Episode 103: Achiever Fever–How To Quit The Need to Succeed Without Losing Your Edge With Claire Booth
In today’s episode, I discuss with Claire Booth, author of The Achiever Fever Cure: How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy, what it takes to start flourishing without being a high achiever.
You’ve heard that winning isn’t everything but deep down you know that isn’t true. Striving to be the best is how you keep your edge.
In the last episode, I discussed the self-help industry’s positive thinking problem. In today’s episode of the Happier Approach, I discuss with Clair Booth, author of The Achiever Fever Cure: How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy, what it takes to start flourishing without being a high achiever.
Claire was a successful but stressed-out market research entrepreneur and executive suffering from what she calls "achiever fever"—constant striving coupled with chronic feelings of inadequacy. Sick and tired of feeling miserable--but ever the self-help skeptic--Claire decided to try anything that might bring relief, from mindfulness to martial arts, from spending ten days in silence to "smiling" at her spleen. At first, Claire was fearful that slowing down and softening up will mean losing her professional edge.
Instead, she discovered a more joyful and purposeful life, one that also turns out to be good for business.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
What Achiever Fever is and how to know if we have it
The dark side of being a high achiever
Identifying and naming our inner judge
Meditation and the life-changing act of chopping vegetables
The connection between alcohol and anxiety
Living life as opposed to just logging life
And what we gain when we give up the Achiever Fever
Find out more about Claire Booth and the Achiever Fever at claireboothauthor.com.
Research and resources mentioned:
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray
Sober Curious by Ruby Warrington
My books on living with High Functioning Anxiety
And how you can work with me one-on-one
+ Read the Transcript
Claire: And he said, you’re basically logging. I don’t know if this is his words are my words. They’re good—either way. You’re logging time as opposed to living time. You’re just trying to get through it as opposed to get from it. The joy is in the learning. And I thought, no wonder I haven’t had any joy in my life because looking back, of course, I’ve learned all sorts of things, but I didn’t luxuriate in the learning.
It’s only as a result of doing this inner work and where I am now that learning for the sake of learning is one of the most pleasurable things in life. And I went through years of my life with that and understanding.
Nancy: Self-help books make it sound so easy. Take a big old mess of a person, implement a proven system. And then voila transformation. The system has magically fixed and healed all the messy, broken bits. Self-help books rarely show the during. The messy, middle, the part where things go wrong, expectations are unmet frustration and boredom set in.
But my guest today did just that with full honesty and integrity. You’re listening to the happier approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. And I’m your host, Nancy Jane. My guest today is Claire Booth.
Claire is the author of the book Achiever Fever: How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy. Claire was a successful but stressed-out market research, entrepreneur, and executive suffering from what she calls achiever fever, constant striving, coupled with chronic feelings of inadequacy. Sick and tired of feeling miserable, but ever the self-help skeptic, Claire decided to try anything that might bring relief from mindfulness to martial arts, from spending ten days in silence to smiling at her spleen. At first, Claire was fearful that slowing down and softening up will mean losing her professional edge. Instead, she discovered a more joyful and purposeful life. One that also turns out to be good for business. In the Achiever Fever Cure, Claire shares her struggle, how she recognized the struggle, and how she worked through the struggle. And most importantly, how that struggle is ongoing, even confessing her secret hope to be in a car accident so she could stop writing the high functioning anxiety roller coaster.
I wanted to ask Claire about how she knew she had achiever fever and that it was a problem? How did she ask for help? And what her journey has been quiet her achiever fever? It definitely was non-linear. I love my conversation with Claire, and I know you will get a lot.
Nancy: Claire, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for showing up and sharing your story.
Claire: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure.
Nancy: So I just want to say thank you so much because there are so many self-help books out there that make it sound so easy. As if you can just poof, you’re healed as long as you meditate so many times a day and do so many things.
And I really appreciated your honesty throughout this entire book about how you struggled and how you recognize the struggle, and how you work through the struggle. Your integrity and honesty were incredible.
Claire: Thank you
Nancy: Okay, so let’s back up a little bit. What is Achiever Fever, and how did you know you had it?
Claire: So, Achiever Fever is the dark side of achieving. And I’ll say right up front there’s nothing wrong with achieving. There’s nothing wrong with having goals. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good about working hard, working towards something accomplishments. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Where it does go wrong is where we start tying our identity, our happiness, our self-worth to our achievements. And we find ourselves saying things like, I’ll be happy when. Or I’ll be a success when and it forces us into this future state so that we end up living our lives in a constant hurry or worry state of mind. And we completely forget the fact that our lives are happening right here, right now.
How did I realize I had it? The hurrying and the worrying had been my normal state for as long as I can remember. Ever since probably middle of junior high, I think, when I started tying my identity to getting good grades and then started tying my identity to getting into the right school and doing the right degrees and that type of thing.
