The high achiever’s emptiness: why your success doesn’t feel like you’ve won
On virtual meetings, you look and sound confident, get the odd laugh and appear firmly decisive and in control.
Off-screen, the silence hits different. Your shoulders drop and the smile fades, at times you distract yourself with things like picking up your phone to scroll, or perhaps crack on with the next task despite there being little to no joy in the process.
Maybe work is OK right now, but when you open the front door back at home you carry a sinking quiet feeling as you smile to say ‘I’m home’, a disconnection you feel but have no obvious way to process so you keep pushing on as you usually do. Many feel a long way from feeling ‘at home’ in themselves in important aspects of their lives, able to express themselves freely with integrity and to strongly connect with those around them.
This is what high-functioning anxiety looks like, and is a feeling that affects all of us at times.
If you’ve achieved everything you set out to and yet still feel strangely empty, what’s really going on?
The Expression Gap
Much of the above problem relates to what I call ‘The Expression Gap’ - the unbridged space between what’s arising in your inner world, and it’s expression in your outer world when you want or need something to land and connect.
At it’s most extreme, it’s the void you feel when you have no idea how to express yourself and instead choose to shutdown and stay silent.
It lives in that world between who you show up as and who you really are and want to be.
It lingers in those moments like when you return home to your partner or children and they ask or wonder why you’ve been so distant lately, and in those moments when the incoherent message you wanted to send just misses the mark, creating confusion or tension.
The Expression Gap is a different take on the challenge with men being open and vulnerable, especially in times of need. The world endlessly tells men to express themselves, to be themselves, to open up etc but doesn’t really offer many solutions that speak to them and inspire them to act. There are several valuable and crucial men’s talking groups and support groups e.g. Andy’s Man Club, Men’s Sheds etc but I felt like we need something new and different that gives men a North Star for self-expression having had issues with this in my own life. I also see these issues first hand when leading teams as a management consultant, team members who were afraid to express their thoughts and feelings, especially in environment's that didn’t feel psychologically safe.
Part of this is that we are tempted to label men inauthentic, domineering, fake, incongruent, call it what you want. But they’re labels, and labels hurt, causing us to close-up even more and stifle progress.
The Expression Gap gives the situation a noun (the expression ‘gap’) instead of an identity label and adjective (inauthentic), whilst then offering a skills-based solution (because many men are practical beings at heart). Now we have something to aim at, a North Star to spot when an important gap forms and to learn how to close it to reconnect.
It stems from a number of things, such as:
not feeling safe to express yourself (e.g. through fear of being “too much” or “too unsure”, or perhaps “too emotional” or fear of safety and being judged in the immediate environment)
your prior conditioning (eg. success means control)
or feeling pressure to perform (the ‘Performance Trap’ - more on that later).
From a recent survey, 76% of men report experiencing work-related stress or anxiety (Mind UK, 2023), with Harvard Business Review reporting that 58% of male leaders feel they can’t be fully authentic at work.
A study by Wacker et al. (2024) illustrates how masculine role fit and leadership position can lead to burnout and disconnection. In their study, for non-managers a worse P-E fit in masculinity (the individual’s masculinity level lower than the perceived masculinity of the work environment and therefore a poor match) is associated with higher burnout values (β = 1.72, p < 0.01). In short, if such men are perceived to be less masculine than the culture in work, they are more likely to burnout.
Psychologist Dr. Susan David notes that when expression relates to sharing feelings: “emotional rigidity - suppressing difficult emotions - undermines performance and wellbeing.”. Many men default to performance-mode, not knowing expression is holding them back from the upper end of that.
The consequences of not closing the Expression Gap can be deep and pervasive, including:
Disconnection
Emotional numbness
Burnout or acting out
A strong imposter syndrome
Strained or distant relationships
The Expression Gap’s accomplice: The Performance Trap
If we don’t feel we are able or willing to express ourselves (and close our Expression Gap), we are then choosing to put on a mask for the world.
The mask is our way of showing up and performing, whilst also hiding what’s going on underneath.
Many of us are all too aware of the illusion that external achievement doesn’t equal fulfilment. The Performance Trap is when your self-worth depends on your next win, and it fuels the Expression Gap. Every presentation, every project, every promotion becomes proof you’re still ‘enough’. Until it doesn’t.
In a Thaler (2020) study, they highlight how overconfidence and performance-driven identity among men can create the trap. They found men were more likely to believe they out-performed others, whereas female subjects’ beliefs about their performance were well-calibrated. Men believe they are to perform their way through challenges, and distort their belief in their ability to do so.
