The Flaw in Earning Your Worth

At A Glance

There's a need that sits underneath a lot of what drives high-achieving women. Not the need to succeed exactly, or even to be recognized — though both of those are real. It's something more fundamental than that. The need to feel like you matter. Like your presence, your contributions, your existence in a room has genuine weight and value.

This need isn't a weakness. It's one of the most basic human needs there is. The problem isn't having it. The problem is the strategy many high-achieving women use to meet it.

The strategy is perfectionism. On the surface it seems reasonable enough. Meet a high standard, earn recognition, feel valuable. Except that it doesn't work. Not because the standards aren't met, but because of what perfectionism is structurally set up to do.

Perfectionism doesn't move toward enough. It moves the goalposts. The standard that was supposed to confirm your value immediately becomes the next standard that needs meeting. As a strategy for feeling like you matter, perfectionism requires you to keep earning it indefinitely.

And that's before you factor in the part that's entirely outside your control.

The recognition, the approval, the admiration that perfectionism is designed to generate isn't yours to determine. You can meet every standard and the room still might not respond the way you need it to. The feedback might not come. The acknowledgment might be smaller than the effort warranted. The person whose recognition would have meant something might not give it. You've handed the meeting of one of your most essential needs to an outcome that is unreliable and outside your control.

This is the structural flaw at the centre of the arrangement.

It requires you to hit a target that keeps moving, via an outcome you don't control, to meet your deepest need. 

The exit from this pattern isn't achieving less. It's stopping the arrangement where your sense of worth is contingent on outcomes you don't control. When you can meet that need from the inside, through a high-quality relationship with yourself rather than through the room's response, something shifts. You start operating from ground that's already solid.