77. Your Feelings Are Overachievers Too
I know a lot of y’all are overachievers.
We (because, yes, I also identify as an overachiever) want to go above and beyond with everything, all the time.
And sometimes, we have a feeling that seems to behave in just the same way.
Just like we go above and beyond and do all kinds of extra things in our work, our anxiety, dread, sadness, anger, etc may also act out this same pattern, doing way more than the bare minimum.
(And even if you don’t identify as an overachiever, you may experience this kind of big emotion).
If you feel like your own feelings are always doing the absolute most (even when it’s not required), be sure to check out this week’s podcast.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
I have a super fun announcement. This July, I’m launching my group coaching program Satisfied AF. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever designed in my life, so if you want to come together and be part of a community, build relationships, and figure things out so your life can feel satisfying as f*ck, click here to sign up for a consult.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What I mean when I say feelings can be overachievers.
Why our feelings may be doing that.
How to see where your emotions are following your overachieving patterns and how it’s showing up in your life.
Why it’s so easy to just believe what our anxiety is trying to communicate to us.
Where our overachieving negative emotions bring up a negativity bias and give us unhelpful information.
How to start seeing your overachieving feelings through a new lens and decide whether you want to engage with them or not.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about our feelings and how they can try to be overachievers, just like we try to.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, y'all, happy Wednesday. I'm pretty excited to be talking to you this week. Actually, I'm traveling to Seattle this week and so I'm recording the podcast. And I woke up in the middle of the night the other night and was like, “Oh my goodness, what if I forget to record the podcast before I go to Seattle?” Because usually if I didn't record the podcast, I'd be at home. So I could just do it with my podcast mic, but I'm not going to take my podcast mic when I travel.
And also, if I'm being really honest with y'all, and that's what we do here, I used to have a really regimented schedule where I was recording the podcast at the same time every week. But my schedule has been a little bit different the past several weeks as I've been doing some extra work.
I've been doing written coaching review for Kara Loewentheil’s advanced certification in intersectional feminist coaching. Which is such an honor and a delight to help other coaches make their written coaching more powerful.
And I've also been doing consult calls for my group coaching program, Satisfied As Fuck. Which also this is such a delight and so powerful to be talking to these wonderful humans about what it would look like for them to be satisfied as fuck in their lives and careers. Oh, and I've also been like moving, I've moved a couple of my one-on-one clients around into new times because of their work and other stuff.
Anyways, all of that to say my schedule has been a little cattywampus, as one of the people I used to work for in North Carolina taught me to say. Which kind of means irregular or weird, or in this case I'm calling it like kind of all over the place. And in any event, I don't have that regular time slot right now. And I need to get it back on my calendar ASAP because when I don't have it there, then I have to mentally remember to do it, which is not the most effective thing.
And the other night I woke up, this is where I started, I woke up in the middle of the night and my brain said, “Oh, fuck, I have to make sure to do that.” And I was like having this like anxiety terror of like I could have gone to Seattle without having recorded it and then everything would have been ruined.
Which is interesting, I don't know if your brain does this, my brain does this all the time. It's like my brain will discover something before it's a problem. But then it will be like really obsessed about how it could have been a huge fucking problem. And I'm always like, “But, brain, it hasn't happened yet, and we thought of it so we will prevent that potential problem.” But my brain is like, “But it could have happened.” And I'm like, “Okay, that's true but not useful.”
This is like kind of where my concept that I've taught y’all on another podcast useful content comes in. Because our brains will try to worry about all kinds of shit, and then it's a skill to be able to look at those worries, look at those anxieties and pull out the useful content.
So I think the useful content for me waking up in the middle of the night freaking out about how I potentially could have forgotten to record a podcast is that it's time to put that back on the calendar. And first of all, like after that happened I put it on the calendar for this week. But second of all, also to get it back in a recurring spot. Because the spot that it used to go in, something else is there now. So I have to find a new spot for it.
