From High Achiever to High Performer
How To Enjoy The Journey and Not Just The Results!
Are you a high achiever or a high performer? Do you constantly strive for new achievements, or do you mostly find enjoyment in the process?
Do you often feel that there is a never-ending list of to dos and goals to reach? Welcome to the high achiever’s inner monologues. As a high achiever, you are driven, ambitious and motivated. Yet, this comes at a cost. The price you pay for that drive is the price of perpetual disappointment. Each time you miss the target, you are disappointed. Each time you fail, your heart sinks. Each time you land on the moon instead of the stars, you feel disillusioned. In the back of your mind, you always wonder: Is this enough? The answer to that question is always no. Am I ‘there’? No, not quite yet.
This great ambition stems from a lack of self-worth and if you don’t monitor your high achieving patterns, it can lead to overwhelm and even burnout. Your high achiever can be a great benefit to your life, if you don’t let the toxicity of it get to you.
How can your high achiever be your greatest strength and not an on-going internal void of dissatisfaction? This was the question I set out to answer as I worked on my own high achiever drive, and with my clients (who all are… high achievers).
Most high achieving patterns are correlated with the arrival fallacy. You believe that when you finally reach your vision, you will be happy. When you earn zillions, when you live in a palace, when you are married to prince (princess) charming, only then will you be happy. The arrival fallacy takes you down the rabbit hole of busy success hunting, only to arrive at another rabbit hole. So, you continue running until exhaustion makes you stop and you realise that you still have not found the happiness you were longing for.
That’s when you start to question your process. Maybe running after success, achievement after achievement is not the solution. But if this is not the solution, then what is? The answer cannot possibly be to just stop all chasing. And your high achieving mind cannot stop from wanting the very best. So how can you both reach great levels of success without sacrificing your inner peace?
There are three core strategies that you can apply daily to empower you to continue your striving and growth and find joy in the process.
1. Focus On The Journey
Being motivated to land on the stars is wonderful, but it takes your attention away from the present moment. In my book ‘The Magic of Focus’, I cover the three pillars of Focus: Short Term Focus, Long Term Focus and Selective Focus.
When you put all your energy into your vision and Long-Term Focus, it means that you are neglecting your day to day, and always rushing to get ‘there’. While you still want to know where you are going, you want to place most of your attention on the present and optimise your day to day. This is where Selective Focus comes into play – your ability to appreciate your journey and process.
There are three main ways you can do this:
Apply your high achieving mindset to the journey
Instead of obsessing over your dreams, wondering what the ideal scenario would be, start to look at: What would make your everyday joyful? A typical high achiever pattern is to crunch the days into oblivion, sacrificing each day towards your vision. The belief behind this is that by putting in all the effort, it will pay off later. Of course, work is necessary, but it doesn’t need to be a grind. Once more, this comes back to the arrival fallacy. You won’t be happier just when you reach your goal. So instead, how about making the journey more enjoyable?
As Muhammed Ali said: ‘Don’t count the days but make the days count’. A few things start to happen when you find joy in your process. One point is clear: you are happier and more fulfilled. But that’s not it. You are also a lot more likely to achieve your objective faster and with more ease, because you are enjoying the journey, have higher energy, and make better decisions. You then strike goal after goal. Pretty great news for a high achiever, right? What’s more remarkable is that as you shift your perspective, you become less attached to the goals you reach, and your focus is placed on the journey itself.
Want more presence? Get into flow
I know no better way to be present than to be in flow. That wonderful state when everything around you disappears and you are merged with your task. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains this beautifully in his book ‘Flow’: your greatest performance comes when you are in flow. What does that look like? That’s when you have the perfect balance of skills and challenge, when you feel that your skills can match the challenge that you have been given.
To optimise your flow states, avoid interruptions (especially emails, slack…) during deep work as it takes on average 23 min to get back into flow after you have been interrupted (studyhttps://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/23146/too-many-interruptions-work.aspx).
The more you are in flow, the more you will enjoy the journey. If you feel overwhelmed, and drowning in small tasks, you are probably not in flow, but just turning off fires. Instead, switch to deep work activities that allow you to be more in flow. You can even start to measure how much you are in flow during the course of each day.
As a recent Gallup study illustrated (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236297/strengths-based-employee-development-business-results.aspx), there are only 13% of employees worldwide that are engaged in their work. Yet, by focusing on strengths, engagement goes up. This could be because your strengths most likely correspond to your ‘zone of genius’ (great concept from the book ‘The Big Leap’ by Gay Hendricks), which contribute to you being in flow.
