Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
Here is a question you have probably never asked yourself. When you are working, really working, polishing, refining, preparing, who is all of that effort actually for?
Because there is a shift that happens, often without you noticing it, where you stop working on the work and start working on how the work will be received. The report gets written once and reviewed six or seven times. The email takes four minutes to draft and another fourteen before it’s ready to send. The presentation is ready on Tuesday and rebuilt twice by Thursday.
None of that extra effort is for the client, the reader, or the room. It’s for an audience you can’t see.
In this episode, we look at who that audience is, how they got there, and what it actually costs you to keep performing for them.
Key Themes
- When doing the work becomes performing the work
- The invisible audience assembled over years
- Sarah’s one-hour four-sentence post
- Internal versus external validation
- How to notice the moment the switch happens
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. Here’s a question that you’ve probably never asked yourself. When you’re working, I mean really working, polishing, refining, preparing, who is all of that effort actually for? Because I suspect the answer will surprise you. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble, because success shouldn’t cost everything. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach. The previous 4 episodes, we looked at perfectionism, and we finished up by uncovering the pattern which sits underneath perfectionism, namely approval seeking. We saw the bar which keeps rising was never really about the work at all.
Today, we’re going to start pulling on that thread properly, because for the next 4 episodes, We’re going to be exploring the approval pattern itself, and we begin where the pattern lives, with the audience, and not the audience in the room, but the one that you carry around inside your head. Before we get into it, if you haven’t already, please do follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. This next 4 episodes build upon each other, and giving us a follow is the easiest way to make sure that you Don’t miss a step. Let me describe something and you tell me if it sounds familiar. You finish a piece of work, it’s done, it does the job it was meant to, and yet you can’t quite bring yourself to release it. So you go over it again. Maybe it’s an email or a report and you adjust a sentence, you soften a phrase here, sharpen a phrase there. And you imagine how it’s going to land with the recipient.
And somewhere in that process, something changed without you even noticing. You’ve stopped working on the work and you’ve started working on how the work will be received. And that’s the shift that we’re going to explore today. Because for most overachievers, the exhausting part of the working day is rarely the work itself. The work you can do. You are good at the work. Let’s face it. What wears you down is the performance layered on top of it.
The constant invisible effort of managing how you and your output are going to be judged. The report gets written once and reviewed 6, 7 times. The email takes 4 minutes to draft and another 14 before it’s ready to send. Or the presentation that’s ready on Tuesday, and rebuilt twice by Thursday. Sound familiar? I’ll bet it does. And here’s the thing, none of that extra effort is for the client, the reader, or the room. It’s for an audience that you can’t see. Let me give you an example of how this plays out.
Let’s take Sarah, We’ll call her Sarah, not her real name, but she was a founder of a company and she was running a pattern which I have seen in people many, many times. She sits down to write a short post about something that her company has done well. Nothing controversial. It’s good news told plainly. 4 sentences, maybe 5. Nothing to it. So why does it take her over an hour? Well, it’s not because the writing is hard. It’s because every time she reads it back, she’s reading it as someone else.
First, she reads it as her old boss, the one who used to pick apart everything she wrote. Then she reads it as a particular peer, you know, the skeptical one, the one who might think she’s showing off. Next time she reads it over, she’s reading it as a client who once criticised her for being too casual. 6 drafts, each one written for a different reader, and not one of those readers is real in the sense that not one of them is actually going to scrutinise the post the way in which she imagined it would be. The old boss hasn’t thought about her in years. The skeptical peer is going to scroll right past. The client long since moved on. But in Sarah’s head, they’re all in the front row watching, waiting to judge.
Which is why a 4-sentence post took her an hour. She wasn’t writing so much as performing for an audience of ghosts. Let’s pause for a moment and put the question to you directly. My question for you, be honest, where does this show up for you? Think about the last piece of work that you hesitated over, the one you kept adjusting past the point where adjustments were making it better. Who were you imagining was going to read it or receive it or use it? Whose reaction were you rehearsing? Take a moment to think about that. There is usually a face when you dig right down. There is an important distinction at the heart of this episode, and it’s the difference between doing the work and performing the work. When you’re doing the work, your attention is on the thing itself, on whether it’s clear, on whether it solves the problem, whether it does what it needs to do.