Perhaps like many of us you hear parts of yourself in this, in a stage of your career where you’re still climbing but starting to wonder: ‘what’s the point if it doesn’t feel like I’m really winning?’, or perhaps you’ve already built an empire but wonder if you’ve become a performance of yourself.
Why success doesn’t feel like you’ve won, yet.
As you can probably predict, some of the answers to this lie in the world of psychology and neurology.
We now know from the neuroscience of fulfilment, that dopamine drives achievement, but connection and authenticity trigger long-term fulfilment and wellbeing (eg. oxytocin and serotonin).
Many men are trained to achieve for validation rather than express from authenticity. “Men often suppress vulnerability, creating emotional isolation despite external success” as the American Psychological Association puts it.
The reason why success doesn’t feel like you’ve won can be partly explained by some recent studies by Duarte et al. (2021) and Jang et al. (2022), showing research evidence that authenticity and alignment matter more than just tallying wins.
The study by Duarte included 214 employees who found a positive relationship between authentic leadership (leaders who are self-aware, transparent, ethical) and individual performance. Being aligned and genuine as a leader benefits performance and by extension, performing inauthentically may hinder it.
In a study entitled: ‘Authentic Leadership and Task Performance via Psychological Capital’ (Jang et al., 2022), researchers investigated how authentic leadership influences task performance, mediated by psychological capital (self-efficacy, hope, optimism, resilience) and moderated by performance pressure. The takeaway: high performance pressure weakens the positive effect of authenticity on performance — relevant for high achievers trapped in “performance-mode”.
Accompany this with the statistic: “Authentic expression increases psychological resilience and trust by up to 37% in teams.” (Gallup, 2022).
So why does success not feel like you’ve won?
Because you’ve mastered dealing with high pressure performance for external achievement, but haven’t achieved inner alignment and a way to express yourself authentically in a way that lands, unlocks connection and even higher impact performance.
Maximum fulfilment comes when expression and achievement are in sync. You’re caught in the entrapment zone…
The Bridge: From Achievement to Authenticity
The Expression Gap and the Performance Trap keep us trapped in a vicious cycle, both fueling exhaustion and disconnection that arises from performing a false self.
The solution isn’t abandoning ambition, it’s aligning it with authenticity.
Here’s where xQ Expressive Intelligence comes in, something I have conceived and developed to act as the missing link that goes beyond EQ: where its not just about understanding our inner world such as emotions, complex ideas, playfulness, creativity etc, but also developing the skills to express them with authenticity and precision so it lands. It’s the new language of connection, revolutionising how men express and connect for maximum impact. And with it comes deeper trust, better communication, less burnout and unshakeable confidence.
This transformational nature of moving from unfulfilled achievement to authenticity or from pure performance mode to presence is validated by studies showing authentic leadership boosts performance when matched with psychological resources (Jang).
Here’s what can happen when you close the Expression Gap:
By developing xQ Expressive through a skills-based framework, you’ll learn to express what’s real, so you can reconnect with purpose and freedom. Things will feel like they flow more effortlessly, both individual expressions of yourself but also relationships.
When men express who they really are, not who they think they should be, they lead and love with clarity, energy, and peace.
As The Modern Man Leadership, Executive & Life Coach, I’ve spent several years coaching male leaders and professionals to break free from silent burnout, master my expressive intelligence framework, and rediscover freedom beyond success. And I believe this framing of the problem as an Expression Gap combined with the offer of a skill-based practical solution to expression, can serve as a North Star to men who feel lost in how to move forwards when everyone is telling them ‘just express yourself’ or ‘be yourself’ etc. If it was that easy, we wouldn’t have such a silent crisis with men today. We need something more practical.
I’m here to try and build off the already great work that’s taken place in the area of connection and vulnerability such as by Brene Brown, Esther Perel, Joe Hudson etc, to help solve this problem. To provide a way for men to close any expression gap, to enable us to reconnect and have maximum impact.
Closing thoughts…
You don’t have to escape the Performance Trap alone.
xQ Expressive Intelligence is a private, safe first step for men who aren’t yet ready to talk, but want to start expressing.
Take our Free xQ Expressive Intelligence Quiz and benchmark your ability to express yourself and connect with others here, so you can start closing your most debilitating, frustrating or inhibiting Expression Gaps that show up in your life.
True freedom isn’t what you achieve, it’s who you become when you stop performing and start expressing.