The High Achiever Trap for Women Leaders

Speaker A: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Women in Sales Leadership. I'm Amy Evans, your host and business and leadership coach. I'm so glad you're here today. This is what we're going to get into today's episode. There are three things that you are going to walk away with. Number one, you're going to understand why women who look like they have it all together are quietly at the most risk for right now and why this isn't a burnout. Problem number two, we're going to get exactly the identity trap that almost every single high performing leader out there is dealing with right now and how to get out of it. And you're going to leave. Thirdly, with a practice that lets you rebuild something that's sustainable, that actually works for you without you sacrificing your edge or your numbers. And you are here, you're because you're in the right place. This show is for high performing women in sales leadership who are CEOs, who are founders, who are sales leaders and they're running businesses and they want to elevate, elevate the results, elevate their leadership and elevate their careers. And when you are listening to today's conversation and you hear for yourself something that a friend of yours would like to know, this is your chance to share it. This show is produced by me and it is supported by listeners, by you, like you. And so share this episode with a friend or three and give her a nice gift today. Better than flowers. This one will help her grow and help her elevate in her leadership. We are going to get into it. These three things I talked about to understand by why high performing women like you are the ones that are putting on a show. We look like we have it all together and, and they're really at risk right now of just losing it a little bit. And I know you'll feel this when I say this to you. You're gonna get a glimpse into this identity trap that almost every single high performing leader finds ourselves in. Like once we get to a certain level of achievement after a certain level of time, there's this identity trap that we fall into and I'm gonna give you the how to elevate, how to get through and start to get better perspectives. Stay with me all the way to the end of today's conversation because the truth is what you're going to find it's actually happening under the surface. All this stuff is happening under the surface in the minute that you peek under that surface is going to lose its power over you, honey. Only way to get there is that we've got to start at the beginning. Let's look at this lie that we've all been telling ourselves. So here you go. You are here. You're listening to this show because you are a performer. I've talked to so many leaders, so many listeners of this podcast, and they're performers. These are individuals. You are people who are earning money that when you were 23 years old, you would have looked at that and said, wow, I can't believe I'm making this much money right now. A quarter million, half a million, A million bucks plus a year. That's who you are from an earning standpoint. So you're at a place where you have title, you've got comp, you've built a life for yourself. Maybe you've got a romantic relationship or a partner. You've got family, whether your own family or your extended family. Hopefully you have some people around you that you love, your friends. Right? This is this life that you thought you wanted when you were 28. And what is happening to almost every leader that I'm talking to right now is that they're starting to notice something. They're here, they've been doing this. They've achieved these elements that they wanted to achieve in their lives. Like, we are here. And what's going on? Why don't I feel better? Why don't I feel happy? Why do I feel not great? Right? There's this flatness, and this is what's disorienting about it. There's actually nothing technically wrong m with you because there's nothing wrong with you ever. You are perfect just the way you are. You absolutely are. You say Amy. No, I'm not. There's so many things that I need to be working on. I am here to tell you you are perfect. There is nothing wrong with you. You're not broken, and you don't need to be fixed. What is going on is an opportunity to just learn. Learn a little bit. Learn about where you are. And we're going to go on that journey together. So this isn't a burnout recovery episode. I'm not going to try to talk into taking a bubble bath. Although I'm a big fan, not everybody is. Uh, I'm here to get you the truth. The truth about what's really happening underneath the surface, because, boy, have I been there. I certainly have. And this first one I talked about is this identity trap, right? It's when and this happened to me, and I didn't realize It. I mean, I kind of knew it when in the minute, but it didn't, uh. It. I didn't get full clarity on it until I was out of it, meaning I was out of corporate America. And I got to kind of, like, step outside of this identity that I'd had as this VP of Sales in a Fortune 200 company leading a 200 million doll