Welcome to 2022. The year we leave 👆this👆 question behind. Seriously, it's exhausting. Exhausting enough that I wrote about it in the book:
We spend so much time and energy spiraling in this question, looking at it in multiple contexts and often all at the same time—hands up if you’re with me— that we lose ourselves in the swirl of not measuring up.
When I say we lose ourselves, I don’t just mean in the context of a momentary loss of self when we can’t tell which way is up. I also mean a disconnect with the bigger picture—who we are at our core. We actually forget who we are. We can get so lost in trying to be a enough as a parent or enough as a partner or enough as a boss or enough as an employee… that we start to think that who we are is directly tied to our success or failure in those spaces. We lose touch with ourselves because we’ve attached our identity to what we perceive “enoughness” to be.
This all starts in childhood (I know, I know. Doesn't everything?!)
And it's rooted in something called essential/necessary narcissism.
A perspective on the world that we have when we are kids and learning that we are our own person;
when we are developing our own identity,
but when we don't have the context of other people and their experience as being independent of our own.
When we are that little, we think EVERYTHING is about us. EVERYTHING is our fault. We are the CAUSE for everything.
I see this in my kids all the time. If I'm stressed out, Kennedy will assume she did something wrong, and Jackson will act up….
We have to outgrow this.
While necessary narcissism supports our development of our sense of self, we have to let it go as we grow up. Otherwise, we'll continue to assume that all bad things that happen are our fault.
(And the good things I suppose, but we're wired for survival and naturally we focus on the negative don't we?!)
Does anyone else jump to “what did I do wrong?” and “how is this my fault?” when something in life goes sideways.
If we aren't careful, that becomes an indicator of our worthiness or enoughness.
Except it's NOT.
It's NOT.
'Enoughness lives outside of family dynamics and lifestyle. Enoughness is not about rich or poor, stable or chaotic, healthy or unhealthy. Enoughness is pervasive. It’s an attack on identity. It’s part of the human condition. And it’s an illusion."
Part of the process in writing the book was to really sit with this concept of enoughness. It's been a key piece of my own journey. Something that I thought I could magically fix and eliminate in one fell swoop.
Laughable right?
But after 30+ years of struggling with the “Am I enough?” question, I was really hoping to find a quick fix. Well, that's not exactly easy when it's deeply wired into your personality structure. You've got to start with changing how you think.
This is where I give you a gentle nudge (or a swift kick depending on your Enneagram type) to book a clarity call so we can work on that thinking.
Why? Becayse we are living in an epidemic of not-enoughness and it's time for that to change.
It starts with you changing it for you.
xoxo
Juli