Feeling Not Good Enough: Facing the Core Fear

What do you do when you’re feeling “not good enough”?

One of the biggest things that I work on with clients, and something that we even devote time to during our life coach training program, is this: how to handle feelings that you’re not good enough.

The fear that you’re not good enough is a fear routine that affects everyone, though it shows up differently for each person (for some of you, “not good enough” expresses itself as going into workaholic over-achiever mode; for others it shows up as comparisons; for others it shows up as procrastination and avoidance and not finishing what you start).

So let’s unpack this feeling not good enough thing, a bit. There are logical fallacies that underlie feeling “not good enough” (they’re not the standard speech and debate logical fallacies, but they are logical fallacies in that if you deconstruct the logic, you find the fallacy underneath).

How do you Define Feeling Like You’re Enough?

Consider this question: How would you even begin to define what qualifies as “good enough”?

You can probably list several ideas: “I’d be good enough if I…didn’t snap at my kids, made more money, lost X number of pounds, actually committed deeply to my spiritual practice, stopped procrastinating…”

But then we start to deconstruct this definition of “enough” and realize…

Can you really define what makes a person “enough”? Can you really define what makes you “enough”?

Walk through this with me: If someone makes plenty of money and is the “perfect” weight and is deeply committed to her spiritual practice and never procrastinates, many of the markers we tell ourselves would determine our own “enoughness”…

…how do you know for sure that those factors make her “enough”? Or what if she does all of those things–but she also yells at her kids. What if she has a massive rage-fest, one time a year, and she’s a perfect mother every other day of the year? What then?

I’m sure you see the point I’m getting at–that this “enough” idea is essentially undefinable. The boundaries are loose and without a container.

Knowing the Origin Story Might Not Lead to Feeling Like You’re Enough

People often think that if they understand the origin story—where “feeling not enough” started—then they’ll suddenly be free from the self-doubt and fear of being not enough.

But this one is only partially true. It’s helpful to see that whoever taught you that you weren’t good enough, only taught you that because they didn’t believe that they were good enough, but knowing that won’t necessarily “free” you from feeling like you yourself are not enough. It might even twist you up into feeling strangely guilty about being upset with how you were raised, like you “shouldn’t” feel that way.

Then there’s the opposite take, of responding to that origin story with anger and lashing out as a way to “fight back” against how you were raised. Unfortunately, I see that a lot of well-intentioned coaches, therapists, workshop leaders, etc., will then encourage their clients to tell that person to “Fuck off” in an angry letter that they’ll never send, or they’ll tell their clients that to say Shut up! to the “not enough” voice whenever it arises.

The problem with this is that knowing the origin story doesn’t change the origin story—it doesn’t change the past.

And abusing the person who caused the original harm, just has you practicing abuse.

You Can’t Affirmation Your Way out of Feeling Not Enough

The next trick people try is to affirm their way out of feeling not enough. The hope is that if you just say “I am enough! I am enough” over and over, you’ll believe it.

Now, if you feel really great reciting that out loud—if there’s no friction and no sense of fighting to get yourself to believe something that you fundamentally don’t believe, then have at it with the affirmations. But if you are trying the affirmations and feel like you’re just arguing with yourself, then you need to go a layer deeper:

Shouting “I am enough!” to try to affirm your way into believing it, is already built on a faulty premise that you aren’t enough.

To operate on a faulty premise to begin with, will only keep you stuck.

You have to stop with the faulty premise.

You have to stop with the assumption that you aren’t enough.

Now, I know that you’ve heard this, “You are already good enough” before, but let me illustrate this with a visual picture:

Imagine standing in a room where there’s a table with a buffet of food.

Except, you are standing with your back to this buffet. Imagine it: a long table, tons of food, and it’s all right there. Because you’re standing with your back to the food, you’re assuming that there is no food. Because you’re assuming that there is no food, you’re saying “I HAVE FOOD. I HAVE FOOD” over and over, in the hopes that then the food will come.

All of that effort is based on the faulty assumption that food isn’t there. If you’d only stop assuming that the food isn’t there in the first place, you’d see that it’s actually there.

Same thing with feeling good enough: the striving and hustling to be good enough is built on the faulty assumption that you aren’t fundamentally good enough, to begin with. This hustling ends up turning you in circles–it’s the hustling that’s distracting you from what’s already there.

It’s all already there. You are already good enough.

Hustling to do things to be good enough, isn’t what makes someone good enough.

Shouting, “I am good enough; I feel good enough” over and over isn’t what makes someone good enough.

The Truth About Feeling Good Enough

Here’s what does make you start feeling good enough:
No longer assuming there is even a “good enough” that could be defined.
No longer assuming that you’re not good enough (letting go of the faulty assumption).
No longer striving or hustling or trying to find evidence that you are good enough (since all that striving would be built on a faulty assumption).

The voices of “not good enough” are really saying…

That they are just habits. This just might be habits that you’ve had for so long, you continue to reinforce them without realizing it.

It’s through listening without attachment to this voice, that you learn this valuable information and can then give less weight to the message–next time it comes up, you might take a breath and say to yourself, “Ah, yes. I see how I’m turning to that old message, again.”

That it’s scary to go after things. Maybe the reason you tell yourself that you’re not enough because it stops you from going after what you want. And if you don’t try, then you don’t fail…therefore keeping you from experiencing failure.

It’s hard to make mistakes. This “not good enough” voice might think that making mistakes is the worst thing in the world, and that it’s protecting you by telling you that you aren’t good enough, so don’t try, and therefore you won’t make mistakes.

The voice of not enough might not realize that actually, what would really help when you make mistakes is developing resilience through self-forgiveness.

It’s listening to the voice–not rejecting it, making it bad or wrong, or trying to sprinkle affirmation fairy dust on it until it goes away–that gives you this incredibly insightful information.

Finally Feeling Good Enough

Assume positive intent on your own behalf—that you are good enough, as you are.

Look at what you might stand to gain by telling yourself that you’re “not good enough”—it might be nothing at all and you’ll realize it’s just an old habit, or it might be that you “gain” the temporary benefit of not really going after what you want by stopping yourself with this “I’m not good enough” stuff.

Be kind to yourself, compassionate—not abusive. No one feels good enough as a result of abusing themselves.