77| Stop Equating Perfectionism or Over-achievement With Enough

What if your relentless drive to achieve isn't ambition at all, but fear wearing a really convincing disguise, or someone else’s voice in your head? Let’s talk about the difference between overachieving and perfectionism, how they overlap, if one is better or worse and how to get off the hamster wheel we may have created. 

Transcript

What if your relentless drive to achieve isn't ambition at all, but fear wearing a really convincing disguise, or someone else’s voice in your head? Let’s talk about the difference between overachieving and perfectionism, how they overlap, if one is better or worse and how to get off the hamster wheel we may have created. This podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

Welcome friends, whether you’re a newbie or you’re one of our experienced listeners, all are welcome and thank you for checking in. Thank yourself for this short self care time and thank anyone that may have sent this to you. In episode 65 we talked about perfectionism but today we’ll go a bit further into overachieving, about what both actually are, where they come from, how they overlap, how they differ, how they help us, and how, if we're not paying attention, they can run our lives without realizing it.

Now this is not an episode about telling you to do less or lower your standards. I'm not here to talk you out of your ambition. This is about understanding the difference between ambition that comes from a place of genuine drive and joy and ambition that comes from a place of fear, because those two things can look almost identical from the outside and yet they feel completely different on the inside. And knowing which one is running internal dialogue of your life, that's one of the most useful things you can figure out.

So let's start by actually defining these two things because they get lumped together a lot and they're not quite the same. Overachieving, at its core, is about output. It's about doing more, accomplishing more, reaching further than what's expected or required. An overachiever is someone who consistently goes beyond the benchmark, whether that's at work, in school, in relationships, in how they show up for literally everyone in their life all of the time. And the thing about overachievers is they're often genuinely productive. They get things done. They hit goals. They impress people. There's a real upside to overachieving, and we shouldn't pretend there isn't.

Perfectionism is a little different and a little sneakier because while you might think it is, perfectionism isn't really about output at all. It's about standards, specifically about the belief that anything less than perfect is unacceptable. A perfectionist might actually produce less than an overachiever because perfectionism can create paralysis. If something can't be done perfectly, it can feel safer to not start it or to delay it endlessly or to abandon it before it can be judged. Perfectionism is less about doing more and more about making sure that what is done cannot be criticized by anyone, including yourself.

And these two things definitely overlap. You can be both at once, and a lot of people are. The overachiever who takes on every project and also redoes them three times because the first version wasn't quite right. The student who signs up for every extracurricular activity and still lies awake at night worried about whether it was enough. That combo of overachieving and perfectionism is honestly one of the most exhausting places to live. And a lot of us are living there without even realizing that we even moved in.

So take a second here. I want you to think about one area of your life where you constantly and consistently feel like you're not doing enough or not doing it well enough and just think about that, maybe write it down and we’ll come back to it later.

Okay so where does this actually come from? I don't think anyone woke up one day and decided I’m going to be a perfectionist or I’m going to be an overachiever. This stuff builds, usually slowly, usually early, and usually in response to something. For a lot of people it starts in childhood. Maybe you grew up in a household where achievement was the primary source of love and approval. Where good grades got you attention and affection, and average grades got you something less or more complicated. Or maybe it was the opposite, maybe there wasn't a lot of stability at home, and doing really well at things was the one area where you felt safe and in control. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I was always such an overachiever as a kid and then into my adult life. When everything else feels uncertain, being the best student with all the right answers or the hardest and best worker knowing everyone’s job can feel like the only solid ground you've got. 

For others it's more subtle. Maybe you had a parent or a teacher or a coach who was hard to impress, not cruel, just never satisfied, always adding just one more thing you could have done better. And you learned, without anyone ever saying it directly, that the goal is not just to do well but to do well enough that this person finally says yes, that's it, that's enough. And the problem is that moment never came. So you just kept going. And now you're an adult and that voice didn't stay behind in childhood, they never do, and instead it lives in your head now and that voice becomes yours.

