40. The Truth About Overachieving
One of the things I say when I’m explaining what I do in my business is that I help high-achievers overachieve without burning out. And that’s true. But the thing about overachieving is it’s not all created equal (and it doesn’t all have the same outcomes).
Overachieving can be a useful skill but it can also be problematic.
Sometimes we get so used to doing something that we never stop to ask ourselves whether what we’re doing is actually beneficial in the long run. Overachieving sounds like a good thing, right? But sometimes it leads to burnout and overwork. Other times it leads to us robbing others of opportunities to grow and stretch their skills. Sometimes overachieving leads to underdelivering, as strange as that may sound.
Overachieving isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, and understanding the drivers behind it will provide some valuable insight into how you want to move forward. Tune in this week and we’ll discuss the ups and downs of overachieving and how exactly you want to employ this skill in your own career.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What I mean when I describe someone as an overachiever.
The point at which overachieving behavior could become problematic.
What’s going on in your brain if you’re overworking in situations where that is not being asked of you.
How people with marginalized identities fall into a trap of overworking and overachieving in the workplace without being compensated appropriately in exchange.
Why there is nothing inherently good or bad about overachieving.
How to put your own overachieving into perspective, and what you can do if you decide you need to change it.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about overachieving.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all. Okay, first of all, I wanted to give you an update on the cat because I know last week I kind of left you with a cliffhanger. The cat is fine. Last week I was talking about how we had sent him in for oral surgery to get some of his teeth removed because they were not in good shape, and they were at risk of an infection and probably causing him pain.
And when I recorded the podcast, he was still in surgery. And I was sharing with y'all– In case you don't remember or in case you didn't listen to last week's episode, I was sharing with y'all about all the uncomfortable feelings I was feeling not knowing what was going to happen. Because there's always a risk, especially with an older pet like ours.
So I just wanted to follow up and tell you he's fine. He came out of surgery great. And he's recovering and things are going pretty well with him. I mean, he's recovering, so it's not 100% well.
I've had my wisdom teeth out, so I know recovering from Oral Surgery is not my favorite thing in the world for me, probably not for him either. But he survived and were incredibly, deeply grateful. And I thought that you would want to know.
Okay, this week we're going to talk about overachieving. But one of the things I say when I'm explaining to people what I do in my business is that I help high achievers overachieve without burning out. And that's true.
But this week, I want to talk about some of the problematic sides of overachieving, because I don't think we always have a full picture of overachieving. I think we widely see it as something beneficial, that's helpful to do in our lives and in our careers without really questioning, why am I doing this? And is it beneficial in the long run? Or just are there other reasons I'm doing it?
Like, for instance, I have an episode about overworking. And one of the things I teach in that episode is that when we attach our value to our work, and it's specifically to how productive we are and how much we get done, we will over work even if that's not the culture or the norm in that office. Even if other people there are not inviting or insisting that we do that.
We will do it because of that connection in our brains because we all want to feel worthy. And if we think the only way that I can feel worthy is to create a certain amount of work or to create more work than everyone else or to be the last person in the office, then of course we're going to do those behaviors.
And I've seen this many times where people want to stop overworking, but they can't because of that internal connection. So we really have to unlink that. And this can be the case with overachieving as well.
Okay, so first let's define the terms. What is overachieving? Overachieving, according to a quick Google search, is performing better or achieving more than is expected or is the standard.
And there are different ideas on this, on like how we go about creating the overachievement. But one thing that people are realizing more and more is that for a lot of people who are overachieving they’re overachieving through extra effort, extra hours worked, et cetera.
That's not true for all people, some people overachieved by finding different ways to do things. And by streamlining processes. Or they simply have a different way of working where they're able to create out-sized results without that out-sized effort.
What I want to offer you today is that overachieving isn't good or bad. You can totally decide to do it. In a lot of ways, as a recovering perfectionist people pleaser kind of person, I'm a diehard overachiever. I remember when I was a little kid, actually, many of you might not know this.
When I was a little kid, I was home schooled for a while until my dad got custody of me. And when I went to public school for the first time, at the tender age of eight, I'd never been in a formal school setting. And it was very confusing to me because all of my schooling that I had had had been just with me, and my mom, and my brother.
And I think in some of those years also my mom was being a little bit lax about what she was teaching us. So I went into public school as kind of this – I was a little bit almost feral. I just didn't understand anything that was happening or why we had to do things.
