Okay. I’ll admit it:
If I let myself, I can absolutely be an overachiever, overperformer, and over-eager-zealous workaholic.
The “problem” is that I love the people I work with. I love the aha moments and watching those big beautiful brains when they realize what they’ve been doing, saying, or believing has been holding them back.
I 🥹 LOVE 🥹 WHAT 🥹 I 🥹 DO
And yes, even though I teach the strategies of how to help you do your work in a more sustainable way, it’s true: yes … I can go overboard, too.
Life’s a practice.
This overperforming started early on in life. Whenever someone needed help, I said yes. Whenever someone asked a question, I had answers. Whenever I saw a problem, I barreled toward it full-speed ahead to fix it.
Doing that burned me TF out.
Early on in my career, I had to stop overperforming because my body made me. Now, when I overperform, it’s a conscious choice. It’s a weighing of the spoons I have now with the ones I’ll have later. (If you don’t know Spoon Theory).
For over 25 years, I’ve been working with licensed professionals; in the last four years alone, I’ve had close to 200 one-on-one clients. No matter the title – doctor, judge, realtor, nurse, lawyer, therapist, accountant, whatever – I’m somehow still surprised when they describe their struggles using similar words:
- I’m unhappy at work. I’m having trouble focusing. I need help prioritizing my to-do list.
- The world’s burning. I feel unproductive. I can’t focus, but I have to keep pushing through because I have to meet my billables.
- I want to start looking for a new job. But honestly, I don’t want to because I’m burned out, but I know I need to.
- I want to do something new for work, but I don’t know where to start and who to talk to about changing my responsibilities.
- I’m ready for a change, but I don’t know where to start.
And when I hear the same story again and again, THIS is inevitably what I tell them:
“YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE. I have been where you’ve been. I felt what you’ve felt. Heck, some days I feel unproductive and can’t focus, too! The world is burning and it sucks. People are idiots. But YOU – you are a precious human who deserves happiness and joy in all the pieces of your life, even if others have it bad right now. And it’s going to be okay. Here’s what we’re going to work on …”
It occurs to me that maybe you needed to hear it today, too.
Most people are spending too much time proving themself at work, and not enough time taking care of the things that actually matter in life.
When you have a clear understanding of what you want and expect your life to look like, then you won’t feel like you have to overperform at work.
People are doing what they THINK they’re supposed to be doing at work and in the workplace, and not actually what they WANT to do.
If you have to carefully navigate the emotions and expectations of others in your work each day, then I hate to break it to you: you’re in a helping profession.
And when you have to manage these experiences, it can feel overwhelming, uncertain, and fragile … like one wrong move will make everything blow up into a million tiny pieces. I get that pressure. But when you overperform to avoid that, all you do is sacrifice YOUR million tiny pieces for someone else’s. That won’t work long-term. It’s not sustainable. That’s because there’s only so much of you to go around. But chances are, you knew that already.
Chances are, you’re already feeling spent just reading this. You’re probably reading this on the toilet or between client / patient calls … you’re probably trying to slip your life into what’s left after work.
Instead of sacrificing your wellness and wellbeing to prove you’re a performer (and thus, over-performing), stay in integrity and be an ethical and competent professional: start pulling back a bit. Start living more for YOU, not for work.
When we first start our work together, I have to often give my clients permission to start living for themselves and not work.
They all sigh a big sigh of relief for the permission … and then immediately start freaking out about how to do that.
Letting go of overperforming at work means allowing space to figure out what you feel and who you are again. It’ll make you nervous, no doubt. But remember that nervousness is just excitement, clouded by fear.
So if the idea of not over-performing at work freaks you out, start small. Start simply by asking yourself these three questions:
- What am I excited about?
- What am I afraid of?
- How can I get the resources I need to handle both of these feelings?
This is where Human Design helps us reflect on what’s working and what’s not, and WHY. It’s not enough to know the information; you have to understand how it connects to everything else in your life.
To have a life you’re able to live, you have to be willing to process and let go of the addictions that keep you from living it: proving yourself, people-pleasing, and protecting yourself from (alleged) failure.
This is the intersection of the work I’m doing every single day with licensed professionals who are probably just like you. Reconnecting who you are with what you do, and understanding that what you do can change to fit the person you know you are underneath it all. If you’re struggling to figure it out, or to make space just to think about it (much less make a decision about it), schedule a Roadmap to Freedom coaching session. Let’s go on the journey together.
At the end of the day, we all want to put our heads on our pillows and be grateful for the people we were able to help today.
