Afford Anything - Thriving in a High-Pressure World, with Jennifer Breheny Wallace

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

#483: Competitive. Results oriented. Driven to be the very best. These are a few ways to describe achievement culture. Achievement culture can also be described as stressful, high pressure and unhealthy. Yet, there is consistently the pressure – internally and externally – to make more money, be a better parent, spouse, friend, or employee. These burdens comes at a heavy cost to our well-being. Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of the New York Times Best Seller “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic - and What We Can Do About It” shares with us how to manage our need for success AND how to avoid the toxic traps that can accompany obsession with success. She offers insights into the consequences of this culture on individuals' mental health, and overall well-being, while also discussing practical solutions to common challenges. If you've ever felt the burn of trying to do it all, or if you just want a smarter way to navigate success without losing your sanity, the insights shared in this interview will help you develop a more fulfilling and balanced life. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode483 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Competitive, results oriented, driven to be the best. We live in a culture of achievement, but what happens when that achievement culture becomes too much, when the load of it, whether it's the drive to reach financial independence at an earlier age or the drive to reach a certain net worth, the drive to get promoted in your company, the drive to be a better parent, the drive to succeed in whichever way you define it, or perhaps all of the myriad of ways in which you define it, what happens when that becomes overwhelming? You don't want to sacrifice the dream, but you also need the pathway to be sustainable. That's what we're going to discuss today. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not

everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention to any limited resource you need to manage. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most? And second, how do you make decisions accordingly? Now, answering those two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this show is here to facilitate. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast on today's episode, Jennifer Brayeney Wallace. the author of The New York Times bestseller, Never Enough,

when achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it, shares with us how to manage our need for success and simultaneously avoid the traps that come with that obsession. So she offers insights into the consequences of a culture that is obsessed with success and discusses very practical solutions to common challenges that we face. So if you have ever felt the burnout that comes from trying to do it all, and you feel like there's got to be a smarter way to navigate success without losing your sanity, you'll enjoy this episode.

Here she is. I'm here with Jennifer Wallace, who writes about when achievement culture goes too far, when it becomes toxic. So I'd love to chat with you about that. So thank you for being on the show. Now, let's start with some definitions, right? What is going too far when it comes to our ambitions? When it goes too far is when our sense of self is tangled up in our ambitions, in our achievements, so that we only feel like we are worthy or matter when we're achieving. And when we're failing or not achieving and our self-worth sort of goes down the toilet, that is when it becomes toxic. There is, in some families, very much a message that your purpose for being on this earth is to go

do something great. The justification of you being a carbon-based life form that breathes oxygen is so that you can go make a contribution to humanity. How do we disentangle a sense of innate worthiness? from that desire to, in the words of Steve Jobs, leave a dent in the universe. I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to leave a dent in the universe. I think that is what drives purpose and meaning in our lives. So I certainly don't want people not to want to be positive contributing members of our society. I mean, it's important for our society to function. It's important for our mental health that we think that we can make a positive impact

on the world around us. But what I want to do is raise children, have people in my life who know that their worth is constant, whether or not they achieve, whether or not they fail, that who they are deep inside is what matters. I have gone in search of the healthy strivers. What do people who are achieving in healthy ways have in common? what is school like for them, what are their relationships like, but it really boils down to this idea that they have a high level of mattering. That is that they feel valued for who they are deep at their core, away from their achievements and successes. And importantly, that they feel dependent on and relied on to add meaningful value back to families, two friends, two larger communities. So mattering acts like a kind of protective shield.

When we feel valued and when we are relied on to add value to others, that protects us. It doesn't mean we won't feel anxious or depressed or, you know, have failures. But mattering acts like a buoy that lifts us up and makes us more resilient. How can a person, anyone who's listening to this, who perhaps over-identifies with their work and who's sense of mattering is so rooted in their work, how can they start to work out of that? And I actually, I want to break up this question into sort of different life stages because there are some people who are listening to this who are early in their careers. And so they haven't yet necessarily proven themselves. And there are other people who are listening to this who are right on the

verge of retirement. And they need to disentangle a sense of self from their job because very soon they're going to retire, and that's going to inherently produce a bit of an identity crisis when you can no longer say, I am a lawyer, I am an accountant, I am a manager. So let's actually break that up. We'll start with a person in their 20s or more broadly the person who has not yet proven themselves. How do they disentangle mattering from self? Here's a visual that I'm going to give, really everybody who's listening. When we think about our inherent worth, here's a way of thinking about it.

go into your wallet and grab a $10 bill. Hold it up. Do you have a $10 bill? All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. For those of you watching on YouTube, this is happening live, $10 bill. $10 bill.