Actually, and see this is something that brains do all the time, I was saying I need to put it back on the calendar in a scheduled way. But now that I think about it, it's actually already been put on my calendar in a scheduled way since I had that freak out the other night.
I just didn't record it today during that time slot because someone was here doing work on the house and making a lot of banging noises. Which happens a lot at our house as y'all know, since we're having a lot of work done here and Alex is doing a lot of the work.
Anyways, that's a bit of a ramble, but I think the important parts for y’all to think about there are number one, our brains often will want to worry and obsess about stuff that we've already noticed and sometimes even already solved for.
But it's like the thing was so exciting to the brain when it first realized it, and I don't mean exciting in like a positive way. I mean, like the brain is heightened, right? It's like activated and so it's feeling such activation about the thing that it still wants to like worry and fret even though you've already solved the thing.
Actually, when your brain is in that space, that can be a good time to complete the stress response because sometimes you've already dealt with the stressor, you've already dealt with the situation your brain was being stressed about. But you may still be having the physiological response to stress, and there's a whole podcast episode on ways you can complete that stress response in your body and so your brain can then simmer down.
The other thing from that is something that's related to today's podcast topic, which is this idea that our feelings can also be overachievers. And I had this idea a while back because I was posting someone else's post on Instagram to my stories. And I just like quickly wrote out like, because your anxiety is an overachiever too.
And then I just posted it and then like forgot about it. And then I was talking to someone else, and they were like, “Wait a minute, that whole idea right there, do a whole podcast on that.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is something.”
So let's think about it, right? A lot of us, me and a lot of the people that come and listen to this podcast, we're overachievers, right? We're like always trying to do a fuckload of shit, trying to add a lot of value, get a bunch of stuff done at work, get a bunch of stuff done in our lives. And sometimes we like really like that too.
And I've got a bunch of episodes on this, but like one of the reasons that we overachieve is because we're attaching our work products to our worthiness, like it's often like a validation loop. I think even when we get out from under that, like I do still like achieving a lot. But overachieving without any oversight can also create a lot of negative results.
I've talked on the podcast before about how sometimes when we try to over deliver, we end up under delivering. Specifically we try to do so much that then we're taking opportunities away from other people. Or sometimes, this happens a lot too, like where people are getting burned out but they're unwilling to let go of responsibilities. So they're hoarding the responsibilities, but they're not even able to do all the things well because they're too tired and they have too much work.
So this is something just to be aware of, as we talk about all the time that overachieving and the desire to overachieve, we want to look at why we're doing that and look at what would be actually the achievements we want to accomplish versus that part of our brain that just says we need to do everything all the time all at once.
Okay, but what do I mean when I say your feelings can be overachievers? What I mean is exactly that. Like a lot of times our brain likes to do many things with the same pattern, right? So the same way we might want to overachieve at work, our anxiety might also want to overachieve, right? So our anxiety is going to take that pattern that our brain uses and be like, I would like to overachieve in anxiety, please.
And so the way that anxiety overachieves is it brings you even more shit to be anxious about, right? Like it's trying to do its job at a 57 out of 10. For some of you it might not be anxiety. For some of you, your anger might be an overachiever. Your sense of dread might be an overachiever. Your sadness might be an overachiever.
I think for me, honestly, I resonate with all of these. I didn't even think that through until I was recording the podcast. Beforehand I was like, yeah, my anxiety is totally an overachiever, it's always finding stuff to be worried about. Like I said before, it wants to be worried about stuff that we've literally already solved and resolved. And it just is always finding something that could be upsetting.
But now that I'm talking about anger and sadness, I'm like, oh yeah, definitely I've had moments in my life where my sadness was going at things like at 12 out of 10.
Okay, so let's look into this a little bit more deep. When people overachieve, often they're neglecting something else, right? Like maybe you're overachieving at work and then you're like neglecting your physical body. Or you're overachieving at work, but you're neglecting your other relationships, your hobbies, whatever.