I actually remember as a little kid they were like, “And you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom.” And I thought that was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever heard, which is really interesting. I had a lot of bodily autonomy before I went to public school. And one of the things that I noticed, I didn't realize I was noticing it because, again, I was eight and my self-awareness was not high.
In retrospect, I can see I had a lot of bodily autonomy going into that. And I was really confused about why anyone would have any interest in taking that away from me or making me ask permission to do that.
And we're not going to get into the psychology of schools right now. But I do think that's an interesting topic, the way that we're trained to follow directions and behave a certain way. And that's a lot of our socialization, right? A lot of it's from our family of origin, but a lot of our socialization is also from the way that we are schooled.
Okay, all that’s sort of an aside. But one of the things that I realized when I came into the public school setting, really to group school setting, as an eight year old was that grades mattered. And grades were how you got approval. And they were how you got treats and rewards and all kinds of good things that I wanted.
But I remember being a little kid, and kind of being unable to tell if my work was good or not. I actually, as a child loved math because math was so clear cut. It was always really obvious that I had the right answer.
Whereas other subjects, even though I eventually did go on to study English and French, other subjects like English and like writing were much more subjective. And I found a lot of that to be really confusing as a kid. And I really struggled to understand if my work was good or not.
And so one of the ways that my child brain figured out how to handle this was through overachieving. So this is a habit that for me goes back really, really far. I figured out that if I wasn't sure if what I was doing was good, then one way to handle that was to just kind of like do more of everything. Just try to like do more of everything in every category so if one of the things I thought was good actually wasn't, then maybe some other good stuff would come in and balance it back out.
And I remember always wanting the teacher to read my work and tell me if it was good. And so I think that is a really interesting way of seeing that as a child I learned to stop being my own authority figure. I learned to stop asking myself like, “Do I think it's good?” And I learned to ask other people, “Do you think it's good? What do you think? Teach me how to think about this. Teach me how to tell if it's good.”
And I realize this is kind of a tangent, but I think it's really important because I think this is how it is for many of us. Really small children have really solid ideas about what's good, and what's bad, and what's right, and what's wrong. And I do think we have to parent kids, obviously, to teach them certain things. But for a lot of us this socialization included a lot of things that were not for our benefit. And they separated us from our capacity to decide for ourselves.
I know back when I was growing up very few people were asking me like, “What do you think? And why do you think that's good or bad?” And maybe sometimes they were asking that on tests as reading comprehension. But it always kind of felt like I had to like perform to someone else's standards. I didn't have that awareness of it at the time, but I can see that looking back now.
Although I did do a lot of creative problem solving stuff as a kid, And what I liked about that was that it was much more focused on you figuring it out for yourself. Anyways, that's kind of a tangent.
My point is, many of us have been overachieving for as long as we can remember, for as long as we've been schooled. And I am definitely one of those people. And overachieving was a way that I kept myself safe.
Now, obviously, overachieving doesn't literally keep you safe, but that was how I made sense of the world and how I figured things out. Like, “Hey, if I overachieve, especially if I overachieve academically, I will get these rewards and results that I like. And I will avoid these other results and punishments I don't like.”
And obviously it was a bit of a mess because I was also a kid with a bunch of impulses and stuff. So I was also not doing that a lot of the time. But as I got older and I got more and more able to manage my impulses, that overachieving and perfectionism and people pleasing, those became stronger and stronger because they weren't being tempered by these other things.
Again though, I don't think overachieving is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of my clients in many ways want to overachieve. They want to have superior work products, and I'm really into that. But I think the question always is, why are we overachieving? Why are we overachieving? And what are we defining as overachieving? I think that's also a really important question.
A few weeks ago, I did a podcast about money. And something I see is a lot of women are overachieving in a way where we're doing more than one person's job. But we're often not getting more than one person's paycheck. We're often not getting more than one person's compensation.
So with that kind of overachieving in particular, I can really see the social conditioning coming through with like, “I have to be better than everyone else to be excellent. I have to be better than everyone else to be safe.” But what it's also doing is it's having us give way more value than we're getting in return.
And then I often see people who are overachievers and then they want to get promoted. And then people are saying like, “Well, you have to do even more on top of what you've been doing.” Because they've been used to you delivering that amount of product, or work, or whatever, service for the amount of money they've been paying you. And I think that can get a little bit tricky.
