If my calendar is packed, I feel solid. If it’s empty, I start side-eyeing my own career choices. I wish I could tell you that never happens anymore, but it does.
That reflex is not a personal flaw. It is psychology doing exactly what it was trained to do.
In the research paper Contingencies of Self Worth (by Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe, published in 2001 in Psychological Review), the authors explain that many people base their self-worth on performance-based domains like achievement, productivity, and competence. When those domains are going well, we feel worthy. When they wobble, so do we.
Accounting is basically a master class in performance-based worth.
It makes total sense that our brains decide this must be how value works. The problem is what happens on days when nothing is on fire.
For a long time, I believed this equation: If they need me, I matter.
I was the fixer, the closer, and the one who remembered which client hated email and which one always forgot payroll approval. That felt good, important, and like job security.
What it actually was, was exhaustion with a flattering story attached. Every system had gaps because I was the gap filler. Every process stayed fuzzy because I knew how it worked. The firm ran, but only as long as I kept running, too.
Jennifer Crocker describes this perfectly in Contingencies of Self Worth. When self-esteem depends on performance, people don’t just work harder. They become more controlling, more defensive, and more afraid of failure, because failure stops being an event and starts feeling like an identity threat.
That was me, not heroic, just terrified of being replaceable. Here is the punchline. The more indispensable I became, the less sustainable the firm was.
This is not about motivational posters or positive thinking. This is about how humans are wired.
In Self Determination Theory (developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in 1985 and expanded in 2000), researchers explain the difference between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation comes from outcomes, approval, and rewards. Intrinsic motivation comes from values, identity, and purpose.
When your worth is tied to output, everything becomes extrinsic. You perform, but your nervous system never rests. You can succeed all week and still feel one bad email away from unraveling.
Burnout research confirms this. In The Truth About Burnout (by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, first published in 1997 and updated in 2008), burnout is not caused by working too hard. It is caused by chronic mismatch, especially when people feel they must constantly prove their value to stay legitimate.
Accounting firms accidentally create this mismatch all the time. We praise the person who saves the day, reward availability, and we normalize last-minute heroics. We then wonder why the most capable people are tired, irritable, and quietly fantasizing about jobs with fewer spreadsheets and more houseplants.
Pick one recurring task you currently own and design it to survive your absence. Not forever and not perfectly, but just long enough that the firm does not panic when you take a real day off.
Document the steps and what ‘good’ looks like. Decide where judgment lives and where it does not. This moves your value from doing the work to designing the work, which research (according to Deci and Ryan) shows supports autonomy and intrinsic motivation.
Also, it is incredibly humbling in the best possible way.
Stop asking yourself how busy you were this week and start noticing how calm the systems were.
Michael H. Kernis explains in Toward a Conceptualization of Optimal Self Esteem (published in 2003) that stable self-worth comes from consistency, not constant validation. Calm systems create consistent experiences, which makes your sense of value less reactive.
Busy feels important, but calm is actually effective.
Block time for thinking, documenting, and improving things that already work. This time will feel uncomfortable because it produces no immediate proof that you are valuable. That discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is a sign you are breaking the ‘output = worth’ habit.
Research consistently shows that environments that support autonomy and purpose create more sustainable engagement than environments built on pressure and performance alone.
Also, this is the work that lets you sleep.
When your value comes from who you are, not what you personally produce, the firm changes, you stop hovering, your team steps up, and the business stops relying on your adrenaline.
The research is clear. Self-worth anchored to identity and values is more resilient than self-worth anchored to outcomes, as shown in the work of Crocker and Wolfe.
You were never meant to be the system. You were meant to build one, to trust it, and to still matter on the days when your to-do list is short.