How to Overcome Feeling Behind for High Achievers

Feeling behind?

In our high-performance world, it's easy to feel like you're always lagging behind.

Ali Abdaal, a doctor, YouTuber, podcaster, and author of Feel Good Productivity, reaches millions with his content. His latest video, My Honest Advice to Someone Who Feels Behind in Life, resonated, gaining over 400k views and 830 comments in just nine days. This video struck a chord with high achievers who are pressured to feel farther along.

Ali suggests visualizing your ideal day and week to combat the thoughts of feeling behind.

This is an exercise in awareness, discovery, and imagination.

Feeling behind is often a measure of being in the "wrong" place. But what if you could redefine what "right" means? Start by answering these questions:

For your ideal week:

• What would you be doing? Each day, each hour?

• What would you want to be different?

• What would be true for the ideal to become a normal or typical week?

• Who would you be if you weren’t 'behind' but in the 'right' place?

Commit your answers to paper, as a cursory review won’t yield meaningful results.

When you explore your capacity and open your mind to possibilities, you focus on what you want, not what you don't have.

The 'feeling behind' thoughts will rule your weeks without a focused practice on what you want to create for your life.

Simple shifts can bring you closer to your ideal week.

What's Right Anyway?

When you want something you don’t have, you can develop tunnel vision, which suffocates long-term thinking.

If feeling behind is a measure of being in the 'wrong' place, what's the ‘right’ place?

The only right is the right you make right.

When you decide on your right, you can see your proximity to it and move toward it.

The Comparison Trap & Arrival Fallacy

Don’t look outside yourself to others to measure your right.

Comparison can plunge you deeper into despair and keep you farther away from what you want to make right for yourself.

Comparison yields small thinking, which gets small results or more of the same (feeling behind).

So many people think that when they get 'there,' life will be better.

That’s called the arrival fallacy.

Coined by psychologist Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, the term arrival fallacy refers to the belief that attaining a particular goal will lead to long-term happiness.

The actual arrival rarely brings the big rewards that the mind conjures up.

It’s never better there.

Joy, fulfillment, and meaning come along the way of getting there.

Defining a compelling future like your ideal week pulls you toward it instead of pushing forward without direction.

The same holds true for success. What’s your definition? If you don’t define it, how will you ever achieve it?

Remember, your time is the one resource you can never get back. How you use yours is either on default or by design.

Consider this thought from Robert Glazer: While it’s natural to worry about whether we have enough time, what really matters is using the time we have well. Time spent lamenting or wishing for more time is not time well spent.

Here's my calendaring exercise if you want to take this exercise further.

Put your ideal week into action by ditching the to-do list. Instead, write your To-My Future list.

Every week is a new opportunity to rewrite what you want. We are all a work in progress. The joy is in the progress, not the destination.