Michele Woodward

Powerful Coaching. Powerful Results.

anxious striving

Maybe You’re An Anxious Striver

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Years ago I learned something from my friend Jen Louden. It’s her idea of “Conditions of Enoughness”. Basically, it’s deciding before you set out to do anything what “enough” will feel like, so you know when you’re done.

I thought of this brilliant concept recently when hearing people talk about their drive for constant improvement. It occurred to me that constant improvement could actually be a bad thing.

Like, how you remove minute parts of a knife everytime you sharpen it. And, if you persist in sharpening the edge, at some point the knife loses its structural integrity and becomes a wisp of a thing rather than the sharp thing it once was.

I was reflecting on people who are what I call “anxious strivers”. The kinds of folks who are driven to go-go-go and do-do-do. Who only eat foods which have a point – their diet exists merely to provide protein, minerals, and “good fats”. They only read books which will improve their lives. Every spare minute is devoted to Doing Something In Service To Something Else.

Joy has very little role in their lives.

I have to ask, though: When you live in pursuit of constant improvement, when do you know how to stop? When do you know what enough is like? Because of the relentless “constant” in “constant improvement”, are you putting yourself on a hamster wheel that never stops and calling it exemplary performance?

Perhaps then, rather than constant improvement, we need to think about simply having clear goals and working to meet them. In that context, the questions become more like: How did I do yesterday? Do I need to do something differently than yesterday to reach my goal? Is it enough to keep doing what I’m doing and stay on this path I’ve set? Does this feel like enough yet?

That’s not to say stop learning. To stop incorporating your learning into your actions. I would never say that, because I’m a learner through and through.

I am suggesting that anxious striving, never knowing what enoughness looks like, never doing something just for the fun of it, sharpening your edge until you have nothing left… this is the recipe for burnout and unhappiness and, oddly enough, ultimately leads to a lack of real, meaningful progress.

Death To Anxious Striving

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Sometimes the words “anxious striving” pop out of my mouth, usually when working with someone who’s making a big change in his or her life.

“Anxious striving” is often what’s brought them into coaching in the first place. They’re stressed, they’re out of sorts, and they know something’s got to give.

And it’s so very hard to let go of anxious striving, since many of us were raised at the knee of hereditary anxious strivers who were driven to go-go-go, bigger, better, best.

We’ve learned from parents, peers and bosses that the optimal state of being is in constant motion towards harder and harder work, for which rewards may or may not come (depending on the mindset of whoever you listened to – some of us got a heavy dose of the always inspiring “work is hard and people like us never get a break – deal with it”).

Anxious striving is a mindset where we’re always the horse yoked to a heavy wagon, pursuing the dangling, unreachable carrot at the end of the stick perpetually in front of us.

It’s relentless pursuit of pursuit, for motion’s sake.

And it can be exhausting.

Now could be the moment where I wax rhapsodic about the joys of simply being. Of chasing butterflies in fields. Of wearing linen in a softly-focused life of repose.

But… nah.

The majority of us live here in the real world where we have meetings, and mortgages, and people who rely on us in one way or the other.

Plus, there’s a lot of meaning in work. I actually love working. The satisfaction that comes from doing a job that’s important to you, and doing it well, and hearing from someone that the work you performed really mattered – there is nothing like that in the world.

But anxious striving swamps meaning’s boat. So we have to find ways to eliminate it so we can be fully immersed in the Big Reason Why we’re doing what we do.

Here’s a good way to start. At the outset of anything you need to do, just ask yourself something my friend, the writer Jen Louden, suggests: “What are the conditions of enoughness?”

I love this question. And let me give you a simple example of how it might work. Let’s say I’m playing golf in a foursome, and let’s just say some money has been put down in a few side bets, raising the competitive stakes a bit. You with me?

Now, the competitive part of my noggin could start with anxious striving with messages like, “Michele, you’ve got to beat them! Twenty whole dollars are on the line! Par every hole, girl. You’ve got to par every hole.”