If we've been doing multiple people's jobs for our one paycheck for a long time, a lot of times people get used to that. And then they don't necessarily want to compensate us at the level that is appropriate, equal to the amount of work we're doing.
But if we have this internal narrative of like, “I always have to overachieve to be safe. And I always have to do more.” And all of that, first of all, we might not even ask for more compensation. And if we ask, and they say, no, we might just be like, “Okay.”
And I've even seen people do this thing where they will take on more work than everyone else, even without more pay. Because that's how they create not just feelings of safety, but superiority. And I think when we are creating feelings of superiority, what we're really looking for usually is safety anyways.
But I think it's almost like in their brain they're like, “Oh, I have to be better than everyone else in the office to feel safe. Because if I'm not the best in the office, if I'm not doing more than everyone else, then I'm at risk.”
And I know as a person who has been laid off, I've fallen into that thought pattern myself a lot. But then what I see happen is women realize, and people with marginalized identities too, realize how much more someone else is getting paid to do a shittier job than we're doing. And then we completely lose our shit.
So this is why I think we really have to understand what do I actually mean when I'm saying I overachieve, or I want to overachieve? How are we defining that? And why the fuck are we doing it?
Here's another thing I want you to consider. There are problematic elements to over delivering or overachieving beyond those things also. Beyond the way that sometimes we're basically trading our $10,000 of effort for like someone else's $1,000 of compensation. Sometimes over delivering or overachieving has a different kind of cost. And this is that sometimes when we over deliver, we're actually under delivering, because we are taking something away from someone else.
So for this, I have an example from my own business, which is a little vulnerable but I'm going to share it with y'all. And that is sometimes my desire as a coach to over deliver can actually make me under deliver for my clients. And you might be like, “What? How is that possible? How is over delivering under delivering?”
But the way that I've seen it happen, and that I've had to coach myself to correct in my business is, as a coach I want to give my clients everything. I want them to have the most spectacular results possible and get everything they want. And sometimes when I was a younger coach what that meant was that I would want to solve my client's problems.
And here's the thing, that's not really my job. I have a toolkit that can help you solve your problem. It's not my job to know what you should do. It's not my job to give you advice. It's never my job to know better than you. That's not what I'm ever trying to teach you as my clients.
And when I say my clients, I mean my paying clients. But I also mean every one of you podcast listeners, because y'all are my clients too. And I'm working every week to deliver coaching to you that is going to help you improve your life in real and lasting ways.
But if I try to solve your problems for you, that creates a problem because then I'm the one who solves the problem. That's why as a coach, I see it as my job to help you figure out how to solve your own problems. So I bring you all my best tools. I bring you all my best teachings. I bring you all my best insight.
And yeah, I'll also bring you my brilliant brain because my brain is amazing and as awesome ideas. I have a very creative mind that loves to come up with solutions that are outside of the box. Again, that's that when I was a kid and did the creative problem solving. I think that really taught that to me.
And honestly, I think the fact that I joined the public school system at a later age meant I spent more time as a child having this kind of wild, untamed sort of experience. And I think that has impacted how I think to this day, even as an adult in a way that I really value.
I'll bring all of that for my clients. But if I try to solve your problems for you, me doing that, which one could say would be me over delivering, is also under delivering. Because here's the problem with it, it undermines your agency. And I don't want to undermine your agency.
No matter what else the fuck I do I want to be teaching you about the power of you. I want to be selling you on the power of you. I want you to come to my podcast to learn whatever the fuck it is I'm teaching that week. But I want you to leave thinking, “Fuck yes, I can have the life I want. I can create this thing. I can hit that goal. I can love my job.”
I want you to be like, “Oh, I could probably actually enjoy my life as it is much more using these tools. And then I can also use these tools to go out and create huge changes in my life like writing the novel I've always wanted to write. Or hopping into an entirely different industry, which I've wanted to do but been afraid of. That's what I want for you.
So that's something I want for y'all to think about too in your own work and your own life. Sometimes when you overachieve, when you over deliver it's weirdly also a way in which you're underachieving and you're under delivering.
So if you're a leader at work and you're overachieving and over delivering, it's possible that by doing that you're also under delivering as a leader to your team. Because you're not creating expectations for them to do really incredible work. Because you're like, “I'll do all the work. And you can just do this little bit of work and feel fine. And we're going to be great.” In a way you're over delivering but in a different way you're under delivering.
