What is Even-Achieving™?
Here’s the thing. I’m a high performer. I love doing things well. However, sometimes my drive for excellence comes with a cost – stress, burnout, and leaving people behind to name a few.
In the past, when I’d taken on too many things, I would change my environment – assuming that it was the leadership or the workplace that was too stressful or demanding too much. I got into trouble, however, when I started my own business… and when the burnout was creeping in, I could only blame myself. I was the leadership. I had built the system.
For 5 and half years, I was stressed out but felt like I was keeping my head above water – even if it was just barely. I was ignoring the fact that my weight kept ballooning, my vocabulary was often getting lost in the brain fog, my temper was short, and my hair was steadily turning more and more white. But my company was successful. The people who worked for me were fantastic, capable, and—we were dang good at what we did. Isn’t that what counts?
In 2022, however, I started drowning. Demand for my business was going down and so I thought the appropriate thing to do was to double down and work even harder. Then, my mom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
For the next year and a half, I thought that giving more was the solution to saving everything. At work, we were innovating, brainstorming, pulling in consultants, doing research (both internally and externally), everything I could think of to get a leg up on what I was hoping was just our next chapter.
At home, I was coordinating each week with my sisters so that my mom was not only getting to appointments and taking meds on time, but that she was also surrounded by love, joy, and hope. This meant we made sure she was never alone. We coordinated activities such as a surprise “joy mob,” a giant family talent show, a hair shaving party, and a legendary Christmas celebration. We displayed love notes and coordinated/refereed visits from friends. We created ground rules about what topics were safe to talk about in front of mom. We taught dad how to cast family video archives to the TV in the living room. We had regular zoom get togethers with family that was out of town. We played games of pickle ball that eventually morphed into playing ball of any kind in the house. We had dance parties in the kitchen and more and more and more.
It's bittersweet because I’m proud of the things we accomplished during that time. Overall, the memories I have are great. However, even simply remembering those things has my blood pressure rising again. There was so much stress involved.
My mother passed in May of 2023. The night before she went on hospice, I received an email that said the last sales proposal we had been waiting on – the one that could save my company—was completely denied. In the darkened hallway outside of my mom’s room, I realized I was going to have to say goodbye to both my mom and my business. I was heartbroken but also craving the rest that I hoped would come when it was all over. I hated feeling both of those things at the same time.
A week later, my mom passed away. We buried her on the day before Mother’s Day. 2 months later, I sent my last invoice. My business was closed. And I was so tired that I was completely numb…
I remember trying to figure out where I was supposed to go from there. I also remember an exhaustion that was so overwhelming that my world felt like it was in grayscale. Colors required too much energy. Smiling required too much energy. Even feeling sad required too much energy. The only thing I seemed capable of was sleeping.
Thanks to a wonderful therapist, I slowly began finding energy to get going again – and being the high performing junkie that I am, I found out I could enroll in a master’s program at Harvard through the Harvard Extension School. Every other option at that point seemed like I would be going backwards and even though I wasn’t at my level best, I still couldn’t tolerate the idea of going backwards. So, I jumped in full speed ahead. That first semester was rough… after having what was probably a nervous breakdown, family members and classmates helped me find my way across the finish line of that first semester. Funny thing about burnout, pushing through it doesn’t make it better.
Then I realized that I could use my studies to help me heal.
Technically, I studied Industrial-Organizational Psychology, but I chose to emphasize all my electives on stress and wellbeing. I thought I may as well figure out how I kept getting myself into this mess.
As I studied the very thing I was suffering from, I slowly began to change. It took 14 months of intensive daily work before I felt like I was fully healed from my burnout. I know it took this long because when I was still in the burnout phase, if I overextended even a little bit, I would be exhausted and barely functional for several days – my world was sent back to grayscale.
There were times I wondered if I was permanently broken. I was worried I had flown too close to the sun and was now permanently injured. But the daily changes I was making were slowly adding up. The behaviors I was applying from class were helping me rebuild my capacity. I was learning that I could continue to seek excellence, but in a more sustainable way.
As I entered my last semester at Harvard, I knew I wanted to teach what I was learning to others. Enter Brian Miller and his team at Clarity up. They’ve helped me change my approach from simply teaching you about this topic to being willing to walk with you through what high performance and sustainable wellbeing looks like for yourself. And we’ve named it Even-Achieving.
So, what is Even-Achieving? Even-Achieving is reaching for those big dreams and goals but doing it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice your ability to your best day after day – especially when it comes to your health and your relationships.
Even-Achieving centers on understanding that we must keep both our drive and our needs in balance. Both sides of that scale matter. Our drive helps us aim for excellence. Most high performers have skillfully honed their drive into maximizing machines. However, there is another side to this. We cannot ignore the fact that we have a body—and it also has needs. Turns out, we are the most important resource that we have for getting things done. Imagine that.
As we build this awareness, we can begin to see when we’re tipping too far to either side and then use strategies to help us balance back out. When we do it well, we’ll continue reaching for our dreams, but we won’t be drowning in stress. This is the key to sustainable high-performance.
So, are you ready to Even-Achieve? I sure hope so. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s do this.