All it takes is somebody to say, Hey, you’re really good at this. And it just adds wind to the sails. And so I just glommed onto this. Oh, I’m an achiever. Okay. No, I’m not just an achiever. I’m a high achiever. And so that became my identity, and I had to protect it at all. Because it’s who I was, who I thought I was.
So I lived my life in that way with all of the accompanying constant anxiety and worry and rushing and box-ticking. And list-making until it got too big to bear. And the way that came about for me was I stopped sleeping. I got really bad insomnia. It was a number of things that, that came into my life at one.
The majority of it was, I was working for a large global corporation. I had moved to Seattle. I was opening their Seattle office, building it, building the team, getting the clients. And I was the face of it. I was responsible for it. And so, for an achiever, it’s just a platform to excel and to prove how good I am, look like, check me out, look what I can do.
And I put so much pressure on myself that I would lie awake. And think those thoughts around what if this happens? What if I can handle this? What if that falls through? The what-if scenarios and get bigger and bigger. And before I knew it was three o’clock in the morning, then four, then five. And that happened for a number of nights. I knew something was very wrong when I started fantasizing about getting into a car accident.
Nancy: That’s my favorite part of the book
Claire: I can laugh about it now, but back then, I was. Desperate to just get into a car accident.
Nothing too brutal. I didn’t want to be maimed, and I didn’t want my insurance rates to go up. I just wanted something that would not impact my car too much but would send me into a coma. I just wanted to be in a coma. I wanted to be in a hospital bed, pumped full of drugs, and just left to finally sleep for four days because I was doing so well at work.
But I wasn’t able to do the basic human function of sleep. And I remember being constantly envious and jealous, just looking at other people when I was on my way to work or when I was anything from a drug store to a grocery store and just looking at everyone else and thinking, how do you guys do this?
How do you sleep? Why am I such a bad human being? How can I not do this? When I finally did get into a car accident? That was a major wake-up call for me, my very first wake-up call. It wasn’t actually enough to really wake me up, but it got me on to sleeping medication. And as soon as I was on sleeping medication, my goal became to get off the sleeping medication.
It was about five or six years later when I started my own company. I started getting insomnia again. And it was, yeah, it was about five years into running my company. And again, everything was going really well. We were successful. I was building this business, but I just couldn’t find any happiness for enjoyment in it because I, again, that anxiety and the insomnia were back. It was a comment that an employee gave me.
That was the real wake-up call.
Nancy: So tell us about that. Because it’s hard to break the addiction to achieving, so what was the comment that started that?
Claire: The comment was I thought that I was doing a good job hiding all of this anxiety and insomnia and depression, for that matter. I thought I was doing a great job hiding it. I would be on at work.
And then I would take it home and worry and cry and drink a bunch of wine and try to find something on Netflix that I that would hold my focus, which of course didn’t exist because my mind would just go off in a thousand directions. I did have my employees each year do a review of all the senior leaders.
And one of the comments that I read in my review, this is all done anonymously. One of the comments was I know what kind of day it’s going to be as soon as Claire walks in the front door.
Nancy: Wow.
Claire: And that was my holy shit. They see this. They see what’s happening. And I thought, for sure, I was hiding it. And so that realization, that recognition that my mask was slipping, was so humiliating for me.
It was embarrassing. It was humbling. And the big thing was I realized that I was going to become a liability to my own company if I couldn’t do something. So yeah, that, that was where I finally held my hand up. No more. I enough, I can’t live my life like this anymore,
Nancy: Which is interesting because that is the complexity I think is that you gain so much with everyone saying nice job and way to go, and I can always count on you and, and then ticking all the boxes of achieving.
You get so much. And then yeah, I paid the price with this anxiety, and I pay the price with not sleeping. Yeah. But I get all this stuff that I’ve been told I should want. And then to recognize now, wait a minute, my mask is slipping, so I’m not going to get all the positives anymore if I don’t get this under control.
Claire: Yeah. And those highs that elation that I used to feel when I did achieve something like we got this great big new client, or we hit this particular target or something that I would do. I’m a climber and a swimmer. So I swam a particular time, or I climbed a certain grade that elation would last anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe a couple of hours, and maybe I could extend it with a bottle of wine into the evening, but the next morning I’d wake up and think, okay, what’s next? What’s bigger. What’s better? What’s faster? What’s next? This idea that I had, that there was a finish line, just got moved a little bit further and a little bit further and a little bit further.
And I thought, wait a second, this doesn’t make sense. All these things that I think are going to make me happy, all they end up doing is making me miserable. Like this doesn’t make sense.
Nancy: And that becomes the breaking point. Light can come in to be like, okay, what do I need to do next?
Claire: Yeah, it’s that intuitive, experiential recognition of knowing deeply, knowing that reaching a particular something or getting a particular something, or making a certain amount that intuitive understanding that it’s not going to make a difference and you need to be able to see the pattern. I think you need to live long enough to see the pattern. This happened to me when I was in my early forties. I guess in my world, that was what it took for me to finally see that there was a pattern here that was not serving me.
