Why High Achievers Are So Afraid of Happiness

Help! Nothing’s wrong!

Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash

How do I relate my success to satisfaction and happiness? Am I chasing something meaningful or just “something”? The more I sit with these questions, the more I have to challenge myself and realize: I’m not really happy with being happy.

It sounds odd, but in my own personal development work (and in my coaching work), I’ve grown to appreciate a really important paradox: high achievers are uncomfortable with real, meaningful achievement.

We’re like dogs chasing a car — we wouldn’t know what to do if we caught it.

This sounds a little far-fetched but, let me tell you, I see it time and time again. I watch highly driven executives finally get to their next big win and what happens then? After about two seconds of celebrating, a new and often bigger anxiety creeps in to ask “what’s next?”

Let’s unpack this idea a bit, because by understanding what’s happening here we might just be able to do something about it.

We’re All Telling Ourselves a Story

While I’m talking about high achievers here, you could just as easily say “perfectionist” or “overachiever.” Not exactly the same ideas, but a lot of overlap. And all have one thing in common: like everyone, there’s a story running in the background that drives the behavior.

I have a story that I tell myself. It’s that I need to do well enough to be accepted. That sounds relatively innocuous, but the risk of failure here is really heavy. If I don’t do well enough, I won’t be accepted. My emotional belief about acceptance, which is just another word for safety, is that it’s conditional. And it’s conditional on doing “well enough.”

All high achievers and high performers have a story that they tell themselves. If I do X then I will get safety, love, acceptance, independence, etc. It’s what puts so much fuel in the fire to go off and do amazing things. It can also be what holds us back from taking risks or stepping too close to failure.

My story put me on a great climb of the ladder. I got into a good school, then into a good job, then a better school, then a better job. It actually served me in a lot of ways, but it was…