Pause, Pause, Pause
High achievers are fast and furious. They run until exhaustion, and even then, they continue running. Want to climb Mount Everest? You can’t do it all in one go. You need to pause. High performing athletes value their rest and recharge as much as their athletic work. The magic is in the pause. Take breaks. Be present. Pause.
2. Focus On The Gain
I still vividly remember when my coach recommended: ‘The Gap and the Gain’ (Dan Sullivan). I devoured it in three days (yes, I know, high achiever). And I was stunned. Something so simple, so trivial could really change everything. As always, it came down to mindset.
The genius of ‘The Gap and The Gain’ comes from its simplicity. As a high achiever, you tend to measure your progress by focusing on what’s missing. You think about your vision, and how far you still have to go, then you run around being busy to try to make it happen. The problem? The goalpost keeps moving forward. Each time you attain a new level, you barely pause to acknowledge it, you are already focused on the next target. Here’s a case in point: A week after my book was published, I was on a call with a close friend, and she asked me how the book launch had gone, and I had already forgotten about it as I was already looking at my next projects. Wow, four years to write and publish my book, and a week later, it was already old news… Does this sound familiar to you?
Measure progress backwards
What Dan Sullivan explains in his book is how to pivot things around: focus on how far you have come, not how far you still have to go. The golden rule of ‘The Gap and The Gain’ is: Always measure progress backwards, not forwards. By reflecting at the end of each week and asking yourself: What have you achieved? What have you learned?, you shift your perspective from only looking at all the to-dos on your never-ending list, and taking a moment to appreciate your progress.
Appreciate the small wins.
Celebrate the small wins along the way. As basic as this sounds, it truly changes how you function. By building the habit of gratitude and celebration, you are rewiring your brain to notice your progress and focus less on what is missing. You are developing an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset. Each small win adds up to the life and work you want to lead. Each small win counts.
Play the long game
You love where you at now – as much as you love where you are going. This circles right back to the first point around focusing on the journey. If you love where you are now, that radiates energy and it will lead you towards your dreams. Each time you find yourself fighting your days, ask yourself: Are you playing the long game? Are you loving where you are now?
3. Focus On The Pace
The difference between a high achiever and a high performer is this: the high achiever runs and gets exhausted; the high performer paces themselves. The high achiever is focused on achievements for achievement’s sake, whereas the high performer is interested in the journey, the learning, the process.
In his book ‘High Performing Habits’, Brendon Burchard breaks high performance down into six core pillars: Seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage. Pillars 2 and 4 (energy and productivity) require a great pace! If you are rushing and burning out, your energy is low, and your productivity also decreases.
How can you focus on the pace?
Prioritise wellbeing
Instead of only looking at your business goals, turn your drive onto your wellbeing. Apply your high achieving mindset to your wellbeing. Start to analyse: how can you improve your sleep, your exercise routine, your diet? All the high performers I know and have interviewed on my podcast (the focus bee show), all are equally as obsessed about their energy levels as they are about their business. They didn’t all start off that way, but somewhere along the line, they realised, to achieve their mission, they needed to have the energy to get there.
A Gallup Study on preventing burnout goes a step further by explaining that organisations need to make wellbeing part of the culture. (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/313160/preventing-and-dealing-with-employee-burnout.aspx)
Intrinsic Motivation
High performers are intrinsically motivated by the work they do. They take joy in the activity they are doing. They are in flow and appreciate the steps along the way. If you are driven by extrinsic factors, you are more likely to burn out, and to be lured by ‘the arrival fallacy’. Intrinsic motivation ensures you are making the most of the journey and keeps you working at a great pace.
Compassion
A last word on compassion. High achievers are notoriously hard on themselves. Nothing is ever good enough. The stars are still too far away. Nothing can fill that empty hole of longing for glory. So instead, let’s stop and show some compassion. It doesn’t take much. Simply acknowledging you are doing great, patting yourself on the shoulder, and pausing to celebrate how far you have come.
The bottom line is: what makes you strive after achievement? A need to prove your worthiness to others and to yourself. What makes you strive for great performance? A desire to grow, contribute and enjoy the process. Which route do you want to take?
You have a choice: you can choose how you show up, you can choose how you manage your patterns, and you can choose your behaviours. By focusing on the journey, the gain and your pace, you will make your high achiever your ally and achieve the success you want, as a by-product.
Thank you for reading,
Enjoy the journey,
Katie