Nancy: Because I was just going to ask you, do you think it’s an age thing?
Claire: I think that because more people are talking about vulnerability, especially millennials are being more vocal about their feelings and emotions. We, I’m a gen X-er. We didn’t talk about this sort of stuff ever. I wanted to portray myself as a confident, strong person.
I wouldn’t dream of telling anybody that I felt like an imposter. I didn’t feel like I was strong enough or that I had this insomnia or anxiety. That’s the thing. But millennials now are so much more vocal about it. While I do think some lived experiences required the awareness of achieving not being the meaning of life, it doesn’t require you to hit 40 to figure it out. There are so many self-aware 20 somethings that I’ve read, or that I’ve felt that I’ve read books. God, how have you figured this out already? Good on you. Yes. Yeah. And then I’ll find myself going down what was wrong with me and doing it again. Here we go.
Nancy: Exactly. (Laughter)
Claire: How are you so much better than me? (Laughter)
Nancy: Because I do. I know in my practice. That most of my clients are in their thirties and forties. And when I start getting clients up in their fifties and sixties, the path is so well-worn to be an achiever that they have a harder time unhooking it, because it just isn’t worth the effort. And in their thirties, they’re a little more like this isn’t something’s off and we can talk about it and they could be like, oh yeah, I can flip this.
And it still takes work. And I’m not saying woo, it’s done, but it’s a little less ingrained gen X mentality that we were taught.
Claire: For all the good, the internet has done. It’s also led to this five quick fixes and the hack and the five steps and doing the inner work.
It’s work. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes a lot of strength. It takes strength that I didn’t know. I actually had, I thought strength was a physical thing. And I used to think the stronger I got physically, the more confident I would be, the more strong I would feel mentally. And now I realize it’s actually exactly the opposite.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that I loved is that you shared, you started working with Ian and, he agreed to help you. And right after you said yes to him, you immediately, as you’re walking away thought, no, I can’t do this, I have to keep achieving this as self-indulgent and this’ll take too much time. So I loved that you admitted that. Sometimes I’ll have a potential client call me and then they’ll they want my help and then they’ll be like, yeah, no, nevermind, I can handle it. So tell me about that process for you about Ian.
Claire: So there are so many people out there that are equipped to help people that are struggling with anxiety and depression and insomnia, for whatever reason, but until you are ready, it doesn’t matter how good that therapist or counselor coach is until you are ready to face the music, nothing is going to happen. Ian was my climbing coach. And one day this is just a few weeks after I’d realized, like I’m done living my life like this sucks. I hate this. I want to change this, but I didn’t know how, I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what book to read. And I remember I used to go to bookstores and I would go to the business section and look through the books, trying to find something that would.
And that’s the way I used to think about it. I just want to be fixed. I want it to problem gone. And I pick up these books and they, in the business section, they all tended to have the same theme, which is like work 150% and strive, and they just ended up stressing me out. And I thought this is not the way.
And I was too scared to go to the self-help section because I had this perception of well, people that are in the self-help section, there are a completely lost. Like anyone that’s going to go to that section, they are crazy beings into crystals and Woohoo and hippies and yeah, that’s just so not for me.
And had, I just gone into that goddamn self-help section from the beginning, but I wasn’t ready. You have to evolve in the way that things are going to evolve. You can’t get ahead of your own evolution. As somebody once said, I had this desire. Like I knew I wanted to change. I had this desire, my mind, I still just didn’t know how it was going to happen.
And then one day when I was in my in a climbing class, I overheard my climbing coach talk to a fellow classmate. And he was talking about this new program that he was thinking of offering called the transformation program. And it was for people that were stuck and wanted to change something.
And I think he was talking to this fellow classmate about his or her weight. This person wanted to change their weight. And I remember hearing him say the word transformation and I don’t think I’d ever really heard that word properly before, but when I had the awareness that I wanted something and I was searching for something, even though I didn’t know how to do that or where to go. And then he said transformation. It was just like a magnet. Like I was just straight to him. I actually know the way it actually worked was he said it and I under my breath, I said, yeah, God transformation. Wouldn’t that be great?
Like, it just fell out of my mouth. And in that life-changing moment, he heard me. Wow. And he came to me and said, What is it that you want to change? And I just said everything. I want to change everything. And I remember getting so emotional and worked up just finally saying I want to do everything.
I hate so much about my life. And that’s where we started. Wow. It just takes that one person. Sometimes the person that wants to change needs to be ready and needs to hold up their hand and say, yes, I want to change. Once that happens the way the world seems to work, call it the universe, call it awareness, call it whatever you will find your person, it’s when you’re ready.
The teacher appears.
Nancy Yes. Yes. I agree.
Claire: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the case for anybody that is looking to change. They just have to say it. I want to change and the right thing or book or personal, whatever it is will come into their life. And I don’t think that’s magic at all. I think that’s just once you’ve got it in your awareness, you see the world in a different way.
