Healthy High Achiever Blog

Do you feel like your life is in crisis? In a lighter sense, a predicament?

Mine was, read on…  

Your time is running you ragged, it’s never your own and nothing is ever good enough, sound familiar? You’re trying to perfect your appearance and achieve status thinking it’s going to secure you love and respect, but it doesn’t feel like your getting it.

Maybe you are achieving your goals and you’re financially successful, but your well-being just isn’t there. There’s something driving you to over-everything yet you’re still not getting what you really want. And for the life of you, you just can’t figure it out.

If you’re an achiever by nature or not, in today’s day in age, chances are good, that "something" or compilation of things is causing performance addiction.

I suffered this fate for years, despite all the outward mask of activity and excellence. Overachieving at the cost of my well- being was a way of life, until about a year ago.

I was at my 20th high school reunion, and while I having a great time (on the outside) I was facing that ill fated, stereotypical story of comparing me to others (on the inside) and it was really upsetting. It was not how I wanted to feel at this once-in a-lifetime event. The reunion was not an isolated case; it was the tip of the iceberg and the last straw. 

It was during that event that I finally decided to listen. Something was wrong and my gut was telling me. Whatever it was, I had enough of it, no more running away from it.  I left that night feeling committed to getting an answer finally.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. 

The next day, I picked up a book I bought about a week before, only because it had the word "performance" in the title. I had been working on this big idea I discovered, called Performance Lifestyle (which I’ll explain to you more as we move forward together) so it seemed like a good read. It was talking about some syndrome that was "ruining your life." I had no idea what it was about but there was something deeply personal I was trying to solve. 

The book was "Performance Addiction," by Arthur P. Ciaramicoli. Once I started reading, I could hardly put it down. I had finally found my answer, I was performance addicted, and it was ruining my life.

Almost immediately, I admitted that some insatiable feeling of something wrong (even when everything seemed right) had driven my life for decades, since probably junior high school. It drove me to perform at any cost, and get ahead of myself. It prompted me to achieve at higher and higher levels with little satisfaction, and set incredibly high expectations, that far exceeded my abilities… And that it was undermining my health and success, happiness and my relationships.

For decades, I was captain, leader or owner of everything I got involved in, and I was always involved, yet I felt isolated, lonely, self-conscious and fatigued almost all the time… I rarely felt accepted and respected (only my perception) and all it did was drive me to achieve more and more at the cost of my well-being.

I justified it by thinking "this was the price of high achievement". It wasn’t, it was an "addiction" and in the age of achievement we live in, it was reinforced and in control of my life.

Despite a "healthy lifestyle" by all accounts and helping, others live the same; personal energy had always been a problem for me.  Always petal to the metal, the fact is, I was overspending my energy, and getting more sleep was not solving the problem.

Thank god, I knew what I knew about food and fitness. If I hadn’t been a student of healthy living, without exaggeration, the downward energy trend I was in for a long period, could have been a lot worse.  

For reasons, I will save for another time, Performance addiction, lead to a life of ambition that was outpacing my ability to perform "well." It affected me negatively in many ways. When I started getting honest about this, pretty soon I found that other achievers were essentially suffering a similar fate and the healthy lifestyle conversation around sleep, diet and exercise alone wasn’t addressing it.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that I have little doubt performance addiction sits at the heart of why so many people have so little time, space and energy, why we often don’t take care of ourselves at the level we need to, and why the relentless demands of modern day life can get the best of us. 

When I launched my company as MyTrainer.com four and a half years ago, I wanted to help people "look better", "feel better" and "perform better" through healthy lifestyle. The focus was fitness, nutrition and recuperation however, down deep inside, I wanted to understand lifestyle in a way that improved health AND success.

Year after year of progressively pealing the onion back on lifestyle, and teaching what I learned, when I finally unearthed Performance Addiction, I could see clearly now why most people drive themselves into the ground. The process revealed a truer meaning of lifestyle and what it means today, when I speak of Performance Lifestyle.  

In a Performance Lifestyle, sleep, food and fitness are only part of the answer. Getting free of performance addiction and it’s insidious cascade of costs is where the conversation starts and in between, are the steps that all healthy high achievers know and live by.

I look forward to helping you unleash the full potential of your lifestyle to look, feel and perform better and achieve your goals, successfully, with your health and "wellbeing" intact.

stay tuned…