business with a hundred sales, uh, people and support people all rolling up to my organization, right? This identity trap. And the identity trap is where you. We begin to. Because we do this work all day, every day, for so many years, for so many weeks, for so many months and quarters and all of that stuff. We begin to believe that our job is who we are. We begin to believe that our job is who we are. And I know I did it. I believed that, like, my identity was my title, how much money I made. That is full on what I believed. And there's a point where you get to a level of achievement where. Where your job and what you do stopped being something that you do. And it started to become who you are. Yeah, it started to become who you are. And this just. It kind of creeps up. It crept on. Crept up on me. It creeps up on you, right? It's, uh, a. It's. It's. You start to get acknowledged, like, oh, we can always trust you. We can always trust you. You always perform, you always deliver, you always come through. You always take care of everything, right? And you're like, yeah, I do. Feels good. Feels good to be acknowledged for that, right? But there becomes a point where we're so entrenched and we've got these blinders on because we're just doing the work all day, every day, where we can start to view our whole identity as wrapped up in our work. And I'm not here to tell you it's bad. I'm, um, here to help you see it. And then you can start to choose how to look at it a little bit differently. And there's this pattern, these three patterns that go along with this, right? Where you're in this identity trap. And there are these three things that start to happen along the way. And I saw this for myself, full on. Number one, I started to have quiet resentment. Resentment. It was like, yes, I was always counted on to hit my number. I was gonna hit my number. That's a job, right? Table stakes to play the game, as they like to say, if you're betting in Las Vegas or anywhere else, right? There's just this low hum of resentment. That I started to have. And what it would have was, it just, it started to show in this, like I wasn't being acknowledged, uh, anymore. It was just an expectation that I was always going to perform. And the higher up you go in leadership, the less accolades you get. Right? The accolades are for the individual contributors, right? They're for your team. You don't get that love. You're the giver of the love. You're the giver of the awards. You do that. No one's saying, great job, Amy, great job. Look at how amazing you are, right? You don't get that. And so what happens is that you come home and it can start to look like having some unhealthy patterns where. And I, I definitely fell into this where I was just giving so much of myself at work, like the best, I gave the best of me at work every day. And I would come home to my kids and to my husband at the time, and there just wasn't a lot left over for them. And the way it showed up was that I would snap at them, I'd be short tempered, I'd kind of definitely treat them like they were employees, which I'm sure being on the receiving end of that felt like really, really awful. In fact, my ex husband tells me that, you know, I treated him like I was an employee often. And that is not the kind of feeling that you want your romantic partner to have. Um, right. And, and on top of that, like, I did even worse things because I was so self consumed with the resentment of it all that I wasn't taking care of the things I needed to do that I knew helped me deal with it in a better way. Right. And what that looked like was I didn't go for my runs, I didn't go to the gym, I didn't go to hot yoga, I didn't do the exercise that I knew was good for me. I didn't go for a walk at the end of the day, right. Um, I would pour myself an extra glass of wine and kind of just like numb out, right? Sit there on the couch, scrolling my phone. TV show was on, My husband was at the other end of the couch, my kids were in bed. I had one hour to kind of decompress before it was time to like lay down and get maybe some crappy rest and do it all over again. So that's pattern number one, like this resentment and like the falling off of the things that, you know, work for you. The second thing is this crash, if you will. It's like this Phantom crash. And you can see it coming a mile away. You know, you might be in the middle of that right now, because we are sitting here and for those of you that are on a calendar year, we're almost midway through the year right now. And so all of that energy that it took to like, launch the team, launch the year, do the territories, do the planning, all of the stuff in addition to all the home things that you're managing at home, right? Whether you're, uh, you know, a dog mom or cat mom or a human mom or a plant mom or whatever kind of mom you are, I promise you're a mom of something. Like there's something in your life that you're taking care of besides you likely. And so all of this just elevates and escalates. All that cortisol and that nervous system just running at 11 the whole