From Proving to Leading: Why High Performers Burn Out | Productivity Dysmorphia and Self-Worth

Why do high achievers struggle to feel “enough” even when they’re performing at their best?

In this episode of Beneath the Busy, Clinical Psychologist & Leadership Coach Lauren Davis explores the proving mindset: the quiet pressure to earn your worth through achievement and the emotional cost of carrying that pressure for years.

Through the story of Zane, a respected senior leader on the edge of burnout, Lauren unpacks how productivity dysmorphia, identity, self-worth, and workplace culture shape the way high performers work… and why so many leaders push themselves past capacity without noticing.

If you’ve ever felt like your accomplishments “don’t count,” or that slowing down would expose you, this episode offers a compassionate and practical way forward.

What you’ll learn:
• What drives the proving mindset
• Why high performers tie worth to output
• How productivity dysmorphia keeps leaders feeling “behind”
• The emotional cost of being “the reliable one”
• Why overperformance often begins in childhood
• How praise can intensify burnout
• Simple tools to shift from proving → leading
• Questions to rebuild a calmer internal foundation

Resources in this episode:
• Proving Mindset Checklist
• Leadership Self-Worth Reflection Prompts
• Productivity Dysmorphia Mini-Guide
• Season 2, Episode 1 – The Resilience Trap
• Season 2, Episode 2 – The Cult of Busyness

A gentle reminder:
You don’t have to perform your way into worthiness.
You are enough.
And you don’t have to do this alone.

Thanks for listening!
If you’re ready to take this further, here are a few ways to connect or go deeper:

Free Mental Health Check-in
→ Sign up here to receive a simple yet powerful resource to combat burnout and reclaim your energy.

Join Laurens Newsletter
→ Thoughtful, grounded reflections on navigating workplace pressures, supporting mental health, and leading with impact. Sign up here.

Say hi / share a takeaway
→ Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn.
→ Message Lauren directly here.

Work with Lauren
→ See how Lauren supports senior leaders and HR professionals in building mentally healthy teams and organisations.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding the Proving Mindset
• 9:41 The Journey from Proving to Transforming Mindset
• 14:54 Practical Steps for Sustainable Leadership

Transcript

You can be brilliant, accomplished, respected, and yet still feel one step away from being found out. Today, we're going to explore the hidden drivers beneath burnout for many high performers. It's what I call the proving mindset and how many leaders constantly feel like they're just never good enough. With Zane's story at the center, this conversation is going to look at how we can lead in more sustainable ways.

Hi, I'm Lauren Davis and this is Beneath the Busy. It's a space to slow down and look at what's really shaping the way we work. The patterns we fall into without meaning to, the old stories that we drag with us, and the impact on our mental health. Here we explore the psychological drivers beneath our behavior. Because when we can see what's running us, when we can name it and become aware of it, we can lead and live.

in ways that feel steadier and more sane. But as usual, before we begin, let's just take a moment to pause. If you can just pause whatever you're doing and just feel your feet firmly grounded on the floor and take a deep, long breath in.

Long breath out.

Let your shoulders drop, your stomach soften, and give yourself the permission to be fully here for this episode today.

Okay, let's get started. Today, I'm talking about a word that seems quite small, but it carries a whole lot of weight. The word improving.

On paper it sounds ambitious. I want to improve my leadership. I want to improve my fitness. I want to improve my confidence. But if you look closely, sitting in the middle of the word improving is the word proving. And for many high performers, that's no accident. Because when we say, I just want to improve, what we're underneath is really, I just want to prove that I'm enough. I want to prove that I belong.

I want to prove that I deserve the space that I'm taking up. So the drive actually isn't coming from a desire to grow and be a better person. It's coming from a space of anxiety, from a space of fear of not being good enough. So underneath the pushing, the striving, the upgrading is actually a belief that quietly says, I'm not enough as I am. I need to do more, be more, achieve more. So that maybe one day,

I'll feel okay. But that's not actually growth. That's actually what I call self-rejection with a productivity filter. Let me explain what I mean. You can actually hear it in the bargains that we make with ourselves. If I land this promotion, then I'll relax. If I deliver this quarter perfectly, then I'll stop doubting myself. So you can see how the worth we place on ourselves is directly linked to some level of performance or achievement or productivity.

