An article against my own business model
I am a life coach. I earn my living from people working on themselves. And I am now writing an article about exactly when that becomes harmful.
That is not a marketing trick, but simply what I see most often in coaching. People don’t come to me because they have worked on themselves too little. They come because they have been working on themselves for years – with tracking apps, morning routines, podcasts, books, courses – and still feel they are falling behind.
So feel free to read this article critically. I have an interest in you thinking well of personal development. All the more reason for me to name the downside.
Development and optimisation are not the same thing
The difference sounds like hair-splitting, but it is the whole point:
- Development moves towards something. Towards a value, a relationship, a way of living that suits you. The yardstick is yours.
- Optimisation moves away from something. Away from a lack, a deficit, a “not good enough yet”. The yardstick lies outside you.
From the outside, both look the same. Both can mean the same morning routine, the same journal, the same training. But they feel completely different – and they end differently.
Development has a destination where you can arrive. Optimisation has none. A deficit can always be shrunk further, never fully closed. Anyone moving away from a lack keeps moving forever.
What research says about contingent self-worth
The psychologist Jennifer Crocker coined a term for this that describes what happens here fairly precisely: contingent self-worth. It refers to a sense of self-worth that is tied to conditions – to professional success, to appearance, to recognition, to performance.
The central finding: the more strongly your self-worth is coupled to such external criteria, the more unstable it becomes. It fluctuates with every piece of feedback, every comparison, every result. Studies link high self-worth contingency with more stress, stronger self-monitoring and an overall lower and more fragile sense of self-worth.
Two caveats so this isn’t over-interpreted. First, these are predominantly correlations, not proven causes – whether fragile self-worth arises from being coupled to performance, or the coupling arises from an already fragile self-worth, cannot be settled conclusively from correlations. Second, a self-worth that also draws on achievement is not a problem in itself. It becomes problematic when it draws only on that.
And that is precisely the mechanism self-optimisation fuels: step by step, it shifts self-worth outwards, onto measurable quantities – steps, sleep score, books read, goals ticked off.
How you can tell it has tipped over
Not by the amount of what you do. But by how it feels:
- A free day without progress feels like a lost day.
- You have routines you hate but can’t drop, because “stopping” feels like going backwards.
- After reaching a goal there is no moment of rest, just the next one straight away.
- You measure things whose numbers you no longer even look at.
- Relaxation has become another task – you “have to” meditate.
- You no longer compare yourself with others, but with a better version of yourself that doesn’t exist.
The last point is the most insidious. Comparisons with others can be put into perspective. The comparison with your own ideal image cannot be won, because the ideal image grows along with you.
Why mindfulness, of all things, often plays along
An uncomfortable point for my own profession: mindfulness, meditation and journaling were originally practices of pausing. In the logic of optimisation they become tools for boosting performance – meditation so you work with more focus. Sleep so you are more productive. Recovery as an investment in the next effort.
That turns the principle on its head. Recovery that has to pay off is not recovery. I have described here why that doesn’t work in practice either: The Art of Switching Off.
What does not work as an explanation, by the way: the widespread notion that willpower is a reserve that gets used up. This idea – ego depletion – has not held up in large replication attempts. If you lack energy in the evening, that is real, but the explanation lies elsewhere.
What helps
Ask about the yardstick. When you want to start something new: whose yardstick is it? If the honest answer is “someone else’s”, it will cost you energy rather than give you any.
Set a destination where you can arrive. “Getting fitter” has no end. “Running twice a week because I sleep better afterwards” does. The second sentence is achievable, the first is not.
Measure less. Remove one tracking app and see what happens. For most people: nothing. That is the information.
Practise the tone in which you speak to yourself. This isn’t going soft – self-compassion is one of the better-evidenced levers of the last twenty years, and it demonstrably does not make you lazy. More on this: Self-Compassion Instead of Self-Criticism.
Check whether it is perfectionism. Very often, self-optimisation is just the contemporary packaging of an old pattern: Perfectionism – Curse or Blessing?
Allow yourself to be enough – and still grow. That is not a contradiction. It is the difference between development and optimisation.
Conclusion
Self-optimisation is not problematic because working on yourself is bad. It becomes problematic when the yardstick moves outwards and self-worth is coupled to measurable results. What emerges then is a process without a finish line – and exhaustion is not the risk, but the foreseeable outcome.
The question is not whether you work on yourself. It is whether, in doing so, you are moving towards something or running away from something.
If you notice that you have been working on yourself for years and still haven’t arrived, that is a good moment for a conversation – not for the next routine. The free introductory session is free of charge and without obligation.
Your progress is my joy.