Overworking yourself at work: understanding why you do what you do and how to do it differently
Have you ever thought about why you bear such an oversized burden at work? How sustainable is your current workload? Can you withstand this level of work for the next five or ten years?
A better question might be: why do you want to?
Of course, part of the answer is the system. Many people find themselves trying to swim upstream in a system that is flooding them with work.
But if you throw your hands up and say that you can’t change the system, then what?
Let’s explore why you do what you do (which enables or perpetuates the system that you are holding responsible) and what you can do differently to change your current professional trajectory toward overwhelm and burnout.
Proving you are enough
In your core, you feel the need to constantly prove that you are enough. Everything you do is about demonstrating you are credible, that you belong where you are.
No matter how much success you’ve enjoyed or how fiercely capable you are, the specter of inadequacy dogs your heels.
You aren’t born this way. The insecurity you feel was created in childhood. Having experienced psychological, physical, or financial uncertainty, every action you take is about ensuring that experience doesn’t repeat.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is the mechanism you use to cope with your fear of inadequacy. As a child you absorbed the idea that your value comes from excelling.
And excel you do. Whether it’s going to the best university or working for an elite company, you surround yourself with others who excel.
This feels great until imposter syndrome kicks in. The self-doubt drives you to work early and keeps you at work late.
And the organization profits from this insecurity. Your insecurity fuels their deliverables and profits.
Precedent gets set in a very short time and it becomes expected that you will perform. The thanks you get is more work.
You suspect everyone around you is performing and if you don’t excel, the truth about your worth will be revealed.
As you accept more and more work, you begin to realize you’ve set up an insupportable precedent. But you don’t know how to undo it.
The crux of the matter
Some part of you doesn’t want to undo it. Because your value is in doing, and you are what you do, you get your worth out of work.
If you don’t get your worth out of work, where will you get it?
So, you resist and persist and because you are so good, you succeed. But when does the success and the pattern you are following stop being worth the pain?
What to do
To get out of this pattern, you must do three things:
- Get in touch with your self-worth
- Define success on your terms
- Use boundaries to safeguard what’s important to you
Get in touch with your self-worth
Begin to actively focus on your self-worth. You are a lovely, magnificent being. You just can’t see it.
But your worth doesn’t change even though you can’t see it. The mountain doesn’t move if you refuse to or are unable to find it.
Your worth is innate to you. You are enough. You are more than adequate. You aren’t born with or without value.
Your value is in being, not doing.
The only way to be more worthy is to be more authentically you. To more fully express yourself. To own your value, your voice, and your power.
For someone like myself, being doesn’t come naturally. Doing is second nature but being is ambiguous.
Where is the 12-step program you can excel yourself right into feeling worthy?
Ironically, the way to be more is to do less. What does doing less look like in your life?
Another way to get in touch with your self-worth is to start listing why you are valuable. For those overachievers who like lists, this one’s for you!
During your day, start noting where you contributed. Ensure that you count personal as well as professional impact. Life is much more than a job.
Count things that aren’t things you did. If someone came to ask your advice, write that down. You had enough worth in their eyes that they sought you out.
In the beginning your list might be short, but as you practice this skill, it will get easier. Then your list will get more sophisticated.
When you can list a failure as something that is positively indicative of your value, you will have mastered this skill.
Define success on your terms
Did you choose your current professional trajectory based on your passion or based on what was socially acceptable? Many overachievers set their direction based on what is most socially and relationally rewarding.
You may have been lucky that your interest converged with what was approved as credible and laudable. If that’s your case, once you have a better sense of your self-worth, you will just need to learn to set some limits.
If you are in a career that leaves you unfulfilled, you are likely to need to re-orient.
You’ve been running a performance orientation that sets goals based on external expectations. You excelled and achieved all those goals, but now that ticking those boxes hasn’t made you feel satisfied, you are asking “what for?”
A mastery orientation gives you permission to define how you want to feel at the end of your life and that feeling helps you decide what success looks like.
In this approach, the feeling is your goal, and your usual goals are strategies to get you to the feeling.
Typically, once you name the feeling, the goals must change because they don’t lead your toward the feeling that you want to have.
Which begs the question: if the job you are overworking yourself for doesn’t give you the feeling you want when you look back over a life well-lived, are you going to continue excelling down that road?
How do you define when you’ve given enough? The system you are functioning in does not apply limits.
You must apply limits that work for you. If you know that your current trajectory isn’t sustainable and you will burnout in a few months or years at this rate, undertake limit setting as putting on an oxygen mask.
Define what percentage of your life you want to invest in your work and what percentage you want to keep. If you looked back over your life, would you be happy with the balance you currently have?
If the boundaries you want to set make you nervous, focus on why you have value. Knowing your worth makes it easier draw and hold the line.
Also be aware that you’ve participated in setting a precedent that the system doesn’t want changed. You may get pushback. If you cave, think about how you’ll feel when you look back over a life unlived and overworked.
When you get anxious and think you are going to be fired for going home, find your courage by looking at how much you did, the progress you’ve made, the skills you used and honed. Don’t use your to-do list.
You can do it differently and still do it excellently. Your worth will be exactly the same either way. But your life will be much fuller and more satisfying if you decide to accept your adequacy.
If you want help with self-worth, defining success, or setting healthy boundaries, schedule a call with me.
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With gratitude to Susan Cottrell for her evocative painting Choose Life or Death. You can find more here: https://freedhearts.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/choose-life-or-death/