(I hope that one of those people you helped was YOU)
I always knew who I was, and I always hated being told what to do.
But at some point, I started telling myself what to do … that I “should” do this or that I “have to” do that. I thought I “needed” to help someone, simply because I could. But I learned far too late that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I’ve been talking a bit more about Human Design, and it’s for a reason. As a Projector, one of the things I’ve come to realize is that my purpose is not to DO – it’s to GUIDE. I spent my whole life trying to prove myself for love and acceptance and approval that I thought I needed. What I learned far too late is that the only person who could give that to me, was me.
But before I knew that, I worked 100-120 hour weeks. I went in early, left late. I got there before anyone arrived, made the coffee, and had the work done before it was even due. I went above and beyond and pretended it was integrity and work ethic. In reality, it was destructive and harmful to my body and my heart. But the people who should have been protecting me from myself didn’t care – they took everything I gave them.
Chances are, you’ve been in a workplace (or two or three) that has taken everything from you with nary so much as a thank you.
If all this sounds too familiar, then you probably need to come to your own rescue.
We can do that by working together. No judgement, no shade: we’ll figure out how you got to this point and how to move forward in the most sustainable way for you.
Soooo. Yeah. I’m gonna need y’all to stop going above and beyond at work.
Hear me out: I’m not saying don’t do your job. I’m also not saying don’t do your job well.
I’m saying that working 60, 70, 80, even 90 hours a week will make you a wreck. And for what? To be exhausted? To not have any time to actually enjoy the life and the payments on the things you’re supposedly working so hard for?
We can’t keep working so many hours with nothing to show for it.
People think that because I live on two continents, that must mean that I work an insane amount. I don’t. My client-facing time depends on the week and the month, but most of the time, I’m averaging 10-20 hours of client time each week. The rest of the time, I’m reading and resting and writing.
I don’t work more than I need to and I don’t pay for anything I do not absolutely need. (Sidebar true story: I haven’t had cable since Hurricane Katrina in 2005).
To have the life you want, you have to make decisions about what actually matters and how you want to spend your energy and your money.
I had a client back in 2021 who felt like a hamster in a wheel (her words). A mom to two smart and ambitious kids, she felt like she was making no real progress even though she was being a badass every single day. She was in debt and felt like she was repeating so many mistakes from her parents.
She knew what was standing in her way: herself. Together, we did the hard work:
- We decided how much money she actually needs to live (not wants, but needs – because there’s three levels of financial security: surviving, living, and thriving)
- We created the structures her nonprofit needed to start serving her community
- We got her jobs swapped out so that she was making more money with less responsibilities and less pressure
- We shifted her narrative from struggling and hustling to living and happiness
Now, she’s in a leadership position; others learn from her, respect her, and she’s been lifted up in her community and seen as the expert she is. She went from gearing up for a fight every single day at work to so self-aware that NOTHING breaks her stride.
The truth is, we all struggle at some point in our lives. The question is whether you want to. You don’t have to.
(And if you don’t want to, then schedule a Roadmap to Freedom coaching session right now. We’ll have some time to pull together resources, so that once we meet, we can create a plan of action that’s reasonable, realistic, and sustainable.)
Alright. Let’s wrap this up!
Society wants you to overperform at work, to the neglect of your personal life.
An entire system has been built to make things more convenient for you so that you never stop working. But it’s time to stop holding onto things that aren’t good for us anymore. It’s time for us to stop giving too much and it’s time to stop putting pressure on ourselves to keep going when we’re just so freaking exhausted.
Just like my client that I mentioned above, chances are, you also believe in education and access to information. You probably also love books and learning and libraries. You likely also want to infuse who you are into your work and you’re probably mission-driven, too, just like us.
We can keep pretending that overperforming at work will get us what we want, OR, we can admit that pushing through and not living the life we really want is causing us to feel even more exhausted and burned out.
If you give yourself permission to dive a bit deeper into what you truly want your work and your life to look like, then chances are high that you’ll actually get what you want. It’s the people who take steps towards what they want that GET what they want.
Staying in one place, hoping one day the work “lets up” is a risky decision.
Staying still means more work, not less.
I’m here when you’re ready to take a first baby step: all you have to do is want the step.
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👋🏽 Hi, I’m🌞 Sheila! I’m a human first and a title second, just like you. I want to help you make your next BIG decision. Supported by Gentle Accountability, that starts with resetting expectations about what you think you can have and deserve. It’s time for you to create your own Joyful and Thriving™ life and career!
#whatwouldsheilasay #shedsaydowhatyouwanna 🎶