time, right? Every month end feels like a quarter end, every quarter end feels like a year end. And you're operating at 11 and there's little time to recover, there's little downtime to just come down from all of that. And what it looks like is the, you know, lack of sleep or interrupted sleep where you're waking up in the middle of the night worrying about whatever happened that day, whatever's coming up, whatever is worrying you. Because there's definitely stuff that's on the list that's waking you up in addition to whatever hormonal awake, uh, you know, wake up times you're getting. Thank you very much. Hormones. Appreciate you for that. What this is revealing is just that your nervous system has gotten so, like, tuned up to running at such a high pace in such a, you know, high performance that you're running out of gas. You're running out of gas. This, what, this can look like the next phase of all this. And I have absolutely been here. And if, uh, this is you right now, man, I feel, feel it and it will get better, I promise. I promise. But the it. The only way that I know that this gets better is when you, like, look it in the face and you say the words I. It's a disconnect. And I felt nothing. I had somebody looking outside of my life would have looked at me and said, wow, look at all this stuff she's got. Look at all the money she's making. Look at all the life, right? And shoot, look, even in grand scheme of things, there are a lot of people who are doing better, right? I'm, I'm always pretty humble about it, but fundamentally, like when I was a Kid growing up from little old middle of nowhere Wyoming, to be at a point in my life where I was making a million dollars a year as a sales leader, like, I just would have never imagined that. And I felt dead inside. I felt dead inside, like, so disconnected, so disconnected from me. So disconnected from just fully my body, disconnected from some of the people that I loved in my life because I was just surviving every single day. Go to work, do the job, come home, you know, dinner, bath, bedtime, read a story, uh, all the things. And then, you know, five, 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes, if you're lucky, an hour sitting on front of a screen, not connecting with my partner, overindulging, because I was trying to, like, you know, path of least resistance to try to decompress a little bit. And it left me in this disconnected place where I was disconnected from myself, disconnected from my body, disconnected from my heart. And it felt really dead inside. And this is really, really dangerous because it doesn't come upon you like a, like a crisis. It, like sneaks up on you over time. And why this hits us, uh, harder, right? I'm not a man. I've never been a man. And I don't ever want to pretend that men don't have tough times too, because, you know, I've got a son, I've got a brother. I watched my dad be an entrepreneur in a small business, and he had all kinds of ups and downs and failures, and he was an absolutely amazing human being who died too early. But this is so different for women because we know this. We're carrying this load that our partners, if we have a partner, they don't carry. And if we don't have a partner, it's just us, right? It's just us carrying it. So to consider where we are and where you are right now, to be performing at the level that you are, to be in the role that you're at, you already had to be one and a half times better than any guy out there. You had to be so on top of your game, so on top of the details, outshine them, outperform them, outdo them out, work them out, everything them just to be, you know, at the same level, fingers crossed, I hope that you're earning the same amount of money. I'm not going to go off on a tangent. There's a. So we have that of like, we've had to work so damn hard to be where we are, and then we have the cognitive load of all the stuff of outside of work that we're carrying to Manage the stuff of life. You want clean clothes to wear. You want a home that doesn't look like a hoarder lives there. I mean, I don't know, maybe you like hoarding. I'm not going to judge. Right. The minute that we talk about it and we say anything about this out loud, like, the worry is like, I can't talk about this. Everybody's struggling with this, and if I complain, then maybe it seems like I can't handle it. And we know that's not true. We know that's not true. So what can happen is that we just kind of carry this stuff around and it just becomes this heavy weight. And this is not any kind of a personal failure because there's just. