Jessica Spendlove, wellbeing and high-performance keynote speaker, coach and author of For the Long Run, explains more.
One of the most dangerous beliefs a high achieving EA can carry is that they have a greater capacity than everyone else. The problem is there is often plenty of evidence to support this narrative.
You have handled the bigger workload, taken on more responsibility, pushed through periods other people would have struggled with and still delivered. Over time, that becomes part of your identity. You’re the person who can handle it, until you can’t.
I know that pattern because I lived it. For the better part of a decade, while working across seven professional sporting teams, I believed fatigue was the price to pay for a career I wanted since I was a teenager. I was ambitious, I loved what I did and I had spent decades proving to myself that I could carry a lot.
It’s a different world to the one you operate in but the pattern is the same one I see constantly in EAs. You’re the person an executive relies on to never drop anything, the one who’s always across it, always available, always one step ahead. That reliability is what makes the role valuable – and what makes the warning signs so easy to miss.
So, when my warning signs started appearing, I didn’t necessarily see them as that. I saw them as evidence that I was working hard enough. That’s where high achievers can get themselves into trouble.
Exhaustion becomes easy to rationalise when ambition is part of your identity, particularly when you are still performing well on the outside and being rewarded or praised. But your ability to keep delivering does not necessarily mean your current way of operating is sustainable.
The truth is, no one is invincible, no matter how exceptional they are. And often the people who need to recognise that most are the ones who’ve spent years proving just how much they can handle.
When worth becomes tied to output
There’s another layer to this. When your sense of worth or belonging becomes tied to performance, achievement starts to become proof. You’re productive, useful, reliable, the person who never drops anything. For an EA, that’s often the actual job description. Being the person who never drops anything is what you’re trusted for, which makes it even harder to separate worth from output.
Follow that logic and you can see why slowing down can feel so difficult. If part of your identity is attached to what you produce, rest can feel uncomfortable because you’re temporarily removing one of the things that reinforces who you believe yourself to be.
That’s why simply telling a high achiever to slow down rarely works. Instead, build a way of operating that allows you to sustain it.
Being switched on can feel identical to being driven
There’s a physiological layer to this too. High demand environments can keep you moving between cognitive load, deadlines, decisions and constant availability. There are few opportunities for genuine recovery – a description that will sound familiar to most EAs, even without the elite sport backdrop.
In the short term, our stress response is adaptive. It helps us mobilise resources and respond to demands. The problem comes when high demand is repeated without sufficient opportunity to recover.
Over time, that can contribute to what researchers call allostatic load, the cumulative physiological burden associated with repeatedly adapting to stress.
When you’re ambitious, that state can feel like momentum. In short bursts, it can be. Held for too long, however, the cost starts to accumulate, and you start to deteriorate.
The warning signs that are always available
Your body and brain communicate constantly but most of us have never been taught to read or interpret them. If you learn their language, and tune in to when they improve or decline, they’ll tell you what you need to know.
I encourage people to start with how they feel, like their energy levels, appetite, cravings and performance – both cognitive and physical as these are always available, all you need to do is tune in to them.
Pairing these subjective measures with objective data from a wearable device can add another layer of information. The real benefit comes from wearing it consistently and looking at trends over time.
Using objective data to corroborate how you feel (when you’re experiencing more stress than usual, for example) can be particularly useful for high achievers who are used to making data informed decisions.
From the inside, ambition and exhaustion can be surprisingly difficult to tell apart, particularly when you are still motivated, still delivering and still getting results. That’s why performance alone is a poor measure of whether the way you are operating is sustainable.
The answer sits in paying attention to how you feel day to day and what your data is telling you over time. Learn to read both, and the warning signs become something you can act on early – long before you’re the one everyone else is relying on to hold it all together, with nothing left to hold yourself up.
