Here comes The Judge
Recovering overachiever wants to help others kick their inner critic to the curb
Claire Booth, successful entrepreneur, was sick of being an overachiever, so she decided to do something about it. She wrote a book.
What? Isn’t the actual writing of a book a fairly big achievement?
Yes, says the author of The Achiever Fever Cure: How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy (LifeTree Media, 2019). 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,” said Booth about her plan to slow down.
“Mentally I wasn’t able to really take it in until I put it on paper.”
What she’s put down on paper is a very accessible and straightforward look at one person’s plan to gear down without losing momentum.
Booth says the book project has illuminated a path that she wasn’t even fully aware she was following. Suddenly she was a cartographer mapping out her own life.
“Fitting all the pieces together helped me see the bigger picture,” said Booth.
“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 have 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’s going to happen, and 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,” said Booth about the mindfulness approach.
“I used to push back against the self-help book title. I used to be really wary of that category,” said Booth, adding that she eventually became a closeted self-help book reader. “I bought an Eckhart Tolle book on my e-reader 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.”
Now happily a recovering achiever, Booth is a stalwart defender of her personal approach, an approach she feels strongly will work for others.
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,” said Booth.
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 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 pooh-pooh positive thoughts and replace them with large helpings of wariness and
self-judgment.
Through her own 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 sevenout-of-10 in terms of its power.
Currently 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.
Giving extra responsibilities to her 14 employees is one way Booth has changed the way she does business, a marketing firm in Vancouver. Another unique way, 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,” said Booth. “It needs to be something that helps them in a personal way.”
For the record, Booth hasn’t completely quashed her achieving instinct. When asked if she ever puts already completed tasks on a to-do list just so she can cross them off, Booth didn’t hesitate in her response: “Oh, totally.”