$10 bill. All right. Okay. So I'm going to ask you, do you want this money? Yes. Okay. Okay. Now I'm dirtying it with my shoe.

I'm dunking it into my coffee. Do you want this dirty, wrinkled, soggy, $10 bill. I still do. You still want it. You know why? Because like your worth, this value doesn't change. Whether you've been knocked down, whether you've failed at work, feel crumpled up, soggy inside, your worth is your worth no matter what. So this to me, and I'll give you back your money, this will dry out and this will derinkle, if that's a word. you know, I think it's a reminder because we live in a society that likes a consumer culture that wants to sell us things to make us feel more worthy. And social media only magnifies and

exacerbates the problem. So what I'd like to do is to help people make the thinking around unconditional worth visible. And whenever you're feeling like you're not worthy, reach into your wallet and crumple up one of your bills and remind yourself that your value is your value. you no matter what. So for a young person who's just starting out, again, ambition is great. I love ambition, but it needs to be part of a full life. We set ourselves up for negative mental health issues and we set ourselves up for potential substance abuse problems if we put too much of our worth into one bucket into work, things that we don't always have control over, right? And We can't control for downsizing.

We can't control for those things. So we need to have a sense of worth that is not firmly tied in our work or firmly tied in just raising our kids because they're going to go to college and they're going to start their own lives. And when you talk about people who are in retirement, mattering matters throughout the lifespan. And the times when it is really in flux, our mattering is when we're adolescence and we're building a sense of self, right? And so we're trying to figure out who we actually are, where we fit in the world. And when we retire and also empty nesting or changing careers or relocating and feeling like we're alone, we're starting over again. And the same thing with retirement, that we need to plan are mattering in retirement. Where are we going to add value when we are no longer adding value at work? What does that look like? How is adding value determined? What does it mean to add value?

So the way I like to think about it is just values generally, right? So I'm going to really oversimplify this. But researchers who study values find that we all have, you know, roughly 12, 14 or so core values inside all of us. And no matter where we live in the world, we have these values. And researchers separate them into extrinsic values and intrinsic values. So extrinsic values could be things like career success, financial success, wanting to buy the big house, wanting to have the high status career. Those are extrinsic values.

Then there are intrinsic values, things like wanting to be a good neighbor, wanting to be pro-social, wanting to be good to the environment, or wanting to grow spiritually as a person, those are intrinsic values. And here's why understanding our values is so important, because when we are overly focused on extrinsic values, researchers have linked that with negative mental health and substance abuse disorder. Intrinsic values are linked with the well-being that we all seek and want. Values operate like a zero-sum game.

So the more time and energy we spend pursuing extradict. the less time we have in our life to pursuing the intrinsic ones. And so what's important is when we're growing up in these achievement cultures or raising kids in an achievement culture or living in a affluent area, we have to be very mindful of the values that are constantly being activated. And we have to surround ourselves with other values like prioritizing friendship in our calendar, prioritizing family time. If we say family time is important, how are we spending our dinners? Are we out with clients or are we home with our kids? If we say friendships are a core importance in our life,

is it reflected in our calendar and how we spend our time? So values can be very protective. And when you talk about the adding value, I think we can add value to ourselves, but we need to balance that with adding value to others. When we are overly consumed with adding value to our self and our own spiritual growth and our own success, we become out of whack. Our lens becomes too self-focused. And what happens when that happens is that we are exposed to a very kind of up and down kind of life when we are overly identified with our own failures and successes. So I'm hearing a couple of things. One is that adding value to yourself, would be that achievement culture of, I've got the best job title, I've got a, you know,

$5 million net worth, I've got the best house and the best car and a six-pack abs, right? That level of achievement would be adding value to yourself, whereas adding value to others would actually be that dent in the universe, even if that dent was made anonymously. Yes. I would also say that within adding value to ourself, there's the extrinsic adding value, to ourself, which is what you named. But there's also the intrinsic, which is growing as a person, wanting to, you know, have better coping skills so that your relationships can be stronger, adding to the self, wanting to eat in healthy ways, prioritizing our sleep. So these are things that I think are not extrinsic. These are intrinsic pursuits to make us a strong, resilient person.