I think this is also true on the emotional level. When we're overachieving and anxiety, what's being neglected? What's not getting enough time, and focus, and attention, and energy? And I think the obvious answer to that is with the what is working kind of emotions, right?
So we talk all the time on the podcast about how, yes, we're going to look at the things in our life that aren't working. But what if we also start with thinking about what is working, start with thinking what's going well, because we have that negativity bias, right? So it's like I think this is an interesting metaphor also, if our brain is overachieving in anxiety, is it underachieving in gratitude? Is it underachieving in belief in our ability to figure things out? Is it underachieving in joy? Right?
The other thing I think is really helpful about this is it can be really easy to just like believe our anxiety. It can be really easy to sort of just like fall for it and listen to it and go on the little ride it takes us on. Let’s take the anxiety I was talking about earlier where my brain was like, oh, fuck you almost forgot to record this podcast, and everything would have been terrible. And then you would have had to like had to miss a week.
What my brain is underachieving in that moment by overachieving in that anxiety, it's underachieving in noticing that nothing has gone wrong. It’s underachieving in noticing that I remembered with plenty of time. It's underachieving in thinking about how even if I had gone to Seattle without recording a podcast, I probably could have figured out how to either record a podcast while I was there.
I could have recorded one when I got back and paid a fee to have it processed and paid a fee to have it produced at a faster rate. The podcast could have skipped a week, right? Like, I like talking to y'all every week. But if the podcast needed to skip a week once, what if that could be okay too?
So let's think about it for you. Do you identify as an overachiever? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Do you think any of your feelings are overachievers? I mean, it's possible that you might be an overachiever and think your feelings aren't. I think it's also possible that you might not identify as an overachiever personally, but you might think your feelings are.
And so I think some interesting questions about that are, one, does just simply noticing that shift the relationship you're able to have with that emotion and the way you interact with it? Two, do you want to keep doing that? If you don't want to keep doing that, what do you want to do instead?
I know that my anxiety does bring up some interesting, useful content. I want that content. I want the information that my anxiety is pointing me to. And I also don't think my anxiety needs to be an overachiever for it to be useful and helpful to me.
And when I see my anxiety through this lens and the idea that it's an overachiever, I think that's so helpful because then I can see that urge to overachieve and I can just decide whether I'm going to engage with it or not, right? So the same way that I sometimes get the urge to overachieve in my professional life, in my business, and I am like no, we agreed we're going to go do this other thing, right?
Like we're going to log off at 4:30 and go have happy hour with a friend. Or we're going to whatever the thing is, I don't have any more examples at this moment. And I can feel that urge for the anxiety to overachieve. And I can also be like, thank you, but we're not going to do that.
And I think it's helpful to really realize that a lot of our little tendencies, like perfectionism and overachieving, and some of our feeling states as well, are reactions, right? They're ways our brain is trying to keep us safe in a world that maybe doesn't feel safe.
And especially we learned a lot of these patterns as children. And so it'll be really interesting because we'll be doing stuff we've been doing since we were in fourth grade, and in fourth grade it might have been serving us, it might have really been helping us. But a lot of times when we're adults, we're like, oh, this is not helping, and I'm not a fourth grader anymore. And I don't have to get an A in math class to stay out of trouble with my parents. I'm a full ass adult now, right?
So I think seeing these things as patterns and understanding that a lot of the patterns the brain does, they were there, they got developed to help us, right? So, for instance, for me overachieving is something that I've been doing since I was in elementary school. At first I wasn't very good at it, and then I got really good at it. And it was a way that I kept myself safe, right?
And a lot of that was like an emotional safety. I was going to get in trouble if I didn't get the good grades. And so being an overachiever was a way that I could get the good grades, which were this thing I needed to do to create this emotional safety.
And so I don't think it's surprising that as an adult, my brain wants to do those same patterns. But I get to slow it down now and be like, okay, there's no adults I'm going to get in trouble with. There's just me and me. There's my relationship to myself, I'm the adult now. And I get to decide if I want to keep doing this pattern, or if I don't, or if I want to keep parts of it, or if I don't want to keep any of it, right? And I can look at my feelings the same way.
