The Disappointment of High-Performance

Would you self-describe as a high-performer (perhaps even a perfectionist)?

Do you find it challenging to simply be with mediocrity (either your own, or others, or both)?

Maybe you find that you’re really good at working hard, but not so good at taking it easy.

High-performance is a fantastic trait, and it’s common in almost all of the leaders that I support, as well as myself. It ensures that we turn in quality work, that we create more than most people do, and that we operate with a high-level of executive function (which is necessary to keep up the pace that we seem to automatically operate at).

When I ask people questions like, “Why do you think you struggle to be with mediocrity” or “What do you think that inability to take it easy is about?”, the usual answers are some flavour of “That’s just the way I am”.

“Just the way I am” is pretty dissatisfying as an answer. It doesn’t give us anywhere to go, nor any way to deepen your leadership. It’s great if what you’re trying to create requires pushing the accelerator forward all the time, but if you’re trying to create some kind of result that requires more than simply always-on-performance, this tendency of yours is going to be problematic.

Worse, if it’s “just the way you are”, your options are pretty limited. You basically have to find ways to remove yourself from the picture, or manage around you. You aren’t going to be able to help other people grow beyond this strategy either, as “the way you are” will end up being reflected in the same way you view others.

Either that’s the way they also are, or they’re just not that way, in which case, there’s not much you can do to change them.

Part of the foundation of ontological leadership is the tenet that you can learn new ways of being.

To do that, we have to start with the context that this tendency towards high performance is something more than just “the way you are”.

I find a really powerful starting point for this inquiry is to shift from a context of “This is just the way I am” to a context of “This is the way I became“.

When we begin to look at your habits and tendencies through this context, we can start to see that always-on-performance might actually be a strategy you created to cope with some other problem.

And what I find, as we start to peel back these layers, is that a lot of high-performance and perfectionism are strategies created to avoid the experience of disappointment.

By performing at an incredibly high level, we ensure that people aren’t disappointed with us, and that we aren’t disappointed with ourselves.

Our inability to be with mediocrity in the world, especially in other people, is a reflection of this underlying allergy to the experience of disappointment.

As we go forward this month, I’ll be breaking down how disappointment has led to the automaticity of our high-performance, the cost of that, and how to pull these two apart.

For now, here are some questions I’d love to hear you share around:

• What is your relationship to disappointment?
• What does it mean when you feel disappointed?
• What about when other people feel disappointed?
• What are the costs you see when we can’t turn off our high-performance?

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