Saboteur Spotlight: The Hyper-Achiever – the Account Manager’s curse

How driven are you to hit your sales targets and other personal goals?

Do you feel constant pressure and stress when chasing these targets? Do you feel dejected and find it hard to recover when you miss your monthly, quarterly or annual gross revenue target?

If you frequently harbour any of these feelings, then there is a good chance that you have a strong Hyper-Achiever Saboteur. 

In my experience, this Saboteur is one of the most prominent in Account Managers and Sales Leaders that I have coached so far.  In this article I want to provide some insight into how the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur can impact your short and long-term performance and what you can do to combat its negative influence.

What is the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur?

As identified from the research conducted by Positive Intelligence™ there are 10 Saboteurs.  These Saboteurs are responsible for hijacking our minds and generating the negative emotions we feel like shame, guilt, disappointment and anxiety.

It is important to note, that each of the Saboteurs correspond with a person’s greatest strengths.  These strengths turn into Saboteurs when they are over-used or taken too far.

In the case of those who have a prominent Hyper-Achiever Saboteur, they have the enviable strengths of being self-directed, pragmatic and goal oriented.  However, they self-sabotage by believing the lie that they need to constantly perform and achieve their goals for self-respect and self-validation.

How does the Hyper-Achiever negatively impact your performance?

But surely this constant need to achieve is not a bad attribute to possess? You might even be reading this and thinking that your Hyper-Achiever trait is responsible for your career success thus far.

Indeed, Western society celebrates winners who have Hyper-Achiever traits.  Obsessive athletes and business tycoons like Cristiano Ronaldo and Elon Musk, for whom winning at all costs is their modus operandi, are raised up on a pedestal and admired.  Shouldn’t we aim to emulate those types of public figures and feed our Hyper-Achiever Saboteur?

Well, there are several ways in which the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur can make a person less effective in their role.

Perhaps the most damaging impact that this Saboteur has on its recipient is that it makes achieving goals so entwined to gaining self-respect, that those goals become part of their identity.  When a person merges their goals with their sense of self, there are two harmful impacts. 

Firstly, when bumps in the road occur en route to accomplishing their goal, because their whole identity is at threat, they are more likely to experience high levels of stress and respond emotionally.  In that anxious state, it is more difficult to have the necessary clarity of thought to take focussed action and get back on track.

This stress can also result in disengaging others in their team, who may start to feel as though they are nothing but disposable tools used to help that person achieve their goal.  This can be especially detrimental if that person is the leader of a team, since once that trust is lost, it can be very difficult to win back.

The second harmful impact is an erosion of personal resilience.  Any time a sales or profit target is missed, a person with a strong Hyper-Achiever Saboteur will take that failure personally and take longer to bounce back from the setback. 

Conditional love is no love at all.

Having to constantly feed the Hyper-Achiever with greater accomplishments is exhausting.  It stops you enjoying the present, only allowing you fleeting moments of happiness when you do achieve milestones, before looking ahead to the future to set new lofty goals for you to chase.

When you do this, you treat yourself like the lab rat who receives a piece of cheese each time it successfully navigates the maze.  This type of conditional self-love is no love at all.

The Hyper-Achiever Saboteur can often result in lower achievement.

You might be surprised to learn that the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur can result in lower achievement.

Look at the world of sports and the phenomenon of “choking”.  There are countless examples of footballers missing what would be game-winning penalties, or golfers missing simple 4-foot putts to blow their chances of winning a Major tournament.  When your whole identity rests on scoring a penalty or holing a putt, it is easy to be hijacked by the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur which can negatively affect your performance in that critical moment.

Even in the longer-term, the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur can make you less ambitious.  When self-validation rests so heavily on accomplishing goals, you can sub-consciously set less ambitious targets to guarantee that you hit them, rather than exploring the true potential for growth in your customer.

Focusing on the process rather than the outcome is the key.

So how can you overcome the lies and destructive influence of the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur?

Focusing on the process of achieving success rather than the outcome itself is key. 

When you focus on the process, i.e. all the incremental actions that you need to take to accomplish your goal, and are less worried about the outcome, you are able to bring joy to and freedom to your work.  You remove that self-imposed Saboteur pressure which makes you choke during critical sales presentations or key negotiations, and instead approach those moments like a fun game that you are playing passionately to win!

By adopting what Positive Intelligence refers to as “The Sage Perspective” you will have the confidence to convert the inevitable setbacks and challenges into gifts and opportunities. You can harness positive emotions like curiosity and creativity when you have this mindset.

This in turn creates momentum for a flywheel which will allow you to deliver your peak performance and your best results.

How building Mental Fitness allow you to harness the strengths of the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur.

Hopefully you’ve gained some insight from this article on how your Hyper-Achiever Saboteur hijacks your mind and adversely influences your performance.  However, to create lasting habit change, only 20% of the necessary work is attributed to insight.

The other 80% of work is attributed to mental muscle building to construct new neural pathways.  This takes at least 6-weeks of intense work.  If you are interested in intercepting your Saboteurs and shifting to a more positive mindset then take the Positive Intelligence Saboteur Assessment https://www.positiveintelligence.com/saboteurs/ and then book a free 30-minute coaching call with me at https://www.expcoaching.co.uk/ to find out more!