Like you’ve got a new filter. You’re searching, you’re looking, you’re more attune to people and books and things that may help you.
Nancy: Yes, I totally agree with that. So one thing Ian worked with you on was hearing your inner judge. That is the work.
And it’s also one of the hardest things to do is start paying attention to that voice. You call it the judge, I call it the monger, but paying attention to that voice. That is for so many of us. That’s your voice. There is no separation between the two. So how did you start separating?
Claire: So the voice just like my state of normal was the state of being in a hurry or worrying.
My other state of normal was having this really nasty voice in my head that would just yell at me and scream at me and tell me I was doing things wrong or tell me the thing that said most often was you should be better. You should try harder. That was the big one. And you try harder each time.
And that voice had been with me for long as I can remember. And there’s a story that I tell in the book about when I was seven years old on the playground and I was standing by the swings. I was on my own, it was a school play ground. And I remember the voice in my head saying something like the reason you’re here on your own is because you’re boring and the other people, the other kids don’t like you.
Nancy: Wow.
Claire: That was the earliest memory I can. That I can remember of that before the voice. And it’s been with me ever since, and I just listened to it on autopilot. That voice is it’s our ego. It’s our protector. It’s the thing that pushes us. But it also is so dominant that we can’t hear those other voices as well, but the voices of creativity and wonder, and love and gratitude.
When we’ve got such a loud inner critic, it’s just, it just dominates the conversation. And so it had been so dominant for so long that I didn’t even know to question. And I didn’t even, the voice was a part of me just like my hand was a part of me and my leg was a part of me. And Ian drew my attention to it.
When I did this climb, it was the very first time Ian and I met. But I was doing this climb and I fell halfway through the class. I remember getting really angry about it. And I think I said out loud God damn it. And he lowered me down and he’s wow, what was that? And I said, every time I do this climb, I fall on this one spot and I’m never going to get it right.
And I just yell at myself and I hate myself and I hate climbing and I hate everything. And this is the way my life seems to go. And he’s oh, okay. I think we’ve got something here we can work with. And he said for you, he asked me, first of all, to name that voice, that to me, it was just like a what are you talking?
What voice? This is me. I don’t understand. Yeah. I never ever thought about this before. I didn’t have to think about it that long. I’m like the judge just judges me all the time. Tell him what the judge would say, like you’re bad, you should try harder. You should be better. You should be faster.
You’re not as good as everyone else, that’s sort of stuff. And I said I feel like I have the world’s loudest inner critic. Nobody has a voice as powerful and as mean, and as nasty as mine, surely nobody does. And I honestly believe. I really did. I honestly believed that.
And I said that and he’s there’s actually a lot of people with a voice just and I remember feeling a mixture of two things. My first reaction was complete and utter relief. Like I remember feeling floaty, like weightless, I can’t possibly be as, as, almost as soon as I had that, lovely, wonderful oh, the second thought was like a competitiveness.
Nope. Nope. Mine. Mine’s bigger. Mine. Mine’s just different. (laughter)
Nancy: You’re going to win on that one too. (laughter)
Claire: I’m going to win on mine. Mine’s much louder, much nastier than anybody in the entire.
Nancy: . I can so relate to that too.
Claire: That’s where it all began. It was taking that inner nasty voice and people have different names for it.
Like you say, yours is the Monger mine’s the judge. But until we name it, we don’t really know how to look at it. And by naming it, it became a character in my life as opposed to my life. And I was able to watch. This voice is a character called the judge and was able to uncouple who I was my larger self.
And I had no kind of spiritual understanding of self at that time, like I do now, but I was able to uncouple, myself from this character called the judge. And once we can separate ourselves that way and observe those thoughts that’s the game changer. That’s the game changer. Yeah, that is the game-changing.
And then the work really begins..
Nancy: I just had a client this past week who was so excited Because she could recognize her judge. She was like, there it is. That’s my judge. And then and then later we were talking and I was like, I, most of my work is helping people recognize the judge.
But the work that really begins once you recognize it. And she’s no, you’re kidding. (Laughter)
Claire: There’s more!?!? (Laughter)
Nancy: She was so excited. I’m like, you shouldn’t be, this is exciting. And there is more
Claire: well, here’s what I thought would happen in that gym that day. When I named the judge and I realized, wait a second, this isn’t me.
This is just a part of me. The gym that day feeling positively giddy. Like I had fixed myself and I went home and I felt on top of the world and I was like, blaring my music and I was so excited. And then I was brushing my teeth. And my eyes traveled down to my stomach and the judge just there, it was, I was like, what?
No, I’m supposed to be fixed. What’s going on?!?. But what happened in that moment? Yeah. I caught the judge and that’s the work is to catch the judge, catch the thoughts, catch what it’s saying. And then and then start writing them down, which isn’t as difficult an exercise as it might sound because our judge tends to say the same things to us over and over again.
