What is an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern®?

In life and especially in the entrepreneurial and leadership world, there are lots of people who focus on targets and ways of doing things.  

For years these people have focused on the concept of ‘more’: more money, more success, hustle harder, the next big thing, find the ‘secret sauce’ and ‘you're only one funnel away…’ styles of marketing.

These days, that focus is waning and you see the latest anti-trend is focused on being the best at doing less.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the shift where the former hustle, do more, build more funnels crowd are now saying that, although they hustled their way to millions, they recommend you don’t do that but you just grow some veggies in the garden and relax and the money will show up for you…(hint: you do actually have to do SOME work if you are building a business (especially in your first year). Just sayin’ in case anyone believes you can just sit back and watch carrots grow whilst the money flows in - it doesn't work like that either...)

The problem arises when doing ‘some’ work turns into a lot of work then constant work, then an entire rollercoaster of overworking and overachieving. The entire focus of your life and business shifts from your initial goal (usually freedom, time, money, flexibility etc) to an almost constant focus on your outer world, achievements and nailing the next goal.

This shows up as endlessly chasing something, taking another course, creating another program, getting another qualification, needing 10,000 (or more) customers (even though 100s or even 10s will make you the money you desire)...

It becomes an endless ride to find something ‘out there’ that will make everything easier for you because life and business no longer feel so easy…

It all starts to become overwhelming…

You start to question whether it is all a lie.

And it is. But it is nothing to do with other entrepreneurs and leaders (who, and I wanna be really clear here, are just normal people trying to help other people).

It is a lie that starts long before you became an entrepreneur or leader and is completely to do with your relationship with yourself.

An inner lie that holds you back from achieving the very thing that you’ve likely long been trying (so hard) to achieve…

A lie that talks to you like this…

And it is a lie that manifests in you creating something I call an Overachiever Emotional Survival® Pattern.

Back in 1993, when I was just 18 years old my nana came through the door and dropped something into my lap.

It was an open page of a newspaper with a  full page spread and a picture of ME looking all smiley and taking up one half of the page. The headline was “Full of Eastern Promise”.

I no longer have that paper but courtesy of Chat GPT, here is an approximate mock up (based on my memory). 

As a shy, awkward and easily embarrassed teenager, I was mortified to see my huge face spread across the newspaper for the world to see. I had no idea why or what it was about.

I read on. 

It turned out that my mum’s pride in my school work had led her to contact the newspapers to tell them I had achieved 4 A’s at A level and 13 A’s at GCSE and had just been offered a place to study Oriental Studies at Oxford University.

Only one of these things was true.

I was going (and did go) to Oxford University to study Oriental studies (specialising in Ancient Egypt). But the rest was a huge exaggeration.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I had done really well with 3 A’s at A level and 9 As at GCSE so academically I was ticking some boxes. It was a far cry from the 13 year old me who got a heap of bottom grades in her school report that year and who was told by teachers to ‘sort myself out quick smart’ and ‘pull myself together or I’d waste my life’ (1980s style school teacher ‘motivation’).

As a lost, confused and people pleasing child, I needed something to help me feel better about myself. 

And so…I turned to work. And more work. And even more work. I set out to get all Grade As in my exams.

Now, I wanna make clear that there is nothing wrong with achieving all Grade As. Many people do.

But this is the distinction I wanna make between Achieving and OVERACHIEVING.

In that moment, in reading the words on the paper and my mum’s exaggeration to the newspapers of my grades, my own takeaway was that what I had achieved still wasn’t enough. Achieving on its own wasn’t enough. 

I needed to OVER-ACHIEVE to be good enough.

Worse, this was a childhood pattern that had been there for over a decade. It had started way before, and this event just further solidified my inner belief that I had to DO MORE to be worthy. 

I had to be an overachiever.

I was already exhausted from 'just' achieving…

It was at this point my inner world took over to try and help me, but made things worse.

