Ep#202 Not Good Enough

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. My name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout Recovery Podcast where I teach professionals to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:28] What we think is true, we make true with our thinking. Truth is a slippery and malleable thing, changing with time, tide, convenience or whim. There is no absolute truth. That seat you're sitting on, it's not solid. It's energy.

[00:00:48] The flower you might see waving gently in the breeze: looks yellow to you? But what is yellow?

[00:00:57] Even if you and your companion agree that it's yellow, who's to agree you're both perceiving the same thing? 

[00:01:03] Memory is just the same. What we think happened the day dad slammed the door and left differs not only from what other family members think happened, but even from what we thought about it at that earlier time. 

[00:01:19] We make our truth because it suits us.

[00:01:23] Much of what we believe was in fact donated to us by adults in our first seven years of life when we lacked reasoning and discernment.

[00:01:31] So we just believed everything and those early beliefs largely form who we are or rather who we think we are. They govern our lifelong abilities, habits, choices, and behaviors. Who we hang out with and who we don't.

[00:01:48] They form our ego identity, until and unless we later consciously shift away.

[00:01:56] Most of us will either conform and mimic our parents or rebel and become the opposite.

[00:02:02] Think about your own societal and religious views formed in your youth. Which way did you jump?

[00:02:09] My own worldview was strongly influenced by parents who grew up, married, and raised a family in wartime. They experienced privations, uncertainty and fear. As well, of course, as loss of loved ones.

[00:02:24] They adopted this kind of one-for-all war spirit, where obedience, service, and loyalty were at a premium.

[00:02:33] My parents did do a very good job in a challenging world. We never went short of food and the basics. We were housed, educated, introduced to work, and my parents remained married until death.

[00:02:46] But all was not entirely well.

[00:02:50] I absorbed many unwholesome messages about people in life . I've yet to shake most of them off, even through conscious awareness and work. Early beliefs can be tenacious.

[00:03:03] How about you? What did you learn about people, life, success, money, family, religion? And how did those beliefs serve you when you were young? And how are they serving you now?

[00:03:16] You might reflect on your background, with whatever challenges you and your family faced, and be glad that you're a functioning adult. That you yourself have work, a home, a partner, perhaps a family of your own.

[00:03:31] But still, if you now experience ongoing stress, anxiety, unworthiness, overwhelm and a sense of not being good enough, that everyday suffering can be tough to bear, can't it?

[00:03:47] Is it hard for you to experience satisfaction in the small stuff? Or the large stuff? Are you always on tenter hooks, worried, ill at ease? Do your guts twist anxiously at ordinary everyday events at work or at home? Or at other people's reactions around you and to you? 

[00:04:10] And does all of that affect your wellbeing, health, sleep, and social behaviors?

[00:04:17] Feeling not good enough -arguably, the root of such ongoing distress and reactivity- is, for want of a better word, normal in our modern culture. Many of us go around tormented every day by self-doubt, fear of failure or rejection.

[00:04:37] The difficulty, perhaps, is that when we believe we are no good, we walk in the world as no good.

[00:04:44] We shy away from intimacy and distract ourselves from the very things that we truly need, and then we feel worse, which reinforces our belief that we don't deserve to be okay.

[00:04:57] We drop into survival mode. What does that look like? Mental, emotional and physical distress. Fear.

[00:05:07] And this makes us greedy for power, control and validation. Not particularly popular moves according to the people around us.

[00:05:15] On a day-to-day basis, we are thenceforth in life never satisfied.

[00:05:22] Nothing ever resolves.

[00:05:24] We try to manufacture satisfaction so we can feel better, get some solid ground under our feet, and then of course, relax.

[00:05:33] But we never truly arrive there, even for a moment.

[00:05:37] So what is this satisfaction we seek?

[00:05:40] Ultimately, don't we all just want to feel safe? And wouldn't that come from being truly loved and accepted? Like someone could be depended on to always have our back, even when we act a bit crazy, so we can just relax in our skin?

[00:05:59] I think we want to feel that it's okay to be us, but we keep undercutting that feeling with our own story of unworthiness.

[00:06:10] So how much time do you spend each day trying to relax, just as you? Trying to avoid confrontation and stress? Trying to escape your painful emotions? Or trying to believe that you're okay?

[00:06:23] For people raised to believe in themselves, who were permitted full self-expression without being rejected as youngsters, who had an influential adult accept and love them unconditionally, I imagine all this must be a lot easier . Because when poor behavior is challenged or corrected in a child who feels accepted, they must surely continue to feel secure.

[00:06:48] I read once about the Dalai Lama being asked by a student what to do about self-hatred. He didn't understand. He didn't know what the person meant, because he said in his Tibetan heritage, there was no such thing as self hatred. Children were raised to understand that they were born perfect, with what he would've called Buddha Nature. And that moments of bad behavior could not affect this, being only like clouds passing before the sun.

