I took the Gallup Strengthfinder assessment a few days ago. Troy had taken it, and as with any assessment you immediately want to know how all your friends and family would score. Troy’s number 2 strength was the same as my number 1 strength and despite he and I being polar opposites in every other strength, we shared one common quality. That of the Achiever.

Gallup explains the Achiever as having a constant need for attainment, an internal fire burning inside them. We feel as if every day starts at zero and at the end of the day, we must accomplish something meaningful to feel good about ourselves.

I have such a love hate relationship with the Achiever in me.

On one hand, I have some many amazing results to be proud of. I’ve worked really hard over the years to achieve some big results.

On the other hand, directly after achieving many of those things I often felt empty, or had a sense of not enough that made me move quickly towards another goal/race/accomplishment.

Every strength has a shadow side and when I started to unpack the dynamic that exists with the achiever in me, I learned more about myself than I could have imagined.

Achieving, in the manner I was doing it, is very much an earthly endeavor, a task on the “horizontal” plane. I’m trying to win races for goodness sake, like literally swimming, biking and running across the earth, trying to do it better than lots of others on earth… this is literally a horizontal task in the purest definition of horizontal.

hor·i·zon·tal

parallel to the plane of the horizon; at right angles to the vertical.

And the downside of being dependent on horizontal achievement, is that it left me totally blind, at a right angle to, the vertical. The spiritual realm. The bigger picture, the source of faith, stability, trust, and enlightenment. That’s the shadow side to achievement, it fosters overdevelopment in one plane.

And I will never forget the day I came to this fact in therapy. That awareness was life changing and also deeply painful. So much suffering, so many quests, standing lost upon so many summits, looking out and wondering “what now?” Where does someone like me even go with that new awareness?

For me, the months after that awareness were the second most painful time of the last three years (the first being directly after the breakdown when I felt so much loss and failure that I thought I might die for awhile).

I spent those months wanting to move away from my pain and being unable to use achievement to do it. My main strategy for moving through my life was rendered useless and instead I was supposed to find salvation in the vertical arena which I knew nothing about. Luckily, as I would come to find out through experience, we are all born spiritual beings, whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not, and whether we act on it or not.

It’s been a wild ride, the road to incorporating this new realm into my life. It often has me at odds with the achiever in me, questioning my intentions, my needs, and my desires, and trying to determine if they are all playing nice together. But I can for sure say that I’m not on autopilot any more, my life is not one big reaction to things unknown and unidentified. I’m not running full force into life any more. I’m tender stepping along like I’m navigating stepping stones across a creek. It’s different, and the push and pull of horizontal and vertical are starting to become a more integrated part of me. I envision a day where I am a blend, a balanced force, taking on the Earth in my own unique, woken, present, wild, and honest way.

When I was reading the results of the StrengthFinder to Troy a couple days ago and laughing over my number one strength being that of the Achiever, I realized that I’m making progress. I’m coming back around . Because a year ago I would have cried sad tears at those results, and 4 years ago I would have been proud of them. Today I can say “yes, that is a beautiful part of me, but not the whole picture.”