Yesterday, I unexpectedly won an award at the girls’ cricket club.
The funny thing is, I’d spent quite a lot of the day thinking I wasn’t being a particularly good cricket mum.
The award I wasn’t expecting
We’d been at the club since about 11 am and the awards ceremony didn't start until around 6 pm. It was a long day of watching cricket, cheering the girls on and trying to work out what on earth is happening with the score.
Yesterday, though, I’d also taken my crochet with me.
At some point during the afternoon I became aware that I’d spent quite a bit of time crocheting while the girls were playing, and my brain did what it does rather well. It started building a case against me.
I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I should have watched more of the match. I should have been more present. Other parents were probably watching more closely than I was.
Basically, despite having spent most of Sunday at a cricket club supporting my child, I had somehow concluded that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job of supporting my child(ren).
Then they started giving out awards...and I got one. For supporting the girls.
For the carpooling, the travelling, creating cardboard signs, the cheering and all the other things that I’ve apparently been doing over the years which other people had noticed, even though I’d never really thought of them as anything particularly noteworthy.
My immediate instinct, of course, was to say it was nothing. Which, when I thought about it afterwards, was quite interesting.
We were keeping completely different scores
There I was, being given an award for my contribution, on the very same day that I had been mentally marking myself down for not contributing enough.
Other people had apparently been noticing all the things I had done, while I was paying considerably more attention to the bit I thought I hadn’t done well enough.
We were looking at the same contribution and keeping completely different scores.
I wonder how often we do that in other parts of our lives.
We notice the email we haven’t replied to rather than the twenty we have. We remember the bit of the meeting where we stumbled over our words rather than the useful contribution we made. We get to the end of a busy week and think about the thing still sitting on the list, or spend time with our children while simultaneously feeling guilty about the work we’re not doing, before going back to work and feeling guilty that we aren’t with our children.
There always seems to be another piece of evidence available if we’re determined to prove we could have done better.
When achievement becomes the normal standard
This is where I think the High Achiever protective strategy gets interesting.
Being able to see what could be improved is useful. It may well be part of the reason you have achieved what you have. You can spot the gap between where something is and where it could be, then you put your energy into closing it.
The difficulty comes when you become so practised at seeing the gap that you barely register everything you’ve already done.
Once something has been achieved, it can very quickly become ordinary. The project you worked incredibly hard on becomes simply part of your job. The difficult situation you handled becomes something anyone would have done. Supporting everybody around you doesn’t really count because that’s just who you are.
I realised yesterday that I do this too.
Driving the girls around doesn’t count because, well, I’m their mum. Going to matches doesn’t count because I want to be there. Making ridiculous signs and cheering them on doesn't count because I enjoy doing it.
And yet apparently, from somebody else’s perspective, all those ordinary little things added up to something worth recognising.
Perhaps that is one of the stranger consequences of achievement becoming normal. We move the bar so quickly that we rarely get to stand beside the thing we’ve just done and allow ourselves to see it properly.
This is part of what I mean when I talk about slowing down to speed up. Sometimes we need to slow down for long enough to notice the score we’re keeping before we automatically start chasing the next point.
What happens when you let it count?
I’ve been thinking a lot about protective strategies this year and, in particular, about the question I keep coming back to:
What is this pattern protecting you from?
Achievement itself isn’t the problem. I like achieving things and I have no desire to stop. But there is a difference between achieving because we have chosen something that matters to us and needing to keep achieving because stopping brings up something we would rather not feel.
If I’m always looking towards the next thing, I never have to spend very long with what is here now.
And perhaps allowing what we have already done to count asks something surprisingly difficult of us. For a moment, there is no gap to close. Nothing to improve. No next target required to justify our value.
We just have to receive what is already there.
Maybe that explains why my first reaction to the award was to dismiss it. Somebody had handed me evidence that contradicted the score I had already given myself, and rather than reconsidering my score, I nearly rejected the evidence.
I suspect I’m not alone in that.
The unsung hero of your own life
I keep coming back to the idea that the High Achiever can become the unsung hero of her own life.
Not necessarily because nobody else sees what she contributes. Sometimes they see it very clearly.
She just doesn’t always include herself among the people allowed to recognise it.
So this week I’m going to pay a little more attention to what I’ve already done before I automatically start looking for what’s missing. Not in a forced gratitude-journal sort of way, and not because I’m going to stop wanting things or striving for them, but because I’m curious about how much of my own life I have mentally filed under that doesn’t really count.
You might want to notice that too.
What have you done, contributed, navigated, changed or carried that has become so normal to you that you no longer see it?
And perhaps an even more uncomfortable question:
What happens if you let it count?