Hold your horses, there, kid. Did you know that the average amateur golfer shoots thirty over par on every round of golf? That’s at least one stroke over par on each hole. But me – anxious golf striver – have just said that my goal for today is to play at the level of a pro golfer, with no practice, training or skill.

I’m really something, ain’t I?

If at the outset, I’d considered the “conditions of enoughness” around the match, I might have done something quite different. I might have looked at the scorecard in advance and made my own par. It would be enough to have four strokes on that par three hole surrounded by water. Maybe I will realistically get a double-bogey on that long par five. Those new goals become my new par, and if I finish the round close to the new score I chose to shoot for, I will have done enough.

But more important, my energy would be calm, balanced and engaged rather than anxious, worried and graspy. Golf would be fun.

And the really crazy thing I’ve found in my own life is that by serving my own conditions of enoughness, I often create such a balanced and happy feeling of accomplishment that I do even better than I thought I would when I started.

Anxious striving drives so many of us, with powerful and problematic consequences – like workaholism, stress, disconnection from joy and meaning, and loss of self. Let’s put it out of its misery once and for all, and embrace instead the idea that we alone can decide what’s enough for ourselves, and getting to enough is… enough.

Acceptance and Approval

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What holds people back the most?

What keeps them from happy? From centered? From comfortable in their own skin?

I think it’s the powerful need so many of us have for acceptance and approval – from external sources.

I started thinking about this last week when a client was telling me that he needed more feedback from his boss: was he doing OK? Was he doing it right? Was he what the boss wanted? Was he? Was he?

It really struck me that this sort of rumination is a big energy suck – energy that could be used toward creation and productivity. And contentedness. “Why not,” I offered, “just ask?”

Dull thud. Silence. More silence.

I sensed a big swallow. Then the client said, “I can’t do that. I mean, it’s my boss. I shouldn’t have to ask.”

I totally get it.

Psychologist Erich Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving, wrote about the different kinds of love including “mother love” and “father love”.

Mother love says to a child: “There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.” This is Acceptance.

Father love says to a child: “You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all you must change your ways if I am to like you.” This is Approval.

So when my client was desperate for feedback from his boss, you might say he was looking for a father to love him. Even if his boss is a woman.

Whoa. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I see countless people around the world who struggle with this. Time after time, they choose to fill their internal gaps with external glue. They make choices because they want to feel accepted (mother love) or because they need approval (father love) – and sometimes those choices have powerful consequences. Like marrying someone because everyone likes him. Or taking a job because you “should”. Or spending money you don’t have to send your child to a particular private school because everyone else does.

It’s all external external external anxious striving for an idealized state we may have had in early childhood. Then again, we might not have had it. But we still idealize it.

As humans, we feel the absence and know we need both acceptance and approval to get along in this world.

After all, who among us could live without love?

Yet, placing the power of love in the hands of others – love is something we get externally – puts us at the whim of folks who may be unable or unhealthy. Or worse.

Think difficult bosses, spouses, teachers, neighbors. You’ve had ’em. I’ve had ’em.

We all have.

And you can’t get something from them that they are constitutionally unable to give.

So, it seems to me that the wisest thing any of us can do is give ourselves that which we seek from others.

Fromm says, “Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and fatherly conscience…The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has build them up inside…not by incorporating mother and father, but by building a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love, and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment.”

There’s the idea. If you feel trapped in a cycle of seeking external validation – desiring acceptance and approval (mother love and father love) – become your own parent.

That’s not to say that you have to chuck your own parents over the side. Nor am I suggesting that by parenting yourself you are somehow making a referendum on how you were raised. Or that you’re becoming a flaming narcissist. No, that’s not it.

What it is is this: every day, treat yourself the way you would treat someone you deeply love, approve of and accept. And to get there, of course, you must act in ways that you love, approve and accept.

Act with integrity. Be kind. Watch your self-talk, as well as your talk with others. Say yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no.

Treat yourself with care. Honor yourself. Be proud of yourself.

And, give yourself a pat on the back now and then. Because you know better than anyone how far you’ve come.