I see this with parents all the time where they do everything for their children. And I'm not opposed to doing things for your kids, but sometimes when we want to over deliver to our kids, then we also kind of rob them of the chance to figure things out on their own.
I think we have such, in our culture, an intolerance for discomfort in ourselves and discomfort and other people that we often do things for other people that we don't really need to be doing for them. And then we call that overachieving and over delivering. And I just see very clearly how sometimes it's under delivering because it is taking away part of the value that you could offer to someone else.
Okay, so to summarize, I think our culture generally sees overachieving as either something good or something annoying that other people do because they want all the attention. And I do think there are ways that overachieving can be good. I also do think there are ways overachieving can be performative, which is kind of what that second thing is getting at. But I also think there are a lot of ways overachieving can be problematic for us.
And I don't think there's one right answer about when it's good or when it's bad. I actually think overachieving is, first of all, it's totally subjective what do you mean by it. But it's also neutral. And what I want you to think about is if you're like, “Should I be overachieving in this moment?” The question is, what does it mean right now? And why are you doing it?
And I actually think another frame that's really useful here is thinking about, is this useful in the long term? Because something I see again and again with my clients, and I've seen it in my own life too, is that we tend to do things that feel good in the short term at the cost of our long term.
Like we're like, “Oh, I just need to hurry up and overachieve this week so my boss will be impressed. And then it would be more uncomfortable for me to not overachieve. So I'll just overachieve and then I'll stop overachieving later.” But then we just keep like doing that over and over again.
And while I don't think overachieving always leads to burnout, I think when we're doing it for certain reasons, like trying to prove our worth and things like that, I do think it can cause burnout. And again it's like, is it useful in the long term? Is it sustainable in the long term? Or are we just doing it because we don't want to feel uncomfortable in the short term?
Because when you have a habit of overachieving, and if you stop indulging that habit and try doing different things, like actually logging off of work at 5pm, it's going to feel uncomfortable. Even if it's what you want and even if it also feels better, more aligned with the life you want to have, it's going to feel uncomfortable because you're switching from your habitual thing.
So here's what I want you all to think about, where are you overachieving in your life? What do you mean by overachieving? Or over delivering, I'm sort of using them interchangeably even though they're not exactly the same thing, but I think they're similar enough for the purposes of this podcast.
Where are you overachieving in your life? What does it mean specifically? Why are you doing it? Is it sustainable in the long term? And do you want to intentionally choose to keep doing it or do you want to choose something else?
Because so often in life, we're just doing the things we've always done, and then feeling the way we've always felt. And then we're like, “I don't know why I feel burnt out. I guess I just have to feel this way.” No, you don't have to feel the ways you've always felt, you don't have to do the things you've always done. The way your past has been does not determine what your future can be.
But if you want it to be different, that's on you. You have to create that. And listen, if you got a little defensive when I said that, me too. My brain hates that shit. Every time I'm like, “All right, Kori, well if you want it to be different, you got to make a different.” I have like a little like tantrum in my soul.
But I find that it's really true. And that once that little tantrum is over it's just like, “Yeah, do you want to have something different or not? You totally can, but you got to be the one to make it. And listen, you don't have to go it alone. Even though I don't have all the answers, and I won't solve your problems for you, having a coach is an incredible benefit. Because having a coach helps you reveal your power to yourself.
And that sounds probably like really coaching and woo-woo. But actually, what it means is like you have a lot of knowing in you already and you have a lot of capability, whether you see it or not. And a coach helps you connect to that and learn how to use it.
It's a little bit like you have like an awesome car but you can't find the keys and you don't know how to drive the car. The coach isn't going to drive the car for you. But we're like, “Hey, here's some places the keys might be. If you can't find the keys here is how you hot wire the car. And here's how you drive the car. And here's what this weird button does.” That's what we're here for.
And when we are changing things in our lives that have been habitual for a really long time, like I was telling you earlier about how my overachieving has been habitual since I was eight. I'm 37, that's almost 20 years, it's most of my life. It can be really beneficial to have someone doing that with you because changing habits is hard, y'all. It's hard.
The brain is like, “I don't know, I've been using this neural pathway for 20 years, I think I'm just going to keep doing it.” Did I say 20 years? I guess I'm 37, it's been almost 30 years. Listen, as I say, nearly every week, this is not a math podcast, okay? Anyways, you get the point.
