Achievement – it’s a positive thing right? I work hard towards something (a promotion, starting a company, a sub 3-hour marathon) and I get it, and then I get the rewards. Rewards being financial, recognition, health benefits and so on.
This blog is not trying to pathologize achievement. Someone can work very hard to achieve things for entirely healthy reasons, achieve them, accept the rewards and move on. Whereas for some folks the quest for achievement may have a darker side to it. A question you may ask is:
‘Is this search for achievement serving a purpose to avoid difficult feelings?’
This may manifest as someone who works hard to achieve a very difficult goal and feels hollow at the end of the quest or sees a small failure or setback as a catastrophic mistake. For those folks the setback, or even the fulfillment of the achievement, can expose some of the challenges that the quest for achievement may have been avoiding. It’s not necessarily the drive to achieve that is the issue, but what happens when achievement fails, ends or becomes unavailable.
There are different underlying dynamics that may lead to a relentless push for achievement, one being the desire for omnipotent control. This is the idea that if we put enough effort and intensity towards our life’s goals, we can eliminate sources of uncertainty or pain. It may show up as an obsessive preoccupation with health or nutrition, with an underlying sense that if I keep on living perfectly I can never get sick (or even die!). This doesn’t have to be something we consciously believe, but the striving may give us a sense of control over things that are ultimately outside of our control.
I am always curious about my clients if they are dealing with a minor illness. Being sick asks us to take it easy, relax and allow ourselves to get back on our feet. For someone built around achievement that can be enormously stressful. You may feel like part of your identity is being lost if you can’t put in the hours at work, go to the gym or show up 100% in other areas of your life. I think the intensity of that reaction can tell us something. What happens when, even temporarily, you can’t achieve?
As with other areas of psychological difficulty, there may be important roots in childhood to explore. Possibly an early sense of things being out of or beyond control and a desire to create certainty, or early experiences of being overly idealized or devalued (or both), leading to a difficulty in accepting the space between those two extremes. There are lots of possible roots here, and I would be wary of making assumptions about where the drive comes from.
If you feel like you have a relentless drive to achieve, and recognize some ambivalence about it, or feelings of dissatisfaction or emptiness when you can’t achieve, it may be worth exploring this with a therapist. I would be curious about this with a client, ask how it shows up, and offer a place to explore potential historical roots without making assumptions, passing judgment or attempting to pathologize.
The goal doesn’t have to be becoming less ambitious. Putting words to what the drive is doing for you can lead to greater insight and possibly reduce some of the power of this need to achieve to avoid difficult feelings.