And underneath it all is the same fear that I'm not good enough yet. Or it's close cousin, if I stop overperforming, what will people think of me? Because actually all every human being wants is to feel seen, heard and valued. We all have that same basic human need. So that's not the issue. The issue is in how we go about getting that need met because we start equating our worth

with our work and we start outsourcing our sense of self, our self value to our outward achievements. And psychologically, this is really heavy. It takes a huge toll on our mental health because research shows that when your worth depends on your performance, on your achievements, then your nervous system never actually stands down. You are always on, always in defense mode, always needing to...

prove or fight for your position, for your worthiness. And you're constantly feeling one mistake away from feeling completely worthless, like a failure. The challenge is that in this mode, we keep moving the goalposts. When I get there, then I'll feel good enough, but then I get there and I still don't feel good enough. So then I reevaluate that assumption and we say, well, then it's got to be something bigger, something better. And then I'll feel good enough.

So we keep expecting the outside, the external achievement to shift how we feel internally about ourselves. And this is where the term productivity dysmorphia comes into play, because we completely have a dysmorphic view of what it means to be truly productive, of what it means to feel like we have done enough. And this happens because our achievements keep changing that external milestone, but not the internal narrative.

So we achieve something, we get that amazing dopamine hit, and we feel amazing, but it doesn't last. And it dissipates relatively quickly. And then the internal narrative says, well, that hasn't lasted. So that wasn't good enough. That wasn't significant enough. Therefore I need to push for more, or bigger, or better. And then we get there, we get another dopamine hit. The brain processes that very quickly. The internal narrative doesn't shift.

And so we continue on that vicious cycle of continuously expecting the external achievement to change our internal narrative. So we keep assuming that that achievement doesn't count. We completely dismiss it or discredit it because we don't feel any different. And so this gap between achieving something, but still not feeling good enough or productive enough or worthy enough, there's the dysmorphic view. And that's where productivity dysmorphia sits. So I want to bring this to life.

with a story of Zayn, a senior leader that I've coached in the past. He took pride in being reliable. Reliability was his identity. And eventually it became his worth. His internal rule was that if I'm not holding it all together, who am I? And he stopped asking over time, what is it that I need? And instead he was focused on what does everybody else need? And how can I fulfill those needs?

And then one step further, when I fulfill those needs, then that means I'm worthy. That means I'm good enough. So what he started doing in this mode of proving, proving his worthiness through his reliability, he started picking up work that wasn't his. He started ignoring his boundaries, not because it was good leadership, actually, although on the surface one would assume that that was good leadership, but because not doing that actually felt very dangerous. It put his.

nervous system into that fight or flight, into that sympathetic overdrive, because it felt incredibly threatening to not be the reliable one, to not take everything on for himself. Because that belief, that inner critic, that quiet voice was whispering to saying, you only matter when you are useful. So you can imagine with that inner narrative, what behaviors it was driving.

And of course the world around him rewarded this. They loved it. They praised him. He got the glowing reviews and that age old, very tricky statement that hooks us in every time. We don't know what we would do without you. I mean, how valuable does somebody feel when people say that about you? They wouldn't be able to survive without you. That feels good. That makes us feel worthy. That makes us feel wanted. That makes us feel needed. But actually,

where this started to warp over time was that instead of actually feeling seen, Zayn started to feel pressure. More pressure to deliver, more pressure to show up, more pressure to be reliable. And slowly, the exhaustion crept in, this constant proving, this constant having to live up to that expectation of I only matter when I'm reliable, that quiet pressure built up and built up and slowly

started turning into burnout. But it was hard to notice because the inner narrative was constantly saying, keep going, you're doing great, people are relying on you. You're dependable, you're needed, therefore you're worthy. And so he was ignoring those quiet signs of burnout, the exhaustion, the loss of motivation, the loss of sense of fulfillment or satisfaction actually. And one day, sitting in his car in the parking lot at work,

trying to muster up the energy to face the day, to face the demands, he had a different thought that just said, I can't keep going on like this. I'm so unhappy. I'm so unsatisfied. I'm exhausted and I can't keep living like this. And that's when he realized he needed to make a change. But thankfully he also realized he couldn't make this change on his own. Like I said in episode one, we need the support of an external coach or

mentor or leader, somebody that can help us start seeing some of the dysmorphic thinking, some of the incongruent thinking that is going on that's fueling our behavior. So that's when Zayn reached out for coaching and it gave him the space to slow down and to reflect on some of the things he was believing about himself and about the world and about how he expected himself to show up in the world. And he began meeting some of the parts that he had been outrunning.