And there’s a, in the survey that I did of other achievers, one of the questions that I asked them was on a scale of one to 10, how strong is your inner critic with one being like what inner critic? I don’t know what you’re talking about. And a 10 being this thing won’t shut up. And the average score among achievers was a seven out of seven. It was an eight and a half for women slightly less than a 7.5 for men. I think I’ve got that. But I then asked if you feel comfortable on the survey was completely anonymous. Please write down a couple of thoughts that your inner critic tends to tell you one.
I was so gratified to see the responses. Like people actually took the time to write down what their inner critic said. Wow. And some of them, and I write about it in my book. I put some of them in the book. Some of them are so dark, so bleak. My eyes just filled with tears, reading what people say to themselves and they tend to be along a couple of different themes.
The first being I’m not enough. I’m not good enough, smart enough, strong enough, as good as this person, as good as my sister is good as whatever the case is. That’s the first theme. Another theme is I’m an imposter. People are gonna see that. I don’t know what I’m talking about. People are going to see that I’m making this up.
People are going to see that I’m not nearly as good as I want them to think that I am. Those are two key themes and certainly themes that my judge would run on repeat.
Nancy: Because it is interesting when you think about, when I hear achieving, I automatically assume corporate business owner, entrepreneur achieving, sometimes the achieving is just being the best mom, it’s that, it’s back to that finish line keeps moving.
It doesn’t have to be, I have all this great success. I could just, I just have to keep achieving in my own life. Whatever that definition is for me.
Claire: Oh, absolutely. It can be, I have a cleaner car than anybody else’s parking lot. Yeah. It’s that mentality being an achiever. And I, this insight dawned on me at the end of a 10 day silent retreat was being an achiever, isolates you from other people as an achiever.
You have to see yourself as an individual. And when you’re an achiever, you need the underachiever. So you need to make sure that there are enough people around you that aren’t achieving as well as you are so that you can keep yourself on top. Yes. Yeah. So you’re being in that world in a very competitive comparative mindset.
And we all think relatively that’s how we operate as human beings. But when you call yourself an achiever it’s like that next level you have. You have to tell yourself, you have to hold yourself up to a higher standard, which means you need to see everyone else’s either as threats or not as good as, and it’s a miserable way to go through life miserable.
Yeah. And that’s why I, that’s why I called it a fever because it’s a delusion. It’s a delusional state, when you’re suffering from a fever and you’ve got these weird hallucinations and you don’t know if it’s day or night or if you’re hot or you’re cold to me, that’s what happens when you are in this achiever fever.
You, you just lose perspective of what’s real and what’s happening and who people are and who you actually are. And yeah you’re just in a weird fever state.
Nancy: When you were in the middle of the year of you, as you called it, you had, and I loved this phrase. You had the fever to get over the fever, and then you went skiing and Ian talked to you about, I don’t know if that went together, but it was in the same chapter in the book
Claire: Yep, they definitely go together.
Nancy: And then Ian talked to you about learning for the sake of learning. And I loved that. So tell us about that lesson
Claire: Because I did this year long program, I found that as the months went by. And I was learning more and more, and my world was expanding and I would wake up in the morning with a smile on my face, thinking like, what am I going to learn today?
Everything just felt new, but at the same time there was that nagging thought oh, you’ve only got six more months.
So yeah, I got the Achiever fever about getting rid of the achiever fever. And then yeah, so I went skiing. And skiing was not part of my childhood at all. So I learned to ski in my thirties and my partner, Chris, and all of his friends are excellent elite skiers really good skiers. And so when I joined them to start skiing, I was such a beginner, but struggling to be one of the group.
And so I wanted to get from complete novice to elite level skiing as fast as I possibly could. And I would push myself as fast as I could. And as hard as I could to get to where I wanted to be. And there was one day where we were back country skiing, and I was so far behind the group and just getting angrier and angry with myself.
And my inner judge was just screaming at me. Like you’re a loser, you’re an idiot. What are you doing out here? You suck. And I fell into deep powder and I couldn’t get myself out and of course I’m flailing around and I just hit that point where I’m just like screw it. I hate this. I’m done. I, this is where I die.
This is where my life ends in this deep snow. I tried my best and I give up, I went in, I obviously didn’t die because here I am. And I went into go and see Ian the next day. And I told them about the story. And he said, how long have you been skiing for? And I said at that point it was a few years.
It’s like, how long has Chris and his friends been skiing for him? Their entire lives. And he just looks at me like, do you see what I’m getting at here? And he said, You’re basically logging. I don’t know if this has his words or my words, but they’re good. Either way. You’re logging time as opposed to living time.
You’re just trying to get through it as opposed to get from. And the joy is in the learning. And I thought no wonder I haven’t had any joy in my life. Because I, looking back, of course I’ve learned all sorts of things, but I didn’t luxuriate in the learning. I tried to get it done as fast as I possibly could.