We also live in a culture that genuinely rewards overachieving. We tend to celebrate the person who sleeps less and does more. Hustle culture, while I think it's finally getting some well-deserved push-back, spent a solid decade telling us that rest was laziness and that your self-worth was directly proportional to your productivity. That's a hard message to un-hear once it's in your system. And perfectionism gets its own cultural boost from social media, where everyone's output looks flawless which makes your own messy, imperfect life feel like a personal failing rather than the full, real world that we all live in.

Now let's talk about what the research actually says about this. Psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford, inher work on mindset found something important in her research on fixed versus growth mindsets which we’ve touched on in prior episodes. People with a fixed mindset, which often underlies perfectionism, believe that their qualities are carved in stone. That you're either smart or you're not, talented or you're not. And so every performance becomes a test of that fixed identity. Every mistake becomes evidence of who you fundamentally are. Which is why mistakes feel so catastrophic to a perfectionist. It's not just that the thing went wrong. It's that the thing going wrong meansthey’re wrong.

In contrast, a growth mindset andhealthy overachieving, treats ability as something that can be developed. Mistakes aren't verdicts, they're information. Needed effort isn't a sign that you're not talented, it's actually the whole point. And what Dweck found was that people with a growth mindset actually achieved more over time, persisted longer in the face of setbacks, and reported significantly higher well-being than those with a fixed mindset. So the relationship between how you think about achievement and how it affects you is not just psychological, it has real life results.

There's also a study from researchers at York University and the University of Bath that followed people over time and looked at the long-term effects of perfectionism specifically. What they found was that perfectionism, particularly what they called self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism, which is the belief that others expect you to be perfect, not that you are but others expect you to be, was significantly associated with burnout, chronic stress, anxiety, and in some cases depression. Not because these people were doing too much, but because of the constant internal pressure they put on themselves. The doing was almost beside the point. It was the relationship to the doing that was causing the harm.

I want to pause here and ask you something. When you think about that area you identified a few minutes ago, the one where you never quite feel like enough, what does the internal voice say to you when something doesn't go perfectly? Is it critical? Is it disappointed? Does it sound like someone specific? Just notice that. You don't have to do anything with it right now but just notice who it was.

Now both overachieving and perfectionism can serve us, up to a point. The drive to do more and do it well has built careers, created art, raised families, launched companies, and changed lives. The person who holds themselves to high standards and pushes past what's comfortable is often the person who ends up doing genuinely meaningful things. If you've accomplished something you're proud of, some version of this drive probably was involved. But it stops helping when the standard is no longer about quality or growth and becomes about avoiding the feeling of not being enough. When you're not working toward something, you might be running from something. And those two things feel similar in the short term but they lead to very different places over time. Working toward something is energizing. Running from something is exhausting. And you can do both for a long time before you feel the difference, which is part of what makes this tricky to identify.

Perfectionism in particular stops helping when it creates what psychologists call paralysis by analysis. The project that never gets started because the idea isn't fully formed yet. The email that gets rewritten six times and then never sent. The creative work that stays private because it isn't ready, and it's never quite ready, because ready would mean it could be judged. Perfectionism, at its most extreme, is actually self-protective. It says if I never finish it, you can't tell me it wasn't good enough.

There's also the relational cost. Overachievers and perfectionists can be genuinely hard to be around sometimes. When your internal standards are very high, you often project them onto the people around you, not always intentionally, but the energy is there. The slight disappointment when someone doesn't meet your standard. The difficulty delegating because no one will do it quite right or like you do it. The exhaustion others can feel when they can sense that no matter what they do it might not be enough. These patterns can create distance in relationships that has nothing to do with lack of love and everything to do with the particular pressure of living inside someone else's impossibly high bar. And if you’re like this at work, your team will likely feel discouraged and unmotivated, the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

Let's talk about what this looks like over time because in the short term, overachieving and perfectionism often look like success. High performance, impressive output, people noticing your work, it’s great for the ego. But over time, without some self-awareness and some intentional course correction, they tend to lead to one of a few places.

The first is burnout. The kind where one day you wake up and the drive that used to feel like fuel is just gone, and no matter how much rest you get, nothing seems to bring it back. Burnout is what happens when the machine has been running without maintenance for too long and the cost has been pushed off so many times that the bill finally comes due all at once. And what’s ironic with the burnout for overachievers is that it often feels like a personal failure, like a weakness, when actually it's just physics. As the saying goes, you cannot pour from an empty cup.

