Learning your Best is Enough

We are enough. Our best is good enough. We are capable, but we are not equally capable in all areas. This inequality in capabilities creates the illusion that our best is not good enough. Anyone can look at any situation and find an example of someone doing it better. That is because every act is made up of a thousand micro actions. Some of those micro actions we will excel at, and others we will struggle with. That doesn’t mean our best is not good enough, An example that resonates with my clients is waking up. If we look at the process of waking up, it involves biological, physiological, and mental processes. Almost all of these are beyond our control, yet a lot of folx rate how they wake up as “successful” or “unsuccessful” based on their concept of what waking up should be, rather than what it is. At its core, waking up is a process we have little to no control over. Setting an alarm does not guarantee that we will wake up. The act of waking up is ultimately down to our physiology. We can learn techniques to account for physiology and wake up at designated times, but no person is inherently good or bad at waking up.

We do this black-and-white good-or-bad assessment with a lot of things, and as we do, we build a rating system for ourselves based on how closely we achieve what we imagine as the ideal. Going back to waking up, some people view a successful wake up as waking up before their alarm. Looking at that exemplifies the tricks and traps we create for ourselves to back up this myth that we are not good enough. Another aspect of feeling like we are enough is the amount of joy we feel about our success. If we have achieved success in any arena of our lives, then we must also be happy in that arena, or we are failing. Success and feeling like we are enough is grounded in our ability to be happy and know what it is that will make us happy. For me this is an impossible task to set for ourselves. How can we know if a thing or situation will make us happy if we have never experienced it? How do we predict happiness with any accuracy? Knowing we are enough is about knowing who we are and what makes us happy.

Once we accept that we do not know whether most things will make us happy, and that the things we are working towards are our best guess, we can let go of the expectation of perfect knowledge and perfectionism. If we accept that we don’t know for certain that we will be the same person with the same perspective once we achieve our goals, then we can move forward with grace and self-acceptance. Trusting ourselves to be able to pivot and adapt creates the courage to go for the things we think we want. It also prevents us from feeling like there is only one thing that will make us happy. Trusting ourselves to go after the things we think will create happiness builds hope. Hope is an essential element when it comes to knowing you are enough, feeling self-love, and experiencing happiness. By knowing that we can work towards and achieve goals, we ground ourselves in trust. The fact that you are alive, even if it is just barely, shows that there are things you know how to do. Knowing that you can do what’s necessary to survive can create the foundation for knowing that you can do what is necessary to thrive. I promise, you are enough.

Posted on Monday: 30 January, 2023