You see, I had no idea about how to manage my emotions back then.  I had no idea how I was meant to process the emotions that came over me as I read that incorrect and exaggerated newspaper article.

The sense of shame, the feeling that I was a disappointment (even though this made no logical sense), the reinforced belief that I wasn’t enough (even though I had clearly done very well).  

As had happened many times before in my childhood, the emotions became overwhelming and I didn’t know what to feel. So, my inner world directed me to just shut those emotions away.

In their place, parts of me - my overworking and overachieving patterns - resolved to work harder to cover up my inner pain. They’d protect me from feelings that I was struggling to process. They'd reassured m. They’d look after me. They knew what to do. They’d be there for me, kinda like my best friends and companions to help me through…

Little did I know that they’d become my best friends for decades after that.

If I ever felt sad, frustrated, confused, angry, lost or even just tired, they would appear, without fail, cheering me on to just push through, work harder and do more so that I felt better.

Their well meaning, but totally misguided advice to me was to:

They were trying to help. But they had no idea that their strategies were like band aids that then covered over the true problem.

They taught me that overachieving could make me feel a bit better. Like a resource I could turn to. For some people it is food, for some it is drugs or alcohol. For some it is smoking.

For me, it was overachieving and overworking. The socially acceptable drug of choice that is promoted in schools and the workplace (“work harder, be successful” taken to its extreme as people praise the hard worker more than criticise).

If I overworked and overachieved in life and in business, I would FEEL calmer. I would feel more successful. It was like I was following a light into a tunnel called ‘the Enoughness Tunnel’ guided by an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® who genuinely believed this was the way…

Except it was wrong.

The Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® was sabotaging my success. It was part of me that helped me bury my emotions so I didn’t need to feel them and then it convinced me that overworking and overachieving was the only way to feel better. It was the only way to feel successful (or even get close to it).

It was COMPLETELY wrong as I discovered when I finally unravelled and untangled my inner emotional world and finally started to free myself from the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern®. 

If you are someone who had always been a high achiever or has worked very long hours in the name of ‘success’, then you might have crossed a line between normal ‘achieving’ which is a good thing (especially in your business) and overachieving which is a form of self-sabotage. 

You see, there is a HUGE difference between working hard and achieving because you are so in alignment that work doesn’t feel like work. You work smarter. You don’t work all the time. You confidentally say 'No' to some things. You aren’t exhausted. You can take time off without feeling guilty and you feel like you are achieving with almost unbelievable ease such that life and business feel fun and enjoyable. You work hard but according to your terms and it does not mentally, emotionally and physically drain you.

And then there is overworking and overachieving where you feel in almost constant struggle. You feel like you are trapped in a hamster wheel of overworking and overachieving where you become afraid to let go of anything because your overachieving is like the scaffolding holding up your business. You end up working and working trying to feel better and it just doesn’t work.

Ultimately, you end up burnt out and exhausted.

It is possible to trace the origin of the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® (which I do in my programs where I can support people with this). However, even without knowing the origin, you will find that the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® leaves clues as to whether it is part of your life and business. 

If any of these are showing up in your life, relationships or business, it is likely you have an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern®.

An Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® encourages you to believe that your WORTH is measured by your productivity, by what you do and by what you achieve in life. It hopes that by focusing you on strategies that help you DO more, you will feel better.

What it doesn’t understand is that you are already worthy just as you are and no amount of doing and achieving will make you feel better if you haven’t tackled what is really behind the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern®.

It does this because way way back, before you were an entrepreneur, when you were still young, you learnt that you were valued for what you did or achieved and not valued or worthy for WHO you were.

It is likely that this was then fuelled in school (especially if you were a high achiever as your achievements would have been encouraged). If you were a low academic achiever, it would have been similar as you would have been made to feel you weren’t good enough in school.

You then started to equate praise, good feedback and feeling good with your achievements and negativity, poor feedback and feeling bad with lack of achievements.