The second place this can lead is to a lowered sense of self. When your identity is built primarily around what you achieve and how well you do it, you become very vulnerable to the inevitable moments when things don't go well. The job loss, the project that fails, maybe illness when you can’t be at your best. For someone whose self-worth isn't tied to their output, these are simply setbacks. For someone whose self-worth is their output, this can feel like an unraveling.

The third thing is more hopeful. When people do the work of understanding where their drive comes from and learning to separate their worth from their output, they don't become less ambitious, they become more sustainably ambitious. They do better work, not worse. Because the work is no longer carrying the weight of their entire identity. It's just work. Really good work that they care about. And that's a completely different and much lighter way to carry it where external forces don’t mess up your internal headspace.

So think about one area where your drive to achieve or to do it perfectly might actually be holding you back rather than pushing you forward. Maybe it's something you haven't started, something you’re procrastinating. Maybe it's something you keep redoing. Maybe it's a relationship where your standards create distance. Just sit with it for a bit and again not fix anything but just sit with it. Awareness is always the first step and that might be enough for today.

So now let's talk about what you can actually do with this from a self-care perspective, which is really what this is all about. The first thing as I’ve said is awareness. If you've been listening and thinking oh wow, that's me, then you've already done something important. You've become aware and named it. And naming something takes away some of its invisible power over you. You can't change what you can't see. 

The second thing is to get curious about the voice. That critical internal voice that says it's not enough, that's not you. That's something you learned, something someone told you. It was given to you by someone or something in your history, and at some point it served a purpose, it kept you safe or helped you belong or protected you from something. But you're not in that situation anymore and it doesn’t need to be part of your belief system anymore. When you notice the voice, instead of either obeying it or fighting it, try just getting curious. Where did this come from? What is it afraid of? What is it trying to protect? Is it really true, or just a programmed reaction? And can you push back a little and maybe let things be a bit imperfect, let your nervous system practice with things being just ok and realizing that the world didn’t fall apart, family and friends still love you, you’re still doing just fine. 

The third thing is to reconnect with why. Not why you feel you should do something or why it will look good or why it'll prove something. But why it actually matters to you. What's the real reason? Because when your drive is connected to genuine meaning and genuine care, it feels different. As Brené Brown, a researcher on vulnerability and shame once said, you can't get to courage without walking through vulnerability. The courage to do something imperfectly, to try without guaranteeing the outcome, to show up without armor, that's where you build your peace.

Overachieving and perfectionism aren't your enemies. They're actually expressions of something good in you. They're the part of you that cares, that wants to contribute, that knows you're capable of more. The problem isn't that part. The problem is when that part starts running on fear instead of love, on proving instead of becoming, on protection instead of possibility. And the good news is that once you can see that, you have real choices about how to move forward. And the next time you come across someone still in that space, instead of just celebrating the overachiever, or rewarding the perfectionist, lets also stop and ask if they're okay. Let’s reach out and let each other know that we are all doing our best and our best is enough.

Remind yourself that you're allowed to be ambitious and at peace at the same time. You're allowed to care deeply about your work and also let it be imperfect. You're allowed to want more for yourself without that wanting to make you feel less than. Those things aren't contradictions. They're actually the goal. And getting there isn't about lowering your standards. It's about raising your kindness toward yourself to match them. Giving ourselves more grace and kindness is one of the most wonderful acts of self care and self love we can do.

So as we close, reflect on where you can give yourself that grace and kindness, where can you slow down a bit, delegate a little, and be willing to let go of the perfect version of yourself and see yourself for the worthy human you are. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who’s doing too much to prove themselves, who’s beating themselves up for not being perfect. Perfect is an illusion and we all know someone who is running themselves into the ground in the name of trying to be enough, and maybe that someone is you. And sometimes the kindest thing we can do is hand them or ourselves a mirror and say, hey, let’s look at this without judgment, let’s see the illusion and find our way out of this crazy fun-house and into a home within ourselves, to a more calm and peaceful life of love and acceptance, little by little and peace by peace.