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. You don't need to be fixed. It's just a structural reality. And the minute that we just kind of step out of the survival mode and look at it and name it is we start to get more power. So this is what you do to rebuild and re engage. Okay, so the identity part. Now this one, this one takes time. So go be gentle with yourself, because you might be saying, like, either. You either might be saying, amy, of course I'm not my job. And then some of you also might be saying, well, I actually think I do believe at my job. And if that's where you are, just let go of judging yourself, okay? You'd be human if you didn't feel that way. The way to get access to any of this power is to start to look at it. You name it and you're aware of it. Awareness itself is a freedom. So whether you're a journal person or not, one of the biggest changes that I've made in my life over the past few two years was to come back to journaling and the personal development. The mental health freedom that the journaling has provided for me is like a whole episode in and of itself. But suffice to say, the science shows that when we put pen to paper and we write something down, it offers a release from our brain. And it also just is a pattern, um, interrupt that causes better thinking to occur. So an opportunity that if you want to do a journal, cool. If not, then just listen to me right now, doing whatever it is you're doing, because I know you're doing something. You're driving, you're cleaning your laundry, doing whatever. This is the question, who am I outside with the work I do? Who am I outside of the work I do? This is a really big Question. Who am I outside of the work I do? M. Right. There's no wrong answer. Write the words down. If you don't have anything, say nothing. Say, I got nothing. I don't know. Okay. If you have stuff, make note. What are the. Who are you outside of the work you do? This gives you insight into, like, where are you on this? You start to see things right, and you can start to go even a couple of steps deeper where you start to look at. Okay. If you're in a place where you don't really know who you are anymore outside of the work you do, you can look back at your past. Like, let's think about a decade ago. What did you love to do? What made you laugh? What made you joyful? What fills you up with energy in life? When I was in that place of feeling totally dead inside, I realized that I had stopped seeing any live music. I'd not been to a concert in, I don't know, five or six years. And I stopped even, like, really listening to music or singing along with music. Like, I'm a singer. I wanted to be Olivia Newton John when I was a little girl. I like music a lot. I love live theater. I love, um, live performance for music. So that's like a. That fills my cup. And I realized I hadn't done that in a long time. So think about something like, what did you like to do a decade ago? That fills you up. The other thing that came up on my list was dancing. And I'll talk about that. Um, it's a chance to think about how do you start to create space for what you used to love doing that, you know, fills you back up to give you access to that part of you that might have been kind of just, you know, taken over by your job, which is what happens when you're performing at a high level. The second move you can make is to choose one thing that is yours and yours only. I, uh, talked about dancing for a second. Like, I love to dance. I'm a freak on the dance floor. I mean, I never took dance class. I never, like, really learned how to properly dance. But, man, I really like to get out there. And I probably look like a total freaking idiot, but I never cared. Um, if there's a dance floor, I'm probably the person that's going to get it started. But it's been forever since I danced. When I was in that point of life where all I did was eat, sleep, work, kids, rinse, repeat, day, day every day after day, weeks on weeks and months. Right. I was like, I like dancing. And I told my friend that I loved dancing. It really lit me up. And she said, why don't you come to this dance class? She invited me to go to the dance class for a year before I finally went. Okay. It took me a year to work up the courage. I was worried about, oh my gosh, what do I wear? What are my shoes? Like? I'd never been to dance before. Like, I wanted to do that when I was 12 and we didn't have enough money and mom didn't have enough time. You know, everybody worked hard and there were three kids and all this stuff, right? And so I was like. I felt like, ooh, what do I do for dance class? She's like, girl, just wear your sneakers and your yoga pants and, you know, a sports bra on a T shirt and a water bottle and just come to dance class. It's not that hard. I was overthinking it. So I finally went. I'm addicted to this dance class now. I drive 25 minutes across town to be at this dance class at 8:30 every Saturday morning to go to this dance class. Because the high that I get out of being in that room with all these joyful women who are dancing dirty, like, really not dirty dancing, but like, you know, fun dancing. Like the kind of dancing that I used to do when I was 20 on a dance floor. Like really, um. It's so joyful and freeing and it makes me feel so alive. And I'd been desperately craving something like that. Pick something. What's your thing? Is it going for a walk in the woods? Is it, you know, massage spa? What's your thing? Pick something and make that yours that you do with. You're not getting something done, you're not taking care of someone else. You're not checking