So I think adding value to the self can also be extrinsic or intrinsic, just like adding value to others can be extrinsically motivated or intrinsically. Do you want your name on the top of a library or in the whatever or do you want it because you want to give value to others? So what is the motivation behind your pursuits? That's where I think we tap into the values. Now when you say values are a zero sum game, can you elaborate on that? Because it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily strike me as intuitively obvious that there is a limited bandwidth that we have for values. Really, values comes down to, think of it like a seesaw. The more you're focusing on the extrinsic pursuits, the less time, energy, really your

schedule to pursue the intrinsic ones. So the reason at zero sum is because we do have limited time. We do have limited emotional bandwidth. And so when we're spending time and energy pursuing career goals for shiny reasons, the less time we have to pursue friendships and deep relationships. So it is zero sum. Yes. You can pursue any value, but not every value. Yes.

And you know what I found so interesting when I was digging around the research around values? This was a theory. I don't know the researcher whose theory this was, but it's the idea. that people who are very materialistic, who pursue materialistic goals, not necessarily just logos, but, you know, maybe the name brand college or the name brand title, people who overly pursue materialisticals, it's not necessarily because they believe more strongly in materialism, not necessarily are they more motivated by materialistic goods, but rather they have less evolved social connections. And so they are spending time pursuing those extrinsic things

in the hope that they will attract those relationships that will give them the intrinsic value that they want. So we often pursue materialistic goals in the hope that it will make us more worthy in the eyes of others and therefore make us better relationship partners. But unfortunately, what the research shows is that it backfires because you're spending too much of your time and energy focused on those material goals, you have less time actually focusing on the intrinsic things that will build those deep nourishing relationships that we want. Right. And so that goes back to then that sense of worthiness that many people struggle with in that they often conflate their own inner sense of worthiness with what they have accomplished. Yes, exactly. And it's also

what sets us up for a very sort of up and down kind of life. It's very erratic when you, when you, you are sensing your sense of self with your achievements and specifically things that you don't really have control over all the time. Right. A lot of the people who are listening to this have some common denominator goals. People want to retire. I mean, everyone who's listening to this ultimately, whether it's retiring at a traditional age or retiring early, everyone listening to this wants to have a good retirement.

And then, you know, prior to that, they want to achieve certain financial goals. And of course, it's going to vary depending on person. Some people want a nice home. Some people want to make sure that they can fully fund their kids' college. Some people just want to hit a certain net worth figure because that's the benchmark that they've set for themselves. And so, you know, inside of this diaspora of goals, what I often see inside of the community is that there can be a little bit of of a sense of you've made it if you've hit your number. You haven't made it yet if you haven't.

For the people who are listening to this, who are feeling that, how or who sense that pressure from others, what practices can they do? That's the hedonic treadmill, right? When you said to me that people have a number that they want to hit, there's data out there that shows that number is a constantly moving target. So you hit it. And then you're not as satisfied. A year or two later, you want to make more and you want to make more and you want to

make more. Evolution has given us that ability to adapt, right? So it's a positive when we, when something tragic happens to us or we lose a limb or we adapt to it, just like we adapt to those external goals. And so whatever number we have in our head, that can get moved and changed as well. It's less satisfying after a certain period of time. I found this so interesting in my research. This is according to decades worth of resilience research. and that is resilience rests on our relationships. So what I would say to people is that if they are struggling to spend time developing one or two or three deep relationships where you can be vulnerable, where you can say

what's bothering you, when you can admit to your insecurities, and to have a reciprocal relationship with somebody who can admit that to you. And what you will find, I believe, is that the more you can invest in your social fabric, that becomes what you go to when you are struggling. So I would say the number one thing to do is to prioritize your relationships. We are sold a bill of goods by the multi-billion dollar wellness industry. Just download this meditation app, say this mantra, you know, those might be good stress reducers, but they don't give us the resilience that deep nourishing relationships give us. I would go to try to create those authentic connections. They say a child in distress needs a sturdy adult, right?

