You Don’t Have to Be the Best at Everything

A few years ago, I was in a therapy session, talking about how anxious I felt about bombing an important presentation at work. My therapist turned to me and said, “Why do you have to be so special at everything? Whoever told you that?” I looked at her and said, “I’ve always been special, since I was three years old.” To which my therapist replied, “Well, who says?” It’s a question I’ve pondered many times since, and one I ask myself when my inner critic takes charge. I’m an anxious achiever, ambitious and career focused. My anxiety prompts me to overperform. I can never rest until I’ve reached the next goal and done it to perfection. Thoughts of failure have driven me to accomplish many things, but the anxiety driving those fears takes a toll on my mental health, my relationships, and my ability to experience joy. Who said I have to be so special? Who said I have to be great all the time? If you also struggle with perfectionism, driven by anxiety, this question can be profound. Many anxious achievers push themselves to the point of overwork in an effort to achieve impossible standards. We often act this way out of habit. Somewhere along the way — through messages we received in our childhoods, our adolescence, or even in our educations and early careers — we internalized the message that if we make mistakes, we’re not worthy. Now, our internal voices threaten, shame, and harshly critique us in life and at work. Anxiety has become the driver that powers us through. The problem is that anxiety is not a sustainable motivator and perfectionism often causes procrastination. When the stakes of failing feel too high, we’re more likely to avoid rather than do. Once a task is done, we may look back and be unable to find anything positive in our performance. We measure our self-worth by our self-imposed standards, and the cycle continues. Inevitably, we become burned out. So, how do we overcome it? Understanding Your Inner Critic I recently interviewed Google’s Newton Cheng for my podcast. Our conversation gave us both more insight into our anxious achiever tendencies. Like me (and maybe you, too), Newton pushes himself to do great things as a way of working through anxiety. Also like many of us, Newton deals with an inner critic. I call it “the voice.” On our journeys to perfectionism, “the voice” often targets the piece of us that always expects to be the best and asks: “How dare you be less than perfect?” Newton’s voice tells him, “You’re lazy… You’re lazy… You’re lazy.” Although, of course, he’s the opposite of lazy. Newton is a successful professional, working as an executive at one of the world’s most admired companies. He’s also a world champion powerlifter who holds records at the global, national, and state level for his age and weight class. After a lot of internal work and therapy, Newton told me he’s started to pay attention to his patterns of thinking. He tries to recognize when that voice inside his head is a saboteur driven by anxiety as opposed to a champion driven by his value of showing up as best as he can. That’s the first step to turning the volume down. What does the saboteur in your head sound like? Maybe it says, “If you work hard enough, you can’t fail. So, work harder.” Maybe, like Newton’s voice, it says, “You’re lazy. Do better. People are depending on you.” Or maybe it tells you that your best is never good enough. Whatever message the voice is sending, pay attention to it. When you feel yourself becoming discouraged by your own thoughts, it’s important to slow down, and acknowledge that “the voice” is not your voice — it’s your anxiety and it doesn’t tell the truth. This isn’t easy to do. Most of us anxious achievers have become so accustomed to listening to our inner critic that we do it out of habit. We don’t know any other way to operate. But with practice and self-awareness, we can learn how to manage. Here are three steps you can do to quiet “the voice” down: 1) Notice when “the voice” strikes. The next time you hear a critique in your head, consider the following: Notice who is speaking. Does the voice sound like you, or does it sound like someone from your past? Sometimes our inner critics are driven by formative experiences or by people we encountered years before. What phrases does the voice use? Notice the words your inner critic tends to say over and over again. Is the voice a harsh taskmaster that shows up when you make a mistake? Or is it a nagging little bug constantly buzzing in your ear? Paying attention to these cues will help you identify when it’s speaking. How do you feel right before the voice takes over? What emotions tend to precede it? For example, you might notice that you feel anxious right before your inner critic tells you to pull an all-nighter on a presentation. What’s making you anxious? What could help calm the anxiety in that moment? Does listening to the voice serve you? For example, is your voice driving you to be people-pleasing? Have you caught yourself bending over backwards to help someone who really didn’t need the help? Perhaps your inner critic is demanding you make everyone happy, at your own expense. Next time the voice tells you to clean up the conference table after a lunch meeting, acknowledge it, and then tell it to be quiet. 2) Address “the voice” with compassion. Only after you notice the themes and commonalities in your favorite self-criticisms, can you attempt to address them head-on. An easy way to start: Address the voice in the third person, out loud. Here’s where practicing self-compassion comes in, and it’s a wonderful skill to learn. Self-compassion means being deliberately kind to yourself, instead of fighting your anxiety or relying on self-criticism to motivate you. In practice, it looks like addressing the voice with understanding and generosity. Sometimes I call this approach the “sweetheart method.” (My therapist told me it would help if I called myself “sweetheart” when addressing the voice.) So, now, when I notice my anxiety trying to scare me into perfectionism, I’ll say aloud to myself, “Now, sweetheart, you’re not lazy because you decided not to write that blog post. You’re being strategic. Your time is valuable, and you don’t need to work for free when you’re busy being paid for other work.” Honestly, it helps. You don’t have to call yourself sweetheart — pick any word that’s right for you! 3) Use an exercise to summon deliberate kindness. Here is an exercise I’ve adapted from Dr. Kristin Neff, an expert on self-compassion. She suggests: “Instead of self-judgment, show yourself self-kindness.” Here’s how it works. Simply sit and place your hands on your chest. Feel your breath, in and out. Connect with the feeling of your hands on your sternum. Take a moment of stillness. Think of something you did well recently. It could be something you rocked at work, or the fact that you fit a workout into a busy day. It could be a kind text message you sent to a friend — anything you did that made you feel good. Hold your chest, think through that moment, and tell yourself, “I did a good job.” Try to really feel it. When you’re done, don’t jump to a negative self-criticism or the next item on your to do list. Just sit with the feeling of self-compassion for a moment. When we take moments to reward ourselves for the small things, we learn to be kinder to ourselves, quiet those inner critics, and interrupt self-sabotaging habits. . . . The psychologist David Burns says that giving up on always being special means we are just human after all. Anxious achievers, perhaps even more than most people, need to look our ego in the eye and realize: We don’t have to be perfect and we don’t have to be better than others. We have the right to fail and carry on anyway. We have the right to have a crummy day, or miss a deadline every now and then. “When you no longer need to be special,” Burns’s colleague Taylor Chesney, PsyD., once said, “life becomes special.” Can you picture a life in which you achieve at the same high levels you do now, but without all the anxiety, stress, and angst that comes from listening to the voice? Can you imagine a world in which you manage your anxiety, instead of it controlling you? Maybe you could put your anxiety to work and channel the motivation it can bring. You don’t have to give up your identity as an anxious achiever — but you can have more power over your feelings and how you respond to them. Without all the negative outcomes that come from holding yourself to a standard that’s literally impossible to reach, you might just unlock your creativity and let loose your drive — and your joy — in an entirely new way. Next time you hear “the voice,” listen for the clues that will help you diffuse it in the future. Find a way to be kind to yourself, and ask yourself the question: Why do I have to be so special?

You Don’t Have to Be the Best at Everything

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