Grinder or Striver

Grinder OR Striver

I just finished a huge project, which I worked on for months at the office, and it’s been a success, but it’s killing me. I am overworked and overwhelmed, and I’m not taking care of myself, my body, or my life. I’m tired of taking on more, but I’m on to my next thing.

Help me work smarter I need a positive change.

A striver is industrious and diligent in carrying out tasks or duties; a hard worker who works at a specific occupation; is “a good worker.”

In the Bible, to strive is to—put out effort; to exert; to endeavor with earnestness; to labor hard; applicable to exertions of body or mind. A workman strives to perform his task before another; a student seeks to excel his fellows in improvement.

All of that means energy.

You are contending with a lot during periods of striving, so you need to make sure you are up to the task and have a plan to mitigate excess stress, which means excessive energy expenditure. If you don’t, you risk being constantly tired, burning out, and wearing out prematurely.

In the earlier stages of lifestyle development, many of us are strivers; we’ve got bills to pay, a living to make, and we’re just exploring the world. We’re also proving ourselves and more than excited to do so in something new we’re engaged in.

The key at this stage is not to turn the proving of yourself into a performance addiction. Depending on the empathy you’ve experienced in your life and the “setup” leading up to now, the last thing you want to be doing is seeking love and respect for your accomplishments and achievements. It will drive you hard and can take your life off course as you try to achieve for the wrong reasons.

As a striver, you are just out of the primary Potentialite stage in your life and still have an easier time than most correcting course if necessary. If you are striving later in life, it’s a new chapter, but you are still susceptible to the hidden lifestyle challenges inherent to this stage.

In this stage, you are working all the time virtually; you are driven because you’re climbing the ladder, establishing, or reestablishing yourself, your career, or your business.

Making sure you live a healthy, high-performance lifestyle in the striver stage is more important than any other time.

Because your energy output is as high as it gets, here is where your coping habits are built, and they will determine whether you burn out and trade your health for success or achieve your goals with your health and wellbeing intact.

It’s not just Boomers and Gen X’ers in the strive who can burn out; millennials and Gen Z’ers too. It’s not age dependent. It doesn’t matter what age you are; the struggle begins if you start overspending your energy and are not recuperating regularly and systematically.

And struggle, by definition, is a downward spiral, a situation in which vicious cycles (i.e., poor habits around work and recovery, etc.) create a problem that continuously gets worse, like depleting your life force energy, which leads to depression, addiction, and more.

Sure, your goals are important, and proving yourself for the right reasons may be essential. Still, sustaining the bar you set in the striver stage will be challenging if you don’t have the energy, health, and well-being to support your performance output and productivity later.

This is why establishing a “balanced and healthy” high-performance lifestyle mindset and skill is essential if you go after ambitious goals.

Lifestyle Coach JAM can help you through this stage, where it’s critical to orient your lifestyle around the strive with a plan to get to the next stage, assuming you don’t get caught up in the phase of overachieving but underperforming >. (Though hopefully not )