a big YES to you. Your pleasure belongs to you, never forget that.

Please pass this onto anyone you feel may benefit from reading this. Drop me a line if you you have any thoughts. I have 2 spots open for coaching . If you are interested, we can have a chat on a free clarity call to see if we are a fit to work together.

Healing our Inner Child

One of the biggest challenges we face in our growth and development as adults is healing our childhood wounding.  That is, the traumatic impact of both emotional and psychological wounds we incur in childhood.  

This wounding is most often the result of our needs not being met by our parents.  Everyone that I work with has experienced this, as I have too. It is not because our parents were terrible parents, although some people’s parents were horrible.  It is that many of our parents are not perfect, they are people who were trying to work, raise children and have a life. They cannot focus all their attention on us 100% of the time.  They also had their own inner child wounds and at times they were parenting from that part of themselves, not their adult parts. The trauma I am talking about that we experienced as a result of this ranges from being criticised for not getting a great test score on a test at school, to being ignored, to in some cases, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Trauma expert, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whom I have had the pleasure of being taught by, says in his book “The Body Keeps the Score”, ‘Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past’.

We develop strategies, habits and patterns of behaviour, that are often very reactive and they become our dominant approaches to cope and live our life.  Thus often repeated patterns of feedback are given, repeated incidences of relationships dynamics occurring are often a sign that you are operating from your inner child self.  Anything that gets you a bit fired up or ‘triggered’ is often a good sign that old programs maybe of shame, inadequacy, abandonment, betrayal or feeling unsafe are operating. These programs always have stories attached to them that allow us to feel in control of what is actually going on.  So much so, that we attract the same situations and act them out on a daily basis.

When we are unaware of these child parts of ourselves running our life we are actually walking around projecting a shadow part of ourselves onto others. Our inner narrative might be ‘the bad person who did that to me’, ‘the bad luck responsible for our suffering’.  In some cases we get feedback in the workplace, giving us a sign of how others are experiencing this shadow part of ourselves - that we don’t see - and how it impacts on them. However, it can, when left unattended for a long period of time turn into symptoms, illness or disease; often in the case of repressed emotions that were not accepted as part of us as children.  For example, many people have an unhealthy relationship with their own anger and struggle to express it in a grounded way as it was deemed unacceptable when they were a small child. How many toddlers having a tantrum at two years old are sent to the ‘naughty corner’? What they are actually doing when they shake their body on the floor is trying to discharge the energetic charge of anger running through them.

Why do we need to do this inner child work?  I hear you ask. Well, often we don’t get a choice because we hit rock bottom.  Either in terms of poor health or relationship rupture. Often in midlife, our psyche gives us a chance to heal this wounding and face our pain to prepare ourselves for a vibrant ‘third act’ after we turn 50.  In her famous essay on Midlife, Brene Brown says it like this. ‘Midlife is when the Universe puts its hands on your shoulders and says “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armour is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armour could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and loveable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short....”

“Facing childhood wounding and working with relationships that will help you heal your relationship with your inner child might be some of the most challenging personal development work that you do but it will also be the most freeing and empowering.  ”

To heal your inner child, you need to bring that part of yourself to consciousness.  You do this by witnessing your inner world. That is, be able to observe when you are acting out one of your habits or patterns of behaviour.  Once you can do that, you work out what that behaviour is trying to gain for you; often love, safety and belonging. The next step is being able to parent yourself. This enables individuation and clear separation from the sensitive child part of you within you.  The third step is learning to put some strategies in place for self care so you can regulate your nervous system and then develop new strategies to cope and thrive in the world.

This work is freeing both to you and your family system.  It breaks cycles of family patterning that you have been carrying.  It creates the capacity for you to witness and observe your emotions and understand in an embodied way that you are not your emotions - you are just the experiencer of them.  It makes baring your emotions so much easier and gives you the ability to listen to them when they arise.

Doing the inner child work is tough.  You want to do it supported by a coach or therapist and with the support of those you love around you.  It will improve the quality of your relationships. It will open you up to different types of relationships and experiences in your life as you stop reacting and start creating the outcomes you want.  It will allow you to have a close relationship with your body and really learn to listen to it and the innate wisdom it has within it, by listening to your emotions and learning to be with them. You will learn to appreciate your shadow and move towards self-love and self- acceptance as you learn to love all the different parts of you, good and not so good.  Hopefully you learn to listen to your nervous system and really learn the meaning of ‘take care of yourself’; how to give yourself permission to rest, how to regulate yourself at a pace that is supportive of your need to recover. But most importantly, you will learn to love all the different child and adult parts of you that you discover and that you are a glorious, multi-dimensional being who is capable of living their best life and thriving in the world. 

I do inner child work in my coaching - if this is something would like to explore, come have a chat with me.