[00:00:00] in today's Take Out Therapy episode, you'll finally discover what it means to be a high achiever, the traits that set these people apart, and how our life experience shapes us into high achieving. If you've ever wondered why you're so driven or what's behind your ambitious nature,

this podcast will help you. We're going to go over what defines a high achiever. Like what does that even mean? This term keeps coming into my therapy office and so I just figured, well, let's talk about it. I want to talk about the role of personality and also environment in becoming a high achiever and some common challenges that high achievers face.

So stick around.

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Welcome to Take Out Therapy, a place to learn stress reduction, emotional intelligence, and self compassion skills for more work life balance and inner peace. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a [00:01:00] therapist who specializes in helping empaths and high achievers break free from anxiety and overwhelm. If you're ready to stop overthinking, let go of people pleasing, and truly thrive, you're in the right place.

Thanks for listening. Now let's get to work.

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well, hello there, friend. I'm so happy you're here for today's session. We are digging into the fascinating world of this phrase, high achiever. This keeps coming into my therapy office. And I thought, let's explore what it really means to be a high achiever. Let's talk about kind of the things that shape us into this type of lifestyle and the challenges that come with it, because believe me, there are challenges.

So in this episode, I'm gonna define some traits of high achievers. I'm gonna teach you how personality and life circumstances combined to [00:02:00] create high achievement tendencies and why being a high achiever. isn't always as fabulous as it sounds. Here's the thing, high achiever, what does this even mean?

It's somebody who is basically always pushing and always trying to, do better. High achievers very often feel misunderstood like sometimes people look at someone who achieves a lot of things and they say, it kind of seems easy for this person, you know? And from a high achievers point of view, they've had to bust their butt to get where they are.

They also oftentimes talk about feeling overly scrutinized, meaning like feeling like people are always just watching them to make sure that they're successful, which is an intense amount of pressure that comes with being like a high achiever. Right. Right. [00:03:00] So I think on the outside, we see people who are just incredibly driven and, successful maybe.

And it does often lead to external success. But this idea of high achievers also tied to having to have things be perfect, honestly. And maybe pushing all the time because it seems like never enough, right? And these things, they lead to burnout. They lead to poor mental health actually.

But I think what's interesting because I work with a lot of people who I would definitely characterize as high achievers is that You feel trapped by your own standards, like that is the script by which you live life. And there's a constant chase to get to the next [00:04:00] goalpost to do better. And one thing that I noticed, and I teach people this in our work together is like, You have to be able to stop and take a moment to see what's been done, what has been accomplished.

And one of the biggest problem with these hard driven people is that they often don't stop to see their progress. And when we don't stop to see our progress, we don't know that we have made progress. So if you're a high achiever, my question for you is, what if you could understand? The core of what drives this nature.

And what if you could get some clarity on where these tendencies come from and find better ways to channel them for a more balanced life? That's what I really work with people on. I had this client, a while back and he had his own company. He was always at the top of his game. Graduating with honors, [00:05:00] becoming a leader in his field, his drive to excel really came from a mix of personality traits, such as just being a generally detail oriented and incredibly motivated, positive person.

And life experiences like growing up with high expectations from his family, right? Over time with our work together, he realized this relentless pursuit of success. Was leading him absolutely disconnected and exhausted mentally, physically, not good mental health, right? So it's, it's oftentimes that high achievers need to redefine success, right?

To not kind of go through life with an idea of success that was given to us by someone else. But rather [00:06:00] to define what achievement means to ourselves. Like if you're resonating with this and you're like, yeah, I'm kind of push hard. I'm driven. I'm, you know, I want to be the best at everything I do.

Take a few moments to reflect on what success means to you. Like personally, what, What is even success? This is such a good journal prompt that I oftentimes give people in therapy because we have to redefine things for ourselves in order to live our own lives. Right? So people that I would put under this umbrella of quote, unquote, high achievers, they tend to be rather self disciplined people.

They're very ambitious. Like they think it's fun to do well. You know what I mean by that? there are people out there that don't really care about getting to the top or [00:07:00] being the manager. Or owning their own, you know, shop or whatever. But there are people that are just naturally driven to do that.

And they tend to be incredibly resilient too, like they've gone through some stuff. So as you're Thinking this through, you also have to, as well as like thinking about your traits, think about your influences as well. How you grew up, right? What was your upbringing like? What were you taught about success and about your role or about what you need to do or how you need to be in your life?

Our upbringing, our culture. And our life events shape our drive to succeed. They just do. And oftentimes when we peel back the layer of the onion in therapy, what we find is that sometimes these high achieving people were just really driven [00:08:00] hard by their parents and kind of made to feel like it wasn't really ever good enough, which, you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, we all carry.

These types of, um, I would call them wounds for sure, because they're just somebody else's baggage, right? Like our parents raised us in the way that they raised us based on how they were raised. We know so much more now, so we can do it differently. But I want to reassure you today that you don't have to carry some of this stuff throughout your entire life.

You can put some of this stuff down and you can decide to do it differently. So, we have to recognize that double edged sword of high achievement, right? Of what success looks like and means. We have to realize that there are, yes, benefits and oh my goodness.

[00:09:00] definite pitfalls, right? Of pushing, pushing, pushing. And my number one kind of place that I go with people or the work that I tend to do right up front with people who are working closely with me to get a new vision of how they want to live with more balance. The number one thing that I teach them is self compassion because When we're so driven to succeed and it's kind of never good enough and we feel really misunderstood, we tend to not have a great relationship internally with ourselves either.

We talk with ourselves about like when we're not good enough a lot, right? And it can be a rabbit hole and this rabbit hole. Can be dealt with with self compassion, which is just a fancy way of saying like be nice to yourself Let yourself off the hook sometimes because maybe it matters but [00:10:00] like maybe it doesn't just taking a moment to like say does this really matter to me?

Am I being that high achiever and am I experiencing that other edge of the sword, which is that it's not great for your relationship with yourself or for your mental health. So just sometimes some things to think about. today as I'm kind of exploring this idea of like, what is this high achiever?

It's a phrase that keeps coming into my office. And it's funny because when I look at like all the people that I serve, this is the profile of the people that come to see me. So if you're one of these people, get in touch, come and see me. Maybe we can work some of this stuff out,

here's the deal. The best thing that you can do for yourself is just to reflect, to reflect into this idea of high achiever and to be able to [00:11:00] understand your drive. It's the first step towards balance and feeling a little bit more peace. Just understanding yourself, like how did you get here and how do you want to move forward?

That's going to be probably the helpful place to start. So hopefully this was helpful today. I tried to give you some ideas about high achievers and how. Some traits define them like ambition and resilience, but also life experiences such as upbringing or societal pressures.

These things all play a role in shaping high achievers. But what's most important is self awareness and self compassion. Those things are essential for managing the challenges of being a high achieving person. You know, it is a gift. Being a high achiever. like I said, it's your kick in life's butt, probably, but it also comes with challenges.

Hopefully that helps. I'll [00:12:00] see you next week.

Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. I truly appreciate you being here. New episodes of Take Out Therapy are released most Fridays, so be sure to tune in. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with someone who might really need it. And be sure to leave a review. It helps the podcast reach more people just like you.

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