What Keeps Driving Me?

High performers tend to share a particular quality.

They’re good at what they do. Very good. Exceptionally good.

And they work hard to be that good.

What gets examined less often is why.

Not why in the motivational sense – the goals, the vision, the love of the game or the craft. That part is usually well-articulated. High performers are often fluent in what pulls them towards the next success: their ambition, their drive and their desire to be the best they can be.

What isn’t often examined is what’s pushing them. The why that’s hidden within the fear. The question of what would happen if they weren’t good, what would happen if they weren’t successful?

This is a different type of why. And asks for a different type of examination.

Many of our greatest strengths began as adaptations. Responses to the world around us.

Intelligent, creative responses to the environments we grew up in – family, school, sport, work – where we learned what was required to belong, to be valued, to be safe.

Some of us learned that failure was unacceptable.

Some of us learned that weakness would be punished.

Some of us learned that there was no place for vulnerability.

Some of us learned that we were the ones to keep the peace.

So, we proved how good we could be, we proved how strong we were, we showed that we could be independent, we became indispensable, we learned to carry things quietly and on our own.

None of this is unusual. It’s a very normal human story. And in many cases, it produced real capability – genuine skills, effective resilience, authentic care for others.

The question isn’t whether these strategies worked.

They did.

The question is whether they’re still needed in the same way. At some point in the past these strategies may have been essential, the question is whether, at some level, they’re running on autopilot long after the original conditions have changed.

The question is whether the fear of making a mistake, of not being good enough, of upsetting others is driving a relentless chasing of something that is forever out of reach.

The question is can we make different choices.

Can we change.

Can we grow and evolve.

The chameleon adapts.

This is its greatest skill. It reads the environment, adjusts, fits in, performs. It takes what worked in one context and finds a way to make it work in the next. It learns to survive, to thrive and become successful.

This is a genuine skill. The ability to adapt, the ability to learn quickly, the ability to become good at something. This cannot be underestimated.

But the chameleon is always responding to the environment. Always calibrating to what’s required. Always, at some level, asking – consciously or not – how do I prove my worth, how do I add value, how can I show how strong I am, what do I need to be here in order to belong?

And if these questions have been fuelling the ‘why’ for long enough, they can become invisible. What began as an adaptive strategy becomes an identity. We stop asking whether the adaptation is still serving us. We simply do what we’ve always done. And the chasing continues, never quite good enough, not quite useful enough, never quite strong enough.

We all carry our own version of the chameleon.

And if we look closely, we can begin to see the patterns. The ways in which we keep repeating the same strategies, the same reactive habits regardless of the environment we are in.

We can see them in what we do – in the ways we perform to seek approval, in the ways we work hard for recognition, in the ways we chase validation.

Once we take a moment to pause and look under the surface. And begin to recognise the familiar behaviours and patterns that we carry with us from one environment to another, then we create an opportunity for a different type of change.

Not relocation – moving from one environment and repeating the same strategies somewhere else.

But the possibility for transformation – a chance to become response-able, to make new choices, to come away from the fear, to stop chasing. To do something different.

To explore what is possible when we stop feeling the need to react to the external environment. To do the inner work and stop questioning whether we are good enough or whether we are too much, and to start trusting that there is so much more to who we are beneath and beyond our performance.