Why Achievement Addiction Costs You the Relief You Can’t See Yet

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

Last week I was moving my daughter into her college apartment in South Carolina. Ninety-eight degrees, the humid kind, where your shirt is wet before you’ve unloaded the first box. Her apartment was on the third floor. The only open parking was on the sixth, and the elevator wasn’t working. By 10:30 that night, we were still assembling a headboard that had been preset to the wrong height and would not budge.

My daughter looked at that headboard, looked at me, and said three words: “Not today, Satan.”

It made me laugh, and then we went back to work. Those three words did something I want to unpack. She named the moment for what it was, and used it to choose her next action over her frustration.

The Circumstance Isn’t the Problem

Most of what we call a problem isn’t truly the problem. We think it’s the heat, the stairs, the headboard. Or in your world, it’s the key employee who quit, the deal that fell through, or the system that got hacked. I hear some version of this from someone every single week.

The circumstance costs you something. But what determines how fast you move through it, or whether you come out the other side with something better than you started with, is your reaction to it. Your reaction is the real cost.

This is where reactive leadership shows up, and it’s sneakier than it looks. It doesn’t always look like yelling or panic. Sometimes it looks like control. Your left brain goes into hyperdrive trying to logically solve something that hasn’t finished happening yet, and while it’s doing that, your right brain, the one that spots the workaround or the person who could help, goes quiet. Your vision narrows to exactly what’s wrong, and everything else disappears from view.

You’ve probably been rewarded for this. Controlling outcomes has likely worked for you for a long time, maybe even felt like your edge. But there’s a point where it stops working, and if we’re honest, it was never really the answer. It was just effective for long enough that you never questioned it.

Choose Reality First

Here’s the shift, and it’s not toxic positivity. I’m not asking you to pretend the headboard isn’t broken or that your business setback doesn’t sting. The real move is choosing reality —what is right in front of you —before you do anything else.

As long as you’re fighting the fact that something happened, you’re spending your energy on the wrong thing. Resisting it is like an additional tax, on top of whatever the actual problem costs you. The elevator wasn’t going to fix itself because I wanted it to. The heat wasn’t dropping ten degrees on my say-so.

My daughter didn’t waste a breath fighting with reality. She named it, “not today, Satan,” and moved straight into her next action.

That’s the difference between action and reaction. Reaction spends its energy managing distress. Action spends its energy solving the actual problem.

What to Try This Week

When you stop resisting a circumstance, something specific happens. You put down a weight you’ve been carrying. Once it’s gone, you start seeing options you genuinely could not see before. This works whether you’re staying calm under pressure at work or trying to figure out how to handle a setback that’s been sitting in the back of your mind for weeks.

Pick the thing that’s keeping you up right now. Then sit with three questions:

What’s the struggle, named plainly, no softening or dramatizing it?
What would change if you let it go, if you stopped resisting that it’s happening?
What are five to seven potential advantages hiding inside this obstacle?

You may not see the advantages right away. On move-in day, I couldn’t either, not while I was hauling boxes with my hands aching. But after we lost two hours because someone forgot the locker key, we came back to find everyone else had already unpacked and cleared out. Then we had a direct shot to our door, and the delay turned into an advantage. Aha! I was determined to find the first advantage. I am competitive like that. I suspect you are too.

The Point Isn’t a Perfect Plan

We took the next smallest step, and then the next one after that. That’s what got the apartment finished and furnished on a ninety-eight-degree day with a broken elevator, a misplaced key, and a headboard that fought us the whole way.

That’s the move, whatever obstacle you’re staring down right now. And I know some that you are facing are pretty substantial. When you are in the arena or simply living life, they are.

Name what’s real. Accept it. Then seek out the obstacle’s advantages.

In this episode, I share:

Why the obstacle in front of you never costs you as much as your reaction to it
The specific left-brain, right-brain shift that happens the moment panic takes over, and why it blocks you from seeing your way through
Three questions to ask yourself when you’re stuck in a problem you can’t stop ruminating over
Why controlling every outcome eventually stops working for high-performing leaders, even when it’s carried you this far
How choosing reality, not positivity, is what actually creates room for the advantages you haven’t spotted yet

Resources and related episodes:

Tune in to the previous episode, The Trap Inside Every Coaching Breakthrough
Listen to What To Do When Your Boss Loses It
Book: “Building a Non-Anxious Life“ by Dr. John Delony
Get on the Inner Game Advantage Waitlist
Book a time with Rita
If you’d like to be notified when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
Learn more about the Inside Out Method
Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Inside Out Method, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.