something off a list for anything other than. I love doing this because it's fun for me. Okay. I started to take myself to symphony performances by myself. I started to go to the theater by myself. I bought season tickets and sometimes my friends couldn't go and I went alone. Um, like, I just started to go do stuff because I needed that. I needed that energy. I needed that creative fuel to fill my life back up and to not just be living this robot. You know, I'm a high performing sales leader. Existence, right. The third thing that you will do that this can make such a big impact for you is to sit down. And this one's going to be tough. So I'm just going to warn you fully, we are Putting on a show a lot of the time, because so much of leadership is setting the example and leading by example. And if we're out of alignment in that example in any way, shape or form, and it doesn't feel right in our hearts, it feels more like a performance. And when we're putting on a performance, the energy of a performance is far harder than just showing up and being you every day. And let's face it, it is performance. Uh, it's called high performance for a reason. There's a performance, right? We. We do the dance, we perform, um, talk. Find somebody in your life who you don't have to perform for and do something really, really crazy. Something that might make you feel uncomfortable. Tell them how you're really doing. Like, really the truth. Not that I'm fine. I'm great. Everything's wonderful. You know, start talking about the kids because you're not going to talk about what's really going on for you or start talking about anything under the sun except what's really going on for you. Be honest. Say, hey, look, I'm feeling drained. And I don't need you to solve it for me. I just need you to listen to me for a little while. Because there's not a lot of people that I can talk about this with because I'm a leader. And at the top, we don't have a lot of opportunity to share when things don't feel good and when we're not doing good and to talk about it. And just that act of being honest. I guarantee you that the person that you tell first, um, off, they're probably going to want to hug you. And you can say, like, look, I just need you to listen to me. I just need some support. I just. I need somebody to hear me not be performing. And it would might blow you away with how that person responds to you. Um. Um. This was a big journey for me. There was a period of my life where I. It was all in that part where I felt so dead inside. There was so much missing. I'd become my job. I'd. You know, I just lost myself in my work. And the kids were little and we were just surviving, which is just like a. Maybe a time of life. I completely had cut myself off from my friends. I didn't call, I didn't write, I didn't talk to them. My family, my mom, my brother and my sister, they would call me and, um, like, I would let a week go by before I would respond to them. It took me some time to where I just Woke up and said, I need people. I can't do this by myself anymore. I've got to start to share my life. I want friends, I want my family to know what's going on with me. And there's only one way to start that, and that's with just being honest with them about how you're doing and what's really going on for you. So that's an invitation I'm gonna extend to you. And I wanna leave you with this. Like you are not feeling depleted or out of gas because you're weak. No, you're not. You're absolutely not. You have been so generous with yourself. Or, excuse me, maybe not with yourself. You've been generous with everybody but yourself, right? Every minute of your career, you're giving. You're giving something to somebody. They. They want things from you and you give them right? Here's your opportunity to pause. And not because your work isn't important, but because you getting aligned on these components will actually put you in a big better position of power, consistent energy, peace, joy, loving what you do again. Can you believe that? Is it possible? I'm telling you it is. And you've got these. You've got these moves I just gave you where you can look at your identity. Choose something that's yours. Like, who are you outside of your work? Choose something that's just going to belong to you, that you do. And stop performing for the people who love you and tell them what's really going on. If this episode hits you in your heart or somewhere in your body or landed in you, it exploded. I hope so. Do me a favor. You're a generous person. Give a gift. Share this with somebody who you know needs to hear that. Hear this. This is how this podcast grows. If there is a topic that you want me to talk about, reach out to me. Find me on LinkedIn at a Lynn Evans on, um, link in. And if you want to get a conversation going with me, one on one, I am here for you. We can talk about your business, we can talk about your career. One hour is my gift to you. Come get it@amyevanscoaching.com thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting me with your time. I'll see you next time on Women in Sales Leadership.