He explored his fear of not being good enough. And his shift started with some simple questions. One of them being, what if I could matter without earning it every day? And holding that question in mind, he was able to start saying no a bit more often, even though it was incredibly uncomfortable. And his anxiety spiked and he worried people would be disappointed or people would think less of him. But the more he did it and he realized

A, that he was still quite well respected, and B, that he started to feel more energized and more engaged in his work again and more fulfilled, he kept going. And so he delegated tasks, he left work on time, he actually took some leave. You know what? Nothing terrible happened. People still valued him. And the most important thing was that he started valuing himself too. And so this shift.

is what epitomizes what I call the transforming mindset. And that mindset says, yes, I'm human, I'm messy. I have good bits and I have bad bits. And still I know I'm enough. And the transforming mindset, as opposed to the proving mindset, says, I continuously want to grow, I want to evolve, I want to develop myself, I want to experience new things, because I want to do it.

just to continue my human experience. I'm not doing those things, growing, upgrading myself because I feel like I'm broken and something needs to be fixed. So I'm not trying to fill a void of not enoughness. I'm transforming, I'm expanding from a space of curiosity and wonder. And so from the transforming mindset, growth just becomes part of the way you live, not a desperate attempt to fix yourself. It sounds like I like who I am.

And I'm curious about who I'm becoming. I'm curious about what else I'm capable of. I want to learn and I want to evolve not to prove my worthiness. So how do we shift from leading from a proving mindset to leading from a transforming mindset? Well, it starts by catching that if then phrase. If I get this promotion, then I will be good enough because those if then,

statements that you're saying to yourself, those are invitations to pause and double check what you are believing. And if you have outsourced your validation to an achievement or a milestone, this one's easier said than done and probably needs quite a bit of work on yourself, but it's definitely possible. It's starting to separate who you are from what you do. Behavior is changeable. Worth is stable. You can always learn

new things, you can always shift bad patterns, but your worth stays the same. We want to practice what I call honest self-acceptance. It's not condoning ineffective behaviors. It's not allowing yourself to become complacent and be a couch potato and never have any goals or ambitions. But when we just accept ourselves for who we are, human, messy, inherently flawed and fragile, it lowers our cortisol levels. And then it makes growth a possible

but also sustainable. I also want to invite you to redefine success. What does success mean? It can be asking for help. It can be saying, don't know. It can be saying, I need a break. Those are not soft, ineffective, unsuccessful behaviors. That's actually really effective, sustainable leadership. And then lastly, give your nervous system some actual tangible evidence that you are enough.

have a mastery list or a small wins list. Write down one or two achievements, one or two small wins, and they don't have to be the big major things, but write them down, make it tangible so you can start showing your brain, your nervous system, that actually I am doing some wonderful things. Yes, there's things I can always do more of and better of, but I'm also doing some amazing things. And for my HR listeners, I just want to acknowledge that you

experiences almost double fold because not only are you experiencing what the average leader does around needing to prove oneself and feeling not good enough. On top of it, you have the HR function where we often feeling like you have to prove that you have a seat at the table. You have to prove your worth as a cost center. The business is often looking at you and wondering, you know, are you adding any value? And so you bring your own internal.

Anxiety around that and then the role itself within the organizational system is often putting a question mark over the work that you do. And so often you're having to support others while proving your own worth and you're also caring deeply while trying not to fall apart. And this all has a cost, which is why next week's episode is specifically for you. It's called Caring Without Crumbling. And we're going to be talking about compassion fatigue, a kind of burnout where

the cost of caring starts taking its toll. It's when you care too much for too long without support. So before we wrap up, here are some reflection questions I want to leave you with. Where are you using improvement when actually you're meaning I need to prove myself? Where are you acting from I'm human and I'm evolving versus I'm broken and I need to be fixed? And if you pause the chase for a moment,

What evidence is there that you are already enough? So if this conversation hit home and you're looking for some support, you'll find ways of working with me in the show notes, whether it's one-on-one coaching or keynotes and workshops, I'm here to support you in your growth and your journey. And if you know someone who's carrying a heavy load, another leader or HR colleague, please share this episode with them.

Because sometimes just hearing you are not alone is enough for somebody to take the first step towards change. And as always, please remember, it's okay to not be okay, but it's not okay to stay that way. You are not alone. Help is always available. And please be kind and gentle with yourself and each other. Thanks for listening. Until next time, be well and take care.