When I was doing my PhD, I tried to get all the coursework that would take people two years. I tried to get a done in a year, like just push through as fast as I could. And. It’s only as a result of doing this in our work. And where I am at now, that learning for the sake of learning is one of the most pleasurable things in life.
And I went through years of my life with that and understanding that.
Nancy: And I think that is almost, I don’t know, but I think that’s almost as pivotal. That lesson is almost as pivotal as recognizing the judge.
Claire: Yeah. And they all go like stepping stones, right? Like just stand the judge in order to rise down the next thing.
And then I needed to learn how to meditate in order to understand the next thing and off it went from there.
Nancy: Speaking of meditating, I love how you talked about being present, how you were so judgmental of the phrases being present and being in the moment because I just so related to that.
You talked about chopping the vegetables that was, life-changing tell us about that.
Claire: To this day. That is one of the most memorable moments of my life. All my life like you said, I would hear people say it’s all about being present. You just got to be in the moment.
And I would think who has time to be present? That’s so stupid. The more that I was reading because I was working with Ian, but I was also reading a lot because I was so interested in all of this. I’m a deeply curious person under all that achiever fever. I still had a very deep curiosity.
And I was like into the self-help section at this point too, that was a whole new world for me as well. Like I walked in I’m like, where have you been all my life, all this stuff. So I started reading all of these things and every book, every podcast, every documentary. I was with them until they all started to say the same thing, which was and was meditation.
It would bring up meditation. And I thought I really enjoy reading about meditation, but I don’t want to. I have no interest in doing this because I thought I was going to be bad at it. And I only wanted to do things I was going to be good at. And I was going to be terrible at meditation. I thought also, I didn’t want to do it because I was too scared of what I might learn.
Like all these weird, horrible thoughts that I made. Kept down for so many years and all of a sudden they start bubbling up and what if it’s too much? And also it just looked really boring. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring and unproductive and I have work to do and workouts to do and friends to hang out with and Netflix to watch.
Like who wants to meditate. It got to the point where all the books were saying the same thing and it, I couldn’t not see it anymore. I go, okay fine. And I did, like a couple of minutes and then I extended it to five minutes and then I extended it to 10 minutes and it was excruciating. It was full on excruciating until it wasn’t, something just shifted for me.
And I think it was I attended a meditation group and I remember being there and thinking Other people do this too. And everyone here looks totally normal. It’s almost like it took my achiever a fever to meditate because while they were meditating, I wanted to be like, I wanted to do what they were doing.
I wanted to, and I wanted to do it well. So I had to take it seriously. Then I started to be able to meditate for longer periods. And to this day, I only meditate for 20 minutes at a time. Like I don’t need to sit there for hours and hours. Although I’ve done silent retreats where I have sat there for hours and hours.
That’s a different thing, but it was the meditation that helped me understand how to observe my thoughts and to help me understand that we are not our thoughts. We can, we just watch the thoughts. And I used to think meditation was about stopping the thoughts. Yes. I think a lot of. I think that, from what I understand, that people that I’ve talked to, and of course you can’t stop your thoughts.
So people try it and think that was a waste of time because I wasn’t able to start, like nobody can stop their thoughts right. For extended periods of time. So yeah, once I was able to start observing my thoughts, I started to see how many of them there were and the way that Ian described it to me is think of your thoughts as boxcars on a train.
And you just watch the thoughts go by because soon as you have a thought, there’s another one right behind it. And another one right behind it. And another one right behind it, you can’t really hold onto one for too long because there’s another one coming right behind it. And so I watched my thoughts and saw yeah, he’s absolutely right.
And sometimes you’ll jump on those box cars. Honestly, You’ll ride it to the next station, and 10 minutes go by because you’ve been in this state of worry or panic or anxiety or regret or whatever the case is, where you’re just mulling over this thought over and over and over and over again.
And then I started to become aware of when I was doing. And started saying to myself up, you’ve jumped on a box par again. Okay. You can jump off. There’s another one coming by shortly.
Nancy: I love that analogy.
Claire: And then eventually Ian said, you’ll start to be able to experience the gap between the box cars. So that short, very short minute period where there’s no thought
And Eckerd totally talks about this a lot in the power of now as he calls it, and I won’t get into that, but I write about it in the book. So as I started doing a little more meditation and started to learn what being present actually was, and that I was capable of being present and what that felt like there was a, it was about a month after I started doing this and I was chopping vegetables because I’ve always liked to chop a bunch of vegetables on the Sunday for meal prep.
And that day I was listening my playlist on Spotify or something, and I was chopping cabbage and kale and carrots. And all of a sudden I just got this really weird feeling that I’d never had before. And it was like, my heart just filled up to wanting to burst this feeling of.
What I now understand was just enormous love and gratitude. Just watched it washed over me and I had to steady myself on my kitchen island because I was so overwhelmed by this feeling. I’m like, what? Oh my God, what is this? I was crying and cry, like sobbing. My body was wracked with sobs and as I was sobbing, I saw that I wasn’t sobbing because I was sad or I was angry.