They need one adult. Well, guess what? Adults also need a sturdy adult in their life. And so I would say to really thoughtfully create those relationships. And you might say, you know, if somebody's listening and they say, well, how do I create? If I don't have that kind of relationship, how can I create that relationship? This has been studied, this idea of what's termed authentic connections. It was an original study out of the Mayo Clinic of busy physician mothers and nurse

practitioners and other busy people at the Mayo Clinic. And researchers were looking at how many hours does it take to create an authentic connection with somebody? They created these eight-week pilot study. And they had people once a week for one hour. meet in person with someone facilitating the hour, but not a psychologist, just somebody keeping the conversation going. And again, it wasn't advice that they were seeking. It was just being heard, being validated, being understood. They found that it took eight weeks, one hour a week,

and they measured the physician's cortisol levels. They did wellness surveys, and they found that that resilience that they were seeking was found in the relationships, and it was one hour a week for eight weeks. That model has been replicated on Zoom. So Zoom will also give us benefits, but what it takes is deliberate time. It takes us putting that in our calendar, that one hour a week with what researchers of those studies call a go-to person. So literally this sounds very cringy. But the researchers say you have to go and find your person and say, will you be my go-to person? when I am struggling, will you be the person that I reach out to? And very often the person will be honored and say yes. And will you be my go-to person? And then you set in your calendar one hour a

week, either to meet or to be on Zoom and meet with that person and really be methodical about it. There's another study where scientists were looking at two people standing at an incline, a hill. and they measured how steep they thought the hill was. When a person was alone, it was measured as much steeper. So what does that tell us? It tells us that when we have someone with us, when we have someone in our life, going through life with we don't feel alone. It's almost like these deep relationships act like a kind of shock absorber from life's

everyday stress. So after learning all of this research, I created this own mantra in my head. when you're feeling overwhelmed, when you're feeling in distress at any time, I want people to remember this, never worry alone. That is something that I read from Ned Hallowell, who's a psychiatrist. But to me, it represents the research, which is if we have people with us going through our lives, almost everything is manageable. Never worry alone. And I'm glad you brought up soon because that was actually going to be my follow-up question was, you know, in this modern world, so many people live several states away from their best friends, their family, their siblings.

You know, many people, their closest relationships are long-distance relationships. And the research shows those connections with that one hour a week can be just as strong. Absolutely. And there's, I mean, there's published research to find this. So what I did during COVID when we were all isolated, and this is character. over since COVID is when I couldn't see my friends, and many of them during COVID have now left New York City, so I don't see them as often. We put in literally into our calendars one hour a week. We made it Friday afternoons for an hour. And we were really religious about it.

And my kids saw me doing that. My kids heard me. I would go up to the third floor where we don't have a door. And I would occasionally hear my kids, you know, footsteps on the on the stairs listening to my conversations, but it was me opening up to my friends and my friends opening up to me about the struggles of going through COVID, the struggles of work, of balancing work and kids and family and being part of, you know, a sandwich generation. We are often told as Americans that we have to be self-reliant, independent, and that's sort of the goal of raising kids, too, to make them self-reliant and independent. That is certainly a good goal to be independent, to be able to meet some of your needs. But what I have found in my

research is that healthy strivers strive for a more profound goal, and that is interdependence, knowing how to rely on other people and have other people rely on them in healthy ways. So that is what this Zoom, that is what never worrying alone, that is what carving time out of your calendar to create these relationships that can give us resilience. That is the power of interdependence. And that study that you talked about in which a person is standing at the foot of a slope, and they judge the slope to be steeper if they are standing alone, am I correct in interpreting that to mean that we perceive hardships to be harder?

Exactly. And they've also looked at somebody coming in for treatment or having a shot or whatever it is, the pain level. When we have someone next to us, the pain decreases. Like I said, almost like it absorbs some of our pain. Like our deep relationships are sponges that we can sort of alleviate our worries and concerns. And those people absorb some of it. The holidays are right around the corner.

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They feel isolated in the type of journey that they are going through. You know, I hear from a lot of people in this community who say, you know, nobody around me understands the particular passions that I have, the particular struggles that I have, the particular goals that I have. I know that my friends love me or I know that my spouse loves me, but they don't get it. What would you say to a person who's going through that? I would say whenever I am going through something stressful where I feel like I'm not being understood, what's always given me comfort is this idea of unlocking the mattering or the magic in other people around me.