Feelings are a little bit different than patterns in that the patterns, I think, are optional. Like we maybe have had them our whole lives, it might take a lot of work to undo them. Emotions we're going to have because we're human beings. So even if I change my thought patterns, like if I step out of the overachieving thought pattern, I'm probably still going to feel anxiety sometimes and the full breadth of human emotion sometimes, because I'm a human being.
That being said, I think it can still be useful to look at feelings as patterns that are also trying to help us. Like anxiety often feels like shit, but it is generally, at its core, trying to serve us. And when we can see that and understand that, we can decide how to engage with it and how to train it, right? Versus like letting it run our lives. We can be the adult and the parent who talks to the anxiety pattern.
And when I say the parent, I mean like the self-parent because a lot of the work that I do with myself, I think about as like self-parenting or re-parenting. And I'm doing that to create new thought patterns and to create a new basis and understanding of what's going to happen. Like what’s going to happen if I disappoint myself?
The way I talk to myself about that now is me creating new patterns and doing that re-parenting. Because a lot of the patterns that we have in our brain now came from our parenting. Not just from our own parents, but from a lot of other adults and authority figures at school and stuff too.
Okay, that kind of went all over the place, as is our custom here. So let's just do a review. The very simple idea that I want to leave y'all with if you only take away one thing from this call, is the idea that if your anxiety feels really big and loud, it's possible your anxiety is just trying to overachieve just like you are.
And that seeing it as that, as an overachiever can first of all, add some humor, which can just lighten things up. It can also help you decide like how you want to engage with that anxiety and how you want to engage with the information it's delivering to you.
And again, it might not be anxiety for you. It might be that your anger is an overachiever, it might be that your sadness is an overachiever, it might be, you know, maybe your joy is an overachiever and for you there's some room to think about the things that aren't working. Not so you can get stuck there in the negativity bias, but because we do need to look at what isn't working for us in order to figure out ways to make it work.
Okay, and if all of your feelings are big fucking overachievers and you do not want to hash it out with them alone, I've got good news for you. You can come work with me, and we can do this together. And right now there are two ways to work with me. I am taking clients one-on-one where it's just me and you and it's all about your brain and your life and everything you want to create.
And I also have the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching mastermind, which is an amazing small group coaching program that starts in July. And it's all about how to create a life and career that is satisfying as fuck to you, whatever that means for you.
All right, y'all, that's what I have for you this week. Can't wait to talk to y'all next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, y'all, happy Wednesday. I'm pretty excited to be talking to you this week. Actually, I'm traveling to Seattle this week and so I'm recording the podcast. And I woke up in the middle of the night the other night and was like, “Oh my goodness, what if I forget to record the podcast before I go to Seattle?” Because usually if I didn't record the podcast, I'd be at home. So I could just do it with my podcast mic, but I'm not going to take my podcast mic when I travel.
And also, if I'm being really honest with y'all, and that's what we do here, I used to have a really regimented schedule where I was recording the podcast at the same time every week. But my schedule has been a little bit different the past several weeks as I've been doing some extra work.
I've been doing written coaching review for Kara Loewentheil’s advanced certification in intersectional feminist coaching. Which is such an honor and a delight to help other coaches make their written coaching more powerful.
And I've also been doing consult calls for my group coaching program, Satisfied As Fuck. Which also this is such a delight and so powerful to be talking to these wonderful humans about what it would look like for them to be satisfied as fuck in their lives and careers. Oh, and I've also been like moving, I've moved a couple of my one-on-one clients around into new times because of their work and other stuff.
Anyways, all of that to say my schedule has been a little cattywampus, as one of the people I used to work for in North Carolina taught me to say. Which kind of means irregular or weird, or in this case I'm calling it like kind of all over the place. And in any event, I don't have that regular time slot right now. And I need to get it back on my calendar ASAP because when I don't have it there, then I have to mentally remember to do it, which is not the most effective thing.
