I’m A High Achiever Feeling Lost At Work - What’s Going On?

When you’re a high achiever feeling lost at work, it’s likely to occur because you’ve made rapid progress in your early career thanks to your work ethic and academic results, but negative traits like perfectionism, needing constant reassurance, and focusing heavily on other people’s measures of success mean you’re no longer satisfied.

After years of doing all the right things, putting in huge amounts of effort and ticking all the boxes, it can be very painful for a high achiever to realise they feel lost, directionless, and disappointed at work. I know, because I’ve been there.

I was that high achiever, type A student who thought if they did everything that was asked of them, everything would work out fine. I was also the person who was terrified of getting it wrong, needed constant reassurance I wasn’t failing, and had to learn the hard way just how bad things can get when stress like that eats away at you.

So let’s dive into why you’re feeling lost so you can avoid the mistakes I made and start feeling happier and more purposeful in your career.

How Do I Know If I’m A High Achiever?

You know you’re a high achiever because you previously got excellent results at school or university, you worked hard to achieve those results, you always give 110% to whatever you’re doing and now the result is that you’ve made rapid progress at work.

High achievers are the top of the class, type A, pass with flying colours type students. The best metaphor for a high achiever is one my old history teacher used during a parents' evening: a swan who appears calm and regal on the surface, but underneath is paddling away furiously.

High achievers get great academic results

You tend to know you’re a high achiever early on in life because you got great results at school or university. This can include for your GCSEs, A Levels, International Baccalaureate, and your final degree classification. You don’t have to have been great at everything to be a high achiever but you’ll have excelled in several subjects and aced your exams or coursework in uni. 

They work extremely hard

High achievers also tend to work extremely hard to achieve great results. You’ve probably got a lot of natural talent but that doesn’t mean you’ve coasted; you have a strong worth ethic and high achievers tend to give 110% to everything they do. That means you don’t just get an A, you get an A*, and you don’t just meet your targets - you far exceed them. I was extremely dedicated in school - the kind of kid who actually had a colour-coded revision timetable - and at uni often handed in assignments early.

They make rapid progress in their career

The result is that high achievers make rapid progress at work, especially early in their career. You’re given extra responsibilities like managerial positions quickly, with the accompanying salary bumps. You may move from company to company swiftly, rising up the corporate ladder faster than your peers. And you’ll get rolled out for client meetings or events that feel ‘big’ because you’re seen as someone with lots of drive and initiative. For me, that looked like working on multi-million pound pitches for our marketing agency, and being in the room with colleagues at least five years my senior to help win those pitches.

Which all sounds pretty cool! Except the cost of this success can be very high.

What Are The Negative Traits Of A High Achiever?

The negative traits of a high achiever include feeling stressed or anxious if you don’t think you’re doing well, needing regular reassurance that you are doing things right, feeling bored if you’re not intellectually stimulated and often rushing to achieve results. You can also end up being a perfectionist with your work and, unfortunately, may pick up unhealthy habits if you are not appropriately motivated or engaged.

High achievers get great results, but that doesn’t mean they achieve those results in the healthiest ways. You might have a fantastic work ethic and go above and beyond in your role, but that energy is probably triggered by some challenging character traits. 

I know this because I worked through all these traits in therapy after becoming really depressed in second year of uni. Some days, I still struggle with these challenges - but they are much more manageable now.

Feeling stressed without clear rules and needing reassurance

High achievers tend to feel very stressed or anxious if they are unclear whether or not they are doing things ‘right’. If the framework for success isn’t laid out, or if there isn’t a clear set of guidelines to follow, their 110% effort can be generated more by a worry of getting it wrong than a desire to achieve a particular goal. This worry can cause particularly high levels of stress hormones, which then take their toll on the mind and body of a high achiever.

This was me during my A Levels. I experienced apparently 'random' and excruciating cluster headaches for several months. After going to the doctor, optician and dentist they all declared it a 'mystery'. Guess what? Those 'mysterious' headaches disappeared on the day of my final exam and I have never had one in the twenty years since.

Similarly, high achievers often feel the need for regular reassurance from others that they are doing ‘well’. Without this reassurance they can feel lost, unsure, and struggle to evaluate whether what they are doing is useful. Again, this has a physical as well as an emotional impact, which can lead to health problems.

Rushing to achieve outcomes so they don’t feel anxious

Because high achievers don’t like feeling unsure about whether they’re doing ‘well’ or not, they can sometimes rush to achieve outcomes to try and avoid that feeling. This results in overwork or even burnout as they work harder and faster to ‘do things right’, even without clear guidance on whether or not they are going in the right direction.

This is something I still struggle with in running my own business. I don't have anyone around me to grade me and so, just like Lisa Simpson on a strike day, I can start to feel panicked about what I'm doing. You don't know whether what you're doing is 'enough', so you just keep going. It's hard to stop when you haven't got a clear benchmark to hit.

