How can someone so accomplished need help and struggle to ask for it? Harvard Business School professor Thomas DeLong has spent years studying what he calls “high need for achievement” individuals, work he captures in his book Flying Without a Net. In an HBR interview titled “The Hidden Demons of High Achievers,” DeLong names the thing they fear most: not appearing competent. They fear exposure.
Here’s the problem: exposure is what drives real growth. So, if exposure leads to growth, and someone avoids exposure, they’re avoiding growth. The relentlessly capable spend enormous energy managing their environment to avoid exposure, which means they spend enormous energy avoiding growth.
That’s step one of the dance: quietly working overtime to control outcomes and appearances. It takes brilliance to manipulate circumstances with such skill. The problem is that step one is not sustainable. Perfection isn’t attainable and control is an illusion, so eventually it breaks down. And that’s step two: the snag.
DeLong notes that for these individuals, “when everything’s going fine, everything’s going fine.” But hit a snag, a skill gap, an overloaded plate, a standard that can’t be met, and they don’t have the tools to handle it. They lose control and turn inward, comparing, blaming others or blaming themselves.
It’s not really about the task. It’s about protecting against the deeper question: who am I without competence? Because they’ve spent so much energy avoiding failure, they never learned how to actually be in it. They don’t practice failing, recovering and remaining whole. So, when they hit a snag, they have not built-up resilience to bear it.
They flounder, sometimes for days, sometimes for years, unable to see that their limits aren’t a verdict on their worth. Eventually, they recover and return to step one: quietly working overtime to control outcomes and appearances. Until they hit another snag, step two.
The thing is that their limits prove they are human. And that is a good thing, being a distinctly designed intricately made human. Just as the banks of a river keep rushing and roaring waters moving forward carving into the riverbed with power, the limits of humanity (if embraced) can keep people moving forward carving their built-in impact into the foundations of their families and communities.
The dance isn’t the whole story. It’s a pattern, not a life sentence. The relentlessly capable don’t need less drive. They need to see the pattern clearly enough to choose something different: a little exposure, a little help, a little room to fail without it meaning anything about their worth.
If you are reading this and happen to feel exposed in the best of ways, see the dance for what it is and realize you’ve had the ability to step out of it all along.
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