And the other night I woke up, this is where I started, I woke up in the middle of the night and my brain said, “Oh, fuck, I have to make sure to do that.” And I was like having this like anxiety terror of like I could have gone to Seattle without having recorded it and then everything would have been ruined.
Which is interesting, I don't know if your brain does this, my brain does this all the time. It's like my brain will discover something before it's a problem. But then it will be like really obsessed about how it could have been a huge fucking problem. And I'm always like, “But, brain, it hasn't happened yet, and we thought of it so we will prevent that potential problem.” But my brain is like, “But it could have happened.” And I'm like, “Okay, that's true but not useful.”
This is like kind of where my concept that I've taught y’all on another podcast useful content comes in. Because our brains will try to worry about all kinds of shit, and then it's a skill to be able to look at those worries, look at those anxieties and pull out the useful content.
So I think the useful content for me waking up in the middle of the night freaking out about how I potentially could have forgotten to record a podcast is that it's time to put that back on the calendar. And first of all, like after that happened I put it on the calendar for this week. But second of all, also to get it back in a recurring spot. Because the spot that it used to go in, something else is there now. So I have to find a new spot for it.
Actually, and see this is something that brains do all the time, I was saying I need to put it back on the calendar in a scheduled way. But now that I think about it, it's actually already been put on my calendar in a scheduled way since I had that freak out the other night.
I just didn't record it today during that time slot because someone was here doing work on the house and making a lot of banging noises. Which happens a lot at our house as y'all know, since we're having a lot of work done here and Alex is doing a lot of the work.
Anyways, that's a bit of a ramble, but I think the important parts for y’all to think about there are number one, our brains often will want to worry and obsess about stuff that we've already noticed and sometimes even already solved for.
But it's like the thing was so exciting to the brain when it first realized it, and I don't mean exciting in like a positive way. I mean, like the brain is heightened, right? It's like activated and so it's feeling such activation about the thing that it still wants to like worry and fret even though you've already solved the thing.
Actually, when your brain is in that space, that can be a good time to complete the stress response because sometimes you've already dealt with the stressor, you've already dealt with the situation your brain was being stressed about. But you may still be having the physiological response to stress, and there's a whole podcast episode on ways you can complete that stress response in your body and so your brain can then simmer down.
The other thing from that is something that's related to today's podcast topic, which is this idea that our feelings can also be overachievers. And I had this idea a while back because I was posting someone else's post on Instagram to my stories. And I just like quickly wrote out like, because your anxiety is an overachiever too.
And then I just posted it and then like forgot about it. And then I was talking to someone else, and they were like, “Wait a minute, that whole idea right there, do a whole podcast on that.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is something.”
So let's think about it, right? A lot of us, me and a lot of the people that come and listen to this podcast, we're overachievers, right? We're like always trying to do a fuckload of shit, trying to add a lot of value, get a bunch of stuff done at work, get a bunch of stuff done in our lives. And sometimes we like really like that too.
And I've got a bunch of episodes on this, but like one of the reasons that we overachieve is because we're attaching our work products to our worthiness, like it's often like a validation loop. I think even when we get out from under that, like I do still like achieving a lot. But overachieving without any oversight can also create a lot of negative results.
I've talked on the podcast before about how sometimes when we try to over deliver, we end up under delivering. Specifically we try to do so much that then we're taking opportunities away from other people. Or sometimes, this happens a lot too, like where people are getting burned out but they're unwilling to let go of responsibilities. So they're hoarding the responsibilities, but they're not even able to do all the things well because they're too tired and they have too much work.
So this is something just to be aware of, as we talk about all the time that overachieving and the desire to overachieve, we want to look at why we're doing that and look at what would be actually the achievements we want to accomplish versus that part of our brain that just says we need to do everything all the time all at once.