High achievers are also very likely to be perfectionists, obsessing over details to get the best result possible in the shortest space of time - which is obviously exhausting. My immune system was screwed for many years because I would work myself to burn out, do a little recovery, then repeat the process - all because I was trying to get it ‘right’.

Relying on unhealthy habits to stop boredom

High achievers are used to accomplishing great things quickly, and if they aren’t given enough intellectual stimulation - especially at work - they rapidly become bored. And when a high achiever is bored and feeling the itch for satisfaction and a bit of dopamine, they can turn to bad habits to stay stimulated, including abusing alcohol, drugs, exercise, sex or become neurotically obsessed with some personal optimisation process. 

It’s like the X rated version of what happens at school to the ‘gifted’ kids: they get bored in class because they’ve already understood the lesson, and so start acting up because they need to keep themselves entertained. For me, my ‘substance abuse’ was workaholism and food, leading to disordered eating for many years.

Why Does A High Achiever Feel Lost At Work?

A high achiever feels lost at work because without fresh challenges they can quickly feel bored, if they don’t have a goal they don’t know what they’re working towards, they can get burnt out from the effort they put in, and they often rely on other people’s success measures rather than their own.  

The positive traits of high achievers - like their work effort and willingness to give 110% - can create great results in corporate life, but the negative traits they suffer from can equally lead them to stress and burnout, even as they are experiencing professional success.

High achievers are often very smart or even gifted, which means if their role doesn’t supply them with a stream of fresh challenges, they get bored - and they do so quicker than the average employee. Same goes if they don’t have a goal: high achievers need something to work towards, some external measure of success to meet. If they don’t have that - because, for example, their company lacks progression paths or their role doesn’t always produce tangible outcomes (like a lot of work in the information economy) - high achievers can start to feel lost and directionless.

When a high achiever feels lost at work, it can also be because they are simply burnt out. They have given so much in such a short period that when they do hit their target or achieve their goal, they don’t have the energy to enjoy or celebrate it - leading to them feeling disappointed and stuck in a career rut.

This was my experience after making a big list of life goals in my late 20s, and achieving 80% of them in just 12 months. I burnt myself out from working too hard, I couldn't enjoy what I'd achieved, and I was skipping from one thing to another to try and stave off boredom.

But the biggest reason I felt lost at work was because I'd set all my goals based on other people's versions of success, rather than my own.

Relying on other people's measures of success

The biggest reason high achievers end up feeling lost at work is because they are so used to relying on other people’s measures of success, rather than their own. It starts in school, where success means achieving a particular grade, and it continues into adult life with unspoken social expectations of what it means to 'be successful' and have a 'good job'.

Hitting that A* grade is addictive for high achievers. It helps us see where we can improve, what's not working, what the next challenge is. But when you get into adult life there is no official grading system; no-one to tell you that you’re doing it ‘right’; no way to measure your success against anyone else’s. So high achievers end up scrabbling around for a framework to use that tells us “Yes, you’re doing well” - frameworks like career progression, salary increases, or even building an impressive CV. We lean on external, socially-prescribed measures of success to ensure we are being a good little girl / boy / nonbinary child by ticking all the right boxes.

The problem is that these frameworks and measures aren’t personalised. They aren’t individually-constructed. They are entirely generic, built for an average person who wants average things out of life. But high achievers don’t want average! You want more - much more - but your obsession with ‘doing it right’ controls you to such an extent that you opt for a standardised path through life rather than one you decide on. 

That way you're guaranteed success, aren't you?

Aren't you??

Newsflash: absolutely not. What's most likely to happen is getting to a point in your life where you’ve ticked all the boxes, been the perfect student, done everything 'right' - and instead of feeling proud and content, you feel frustrated, lost, and exhausted from the last decade of giving it your all at work. You're in a career rut in your 30s because you took the wrong path, and now you're feeling lost.

If you're trying to work out if this is you right now, here are some signs to look out for.

Signs Of Career Stagnation At 35

• You’re bored at work. Not just occasionally, not when there’s little to do, but repeatedly and consistently. You feel disengaged and dissatisfied even when you have tasks to complete or seem busy.
  

• Work challenges aren’t interesting any more. The problems that seemed fascinating to you as a 20-something just aren’t doing it for you in your thirties. Whether that’s learning a new skill or presenting to the board, you don’t feel like you’re stretching or growing in the workplace.
  

• You’re living for the weekend. That means counting down the hours until 5pm on Friday, daydreaming about vacations, etc. Your weekend is jam-packed with all the stuff you didn’t have the time or energy to do in the week and life feels like a rollercoaster from manic excitement to utter drudgery.
  

• You go through the motions at work. Rather than be the high achiever you used to be, regularly giving 110%, you’re now just going through the motions and feel lethargic about how little you’re contributing.
  

• Your salary no longer feels like enough to justify how you bad are feeling. While your pay still covers all your living expenses and more, you’re starting to question if your income is creatively, emotionally and spiritually enough to justify how bored and dissatisfied you feel.