When you are changing neural patterns you've had for like 20, 30, 40 years, having someone sitting next to you helping you do it is a game changer. It's not required, but I think it's a lot more fun. I think it makes the work go a lot faster. And I think it gives you a community.
Even if it's just a community of one with a one on one coach, where you can see someone else who’s doing the same work too and remind your brain that it is possible. You can make changes and you can have a completely different life in one year, two years, five years than you do now. You're allowed to, you're capable. All you have to do is do it.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life. I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers, and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all. Okay, first of all, I wanted to give you an update on the cat because I know last week I kind of left you with a cliffhanger. The cat is fine. Last week I was talking about how we had sent him in for oral surgery to get some of his teeth removed because they were not in good shape, and they were at risk of an infection and probably causing him pain.
And when I recorded the podcast, he was still in surgery. And I was sharing with y'all– In case you don't remember or in case you didn't listen to last week's episode, I was sharing with y'all about all the uncomfortable feelings I was feeling not knowing what was going to happen. Because there's always a risk, especially with an older pet like ours.
So I just wanted to follow up and tell you he's fine. He came out of surgery great. And he's recovering and things are going pretty well with him. I mean, he's recovering, so it's not 100% well.
I've had my wisdom teeth out, so I know recovering from Oral Surgery is not my favorite thing in the world for me, probably not for him either. But he survived and were incredibly, deeply grateful. And I thought that you would want to know.
Okay, this week we're going to talk about overachieving. But one of the things I say when I'm explaining to people what I do in my business is that I help high achievers overachieve without burning out. And that's true.
But this week, I want to talk about some of the problematic sides of overachieving, because I don't think we always have a full picture of overachieving. I think we widely see it as something beneficial, that's helpful to do in our lives and in our careers without really questioning, why am I doing this? And is it beneficial in the long run? Or just are there other reasons I'm doing it?
Like, for instance, I have an episode about overworking. And one of the things I teach in that episode is that when we attach our value to our work, and it's specifically to how productive we are and how much we get done, we will over work even if that's not the culture or the norm in that office. Even if other people there are not inviting or insisting that we do that.
We will do it because of that connection in our brains because we all want to feel worthy. And if we think the only way that I can feel worthy is to create a certain amount of work or to create more work than everyone else or to be the last person in the office, then of course we're going to do those behaviors.
And I've seen this many times where people want to stop overworking, but they can't because of that internal connection. So we really have to unlink that. And this can be the case with overachieving as well.
Okay, so first let's define the terms. What is overachieving? Overachieving, according to a quick Google search, is performing better or achieving more than is expected or is the standard.
And there are different ideas on this, on like how we go about creating the overachievement. But one thing that people are realizing more and more is that for a lot of people who are overachieving they’re overachieving through extra effort, extra hours worked, et cetera.
That's not true for all people, some people overachieved by finding different ways to do things. And by streamlining processes. Or they simply have a different way of working where they're able to create out-sized results without that out-sized effort.
What I want to offer you today is that overachieving isn't good or bad. You can totally decide to do it. In a lot of ways, as a recovering perfectionist people pleaser kind of person, I'm a diehard overachiever. I remember when I was a little kid, actually, many of you might not know this.
When I was a little kid, I was home schooled for a while until my dad got custody of me. And when I went to public school for the first time, at the tender age of eight, I'd never been in a formal school setting. And it was very confusing to me because all of my schooling that I had had had been just with me, and my mom, and my brother.
And I think in some of those years also my mom was being a little bit lax about what she was teaching us. So I went into public school as kind of this – I was a little bit almost feral. I just didn't understand anything that was happening or why we had to do things.
I actually remember as a little kid they were like, “And you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom.” And I thought that was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever heard, which is really interesting. I had a lot of bodily autonomy before I went to public school. And one of the things that I noticed, I didn't realize I was noticing it because, again, I was eight and my self-awareness was not high.
In retrospect, I can see I had a lot of bodily autonomy going into that. And I was really confused about why anyone would have any interest in taking that away from me or making me ask permission to do that.
And we're not going to get into the psychology of schools right now. But I do think that's an interesting topic, the way that we're trained to follow directions and behave a certain way. And that's a lot of our socialization, right? A lot of it's from our family of origin, but a lot of our socialization is also from the way that we are schooled.
