Achieving or OVERachieving?

June 11, 2015 By

Speedometer - Exceeding Expectations of Your CustomersAchieving your goal(s) is a feeling like no other.  When you reach what you have been striving for, there is no better feeling.  Just ask an Olympic athlete or a professional athlete who has won the biggest trophy in their sport.  Ask anyone who has triumphed over adversity.

Achieve means to attain, get, realize, reach, complete and pull off.  Sounds pretty amazing, right?  So then, I wanted to know what does overachieving mean?  I did a little research and it means:  Do better than expected, to perform better or be more successful than expected.  Well, that doesn’t sound all that bad! Why do we tend to think that overachieving is derogatory?

But wait a second, how is it to “do better than expected”?  If I just achieve, am I saying I’ll settle for less than what I really want?  Not exactly.  I’m not necessarily overachieving if I’m doing what I expect, am I?

That didn’t sit well with me.

I found another way to look at overachieving and this made sense to me:  “To be excessively or unhealthily dedicated to achieving success.”  It’s not in the achieving or doing better than you anticipated when the “over” comes in to play, but in the excessive or unhealthy manner of achieving your goals/outcomes.

The differences between achieving and overachieving are in the approach.  If you are to be great at what you do, you need to dedicate time, resources and yourself to your pursuit.  Yet, often in that pursuit there is a moment when the achieving crosses the line into overachieving.

If you find yourself constantly working, overdoing things, and being obsessive and compulsive about making sure things are just so, chances are you are an OVERachiever.  There is nothing wrong with achieving – we should all strive to achieve — but overachieving pretty much defeats and overshadows that act of achieving.

Many of my clients are in overachieving-mode, never satisfied with the pursuit of the goal or even the attainment of it.  They are on to the next thing without acknowledging what they have accomplished, big or small.

To the OVERacheivers out there, I highly suggest you keep an accomplishment log and review it often so that you can see all that you are accomplishing… and slow down to enjoy your successes.

Filed Under: Personal Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Be Clear on Your Outcomes

November 7, 2013 By

Car on mapDo you know what your desired outcome is?

There is a saying, “If you don’t know what road to take, any road will take you there.”  And it’s true.  I’ve experienced it.  Sometimes I just jump in and start something… and then I start again and again when it isn’t working right because I haven’t spent time to do any planning.

Determining what you are doing and why you are doing it—in advance—goes a long way to getting your desired outcome.  Most of my business clients want to make more money.  OK, great, that’s a fabulous outcome.  But when I ask them what they are doing to get more money, they often can’t answer me right away!  They just know on a vague level they want and need to make more money.

So the good news is they know their outcome.  Next they need to break that down to specifics.  Once they are specific it’s easy for them to plan out how they will go about making more money.  Do they need to raise their rates?  Do they need a better way to collect on their invoices?  Do they need to do some inner work on themselves so they stop sabotaging their own efforts?  Do they need money systems and a solid foundation in order to reach their goals (a topic I’ve talked about before)?

Planning is often thought of as boring and so many people skip it.  Yet, planning is an essential part of any success both in business and in personal life.  Planning can be fun, it can be energizing and it can be easy.  Sure it takes time but anything worthwhile does!  Changing a bad habit to a good one, obedience training your dog, and preparing Thanksgiving dinner all take time, but would you not do them simply because you have to put forth some effort?  Of course not!  Not if you want results and success, that is.

Take the time to plan and you will achieve your desired outcome.  There is another saying, “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather plan to succeed!

Filed Under: Personal Development Tagged With: , ,