Overachieving and Under-Earning: How to stop questioning your worth and start earning it (Part 1)

This article was originally the basis for a course, but the more women I coach, the more I have seen that there is an epidemic of women who are over-working themselves and not earning more as a result. That's when I knew I needed to share this information more broadly! Since it has an entire course's worth of content, it has been broken into four parts.

What is overachieving and under-earning? 

Overachieving is to be obsessively dedicated to your work, or when you do better than is expected or needed of you. Managers usually LOVE people that are overachievers. People who overachieve in their jobs often get rewarded with promotions from entry level positions up to middle management, but then they stop progressing and are often left wondering why. Does this sound familiar?

Under-earning is when you are earning less than you want to and know that you are capable of earning, regardless of the assigned income for your current role. Women are chronically under-earning, and while a number of factors (such as the wage gap, maternity leave, traditional and social family obligations, etc) have contributed to this as a social phenomenon, it still holds true that many women are also under-earning on TOP of those reasons, further compounding the problem. 

Why is under-earning a problem? 

Money is a tool- it is inherently neither bad nor good. The more tools you have in your tool belt, the better equipped you are to do, be and experience all the amazing things that life has to offer. If you want more information on how limiting beliefs around money could be blocking you from getting more, send me a message on LinkedIn and I would be happy to send you some more resources. 

How overachieving in your job is sacrificing your career

A job is the role that you currently hold, while your career is the cumulative set of roles from past, present and future. It is where you would like to go and what you hope to achieve, built on the foundation of the value you bring to both current and future roles. Yup, we are time traveling here, folks. 

When you are overachieving at a job, that is, when you relentlessly pursue a level of success in a role that is beyond the need of that role, then it is likely that you have devoted all your time and energy to overachieving. This leaves no time or energy to spend on the things that would propel you to the next level. This is so understandable because we have been told by society that when you keep your head down and do a job well, then you will be noticed and rewarded. Turns out, it rarely works that way in the real world. 

When you continually put all of your effort into overachieving in a role, it is both the neglect of a future focus and the reasons behind your behaviour that can hold you back. When you are so focused on doing amazing things for THIS role you can keep your head down working so much that the opportunities for advancement and development can pass you by. In essence you are sacrificing the career for the sake of the job. 

Why do we feel the need to overachieve?

There are a lot of reasons, but here are a few that seem most common among the women I coach: 

• Lack of trust in self: We do everything, take it upon ourselves to make sure that everything is perfect and go above and beyond because we don’t trust ourselves to be able to handle the unexpected and survive, nay, thrive in moments of uncertainty. We don’t trust ourselves to have our own back. 
• We believe that we need to know everything, do everything and be everything in order to be worthy: We use work to try to make others happy or to manage their thoughts about us (pleeeease like me!). We base our self-worth on feeling needed, liked and useful.
• We are more loyal to our team or our boss than we are to ourselves. This becomes harmful to our long-term careers as we hold ourselves back to stay loyal to those we work with or become so entrenched in being the manager that we forget that we truly want to be a leader. 
• We lack trust in others. We don’t or won’t delegate because we tell ourselves that it is “just easier to do it ourselves” or “if you want it done right, you will just have to do it yourself.” We become focused on proving these theories to ourselves and in the meantime, become so bogged down by all the work, we never have the time or mental space to level up our thoughts and actions and step in to be the leader. A leader trusts in her team because she trusts in herself to lead them to greatness not because she has shown them how to do all the things exactly how she wants them done. 
• We are perfectionists. We sacrifice progress for perfection and think that it all needs to be done to the absolute best of one's ability in order to have it be considered complete. This holds us back because we spend too much time perfecting the unimportant and stretch ourselves too thin to be able to devote our focus to making the 20% of things that deliver the biggest results the most amazing, creative, beautiful versions that they can be. 

If you see yourself in any of the above, the important thing to do is just recognize it without judgement.

Give yourself some love and grace and understand that these habits have, in someway served you up until now. Being hard on ourselves only serves to crush our motivation, not drive us to better results.

If you want more help on moving out of these patterns of behaviours, send me a message on LinkedIn so we can start talking about what this is costing you.

This is the first in a 3 part series. Click here for articles 2 & 3!