High-Achieving vs. Overfunctioning: How to Tell the Difference and Why It Matters for Trauma Survivors in Coaching

Welcome to the Art and Skill of Coaching podcast. Will you learn the exact skills needed to become a confident and effective coach? I'm Justin Marcus, licensed therapist and certified life coach and in each episode I'll be sharing over a decade of education and experience to teach you exactly how to be a great coach. You'll learn proven strategies and technical skills to help you elevate your coaching practice and get your clients results. Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your coaching to the next level, this podcast is here to equip you with the tools, insights and strategies to transform your clients' lives. Get ready to master the art and skill of coaching. Welcome back to the Art and Skill of Coaching where I teach you how to coach. So I want to ask you something and I want you to really sit with it before you answer. Is your drive coming from desire or is it coming from fear? Because here's the thing. High achieving and over functioning can look identical from the outside. Some output, same result, often, same reputation for being the most reliable, most capable person in the room, but they feel completely different on the inside and they produce completely different long-term outcomes. And today I'm breaking this down. The research behind it, exactly how you know if over functioning is running you and one simple tool you can use to start shifting it. So a lot of high achieving women I work with have spent years calling their over functioning something else. I've heard it called high standards, work ethic, being a self starter, a leader, just how wired, perfectionism, anxiety. And in many cases those things are also true and that's what makes it so hard to discern for so long. But there's a version of achieving that is rooted in genuine desire, curiosity, drive, motivation, passion and there's a version that is rooted in the belief often unconscious and often formed early, a lot of times from trauma, that you're worth or you're safety or your value to others is conditional on your output and that second version is over functioning. And it's exhausting in a way that achievement alone never is. And if you're like, wait, is this me? Let me tell you some signs. So resting feels irresponsible or even dangerous or selfish. You feel more anxious when things are going well than when they're hard. Your productivity rarely feels satisfying and there's this sensation that there's always more to do. You can't identify what you actually want because you're so focused on what you should do or what others need from you. You've built an impressive life but it doesn't feel like doors. So those are some common signs and for my nerds in the room, here's where the research comes in. So what research says about trauma and achievement? There's a huge study that you've probably heard of called Adverse Childhood Experiences. It's massive and it's very well known but what's interesting is it consistently shows a correlation between early trauma and high achievement later in life. So children who grew up in unpredictable, chaotic or emotionally unavailable environments. So more that chronic and our personal trauma, they often develop what researchers call a fawn or hyper-visual interspons. So they learn to perform. They learn to excel. They learn to be useful because in their environment, being capable or needed was how they stayed safe or how they received love. There's also research on the connection between trauma and success and it describes it as this thing called the achievement gap where the drive to achieve is not rooted in desire but in the need to outrun a deeper feeling of inadequacy of not being enough. There's also a really common book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkook and this is also important in relevant here. So that talks about the body remembering strategies that kept us safe and even when the environment changes or the threat has passed, the nervous system keeps running the same program. It does not always catch up. And what this looks like neurologically is that when your nervous system is conditioned, trained for survival, your baseline is threat detection. So you're on guard, chronically hyper-vigilant, chronically scanning your environment for bad things and so rest doesn't feel safe. Sileness triggers anxiety and pushing harder feels like the only way to stay ahead of that feeling that something is wrong or something is going to happen. And this is not a character flaw, this is not a personality trait. I'm sharing this with you so that you gain awareness and release judgment and give away your power that this is something that you just have to live with. Because this pattern, and that's exactly what it is, it's a learned pattern, it's an adaptation, a sophisticated one and an intelligent adaptation that did help you at one point. It was adaptive in the sense that it probably helped you navigate an environment that required it at the time. But again, the problem is that that pattern, that adaptation, that conditioned response, doesn't automatically update when your environment changes. So you can be objectively safe, objectively successful, objectively out of that situation and still running a survival program. And so here's the key distinction. High achievement that comes from desire usually feels energizing. It's sustainable, it's flexible. You can stop, you can rest, success feels good, you can pivot, hard work feels fulfilling. Over functioning that's coming from survival feels more compulsive, rigid, depleting. You cannot stop, you fear slowing down, rest triggers guilt or anxiety and success brings temporary relief, but then the bar just moves again. So let me give you some concrete examples because I really want this to land in your actual life, not just as a concept, right? So I'm going to break down how this might be showing up in a couple different domains of your life. Let's start with work. So at work, you probably do the work that could have been delegated because it's quote unquote faster or you want it done right. But the real reason is because letting go creates anxiety for you or asking for help feels vulnerable or you're afraid to depend on other people because you've been disappointed before. This might also look like you say yes to things that you actually don't have capacity for because saying no feels dangerous. But you'll be seen as difficult, ungrateful or not enough. And you struggle to stop working at the end of the day or at the end of the week, not because work requires it per se, but because your nervous system doesn't have an off switch. This shows up in your decision making. Let's talk about that. So decisions that should only take 10 minutes, take weeks because being wrong feels so catastrophic. You know what you want, but