Okay, all that’s sort of an aside. But one of the things that I realized when I came into the public school setting, really to group school setting, as an eight year old was that grades mattered. And grades were how you got approval. And they were how you got treats and rewards and all kinds of good things that I wanted.
But I remember being a little kid, and kind of being unable to tell if my work was good or not. I actually, as a child loved math because math was so clear cut. It was always really obvious that I had the right answer.
Whereas other subjects, even though I eventually did go on to study English and French, other subjects like English and like writing were much more subjective. And I found a lot of that to be really confusing as a kid. And I really struggled to understand if my work was good or not.
And so one of the ways that my child brain figured out how to handle this was through overachieving. So this is a habit that for me goes back really, really far. I figured out that if I wasn't sure if what I was doing was good, then one way to handle that was to just kind of like do more of everything. Just try to like do more of everything in every category so if one of the things I thought was good actually wasn't, then maybe some other good stuff would come in and balance it back out.
And I remember always wanting the teacher to read my work and tell me if it was good. And so I think that is a really interesting way of seeing that as a child I learned to stop being my own authority figure. I learned to stop asking myself like, “Do I think it's good?” And I learned to ask other people, “Do you think it's good? What do you think? Teach me how to think about this. Teach me how to tell if it's good.”
And I realize this is kind of a tangent, but I think it's really important because I think this is how it is for many of us. Really small children have really solid ideas about what's good, and what's bad, and what's right, and what's wrong. And I do think we have to parent kids, obviously, to teach them certain things. But for a lot of us this socialization included a lot of things that were not for our benefit. And they separated us from our capacity to decide for ourselves.
I know back when I was growing up very few people were asking me like, “What do you think? And why do you think that's good or bad?” And maybe sometimes they were asking that on tests as reading comprehension. But it always kind of felt like I had to like perform to someone else's standards. I didn't have that awareness of it at the time, but I can see that looking back now.
Although I did do a lot of creative problem solving stuff as a kid, And what I liked about that was that it was much more focused on you figuring it out for yourself. Anyways, that's kind of a tangent.
My point is, many of us have been overachieving for as long as we can remember, for as long as we've been schooled. And I am definitely one of those people. And overachieving was a way that I kept myself safe.
Now, obviously, overachieving doesn't literally keep you safe, but that was how I made sense of the world and how I figured things out. Like, “Hey, if I overachieve, especially if I overachieve academically, I will get these rewards and results that I like. And I will avoid these other results and punishments I don't like.”
And obviously it was a bit of a mess because I was also a kid with a bunch of impulses and stuff. So I was also not doing that a lot of the time. But as I got older and I got more and more able to manage my impulses, that overachieving and perfectionism and people pleasing, those became stronger and stronger because they weren't being tempered by these other things.
Again though, I don't think overachieving is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of my clients in many ways want to overachieve. They want to have superior work products, and I'm really into that. But I think the question always is, why are we overachieving? Why are we overachieving? And what are we defining as overachieving? I think that's also a really important question.
A few weeks ago, I did a podcast about money. And something I see is a lot of women are overachieving in a way where we're doing more than one person's job. But we're often not getting more than one person's paycheck. We're often not getting more than one person's compensation.
So with that kind of overachieving in particular, I can really see the social conditioning coming through with like, “I have to be better than everyone else to be excellent. I have to be better than everyone else to be safe.” But what it's also doing is it's having us give way more value than we're getting in return.
And then I often see people who are overachievers and then they want to get promoted. And then people are saying like, “Well, you have to do even more on top of what you've been doing.” Because they've been used to you delivering that amount of product, or work, or whatever, service for the amount of money they've been paying you. And I think that can get a little bit tricky.
If we've been doing multiple people's jobs for our one paycheck for a long time, a lot of times people get used to that. And then they don't necessarily want to compensate us at the level that is appropriate, equal to the amount of work we're doing.
But if we have this internal narrative of like, “I always have to overachieve to be safe. And I always have to do more.” And all of that, first of all, we might not even ask for more compensation. And if we ask, and they say, no, we might just be like, “Okay.”
And I've even seen people do this thing where they will take on more work than everyone else, even without more pay. Because that's how they create not just feelings of safety, but superiority. And I think when we are creating feelings of superiority, what we're really looking for usually is safety anyways.