Okay, but what do I mean when I say your feelings can be overachievers? What I mean is exactly that. Like a lot of times our brain likes to do many things with the same pattern, right? So the same way we might want to overachieve at work, our anxiety might also want to overachieve, right? So our anxiety is going to take that pattern that our brain uses and be like, I would like to overachieve in anxiety, please.
And so the way that anxiety overachieves is it brings you even more shit to be anxious about, right? Like it's trying to do its job at a 57 out of 10. For some of you it might not be anxiety. For some of you, your anger might be an overachiever. Your sense of dread might be an overachiever. Your sadness might be an overachiever.
I think for me, honestly, I resonate with all of these. I didn't even think that through until I was recording the podcast. Beforehand I was like, yeah, my anxiety is totally an overachiever, it's always finding stuff to be worried about. Like I said before, it wants to be worried about stuff that we've literally already solved and resolved. And it just is always finding something that could be upsetting.
But now that I'm talking about anger and sadness, I'm like, oh yeah, definitely I've had moments in my life where my sadness was going at things like at 12 out of 10.
Okay, so let's look into this a little bit more deep. When people overachieve, often they're neglecting something else, right? Like maybe you're overachieving at work and then you're like neglecting your physical body. Or you're overachieving at work, but you're neglecting your other relationships, your hobbies, whatever.
I think this is also true on the emotional level. When we're overachieving and anxiety, what's being neglected? What's not getting enough time, and focus, and attention, and energy? And I think the obvious answer to that is with the what is working kind of emotions, right?
So we talk all the time on the podcast about how, yes, we're going to look at the things in our life that aren't working. But what if we also start with thinking about what is working, start with thinking what's going well, because we have that negativity bias, right? So it's like I think this is an interesting metaphor also, if our brain is overachieving in anxiety, is it underachieving in gratitude? Is it underachieving in belief in our ability to figure things out? Is it underachieving in joy? Right?
The other thing I think is really helpful about this is it can be really easy to just like believe our anxiety. It can be really easy to sort of just like fall for it and listen to it and go on the little ride it takes us on. Let’s take the anxiety I was talking about earlier where my brain was like, oh, fuck you almost forgot to record this podcast, and everything would have been terrible. And then you would have had to like had to miss a week.
What my brain is underachieving in that moment by overachieving in that anxiety, it's underachieving in noticing that nothing has gone wrong. It’s underachieving in noticing that I remembered with plenty of time. It's underachieving in thinking about how even if I had gone to Seattle without recording a podcast, I probably could have figured out how to either record a podcast while I was there.
I could have recorded one when I got back and paid a fee to have it processed and paid a fee to have it produced at a faster rate. The podcast could have skipped a week, right? Like, I like talking to y'all every week. But if the podcast needed to skip a week once, what if that could be okay too?
So let's think about it for you. Do you identify as an overachiever? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Do you think any of your feelings are overachievers? I mean, it's possible that you might be an overachiever and think your feelings aren't. I think it's also possible that you might not identify as an overachiever personally, but you might think your feelings are.
And so I think some interesting questions about that are, one, does just simply noticing that shift the relationship you're able to have with that emotion and the way you interact with it? Two, do you want to keep doing that? If you don't want to keep doing that, what do you want to do instead?
I know that my anxiety does bring up some interesting, useful content. I want that content. I want the information that my anxiety is pointing me to. And I also don't think my anxiety needs to be an overachiever for it to be useful and helpful to me.
And when I see my anxiety through this lens and the idea that it's an overachiever, I think that's so helpful because then I can see that urge to overachieve and I can just decide whether I'm going to engage with it or not, right? So the same way that I sometimes get the urge to overachieve in my professional life, in my business, and I am like no, we agreed we're going to go do this other thing, right?
Like we're going to log off at 4:30 and go have happy hour with a friend. Or we're going to whatever the thing is, I don't have any more examples at this moment. And I can feel that urge for the anxiety to overachieve. And I can also be like, thank you, but we're not going to do that.
