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There are people whom everyone admires for the same thing: they always deliver. They hand things in on time, they hold the project up, they solve what no one else can solve. From the outside it looks like success, and often it is. But there is a cost that is not seen from the outside, and that the person themselves usually discovers late: the price of not being able to stop.

A performance that does not switch off

High performance becomes a problem not when one performs a great deal, but when one can no longer perform in any other way. Rest begins to feel like a threat; an afternoon without producing leaves a diffuse guilt, as if one were failing someone. The demand ceases to come from the boss or the post and comes to live within: one becomes one’s own overseer, and among the most severe.

The body keeps the account

That engine that never switches off has a cost, and the first to pay it is usually the body. Insomnia, tension that will not yield, an underlying anxiety that accompanies even one’s achievements. A result is celebrated and, immediately, the gaze is already on the next one, without a moment of enjoyment. The body begins to send signals that the will ignores, until one day they become hard to ignore.

When performing is one’s identity

Beneath all of this there is usually an uncomfortable question: who am I when I am not performing? For many, performance is not something they do, but something they are. And there the silent fear appears that, if they stop, there will be nothing underneath —or no one worth anything without the achievement. Often that equation —I am worth something if I produce— is old: it was learned long before any post, and work merely gave it an adult, applauded form.

Looking at what performance covers over

Therapeutic work does not seek to make the person perform more, nor to make them complacent. It seeks something else: to understand what that tireless engine protects against, what one would be feeling if for a moment it switched off. To loosen, over time, the equation between one’s own worth and what is produced. It is not a quick process, nor does it have a formula —it would be dishonest to offer it as such—; it is a work of elaboration, done with care.

High performance is not the enemy; for many it is a real talent and a legitimate source of pride. The question is not how to perform less, but how to make performing cease to be the only way of existing. When that loosens, work well done ceases to be a silent condemnation and becomes once more what it once was: something one chooses, not something one depends on in order to breathe.

An essay by Carlos Hernán Arango Botero, psychologist. If these lines resonated with you and you occupy a place of decision or of high performance, you can learn about the accompaniment and take the first step in an initial interview.