I was frustrated. I’m like what? I’m trying to intellectually understand it, knowing that there’s nothing to understand. Like I intuitively got that this was one of those moments where I was a hundred percent present. And in those moments, that power of now that I could totally talks about that is what life actually feels like.
I mean that, that is open for us to experience whenever we can be truly purely present and let our thoughts go, that space exists. And that was a very tiny taste. My very first taste, at least that I’m aware of experiencing that space. And unless you’ve been through something like that, it’s very hard to describe it.
But I think maybe people that have a spiritual background, people that have, have a very strong relationship with God, perhaps can, they know what I’m talking about. And I’m way out of my league here on this sort of stuff, but I. That feeling is something I never experienced before.
And no, no achievement had ever felt anything like that.
Nancy: Nicely said that’s what I love about the book is you really do lay out. I just thought of this as you were talking. Because that’s another stepping stone. In this process is having that realization because I remember the first time I read the power of now and I was like, what?
Just what are you talking about? Like I just could not get it. And then after I’d done a few of these stepping stones in your process, I was, I would read it again and be like, oh, this, I get it. On another level. I was able to get the power of now. In a different way. Like it’s like it that’s one of those books that just keeps revealing itself.
Each time I read it in a different level.
Claire: I read that book 20 years ago and I remember reading it in my office with the door closed because. I’m supposed to be working, right? This is what the large global corporation I was supposed to be working, but I would sneak this book out of my desk and read it because I was absolutely riveted by it.
I cannot recommend that book, highly enough, different books, land for people in different ways. Boy that book. Yeah. That landed. That really landed. Yeah.
Nancy: I’ve had a number of people say that to me, that book was a life-changer for them.
Claire: There’s a reason. It’s a, it’s such a huge bestseller. There’s something to this one.
Nancy: So something you talk about. And you mentioned it today and you mentioned it in our interview. You talk about it in the book is and a lot of my clients have talked about this wine and achieving and. And that they go together. So can you talk about your journey, how wine has played a role in all this?
Claire: So I used to use emphasis on use wine as my as my stress management tool. So I would get home at the end of the day would be, I don’t know, maybe 6 30, 7, 7 30, whatever time I worked. And the first thing I would do was come upstairs, open my fridge and grab my bottle of wine and I’d pour myself an enormous glass.
And I would be thinking about this glass of wine, some about 3:00 PM. And halfway through the glass, the world would finally start melting away and the judge would become a little quieter. That’s really what the wine was there to do was to quiet the judge and then I’d have my dinner and then I’d have another glass of wine.
And then I think if I leave the bottle, it’ll just go off. I should drink it. And all the other excuses that I told myself, I. I would maybe go through a couple of bottles a week, but it wasn’t the quantity. It was how I was using it. So once I started to understand how our minds work through this process, I started to see that I was using wine. And so I thought, okay, I’ll try something and I’ll take all the wine out of my fridge and I’ll replace it with something else, because I knew that was my habit. That was my default behavior was to open the fridge, grab a bottle of something. So I thought, okay, I take the wine out. I will go in and grab something else.
Let’s see if this makes any difference. And it wasn’t actually as difficult as I thought it was going to be. So the wine started coming down and then in November, 2018. So that was 10 months ago or something? Eight, eight months ago. I was in Japan, my partner and I were in Japan. We went there for three weeks and we drank every single night.
And we would say to each other in the restaurant, do you want to drink tonight? And one of us say, no, not really. Like we had a drink last night when I another one tonight. And then we’ll say we’re on vacation. Oh, I realized at the end of the 24 nights that we’ve been in Japan, we’d had a drink every single night, even nights, we didn’t even want one.
And I woke up one morning after I’d had that realization and this voice in my head, not the judge, some other. The voice reason said stop drinking and it was so clear and I thought, wow, that’s, when you just hear those voices from, they just make all the sense. Yeah. I heard it. I realized like this is an important thing I need to pay attention to.
And then I immediately talked myself out of it. I’m not going to stop drinking. I love drinking. I love going out with my friends and having a bottle of wine. Of course, I’m not going to stop drinking, but the. The power of the stop drinking didn’t go away. And I often do a dry January, so I thought, okay I’ll do a dry January.
And I got to the end of January and realized I hadn’t missed it. I didn’t, I wasn’t jonesing for a glass of wine. I wasn’t chosen for any alcohol at all. And I thought why put it back into my life? I’m not missing it. So I did a dry February and then I did a dry March. I haven’t drunk since December.
And what I’ve realized is that the awareness that I gain from being sober is so much more interesting to me than then the detachment that I used to feel from being drunk. Yeah. And I enjoy that state of awareness that I’m now experiencing. So much, I don’t want to let it go. I don’t know if this is a forever thing by any stretch, but it’s just a, it’s something in my life that I’m enjoying so much.
