You are not your achievements: mindset coaching for perfectionists
Highly successful women are successful because of what they do and how they do it. So how do you divorce your self worth from your accomplishments?
When you’re a woman with perfectionism, it can be really easy to get caught up in the “what’s next.” I’ve made this target, what’s my next one? I’ve reached this goal, where do I go from here? I PROVED MYSELF, how do I do it again?
We’re an achievement oriented society - which is why it can be so hard to just sit and feel satisfied with what we’ve already done.
It makes sense to tie your achievements and your accomplishments to your worries about being deserving of love, community, satisfaction, self-worth. How do you prove your worth if you don’t have anything awesome you can provide? But what if you didn’t have to prove your worth? What if you were more than what you accomplished?
How can you divorce those worries of your worth from your actual successes? Because you don’t need to feel that pressure to keep succeeding. Chances are high that you’ll still be driven and successful when that drive and success isn’t tangled up with your worth as a human being.
You are not your achievements.
What you achieve, your successes, are not WHO you are as a person, they are WHAT you do. WHO you are is separate entirely. You are worthy and deserving of love when you fail at something, right? If a friend told you she was worthless because she didn’t get promoted, you would jump in to correct her, correct? So why don’t you give yourself that same permission to divorce your failures (and the flip side, your achievements) from who you are as an individual?
You have been taught that you get the attention you want for accomplishing things - so if you’re not in a constant state of achievement, what do you get?
The type of women I provide mindset coaching to (listen let’s be hones the kind of woman I am) has likely been taught to be goal oriented ever since kindergarten. You got your gold stars and your check pluses and your parents and teacher told you how very proud they were. It felt AWESOME. So you kept chasing that feeling through middle school and drama club and jazz band competitions and the honors society, through to college and grad school and then your job.
You can talk a good game about how a disappointment or a B or a missed opportunity isn’t that big of a deal - but you really feel it, deeply, in your bones. Because a perceived failure, historically, has meant that you miss out on the praise, the love, and the attention to which success is tied.
It is challenging enough to separate those perceived failures from hits on your self worth - but it’s doable with shifting your mindset. You can reframe “I failed” to “This was a failure, but I can move forward.” You can sit with the discomfort and notice the shame and then feel a sense of peace instead of pushing it aside to find the next great thing.
It’s much trickier to move on to part two - separating your successes from your self worth.
But it’s equally important.
Reframing “I’m a success” to “This was a success.”
If a perceived failure shouldn’t mean that you’re a failure, then logically a perceived success doesn’t make YOU a success.
You can be a human who succeeds without it meaning that you are a successful human.
And THEN your self-worth isn’t tied to what you do or what you don’t do, it’s just about being a person. Your self worth is there because you have a self. It is worthy and deserving all on its own. You don’t have to prove it to anyone, or to yourself - it just IS.
How to practice divorcing your self-worth from your successes.
Please keep celebrating your achievements! You’re wonderful! Please still feel motivated by your failures - you can do better next time!
You can still receive important information from what you do well and what you do poorly - but you can simultaneously start to build up a little bit of an emotional barrier between what you do and who you are.
Here are a few self acceptance scripts to practice:
It is ok to want to be important. And at the same time, my importance is not only what I do - it’s who I am as a person.
I worked hard to get this promotion and it’s worthy of celebrating. And at the same time, it’s ok to just sit and appreciate this for a bit, without pressure to figure out my next thing.
Ok, I’m disappointed that nobody seemed to like my idea at this meeting. That stinks. And at the same time, it is what it is. I can move forward.
You are not your failures, you are not your accomplishments, you are just you, a human being who has failed or who has succeeded in this moment, without that moment defining them forever and ever.
If you need help with this - if you need help separating out what you do from who you are - consider mindset coaching. We can take a step back to figure out what messages you’re sending yourself, and find a more sustainable path forward. I promise.