So let me give you an example. I was giving a talk at a startup with a bunch of 30-year-olds. And a young man says to me, you know, some days I just feel like no one gets me. Things are really hard. you know, sometimes I feel like I don't matter. What can I tell myself in those moments? What can I do? And I said, I have something better than telling yourself something.

I think what you do is you go down to the cafeteria and you thank the man or the woman who always serves you the warm plate and smiles and asks you how your day is going. And you say to them, you know, lately life has been hard, but coming down here every day and seeing your smile and feel. your warmth, boy, does that lift me. So what I would say is when you are feeling down, when you are feeling misunderstood, when you are feeling lonely, I think the best thing you can do is unlock someone else's value because what that will do is feed your own value. So when you tell the cafeteria woman how much she lights up your day and she smiles, you then reinforce the fact that you have a positive impact on this world, that you are valuable. So when you are struggling and when you are feeling misunderstood and alone, I think the best thing we can do is unlock the value

in the people around us. We need social proof. As much as we want this inherent worth, which we do have, it needs to be balanced. We also need social proof that we matter. Our self-esteem and self-worth is not developed in a vacuum. Psychologists say it's like a social when we see how other people treat us. So we do need that social proof that we matter. That's what feeds are mattering. Right. You mentioned earlier substance abuse issues, and I wanted to circle back to that. I know you've written about some interesting stats about the likelihood that adolescents will suffer substance abuse issues prior to the age of 26 if they have a very stressful middle school or high school, like a lot of pressure to achieve at a young age.

We also know that among all age groups, substance abuse increased during lockdowns when people were increasingly isolated. So can you talk about how there's an interplay between this sense of mattering and not letting achievement culture go too far and substance abuse? Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that substance abuse is what people used to cope with loneliness. And we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic among all ages. We are seeing that, you know, as Robert Putnam wrote about so beautifully, bowling alone, you know, we used to have these social structures in place where we lived in neighborhoods and we had generations living around us. We had, you know, we knew the butcher. The butcher

knew our parents. There was this social fabric that is. now fraying and we have become these one household villages and it is very lonely. I mean, when you are living alone or when you're a family, you know, families are now sort of these one family villages. We're meant to be the chauffeur, the cook, the mental health specialist. We're supposed to support our kids. It used to be done in the context of community. Self-care used to be in the context of community. It's now personalized. And when people don't have those rich relationships that we talked about and they are feeling lonely and disconnected and don't know what to do,

many people turn to substances to sort of fill in for that. For people who are about to retire, one thing that we've seen a lot is that retirees, particularly those who had a lot of social connections at work, Work provided camaraderie, companionship, friendship, a sense of purpose. So for the people who are about to move into this new phase of life where now they're retired, now they don't have the social bonds, the social connection, the purpose that work provides, how can they fend off that loneliness? I think they have to be really deliberate. You know, we often think that relationships, if they're good relationships, they just evolve.

on their own. They just stay strong. But we know this not to be true. We know that with relationships, just like, you know, lifting weights. If we don't lift weights, if we don't exercise, our muscles atrophy. It's the same thing with our relationships. So what I would tell somebody is before you retire, or if you're in retirement now, is to get very clear about who are the people in your life who make you feel valued, to make time in your calendar, literally put it in your calendar, lunches, coffees, walks with the three or four people in your life that make you feel valued. And then also in your calendar, ask yourself, where do I feel like I add value? Am I somebody who is a financial planner and now I'm trying to figure out what to do in retirement?

well, wow, wouldn't it be amazing to volunteer at a local community center, helping other retirees or helping young people who don't have financial skills to plan their own life and retirement? There are these tech cafes. Have you heard about this? In cities and communities all over the country where people volunteer their time. They sit at a table in a cafe for a certain couple of hours a week. and people bring in electronics that are broken and can't figure out how to use their laptops, how to use their iPhone, whatever it is. And a volunteer just sits there and helps them. And these tech cafes both make the person coming asking for the help feel valued,

that they are worthy of being helped and the person giving the help feels valued. So I would say get creative about places where you can add value to other people's lives because that is the best way to feed your own value. And it is so important for your mental health, for you to feel a continued sense of mattering, a high level of mattering. It sounds to me from what you're saying, like volunteering is a really big component of it. Yeah, volunteering would be great. Yeah, just being there for other people, even if it means being just a good neighbor.

