'It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear.' - Khalil Gibran
Come for a walk with me.
Imagine us standing at the edge of a river. A river you know well. It started as a small stream but over the years, the further it travelled, it gained momentum and became a mighty river. You're familiar with its journey, the way it meanders down the mountains and carves its path through the valley. You know its rhythm and flow, its energy and force.
That river is you. The roles you've played. The beliefs you've carried. The story you've lived.
Now let me introduce you to someone you might recognise:
The Insecure Overachiever
In her excellent HBR article 'If you are so successful, why are you still working 70 hours a week?', Professor Laura Empson coined the term 'insecure achiever', a phenomenon that many high-achieving individuals I work with can relate to. Insecure achievers are ambitious, highly capable and successful, but their drive is rooted in a deep-seated fear of not being good enough. There's a quiet voice that tells them 'You've got to keep going, you haven't earned your rest yet'. The badge they wear with honour is 'I'm the one who gets things done'. They always know, they always do, they always hold everything together. The story they live in is one in which they work all hours, attaching their sense of self-worth to their achievements. Achievements earn safety. And they keep performing, striving and aiming for that one milestone to reach before they can finally feel confident. Their intense drive, ambition and high standards often mask toxic working behaviours that they start accepting as the norm.
Empson found that many of them attribute childhood experiences to their feelings of inadequacy and find themselves in a vicious circle where success intensifies the insecurity. The river's path is carved so deep that it's hard to imagine any other way through. They think 'I succeeded because I worked so hard, so if I don't work insanely hard, I won't succeed'. They are not necessarily attached to success itself but to the story of how they became successful. Organisations really value insecure achievers because they are highly self-motivated and it serves them well. However, there are so many institutional and societal myths that lead us to adopt a distorted view of what it takes to succeed. We lose sight of our own measure of success and self-worth. We become afraid that if we work less, we might lose our edge.
The stories we tell ourselves
Growing up, I labelled myself as a hard worker. There were people in school who I perceived as effortlessly smart, the ones who aced every test by barely touching a book and somehow absorbing everything in it. I, on the other hand, would get the same grade after poring over several books, making copious notes and practising relentlessly. And when I started working, I believed that my earning potential was tied to how many hours I was willing to put in and how much of my own personal life I was willing to sacrifice. I saw many traits of the insecure achiever in me and the people I worked with. Who would I be if I didn't work hard? What did I have to keep proving?
Whether we consider ourselves successful or not, there are old beliefs and stories we hold onto about who we are and who we need to be.
Letting go of old stories
Gibran's poem about the river is a great metaphor for transformation that requires letting go of an old identity. And facilitating this involves letting go of old stories you've told yourself that no longer serve you. This kind of identity shift typically happens when you step into a leadership role or decide to change career. To let go doesn't mean that you stop caring, but you do release your attachment to the story of how your worth is earned. The river doesn't tremble because it's weak, but because it knows it's about to dissolve into something bigger. The insecure achiever trembles too, at the edge of letting go.
One of those trembling moments appeared for me when I became a mother - an identity shift so vast that I could viscerally feel Gibran's words when wrote:
'But the river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.'
I was afraid of disappearing into irrelevance and being seen as not enough.
The practice of unravelling
So, we're back at the edge, you and I. The old story got you here, but it won't get you across to the ocean. Where do you begin?
- Name the story.
- How true is it? How is it still serving you and how has it stopped serving you?
- What are your own needs? What is your own measure of success?
- What are you holding on to?
- If you no longer held onto that story, what could you create space for?
We are the authors of our own stories, so we have the freedom to rewrite them. The river remains powerful, remains worthy - but now it flows with a new kind of strength.
I have to end this with what I recently heard Trevor Noah (philosopher in disguise!) say in an interview:
'The only thing scarier than accepting who we are, is accepting that we don't know who we are going to be, when we let go of the things that have made us who we are today'
Yes, read it again.
