Achieving 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.