Why Motherhood Crashes Into the High Achiever with Katrina Oliver
Links mentioned in today’s episode:
Connect with Katrina on Instagram
Listen to Still Becoming Podcast
Find Katrina on Psychology Today
Who else is familiar with the formula: More effort means more control, and more control means more reward. After having a child, that formula no longer applies.
In today’s episode, I’m joined by therapist Katrina Oliver to talk about why high achieving moms hit a wall when pushing harder doesn’t work, and what you can actually do instead. Katrina is a therapist, mom of 9-year-old twins, and the host of Still Becoming, a podcast about what it actually feels like to be a high-functioning woman in midlife.
We’ll get more into this formula that worked for us for so long, why it stops applying in motherhood, what Katrina calls an overwhelm that strategy can’t touch, over functioning, becoming a new version of yourself, and why slowing down matters.
This conversation is a great one between close friends, and it also provides so much value and encouragement, so if you’re in the middle of recognizing these collision points within yourself, you’re not alone. Grab your headphones, slow down a little, and enjoy this episode!
Why Motherhood Crashes Into the High Achiever
For high achievers, the formula that’s always worked was: more effort meant more control, and more control meant more reward. That’s how you got the degree, the promotion, the big thing you built. It’s always worked without fail. Until you become a mom, and for maybe the first time, the formula you’ve always relied on stops applying.
When the formula stops working
Motherhood is unpredictable, and it’s not something that you can out-effort your way into gaining the upperhand. For me, I learned this the hard way. My instinct was to push harder anyway, because pushing is the only tool I’d ever used to get what I wanted. If this resonates with you at all, you’re in good company, because this is what today’s episode is about. I’m bringing on my friend Katrina, to talk more about what breaks when the thing that’s always worked stops working, and what you can actually do instead.
Meet Katrina
Katrina Oliver is a therapist, mom of 9-year-old twins, and host of Still Becoming, a podcast about what it feels like to be a high-functioning woman in midlife. She helps women make space for the parts of themselves that get buried under work, motherhood, and everyone else’s needs, and she believes sometimes the most important thing you can do is stop trying to fix yourself.
An overwhelm that strategy can’t touch
For so many of us, strategy lives in our heads, so the story becomes I’m doing all the things, so why is this still so hard? Then it turns inward: what’s wrong with me? Over time, Katrina sees self-abandonment, with women disconnecting from their bodies, their wants, and their needs, and living in a survival state.
The identity shift is the collision, but it’s happening from the inside
The identity shift is a structural collision, happening from the inside. Katrina described what it looks like when a high achiever hasn’t named it yet: a doubling down on what worked before, with every old strategy fired at full force, like a circuit panel overheating. It’s the classic thought women will dial up the overfunctioning and hope it fixes things.
On a personal note, I first heard the word “overfunctioning” while sitting in a Walgreens parking lot listening to Brené Brown’s podcast, right after my promotion to COO, with a daughter who wasn’t sleeping. I cried. All my life I’d been told I was stressing myself out, and those people weren’t wrong, but the way it was said carried shame. Understanding how I was treating overfunctioning as a coping mechanism changed how I saw myself.
Coping strategies exist for a reason. Instead of shaming your overfunctioning part, thank it for what it’s done for you, and notice when it’s grabbing the driver’s seat. We both talked about Internal Family Systems (IFS), or parts work, which changed my own life. It helps me see all my parts as good, even when they don’t need to be in charge.
You are a different person, and you keep changing
When I went back to work as the only woman on a male-dominated leadership team, I felt I had to prove I still had it, in the same way I always had. It wasn’t until my daughter’s second birthday party when I realized that life was telling me that the way this had been working needs to change. I’d been telling myself I was the same person and I had this, and that felt like positive self-talk. Meanwhile, deep down there were other aspects of myself saying I can’t do this anymore.
The truth is, the shift doesn’t stop. You keep meeting new versions of yourself as your kids grow and your life changes, and reinvention isn’t a failure. It’s the journey. So listen to yourself if you’re feeling like you need to make a shift in your life to align better with what you truly want in life.
Ambition tied to joy, not validation
Katrina shared her own pivot from school counselor to starting her own therapy practice, after realizing how much of her work was driven by wanting accolades and feeling good enough. Motherhood cracked something open and made her ask what it was all for. It took years of tiny steps, and she felt real guilt about leaving a job she loved with a great boss. Her question for you: are you doing this for you? Ambition tied to joy and ambition tied to validation can look identical from the outside.
It’s okay to slow down
Reminder to slow down enough to notice how you’ve been coping, and whether it still fits. Notice if a part of you is asking for help, and give yourself permission not to hold it all together. Katrina suggests pulling out a picture of your younger self and asking how she’s feeling.
I want to land one thing: a lot of the time the collisions are happening inside until they show up outside. Some collisions are unavoidable and necessary. We can’t eliminate them, but we can build the support to see them coming and reduce them.
Quote of the Episode
“I loved the work I did, I loved the community until I realized there was something else. And if I stayed, it would have been for someone else, not for me.”
Katrina Oliver
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