If you’d like to understand more about these symptoms and why they occur in your 30s, then check out my other article: Feeling Stuck? The Signs of Career Stagnation at 35 (UK Edition).

Happily, there are ways to feel clearer and more purposeful in your career. One of those ways is to discover your career “why”.

Frequently Asked Questions: How To Discover Your Career “Why” In Your 30s

Who came up with the idea of a career “why”?

There’s no single person who came up with the idea of a career “why”; instead the idea has evolved over time as work and society has changed.

In previous eras, work was transactional: you did it, but it wasn’t where your life purpose lay. That instead may have sat with community, religion, family, or simply survival. Jobs were something that might be hazardous (chimney sweep! coal miner!) or tiring (farmer! blacksmith!) and focused on essential functions: growing, making, mending and maintaining the fundamentals of life.

As working conditions and overall quality of life improved, and the types of work people were able to do changed, the perception of work also changed. It became imbued with the necessity for it to ‘mean’ something. If you’re farming the land, growing crops for your community to eat, it’s pretty clear what the ‘meaning’ of your work is. But when what you’re harvesting is granular data on sales in Q3 for a multinational screw manufacturing company, it can be harder to identify what the ‘meaning’ of your work actually is - and we do want it to mean something.

That’s because as humans we are naturally curious and expansive. We are always learning and growing, always wanting to understand things and life and the universe and everything. And we want to be happy, and life purpose contributes to that happiness.

Writers and researchers have also popularised the necessity of a career “why” over the last 20 years. Simon Sinek’s TED Talk from 2009 outlining his ‘start with why’ concept has over 70 million plays and has gone on to influence many business leaders. Dan Buettner’s talk How to Live to Be 100+ from the same year introduced Western audiences to the Japanese concept of ‘ikigai’, which has since been used to describe the importance of finding career purpose (although the original concept is unrelated to work).

Is it important to have a career “why”?

Yes, it’s important to have a career “why”, also known as purpose in your career - but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you might expect.

Finding meaning and purpose in life is a positive contributing factor to a longer, happier existence - often in quite literal ways. For example, people with a stronger sense of life purpose experience lower levels of overall stress, as demonstrated in this ten-year study from the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. We naturally want to live a life of meaning, which is why we ask ourselves those 4am questions like “What’s the point?”, “What am I doing with my life?”, and “Did I put the leftovers in the fridge?”.

And because we spend so much time at work, it makes sense that we see work as a vehicle to express our sense of purpose. If you’re doing something for 40 hours a week, it’s logical to want that 40 hours to mean something. Without having purpose, meaning or a career “why”, it’s easy to stagnate and start to feel disheartened. And for many high achievers in their 30s, the meaning they previously assigned to why they were working so hard - social standing, progression, doing the 'right' thing - just no longer resonates with them, leading to feeling lost.

Having a career “why” is one of the best ways to ride out out difficult periods at work. If you have a bigger vision of who you want to be - the wild success you want to achieve - then day-to-day problems become much more manageable.

What’s a step by step guide to discover your career “why”?

A step-by-step guide to discover your career “why” starts with understanding your priorities and defining what work means to you, then progressing to think about what you love doing and your personal strengths.

When I wrote Finding Your Professional Purpose (under my birth name), I structured it as a set of 10 questions. If you want to do a quick vibe check of your career “why”, here are the most immediately useful questions from that book.

• What are your personal priorities for your career? It could be time, money, autonomy, purpose, contribution, excitement, satisfaction - literally anything you want.

• What does work mean to you? Consider the role you want it to play in your life. Is work a main character, a supporting actor, a random extra? No right answer here, you’re just trying to work out what is actually important to you.

• What do you love doing? Think of the tasks you most enjoy completing at work, doing in your personal life, leisure activities, hobbies, etc. 

• What are your strengths and talents? Focus on the things you are innately good at, rather than what you’ve learnt. For example, I’ve learnt excellent time management - but I’m naturally brilliant at being spontaneous.

These questions are woven into my Wild Success Methodology, along with much deeper thinking and practical actions. I teach this methodology on our two-day Wild Success events, which really are the step-by-step guide to find your career “why”.

Over these two days, I guide you to discover your purpose, make a 90 day plan to put it into action, and start experiencing the wild success that’s possible when you’re working on what’s most important to you. As a high achiever, you already have the gift of focus, dedication and talent - now what you need is direction. Find out when our next personal development events are and we'll see you in the room.

About The Author

Astra is an inspirational speaker and writer leading experienced professionals to wild, untamed success. 

Astra's unique insight is based on 10,000+ hours studying purpose, meaning and the human condition. Their study has led to over 2,000 hours teaching, coaching and facilitating, plus published writing, keynotes and conferences, peer-reviewed research, digital content and working with 60+ brands as a communication professional - as well as living on a commune, in a warehouse, and with the Hare Krishna monks.

Through their Wild Success methodology, Astra teaches talented professionals how to find their purpose, take consistent action, and finally start experiencing the wild success they are destined for: not 'next year', not 'some day', but now.

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