If you're retired and you know there's an elderly woman a couple of doors down, can you once a week check in on her? Can you, you know, every day when you go on your walk, can you move her newspaper closer to her door? Where are places in your life that you can feel dependent on and relied on? Because we think we don't want that. We think we don't want to be overly dependent on. And there is such a thing as mattering too much. And I will say mothers and caregivers, if you have a husband or a wife who is terminally ill and you are the caregiver,

you can often feel like you matter too much. And what I would say to those adults is that you need to focus on filling your own mattering cup as well. You need to be balancing out how much you give others with how much you are giving yourself. So mattering can't just be pouring into other people's cups. We also need to be taking care and valuing ourselves. Right. Right. And that's where a sense of boundaries also come in.

Yes, exactly. How can people who have historically conflated their sense of worthiness with their achievements? When they start to make these changes, sometimes these changes might be subtle and these changes might be internal. How can they role model it and make it more obvious for the benefit of their kids or anyone else who is strongly influenced by them? Well, what I love is a technique that I call living life out loud with my kids. I'll give you an example. If you're overly, you know, identified with your work as a writer, I remember my first article for the Washington Post Science section. And I had an editor who was seasoned and really good. And I sent in my draft and she sent back a draft with red marks everywhere. And my daughter at the time was struggling with an English paper that her teacher had given back to her with red marks everywhere. And she was like, oh, I'm not a good writer. And I said, you know what? Come over to my desk. I want you to see what. editor did to my piece of writing. And she said, oh, my God, you must be so embarrassed. And I said, you know what? At first I was. I'm a professional writer. At first, I was like a little embarrassed that I

needed so much guidance. But then I thought, you know what, this person is investing in me. They believe in me. And so modeling out loud how you cope with failure or disappointment. Or if you're, you know, let's say you miss a deadline or something, you have a failure at work, and you maybe talk about it at family dinner. And then afterwards you say, you know what, I think I've beaten myself up enough. It's time to move on. I'm a human. I'm not a robot.

I'm going to make mistakes. Now I have to move on. So modeling out loud these kind of healthy ways of thinking about our failure, that it is not an indictment of our worth. It's simply just a failure. And it's inevitable. We all have them. Right. I've heard that Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, when she was growing up, her father used to ask all the kids around the dinner table, what have you failed at today?

And everyone had to go around the dinner table and say something that they failed at that day because it was celebrated. That's right. We often hide our failures. But I will say that what makes relationships sticky, what makes us bond with each other, bind ourselves with our relationships, is the messiness of life. that is what's sticky. When we try to hide our failures and present a perfectionist facade, the sort of slick facade, that's not sticky. It's very hard to be connected, deeply connected with someone who presents a perfectionistic facade. And so I would say let people behind the mask or take the mask off. How do we know when it's safe to take that mask off, when people will be

okay with that vulnerability? Well, I think we have to be careful. I don't think we should necessarily pour our hearts out to everyone. I think we need to, as I say to my son, we need to read the room. We need to see who's in the room. Are they socially skilled enough to give us the validation that we want? Are they people that we feel safe opening up to? So that's why it's so important to have those one, two, or three friends that you really feel like you can count on. Are these people who also are taking their mask off. And, you know, researchers who study relationships talk about vulnerability as like an onion with different layers. So you start with a small thing, a small little confession. And how do they respond to that? Are they validating? Are they embarrassed? Are they not able to

take in your small vulnerability? That's not someone who you should necessarily open up fully with. So sort of testing the waters. What do people get wrong or what are some of the most common misperceptions or misunderstandings about this issue, about this topic of separating your sense of self from your achievements? Well, I think people often think that perfectionism, being a perfectionist, as Tom Curran, who's a researcher, talks about how perfectionism is our favorite flaw. So I think people often think that we need to be perfect to be loved, that we need to be perfect to be worthy. And I'm here to tell you that it's the opposite. It's the messiness. So I think what people get wrong is that they think that they have to have that title or they have to have that big house or they have to lose the 15 pounds before they are worthy of that deep connection.