But I think it's almost like in their brain they're like, “Oh, I have to be better than everyone else in the office to feel safe. Because if I'm not the best in the office, if I'm not doing more than everyone else, then I'm at risk.”
And I know as a person who has been laid off, I've fallen into that thought pattern myself a lot. But then what I see happen is women realize, and people with marginalized identities too, realize how much more someone else is getting paid to do a shittier job than we're doing. And then we completely lose our shit.
So this is why I think we really have to understand what do I actually mean when I'm saying I overachieve, or I want to overachieve? How are we defining that? And why the fuck are we doing it?
Here's another thing I want you to consider. There are problematic elements to over delivering or overachieving beyond those things also. Beyond the way that sometimes we're basically trading our $10,000 of effort for like someone else's $1,000 of compensation. Sometimes over delivering or overachieving has a different kind of cost. And this is that sometimes when we over deliver, we're actually under delivering, because we are taking something away from someone else.
So for this, I have an example from my own business, which is a little vulnerable but I'm going to share it with y'all. And that is sometimes my desire as a coach to over deliver can actually make me under deliver for my clients. And you might be like, “What? How is that possible? How is over delivering under delivering?”
But the way that I've seen it happen, and that I've had to coach myself to correct in my business is, as a coach I want to give my clients everything. I want them to have the most spectacular results possible and get everything they want. And sometimes when I was a younger coach what that meant was that I would want to solve my client's problems.
And here's the thing, that's not really my job. I have a toolkit that can help you solve your problem. It's not my job to know what you should do. It's not my job to give you advice. It's never my job to know better than you. That's not what I'm ever trying to teach you as my clients.
And when I say my clients, I mean my paying clients. But I also mean every one of you podcast listeners, because y'all are my clients too. And I'm working every week to deliver coaching to you that is going to help you improve your life in real and lasting ways.
But if I try to solve your problems for you, that creates a problem because then I'm the one who solves the problem. That's why as a coach, I see it as my job to help you figure out how to solve your own problems. So I bring you all my best tools. I bring you all my best teachings. I bring you all my best insight.
And yeah, I'll also bring you my brilliant brain because my brain is amazing and as awesome ideas. I have a very creative mind that loves to come up with solutions that are outside of the box. Again, that's that when I was a kid and did the creative problem solving. I think that really taught that to me.
And honestly, I think the fact that I joined the public school system at a later age meant I spent more time as a child having this kind of wild, untamed sort of experience. And I think that has impacted how I think to this day, even as an adult in a way that I really value.
I'll bring all of that for my clients. But if I try to solve your problems for you, me doing that, which one could say would be me over delivering, is also under delivering. Because here's the problem with it, it undermines your agency. And I don't want to undermine your agency.
No matter what else the fuck I do I want to be teaching you about the power of you. I want to be selling you on the power of you. I want you to come to my podcast to learn whatever the fuck it is I'm teaching that week. But I want you to leave thinking, “Fuck yes, I can have the life I want. I can create this thing. I can hit that goal. I can love my job.”
I want you to be like, “Oh, I could probably actually enjoy my life as it is much more using these tools. And then I can also use these tools to go out and create huge changes in my life like writing the novel I've always wanted to write. Or hopping into an entirely different industry, which I've wanted to do but been afraid of. That's what I want for you.
So that's something I want for y'all to think about too in your own work and your own life. Sometimes when you overachieve, when you over deliver it's weirdly also a way in which you're underachieving and you're under delivering.
So if you're a leader at work and you're overachieving and over delivering, it's possible that by doing that you're also under delivering as a leader to your team. Because you're not creating expectations for them to do really incredible work. Because you're like, “I'll do all the work. And you can just do this little bit of work and feel fine. And we're going to be great.” In a way you're over delivering but in a different way you're under delivering.
I see this with parents all the time where they do everything for their children. And I'm not opposed to doing things for your kids, but sometimes when we want to over deliver to our kids, then we also kind of rob them of the chance to figure things out on their own.
I think we have such, in our culture, an intolerance for discomfort in ourselves and discomfort and other people that we often do things for other people that we don't really need to be doing for them. And then we call that overachieving and over delivering. And I just see very clearly how sometimes it's under delivering because it is taking away part of the value that you could offer to someone else.
