The Insecure Overachiever mindset.
When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip lightly. The classic Insecure Overachiever mindset.
Because worrying is so common in every pursuit you attempt, your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer, and your failures are proof that you should have worried all along.
Unfalsifiable negativity. "A walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity" as Andrew Wilkinson says.
You build a link between worry and performance. A belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn't worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes you wanted.
Even when you reach black belt status and have confidence in your capacities, there's a lack of enthused energy: Perhaps the worry has left you but it's not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just high expectation.
I want to propose a radical new approach...assuming that things will go well.
After a while, I don't think that the fear is aiding your performance. You're primarily running on habit and skill and experience.
Maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession, but now you've reached escape velocity and are drifting in space. So why are you still holding the controls just as tightly as when you were on the launchpad instead of enjoying the view?
Fuck me this will all be over soon. You do realise that right? This isn't going to last forever. Your final sports match, the last trip to give a presentation, a concluding project at work.
You can look back on a great run of miserable successes, or actually try to embrace some enjoyment. Perhaps to even prioritise it.
Do not confuse relentless dour severity with seriousness and sophistication. It is not more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience.
Things will go well. You will figure it out, just like you always have. So go seek some joy.
Chris Williamson | @chriswillx