The High, Achiever’s Trap: When Success Silences Your Needs

🎶 “I keep on fallin’… in and out of love with you.”   Alicia Keys

Sound familiar? That lyric doesn’t just hit in relationships. It hits when you’re killing it at work,  but feel completely depleted at the same time.

You’re the one people trust. The one who always delivers. The “go-to” woman who makes hard things look easy. But here’s what no one sees: you’re tired of performing peace while quietly unraveling behind the scenes.

This is what I call the high-achiever’s trap: success is so shiny on the outside, it’s easy to ignore the cost inside.

📌 “When you’re constantly holding it all together for everyone else, you stop noticing what you need for yourself.”

You’ve been trained to be excellent,  but not to check in with your own limits. You’re praised for being low-maintenance, high-capacity, and always available. But over time, that expectation becomes a performance. A performance that robs you of your time, energy, and voice.

Try this:

✅ Identify one invisible task you’ve normalized. 

Are you the team’s emotional support system? The default note-taker? The mentor on-call? Choose one and pause it this week. See what happens.

✅ Shift how you describe your contributions.

Instead of “I helped out with onboarding,” say: “I created a peer support process that improved new hire engagement.”

You’re not selfish for asking: What do I need right now?

You’re strategic for remembering you matter, not just the outcomes you create.

You don’t have to keep falling in and out of love with your career.

It can feel good again, for real this time.

-Sophia

✨ Want tools to speak up, recalibrate, and protect your energy? 

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