Okay, so to summarize, I think our culture generally sees overachieving as either something good or something annoying that other people do because they want all the attention. And I do think there are ways that overachieving can be good. I also do think there are ways overachieving can be performative, which is kind of what that second thing is getting at. But I also think there are a lot of ways overachieving can be problematic for us.
And I don't think there's one right answer about when it's good or when it's bad. I actually think overachieving is, first of all, it's totally subjective what do you mean by it. But it's also neutral. And what I want you to think about is if you're like, “Should I be overachieving in this moment?” The question is, what does it mean right now? And why are you doing it?
And I actually think another frame that's really useful here is thinking about, is this useful in the long term? Because something I see again and again with my clients, and I've seen it in my own life too, is that we tend to do things that feel good in the short term at the cost of our long term.
Like we're like, “Oh, I just need to hurry up and overachieve this week so my boss will be impressed. And then it would be more uncomfortable for me to not overachieve. So I'll just overachieve and then I'll stop overachieving later.” But then we just keep like doing that over and over again.
And while I don't think overachieving always leads to burnout, I think when we're doing it for certain reasons, like trying to prove our worth and things like that, I do think it can cause burnout. And again it's like, is it useful in the long term? Is it sustainable in the long term? Or are we just doing it because we don't want to feel uncomfortable in the short term?
Because when you have a habit of overachieving, and if you stop indulging that habit and try doing different things, like actually logging off of work at 5pm, it's going to feel uncomfortable. Even if it's what you want and even if it also feels better, more aligned with the life you want to have, it's going to feel uncomfortable because you're switching from your habitual thing.
So here's what I want you all to think about, where are you overachieving in your life? What do you mean by overachieving? Or over delivering, I'm sort of using them interchangeably even though they're not exactly the same thing, but I think they're similar enough for the purposes of this podcast.
Where are you overachieving in your life? What does it mean specifically? Why are you doing it? Is it sustainable in the long term? And do you want to intentionally choose to keep doing it or do you want to choose something else?
Because so often in life, we're just doing the things we've always done, and then feeling the way we've always felt. And then we're like, “I don't know why I feel burnt out. I guess I just have to feel this way.” No, you don't have to feel the ways you've always felt, you don't have to do the things you've always done. The way your past has been does not determine what your future can be.
But if you want it to be different, that's on you. You have to create that. And listen, if you got a little defensive when I said that, me too. My brain hates that shit. Every time I'm like, “All right, Kori, well if you want it to be different, you got to make a different.” I have like a little like tantrum in my soul.
But I find that it's really true. And that once that little tantrum is over it's just like, “Yeah, do you want to have something different or not? You totally can, but you got to be the one to make it. And listen, you don't have to go it alone. Even though I don't have all the answers, and I won't solve your problems for you, having a coach is an incredible benefit. Because having a coach helps you reveal your power to yourself.
And that sounds probably like really coaching and woo-woo. But actually, what it means is like you have a lot of knowing in you already and you have a lot of capability, whether you see it or not. And a coach helps you connect to that and learn how to use it.
It's a little bit like you have like an awesome car but you can't find the keys and you don't know how to drive the car. The coach isn't going to drive the car for you. But we're like, “Hey, here's some places the keys might be. If you can't find the keys here is how you hot wire the car. And here's how you drive the car. And here's what this weird button does.” That's what we're here for.
And when we are changing things in our lives that have been habitual for a really long time, like I was telling you earlier about how my overachieving has been habitual since I was eight. I'm 37, that's almost 20 years, it's most of my life. It can be really beneficial to have someone doing that with you because changing habits is hard, y'all. It's hard.
The brain is like, “I don't know, I've been using this neural pathway for 20 years, I think I'm just going to keep doing it.” Did I say 20 years? I guess I'm 37, it's been almost 30 years. Listen, as I say, nearly every week, this is not a math podcast, okay? Anyways, you get the point.
When you are changing neural patterns you've had for like 20, 30, 40 years, having someone sitting next to you helping you do it is a game changer. It's not required, but I think it's a lot more fun. I think it makes the work go a lot faster. And I think it gives you a community.
Even if it's just a community of one with a one on one coach, where you can see someone else who’s doing the same work too and remind your brain that it is possible. You can make changes and you can have a completely different life in one year, two years, five years than you do now. You're allowed to, you're capable. All you have to do is do it.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life. I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers, and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, listen on Spotify and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.