Ultimately, this created a fracture such that you stopped believing that you could be accepted, feel good enough, and worthy just by showing up as YOU. You thought your sense of worthiness came from achievements but it has nothing to do with your achievements (or lack of).

Your self validation, your self love and your self acceptance ALL became conditional on your continued ‘high flyer’ performance. And this likely crossed into your relationships as well as your work.

For example, you may have sabotaged relationships because your standards became so (overachiever style) high. Or, you subconsciously didn’t value your relationships as much as your achievements so you sabotaged them.

If you have an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern®, you may also struggle to just “BE” with your partner or your kids because doing nothing makes you feel unworthy or inadequate in some way.

This may not show up as a clear thought. Instead, you will just find it difficult to BE with your kids, your partner or others. You feel much more comfortable if you are DOING things instead and so you will find ways to avoid just BEING with other people unless there is a lot of DOING happening to help you feel something. 

An Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® starts very early in life. It originates with experiences, people, relationships and environments that make you feel not good enough or not loved unless you achieved (i.e. conditional love). 

This can be from childhood emotional neglect, high parental expectations, a teacher who makes you feel unworthy and only noticed you or praised you when you excelled in class, instability in your life or any scenario or relationship where you learnt to equate your worth with what you achieved.

Parents obviously play a part but I am not a fan of the “everything is my parents fault” model. Parents may well have had their own Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® (without realising it) or they may have been good parents and you still ended up with this pattern.

I believe that multiple factors contribute to the growth of an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® and just looking at your parents alone doesn’t fully resolve the issue.

If you learnt, as a child, to equate your self acceptance, self love, worth and self compassion to your performance, your outer achievements and what you did, then as an adult, this conditioning typically shows up as an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® which leaves you driven to achieve more, to do more, and to be more because underneath it all, at your core, there is a complete lack of self worth and self acceptance.

When I work with my clients, the the most common question I am asking when we uncover their Overachiever Emotional Survival[ Pattern® is…

“Suzi, I get it…but what do I DO to fix it?”

And #Suzitoughlove moment, you can’t DO anything (it takes a different approach). This Emotional Survival Pattern® comes from deeply ingrained beliefs that you hold in your core that to be loved, to be accepted, to be worthy, you must constantly DO.

You can’t then DO more to undo these beliefs. As I say in my podcast episode (here), “You can’t beat an overachiever pattern by DOING more overachieving”.

The trauma and the Emotional Survival Pattern® aren’t about just experiences. In my example above, the young Suzi who read about herself in the newspaper didn’t create this ESP because of that one experience. The beliefs were already there. They had been created when I was much younger.

But as a teen and later as an adult, the clues that the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® was in control were there. Adult Suzi showed up in life and business driven by a need to create an endless cycle of work and success and ultimately, this always ends in burn out.

There was a fear that if I stopped - at all - other than for very controlled short holidays (before returning to normal overachieving and overworking patterns), I might lose everything. I might lose WHO I was. 

You see, I had confused WHO I was with who my Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® was.

And then society, culture and my environment praised my overachiever “results” making me feel like I should be overachieving even though I KNEW life had to be better than a constant state of exhaustion and burn out.

Dealing with an Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® takes more than a single blog post. It is what I do with my 1:1 clients (here) and within my group programs, especially Inside Out® Mastery (which you can join the wait list for here). I show you how to finally release these patterns so they don’t run your business or your life. 

But awareness is the very first step. So, there are some really simple things you can do to become more aware:

Remember, the Overachiever Emotional Survival Pattern® is not your fault. You didn’t invent or create this coping mechanism.

However, as an adult, it is your responsibility to lead yourself and to start to resolve why it is still in your life. That way you can live a fuller, happier, healthy and wealthier life without the overachieving and overworking. Remember, you are enough just as you are.

Empowering yourself into the next chapter of your life is not about how much you do but is about understanding who you truly are and starting from there. 

If you are interested in working to learn how to manage your Emotional Survival Patterns® and stop them dictating and sabotaging your life and your business, you can find out about both my group programs and my 1:1 HERE.