And I think it's helpful to really realize that a lot of our little tendencies, like perfectionism and overachieving, and some of our feeling states as well, are reactions, right? They're ways our brain is trying to keep us safe in a world that maybe doesn't feel safe.
And especially we learned a lot of these patterns as children. And so it'll be really interesting because we'll be doing stuff we've been doing since we were in fourth grade, and in fourth grade it might have been serving us, it might have really been helping us. But a lot of times when we're adults, we're like, oh, this is not helping, and I'm not a fourth grader anymore. And I don't have to get an A in math class to stay out of trouble with my parents. I'm a full ass adult now, right?
So I think seeing these things as patterns and understanding that a lot of the patterns the brain does, they were there, they got developed to help us, right? So, for instance, for me overachieving is something that I've been doing since I was in elementary school. At first I wasn't very good at it, and then I got really good at it. And it was a way that I kept myself safe, right?
And a lot of that was like an emotional safety. I was going to get in trouble if I didn't get the good grades. And so being an overachiever was a way that I could get the good grades, which were this thing I needed to do to create this emotional safety.
And so I don't think it's surprising that as an adult, my brain wants to do those same patterns. But I get to slow it down now and be like, okay, there's no adults I'm going to get in trouble with. There's just me and me. There's my relationship to myself, I'm the adult now. And I get to decide if I want to keep doing this pattern, or if I don't, or if I want to keep parts of it, or if I don't want to keep any of it, right? And I can look at my feelings the same way.
Feelings are a little bit different than patterns in that the patterns, I think, are optional. Like we maybe have had them our whole lives, it might take a lot of work to undo them. Emotions we're going to have because we're human beings. So even if I change my thought patterns, like if I step out of the overachieving thought pattern, I'm probably still going to feel anxiety sometimes and the full breadth of human emotion sometimes, because I'm a human being.
That being said, I think it can still be useful to look at feelings as patterns that are also trying to help us. Like anxiety often feels like shit, but it is generally, at its core, trying to serve us. And when we can see that and understand that, we can decide how to engage with it and how to train it, right? Versus like letting it run our lives. We can be the adult and the parent who talks to the anxiety pattern.
And when I say the parent, I mean like the self-parent because a lot of the work that I do with myself, I think about as like self-parenting or re-parenting. And I'm doing that to create new thought patterns and to create a new basis and understanding of what's going to happen. Like what’s going to happen if I disappoint myself?
The way I talk to myself about that now is me creating new patterns and doing that re-parenting. Because a lot of the patterns that we have in our brain now came from our parenting. Not just from our own parents, but from a lot of other adults and authority figures at school and stuff too.
Okay, that kind of went all over the place, as is our custom here. So let's just do a review. The very simple idea that I want to leave y'all with if you only take away one thing from this call, is the idea that if your anxiety feels really big and loud, it's possible your anxiety is just trying to overachieve just like you are.
And that seeing it as that, as an overachiever can first of all, add some humor, which can just lighten things up. It can also help you decide like how you want to engage with that anxiety and how you want to engage with the information it's delivering to you.
And again, it might not be anxiety for you. It might be that your anger is an overachiever, it might be that your sadness is an overachiever, it might be, you know, maybe your joy is an overachiever and for you there's some room to think about the things that aren't working. Not so you can get stuck there in the negativity bias, but because we do need to look at what isn't working for us in order to figure out ways to make it work.
Okay, and if all of your feelings are big fucking overachievers and you do not want to hash it out with them alone, I've got good news for you. You can come work with me, and we can do this together. And right now there are two ways to work with me. I am taking clients one-on-one where it's just me and you and it's all about your brain and your life and everything you want to create.
And I also have the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching mastermind, which is an amazing small group coaching program that starts in July. And it's all about how to create a life and career that is satisfying as fuck to you, whatever that means for you.
All right, y'all, that's what I have for you this week. Can't wait to talk to y'all next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.