can't act on it because it might disappoint someone else. Or you find yourself asking for opinions from five different people who may or may not have experience with your issue because you struggle trusting your own intuition or ideas or thoughts. This could also show up in your body and this is usually where people start to notice that something's going on because these symptoms are hard to ignore. So you might have chronic tension, poor sleep or this low grade sense of dread that may or may not have a clear source. Maybe you get sick when you slow down because your body finally has permission to crash. Or you feel most yourself when you're busy because stillness feels so uncomfortable and the thoughts and emotions are really hard to tolerate. It also shows up in your relationships. I'm going to keep going because I really need you to hear the impact of this. I know on the surface it is helpful. It makes you feel quote unquote productive and need it and motivate it and successful, but there is an invisible cost. So again, in your relationships, maybe you over give, maybe you over explain, maybe you over accommodate, and then you resent it because it doesn't feel fair and your relationships that aren't reciprocal. You might also struggle to receive help or support without feeling guilty or like you owe them something and you're the person that everyone leans on, but you don't allow yourself to lean on anyone. And so you feel very resentful, very alone and very exhausted a lot of times. So if you've been nodding along, what do you actually do with this? I do want to give you one clean and easy tool, non-noverhaul, just one thing and it's super simple. And a lot of times it's the simple things that work. So if you've heard this before and you still aren't doing it, this might be the call to action to actually try it, okay? So it's called the pause and name practice. That's it. And again, it sounds simple because it is, but don't let that fool you. It's one of the most powerful regulation practices in science and I teach it to clients because what it does is it interrupts the automatic loop that you have in your brain and in your body before it takes over. It's actually for a medical cognition. So I know I'm kind of nerding out for a second, but I want to give you the signs behind it because don't let the simplicity fool you. Here's how it works. The next time you feel the urge to over function, okay? So say yes is something you want to say no to, to take back a task that you don't have to do or could delegate or to keep working when you're done or pick up a responsibility that isn't yours, right? Any of those behaviors or tail-tail signs pause and ask yourself these three questions. And if you're taking notes, write these down. What am I afraid will happen if I don't do this? And is that fear based on what's actually happening right now or on what used to happen in the past or only happened one time or hasn't happened in a decade? And the third question that can move you forward with power, agency and disruption is what would I do if I wasn't afraid of that? Now, the purpose of these questions is not to get to a perfect answer, my overachievers, okay? The point is not to solve it. The point is actually interrupt the automatic response just long enough to create choice. Because over functioning for a lot of you is automatic at this point. It happens before you even realize you're in it. And the pause and name practice gives you a moment of awareness, a second, that's it. And in that moment, a different response becomes possible. And choice, choice is where your personal power lies. And unfortunately, it's the thing that you probably didn't have as a child, especially a child experiencing trauma. Now, you do as an adult, you have choice more times than not. So use it, that's where your power lies. And over time with repetition, this is going to build the capacity to act from choice instead of conditioning. And that's the beginning of the shift. So if you're asking yourself, but what if I'm actually just a ambitious, right? Like I get it, but what if this trauma thing isn't for me? Fair question and honestly it might not be. Not everyone who achieves at a high level is running a trauma pattern, but here's a simple way to check. Ask yourself, does working hard feel like a choice or does it feel like my only option? Can I rest without guilt or anxiety? And if the answer surprised you, that's worth exploring. You might also be asking yourself, "Why try to slow down before and everything fell apart?" Or, it felt like it was going to fall apart. That's my question to you because there's a difference between things actually falling apart and your nervous system believing they will. And part of this work is learning to tell the difference because your nervous system is not the most reliable narrator all the time, especially if there's a trauma history that is skewed at. The other question you might have is, you know, Jess, I hear you and this is great and I would benefit from that, but this sounds like a lot of work and I'm already exhausted and have a lot on my plate and I hear you. But I want to say this clearly, the goal is not to add more work to your plate. The goal is to change the internal experience of the work you're already doing. That's what makes everything lighter. It's not about doing less, it's not about doing more, it's about operating from a completely different place, a regulated place, a safe place, a place where you can grow sustainably, a place where you can double your results without more effort. So if this episode landed or if you heard yourself in the examples or if you've been calling your over-functioning ambition and something in you just went, "Oh God, that's me during today's episode. I want to invite you to book a console with me. This is three months of 101 Trauma and Form Coaching. We work directly on the patterns driving your over-functioning. And we build specific skills that create real capacity for change and we do it with precision, not years of circling the same issue or taking all this time to build awareness and then just leaving you hanging. And this is the work I did in my own life. It's the work I've guided hundreds of clients through and it works faster than you think when you're finally addressing the right thing. The link to book your consults in the show notes, my schedule is closing mid April by the way for 101 and that's coming up fast and I won't reopen to the fall. So if you have been thinking about this, I'm telling you now is a time. Again, that link to book your calls in the show notes and as always, thank you for listening. I hope you found today's episode helpful. If so, please do us a solid, leave us a five-star review, that helps our podcast grow and spread the message and share these tools with people who need it. 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