And I’m there’s books out there called the joy of being sober for sober, curious, more millennials are cutting way back on their alcohol. And if I miss the alcohol because of the taste, I would drink it. But I’ve noticed the only times that I want. Is when I’m with friends and I’m afraid of being judged for not drinking.
Yeah. And that is not a good enough reason for me to drink at all. It’s just an interesting thing to notice like, oh, I’m feeling.
Nancy: That’s awesome. Yeah, because I am I’m going to devote an episode of this podcast to this drinking idea, because it is such a common thread. And I did a similar stop drinking a couple of years ago.
Because almost exact same story you just told. And I was at the time Brooke Castillo, who had a stop over drinking program. The heart of the program was that you had to decide 24 hours in advance if you were going to have a drink and how many you were going to have.
I put so much pressure on myself to drink in social situations. And so it was, it took a year. I did it for a year and it was like how you’re doing it. Like I just kept re-upping every day doing it. And and now it’s so freeing that I, now I have a choice. Yeah,
Claire: that’s good.
Nancy: When in the past, I didn’t feel like I did, I had to drink because it would have been, I would have been judging myself so much.
Just exactly, as you said, because I had judged so many people for not drinking. And so it released me of all of that. Like I made it through a Christmas and that Thanksgiving and new year’s and my birthday and I didn’t drink and it was fine. So I can do anything was where I got, crazy empowering
Claire: Isn’t it?!?. I never thought I’d be able to say. I don’t drink and I’m proud of it and I don’t miss it and be truthful about that.
Nancy: And it takes your anxiety through the roof
Claire:. It really did. Yeah. Oh boy. I used to wake up and think, oh, why did I say that was so dumb? Yeah. It’s so much more about what you gain than about what you lose.
And I used to think I used to get so fixed it and I was like I’ll lose this. I lose the social, lose that that, but I never thought about what I might gain.
Nancy: Yes. Yeah. That’s very well said. Yeah. Okay. One last question. I, so I really encourage, like I said, I encourage people to buy the book and I don’t want to give away all of the experiences because I know there’s so many more ahas than we’ve covered in this book, but I’m curious, have you.
Have you lost your edge? How has losing the fever helped or even hurt you’re achieving ways as they say.
Claire: That is such a good question. I’m worry about using the word achieving. I don’t want to use that word anymore, but I don’t know a better word for it other than maybe flourishing.
There are a few things in my life that have happened as a result of this book where I can honestly say, now I am flourishing. My business is flourishing. So as a result of all of this work, all this inner work, a few things have happened. One, my business has doubled in size. Wow. So I have, stats to show that all this work there’s a business case for it.
I, am in the best physical shape of my life, because when you get rid of your achiever fever, you also get rid of those constant self doubts and the worries. And so I’m able to perform at a level of physical. That I wasn’t able to before, because I don’t have the doubt and the worry holding me back. So I watch myself now, whether it’s swimming, climbing, lifting, weights, whatever the case is, and I realized that I could not have ever have done what I’m doing now.
As an achiever, huh? Yeah, there’s, it’s opened up so much more for me. My relationship with my partner and my family is so much more fulfilling and I’m so much more open and we have deeper conversations. I sleep like I don’t have insomnia. I haven’t had insomnia in years. Wow.
Okay. Occasionally I’ll have a bad night’s sleep. And that’s my cue that okay. Something’s off. Something needs to be looked at what’s, what’s going on here? I’m just a truly happier person who no longer worries. I don’t. And just to be able to say that to me is still so shocking.
Given, given how many hours I used to devote to worrying and now, a warrior will come in and I’ll be like, oh, there you are. I see you. There’s nothing I can do about you right now. Thanks. Thanks for coming in. You’re not helping me at all and it’ll go away. It’ll just leave. Wow. Be able to be that much more focused on present on whatever it is that I’m doing.
So I would say, as a result of all this work, I am flourishing and edge is an interesting word. If we take it in its truest form, an edge is a sharpness. And I have much more of a laser focused than I used to have because I’m able to be so much more present. But what I think I have more than that is, is as like a softness that I didn’t use to have before, like a much more of an open house.
I don’t look at every person I meet anymore as a possible business opportunity. I look at them as a possible friend. Yeah, my mindset’s just completely shifted.
Nancy: Because it’s interesting because the answer is have you lost your edge? The answer is, yes, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m not looking for that anymore. So it doesn’t matter
Claire: Or I’ve lost the edge, but I gained I’ve gained heart. Yeah. I guess is really the only way I can put it. I’ve gained gratitude. I’ve gained love. I’ve gained. I didn’t like myself. Let alone love myself. I love myself. Now. I’ve gained. And it’s only when we can love ourselves that we can love others.
So I’ve gained the ability to truly love and cherish people in my life.
Nancy: Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for agreeing to chat here and share your experience and your wisdom and it’s, the achiever fever cure people. You need to go read this book. Thank you so much, Claire.
Claire: Oh, thank you so much
Nancy: More about Claire Booth and the achiever fever at ClaireBoothauthor.com.