And actually, it is in the messiness of our life that people stick to us, that people want us, and that we therefore find the resilience that we're looking for. And is that because people can relate to us? Yeah. Because I think we want to see people who are human. We want someone in our life that can validate our experience. If we're talking to our perfectionist, we are not going to reveal all of our flaws. And so therefore, the relationship just isn't going to get deep. It's interesting because researchers who study perfectionism find that often people adopted it as a coping strategy early in childhood as a way of coping with conditional love or what they perceived to be conditional love from a parent.

So perfectionism is a coping skill that a child used to win their parents' love because they needed it in order to survive. but unfortunately it is a coping strategy that backfires because it creates a barrier in deep relationship. So I think what people get wrong is that they think they have to be perfect to be loved and that they have to be perfect to be respected. Not only is that not true, it actually acts as a barrier. Excellent. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you and your book and the rest of your.

work. Your body of work. I'm on Instagram at Jennifer Brerheny Wallace. You can head over to my website at Jennifer B. Wallace.com and, you know, read the book, never enough when achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it. Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jennifer. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, people who are ambitious and who identify as high achievers can often have a hard time disentangling their achievements from their self-worth. And let's face it, if you listen to a podcast about how to invest money, if you self-select to somebody who listens to a personal finance podcast, you are likely pretty ambitious and pretty oriented towards achievement. Right? People who are in the financial independence community generally are like pretty high achieving people. This is probably you, right? If you are a high achieving person, it's often really, really easy to conflate your achievements with your worth.

That can lead to an unhealthy mindset. And it can ultimately really lead to a lack of fulfillment. So in the first key takeaway, Jennifer discusses how healthy strivers maintain. a healthy balance between their goals and their impression of themselves. But it really boils down to this idea that they have a high level of mattering. That is that they feel valued for who they are deep at their core, away from their achievements and successes. And importantly, that they feel dependent on and relied on to add meaningful value back to families, two friends, to larger communities. So mattering acts like a kind of protective shield. When we feel valued and when we are relied on to add value to others, that protects us.

It doesn't mean we won't feel anxious or depressed or, you know, have failures. But mattering acts like a buoy that lifts us up and makes us more resilient. So that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from hardship. It's critical for your mental health, for happiness, and for long-term fulfillment. But one of the big questions is, how do we build resilience? Jennifer discusses not only one critical area of focus in order to build resilience,

but also how much time we need to devote to that focus and what that should look like. This is according to decades' worth of resilience research, and that is resilience rests on our relationships. So what I would say to people is that if they are struggling to spend time developing one or two or three deep relationships where you can be vulnerable, where you can say what's bothering you, when you can admit to your insecurities, and to have a reciprocal relationship with somebody who can admit that to you. And what you will find, I believe, is that the more you can invest in your social fabric, that becomes what you go to when you are struggling. So I would say the number one thing to do is to prioritize your relationships. Researchers were looking at how many

hours does it take to create an authentic connection with somebody? They created these eight-week pilot study, and they had people once a week for one hour meet in person with someone facilitating the hour, but not a psychologist, just somebody keeping the conversation going. And again, it wasn't advice that they were seeking. It was just being heard, being validated, being understood. They found that it took eight weeks, one hour a week, and they measured the physician's cortisol levels. They did wellness surveys, and they found that that resilience that they were seeking was found in the relationships, and it was one hour a week for eight weeks. So that is the same thing. So that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, there are times in life when we don't feel

understood, we don't receive the comfort that we're seeking, or we just kind of feel alone. During these moments, it's critical to have coping mechanisms. So Jennifer shares an impactful coping mechanism that can help lift you up and remind you of the positive impact that you are making on the world. When you are feeling down, when you are feeling misunderstood, when you are feeling lonely, I think the best thing you can do is unlock someone else's value because what that will do is feed your own value. So when you tell the cafeteria woman how much she lights up your day and she smiles, you then reinforce the fact that you have a positive impact on this world, that you are valuable. So when you are struggling and when you are feeling misunderstood and alone, I think the best thing we can do is unlock the value in the people around us.

So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Jennifer Braney Wallace. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or a family member. That's a single most important thing that you can do to spread the message of good financial health and having, a long-term, sustainable, you know, thinking long-term, right? And being in this for the long haul, open up whatever app you're using to listen to this show and leave us a review in that app and make sure, of course, that you've hit the follow button

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