Claire Booth learned to slow down. Now she wants to teach the rest of us how to do it
An inside look at North Vancouver author’s plan to gear down without losing momentum
North Vancouver’s Claire Booth was sick of being an overachiever so she decided to do something about it — she wrote a book.
What? Isn’t the writing of a book a fairly big achievement?
Yes, Booth, author of The Achiever Fever Cure, gets that. However, she says she needed to write a book about recovery to actually recover.
“I get the irony, yes, but it actually took the writing of the book to teach me what I knew. I knew it intuitively, but I didn’t know it intellectually,” Booth said about her plan to slow down. “Mentally I wasn’t able to really take it in until I put it on paper.”
What she has put down on paper is a very accessible and straightforward look at one person’s plan to gear down without losing momentum.
The founder and CEO of the successful Vancouver-based market research company Lux Insights, as well as a teacher at the UBC Sauder School of Business, Booth says the book project has illuminated a path that she wasn’t even fully aware that she was following. Suddenly she was a cartographer mapping out her own life.
“Fitting all the pieces together helped me see the bigger picture,” Booth said. “The act of doing it was actually a very pleasant meditative act. I really had to sit down and be aware of just letting the words come out and not jumping ahead to: ‘What are people going to think of it? Am I going to get judged? Why am I doing this? How many pages do I need to write?’ I was constantly pulling myself back to the present moment.”
So you’ve probably gathered that what Booth has been busy discovering is a kind of mindfulness. In the book she says overachievers are: “Logging time rather than living time.”
Too much time is spent on worrying about what is going to happen, what’s supposed to happen.
“Things just have a tendency to fall into place when you take that pressure off yourself and you recognize you don’t really have a lot of control over anything,” Booth said about the mindfulness approach.
But you have to remember to take time to recognize your behaviour and you have to understand that recognition is followed by some emotional work.
“The word ‘cure’ is in the title because I know what the cure is. It is practising some of these new things that I have picked up in my life and it’s practising them on a daily basis and remembering to practise them,” Booth said, while admitting some days are easier than others to adhere to the plan.
“It’s an ongoing process and in order for me to keep the achiever fever at bay I have to stay very aware and very present, and keep remembering to remember.”
Officially out Jan. 22, The Achiever Fever Cure will be found in the self-help section of the bookstore, something Booth admits was an area she shrugged off as the habitat of the touchy-feely, flaky folk — certainly not the stomping grounds of a highly successful entrepreneur who is in a competitive swim club.
“I used to push back against the self-help book title. I used to be really wary of that category,” Booth said, adding she eventually became a closeted self-help book reader. “I bought an Eckhart Tolle book on my ereader because I didn’t want anyone to see that I was reading Eckhart Tolle.
“But truth be told and all said and done, it is a self-help book,” Booth added. “I aided my personal development and I hope that I can aid other people’s development, so call it a self-help book. That’s fine, I’m over it.”
Now happily a recovering achiever, Booth is a stalwart defender of her personal approach, an approach she feels strongly will work for others.
“I will stand up loudly and proudly say that this is work worth doing for anyone in their lives and this is not navel-gazing. I can understand why somebody might think it is, but I will go to the mat on the importance of doing this type of work,” Booth said.
So if you’re reading this and think that you need to lower your achiever fever, you should start with acknowledging that you have a problem. Then you have to decide you want to change your ways and travel a different route. Once that happens, Booth suggests spreading the word that change is in your future.
“Tell somebody, because once we say things out loud then they have a tendency to go into motion,” Booth said.
And finally, get a handle on that inner voice. You know the one that says fun things like: “Why bother? You’ll probably suck at that anyway.”
For Booth, the latter step
I will stand up loudly and proudly say that this is work worth doing ... this is not navel-gazing.” Author Claire Booth
was a huge hurdle as she was forever feeling the heat from what she called The Judge. A gloomy Gus of an inner voice, the Judge is quick to poohpooh positive thoughts and replace them with large helpings of wariness and self-judgment.
Through her extensive survey of the habits of successful, high-achieving North American executives, Booth said she learned that most people felt their inner voice was around about a seven-out-of-10 in terms of its power.
Booth reports that The Judge has finally “shut up.” But he isn’t gone for good and Booth knows only hard work will keep him quiet.
She says getting off the hamster wheel of unending goals and cooling her own achiever fever, while delegating more, has had the added benefit of helping her business.
“I have learned how important it is for other people in my business to grow,” Booth said.
“If that means I have to get out of the way so they can develop, then that’s exactly what I want to do.”
Giving extra responsibilities to her 14 employees is one way Booth has changed the way she does business. Another unique way, and one we could all apply to our own day-to-day lives, is what she calls a “flourishing fund.”
“I give each employee a certain amount of money that they can put toward whatever they think will help them flourish. It can’t be something to do directly with their career,” Booth said. “It needs to be something that helps them in a personal way. Someone is taking sign-language lessons. Somebody is doing a mountain-bike clinic.
“As a boss, you can’t just pour your heart and soul into people’s professional careers, you also have to invest in their personal development as well,” Booth added. “As a result, the whole team is flourishing — the business is flourishing. We’re at a level of success we have never seen before.”