Confessions of a Recovering Overachiever.
At the beginning of last year, our life looked pretty simple to me. I was living my dream life professionally…managing this business (The Simple Design Co.), overseeing our coffee shop (Simple Coffee Co.), and spending two mornings a week at our local Christian private school as high school music director.
Twelve months later, I was Principle at the same private school I had been volunteering at, we had transitioned offices and hired an office manager at The Simple Design Co, we had bought a certifiable “fixer upper” house(our third in six years), remodeled it, sold our former house, moved, added a baby girl to our little family, and were closing a deal to sell the coffee shop.
With the exception of our baby girl being born, literally none of these events were planned or expected before the year began…
My gut reaction? I felt like I wasn’t “productive enough”. I could have done more, been more, seen more, spent better time, taken the kids to the park more, played catch more… etc, etc, etc.
Isn’t that crazy? This was probably the busiest year of our lives so far, with many great developments. All my brain wanted me to see though was the time I had scrolled Instagram longer than necessary. Or when I had taken a “too long” lunch break. Or when this business or that one wasn’t growing at exactly the rate I was “planning” that it would for that month. If I could just be a little bit “more productive”.
As our year built, and each new development and project was stacked on top of the next one, like a motivational song building into a dramatic crescendo, I began to realize that I was running up against my limit. Ok let’s be real… reality had to smack me across the face.
For the first time in my life, I had the thought “is this what it is like to lose your mind?” and I wasn’t quite sure if I was joking with myself. I could take you to that exact spot. We had run into what “too much” looked like. In case you haven’t already guessed, this was the reason that we were selling our coffee shop:)
To be fair, I probably wasn’t really close to a breakdown. We just had too much going, and something had to give.
Anita and I are recovering overachievers… We are trying to subtract just the prefix “over”. I’m guessing many people would look at our life today and think that we could maybe slow it down a few more notches. They might be right. Our goal though is not to be “comfortable”… it’s to achieve good things for the kingdom of God. Notice how I said achieve… the word even looks better without the “over” in front of it.
I don’t know if you tend towards being an overachiever or underachiever. I hope you will join us in doing our best to lose both prefixes, and settle into your God-given “achiever” lane.
