Self-discipline can be your worst enemy

To be a high performer, you need to go hard at your goals. But there is a line where you can be doing more harm than good.

[Photo: ABDUL MATIN/Adobe Stock; Ashkan Forouzani/Unsplash]

Val Blair had climbed mountains to get to the pinnacle of her career. An accomplished marketing executive, she navigated high-pressure environments with a combination of dedication and discipline that set her apart from her peers.

But in 2017, she was at the top of a different mountain. A real one. She was suddenly struck with vertigo. Instead of seeking help from those around her, she sat down and decided to wait it out. She’d figure out a way to get down on her own.“I sat there for an hour, thinking, ‘This is just going to be my life, and I’m not going down that mountain,’” she recalls.Finally, two women approached her and offered to help. At first, she declined. Then, they convinced her and carried her down the mountain, as tears streamed down her face, she says.

“Looking back, I think the incident happened because I was at an internal breaking point between who I had been and who I was becoming,” she says. It was Blair’s first indication that the self-discipline she imposed on herself—insisting that she could do everything perfectly on her own—wasn’t healthy. In addition to the significant stress of her high-pressure job, she was also still carrying the grief of losing her partner five years earlier. She believes that her body was signaling that pushing through, no matter what she was feeling, was something that needed to change.

When Control Goes Too Far

Some high-performing colleagues seem to do everything just right. They’re controlled and committed. They collect achievements and optimize every moment. However, the very self-discipline and control that can spur achievement can also veer into negative territory. Overcontrol has been linked to chronic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other issues.

Licensed counseling and sports psychologist Blakely Low-Sampson sees this often in her work with executives and athletes. “Many high performers believe more discipline is better, and that often leads to burnout, exhaustion, and stalled performance,” she adds.

Executive coach Brooke Taylor, author of Healing the Success Wound: Align Your Ambition, Find Lasting Career Fulfillment, and End the Cycle of Never-Enough, had a similar experience when she was a team lead at Google and found herself “really struggling with my relationship with my ambition and achievement and productivity,” she recalls. She felt burned out and was also in recovery from addiction.

When Taylor tried to find literature to help, she found frameworks for issues like how to give feedback or better manage time. At the same time, she was getting sober and developing mindfulness practices. And she made the connection that, just as some people fill a void or feeling of emptiness in their lives (something Taylor calls “part of the human condition”) with alcohol, drugs, or other methods, “high-performers fill that with achievement, significance, productivity.” She also points to a 2023 study that linked effort with moral character, and that, in some settings, hard work is linked with morality, even when the effort is for its own sake and isn’t producing results.

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