Based on my research and years of work with highly successful premier business people – I believe that Over-Achieving Is Ruining Your Mental Health. Yes, it’s also true that extraordinary success can make you rich and powerful. But it can also leave you incurious, blinkered, invulnerable, deeply unhappy and ironically – not living anywhere near the fullness of your potential.
Over the last few months, I have given interviews on and been published in over 50 media outlets on the phenomenon I call “The Superstar Paradox:” – when extraordinary success does not lead to happiness, but rather the opposite. I have found that the ruthless pursuit of over-achievement/ illusory achievements including success, power and money is playing a major role in the erosion of people’s happiness. That happiness decline is seen across the board in western culture, limiting the phenomenon not only to those who are extremely successful, but to anyone buying into “hustle culture” and developing extreme anxiety by scrolling through the lives of others on Instagram. In a society that still values over-achievement in the form of hard work above all – I argue that we must make a change in what we focus on.
I invite everyone out there to check out my proprietary and up to date global research as published in the Journal of Psychology Research, Harvard Business Review, CNBC and Forbes – showing that over-achieving tendencies in any department of life can limit happiness profoundly.
Key lessons:
How to spot whether you’ve fallen into the Superstar Paradox. There are seven tell-tale signs, including mental-arrogance and incessant people-pleasing. Learn what they are and ask yourself whether this applies to you.
How to reframe your success story. Overachievers often believe that success only comes from power, money or status. Yes, those things are important benchmarks for career measurement, but being successful and happy in life overall should be the true Holy Grail. This seems intuitive but is statistically far from it.
How to course-correct crippling self-constructs and perfectionsim. A common obstacle to realizing genuine happiness is our own reliance on perfectionism, which is different from and hinders self-acceptance. I will explain this difference and cite key research on perfectionism.
Why you should “pray for a sh*tstorm.” In case audience members don’t buy all the above points and continue throughout the talk to think, “Nah, I got this,” I’ll explain why they would do well to brace themselves for a curve ball from the universe. In fact, I’ll show them how it could be the best thing that ever happened to them – by telling my own personal Superstar Paradox survival story.
Wishing you HAPPINESS.
Coach Keren