Hey everyone,
Do you ever feel like no matter what you do, nothing works?
Ever felt like even though you know, with a deep certainty inside your heart, that you’re meant to be successful as a writer, that you’re meant to share your message with the world, that you’re meant to achieve the success that comes to others so easily, that maybe it’s all for nothing and you’ll never get there?
Do you ever feel like you’re caught in a trap? You can’t leave this work—it’s your calling, your destiny, your love— and yet, staying in motion and continuously producing work that goes nowhere is painful and kills a part of your spirit each time?
Ever felt like that?
I feel it, too. And I feel it more often than you think.
Because here’s the truth about creative and ambitious people: It is not the achievement of a goal, but the challenge undertaken in going after it that brings us happiness.
Achievement is temporary and we like it, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re a high-performer and a high-achiever, especially a creative one, your true joy comes not from the finishing of a goal, but of setting higher and higher targets that you challenge yourself to achieve.
This is a fantastic thing and it helps you go higher than the average person. It is what makes the high-achiever’s standards and goals far greater than most other people.
But it comes with a flipside. A pretty big one.
I work with a lot of high-performing and high-achieving creatives and one of the things I see come up repeatedly is the downside to the high-achieving, set-big-targets style of creative living. And it is that for many high-achievers, no accomplishment is big enough, no goal satisfying enough, no result great enough.
If you’re a high-achiever, no matter how high you go, you will continue to set your sights even higher and that can lead to periods of self-criticism, self-loathing, and despair. A lot of high-achieving creatives are also closet depressives.
If you’re the kind of person that people look to as successful and having a dream career, but you often beat yourself about your lack of results, you might be a high-achieving artist.
If you’re constantly striving for more and enjoy the process of getting there, you might be a high-achieving artist.
If you continuously expect more of yourself than others do— 1,000 words a day, nah, you’ll do 3,000— you may be a high-performing artist.
And if you’re a high-performing artist, I’m sorry to tell you, there are very few people who will know how to challenge you and bring the best out in you. You will get the usual tropes about goals and success habits and self care that will NOT work for you. But if you do— if you can find that mentor who understands your ambition, your manic energy, and your need for more– it can change the direction of your career and how you view yourself and your writing.
Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with mentors and coaches who guide and help high-achieving entrepreneurs but it has occurred to me that when it comes to high-achieving and high-performing writers, there are very few people who understand that mindset and know how to guide it towards productivity and not destruction.
This excites me because it goes right to the heart of my creative philosophy, which is to create things, build things, and write things that I wish someone had created, built or written when I needed them.
Last year, I took a course on becoming a creative coach. I wanted to learn how to coach writers better, how to offer better support, and how to truly get to the heart of a creative person and show them how to tap into their own power. That is already something I do with my coaching, but I wanted to build on that. One part of my training required me to choose a focus— What kind of writers did I want to work with? What did I want to offer? Who could I most help?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a few months now and the answer came to me at the beginning of this year.
I want to help high performers and high achievers.
Writers like me.
And so that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Next week, I’m going to share a video training with you that I created for the high-performing and high-achieving artist that I think you’re going to love.
If you consider yourself one of us, stay tuned. You won’t want to miss it.
Cheers,
Natasha