When you’re performing the work, your attention has moved to an imagined observer, and the question has changed from, does this work, to, what will they think of me because of this? The same distinction shows up as internal versus external validation. Validation that comes from the inside is your own assessment that the work is sound, made against your own understanding what good looks like. Validation from the outside, that arrives only when someone else approves, which means it can be withheld, delayed, or simply never offered at all. And you have no say in any of that. And none of that really reflects upon you. Now, there is nothing wrong with caring about what people think. We’re wired for it. And for most of human history, the approval of the group meant safety.
And its absence, well, that could mean real danger. The wiring has served us well historically. The trouble starts when that wiring runs everything, when every email, every decision, every piece of work has to pass through an imagined tribunal before it’s allowed out into the real world. That is when caring what people think stops being social awareness and becomes a full-time unpaid second job. Let’s go a level deeper and again just ask ourselves, why does this particular audience never leave? I mean, a real audience goes home. The meeting ends, the room empties, the presentation is over. But the audience in your head, that’s portable. It travels with you.
It’s there when you’re drafting the email at 10 o’clock at night, and it’s there in the shower the next morning replaying how the meeting went. And here’s the part that’s worth understanding. That audience is not neutral. It was assembled over many years from the people whose judgment once mattered most. Teachers, parents, early bosses. The people whose approval at some point in the past of your life felt like safety itself. You internalised them. You had to.
It’s how we learn what’s expected of us. But somewhere along the way, their anticipated verdicts became the filter through which all of your work has to pass. And because the audience is internal, well, it’s got some strange properties. It never applauds for long. It’s never fully satisfied. And it is always available for just one more review, which means the performance never actually ends. There’s no curtain. You can’t win the client, land the promotion, get the praise— or you can, sorry, you can win the client, you can land the promotion, you can get the praise, and within days the audience has taken its seats again for the next show.
That’s the approval pattern in its purest form. Enormous effort directed at a verdict That never quite arrives from an audience that never actually asked for that performance in the first place. So, all right, what do you do with this? Well, I’m not going to give you a 5-step technique because the pattern doesn’t shift through tactics. It shifts through awareness. Here is the perspective I would like to offer you. Start noticing the moment the switch happens, the moment that your attention moves from the work itself to how the work will be received. It has a feel to it. The energy changes.
Curiosity gives way to caution. You’ll catch yourself rehearsing reactions rather than solving problems. And when you do catch it, ask yourself this one simple question. Who am I imagining right now? Name them. You don’t need to argue with them. You don’t need to evict them. Naming them, that’s enough to begin with because the moment you can see your audience, you’re no longer entirely inside the performance. You have stepped into the wings just for a second.
And from the wings, you get to notice something rather useful. The house is mostly empty. In the next episode, we’re going to go a step further into this territory, because the audience in your head has a spokesperson, a voice that delivers its verdicts. And when you listen closely to that voice, you discover something unexpected about it. It has an accent. And that accent isn’t yours. That is coming up next week in The Critical Voice. That’s next week, the next episode.
Until then, here’s a question I would like to leave you with. The next time you catch yourself polishing something past the point of useful, pause and ask yourself, who am I performing this for? And did they ever actually ask me to? If today’s episode has you recognising yourself, you might find it interesting to discover which kind of overachiever you are because this pattern shows up differently depending on how you’re wired. There’s a short fun quiz. It takes, takes a couple of minutes. Go to keithbn.link/quiz. Take the quiz and find out what kind of overachiever you are. You are, so you can start to understand how this pattern is showing up for you. And if the episode resonated, it would mean a lot to me personally if you left a review or a rating on your favourite platform.
It helps other people to find the show. Share it, share the show, share it with someone who redrafts their email 6 or 7 times. They’ll know why you sent it. And if you haven’t already, remember to hit follow or subscribe so that you’re there ready for the next episode. Finally, if you want some more, head over to KeithBN.link/TOP. You’ll find all of the episodes in the Overachievers Podcast. Find this episode. You’ll find the show notes along with some additional resources worth exploring.
I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore A healthier way to succeed.