[00:07:19] That wasn't my experience. In my upbringing, self-hatred wasn't simply normal, it was almost branded a virtuous necessity. We were taught to be self negating as opposed to proud, boastful, self-seeking or superior. We were taught a kind of service to others that required diminishing oneself to a state of unworthiness.

[00:07:44] In fact, my recollection from my early years was being admonished by my mother. "No one will like you if...", and she would add on the behavior she was trying to discourage in me. And I really think the words changed to suit the occasion.

[00:08:00] As an adult, looking back, I imagine she was trying to protect me from disappointing other people, causing them to reject me.

[00:08:09] But at that tender age, as a young child, when I received her scalding, I understood that to mean that nobody liked me. Full stop.

[00:08:18] That was my flavor of not good enough, and it's still an undercurrent in my psyche today, to be overcome consciously.

[00:08:26] Here's an example. I had some bad news yesterday, so this morning I went to the beach for an early swim with my friends. Magical! Mornings really don't come any better than that for me. And returning home, as I walked in the front door, there was a pale dawn light seeping through the window shutters, filtered by leaves, and it was casting a beautiful dancing shadow display on the wooden floor in the doorway.

[00:08:54] And I had to laugh, thinking, what is it more that I want than this? Really, can I not be satisfied by friendship, nature, the ocean, beauty, and the essentially limitless joy that is available? Even while I was thinking that, I could sense the joy in me, but I still felt unsatisfied.

[00:09:15] Okay, so the question becomes: How can I immerse myself in joy? Let the light of nature and human kindness warm me?

[00:09:25] As a coach, of course, I'm fully aware that every feeling I want, I can create.

[00:09:31] I teach Emotional Intelligence. Humans can minimize the duration of negative feelings and create more positive feelings, by choice, under any conditions.

[00:09:45] But I'm not immune to any emotion. No one is.

[00:09:49] And underneath my desire to feel good, lay the bad news I've been suppressing or pushing aside.

[00:09:56] It bubbled up and I needed time to honor it, feel it, let it pulse through me. Disowning it wasn't going to work. I felt like, In this instance, I was letting somebody I cared about down and that hit me really hard.

[00:10:15] And so, for me, that's just time to connect with somebody I trust and talk it all out. And when I do that, that releases all that stuck energy so I can get back on deck, back to believing I'm... not a hero, but simply good enough.

[00:10:30] Because when we do feel not good enough. When that old ghost pops up, that seeming truth, we still have agency.

[00:10:39] If we think it's true that we are not good enough, then we must learn to release that belief and replace it with worthiness. That's a choice and a practice. It's a life affirming habit that allows us to show up as loving in our world. Learn beliefs can be unlearned.

[00:11:02] Not good enough was never a truth, about me or about you, and it was never intended to be a mantra.

[00:11:10] So, perhaps this is the opportunity to teach yourself unconditional love, for yourself first. Coming home to a warm, generous heart, actually, the one that lies inside your own chest is step one. And I can't recommend it highly enough as the pilot light to receiving love more deeply from other people.

[00:11:35] Love is abundant. Disconnection blocks it.

[00:11:39] So we need to lean back in to the circle of love around and within us to thrive.

[00:11:45] It's really that simple.

[00:11:47] So if you'd like to explore this: Start by giving yourself the love that you wish you could get from other people. Learn to gently refute the not-good-enough belief when it pops up and replace it with whatever you really want to hear. How loved and wonderful you are. How good your heart and intentions. 

[00:12:08] If that sounds kind of weird when you start doing it, persist, invest energy in it. Practice. Until it sounds more natural and it becomes a habit for you. Of course, it's not a positive affirmation, it's actually a felt sense of connection in your body. For helping you to learn this process, read a book called Joy on Demand by Cjade-Meng Tan, who is the former Jolly Good fellow at Google.

[00:12:38] Just do it.

[00:12:40] Because the cure for burnout starts here, and I'm not kidding.

[00:12:45] Do not starve yourself of your own love and approval, rather bask in it.

[00:12:51] If you're denying yourself love, acceptance, and grace, you will not feel love, acceptance and grace when it's offered by other people. It's no wonder then that we feel excluded and disheartened.

[00:13:05] So include yourself back into your heart. Declare yourself good enough and look for all the reasons why that's true. Let your heart open to life. It's the truest guide there is.

[00:13:19] If you find this concept a bit difficult to grasp or practice, if you feel that you're not good enough and you're stressed, isolated, and burning out, please come and talk to me.

[00:13:30] I can teach you because I believe in your innate goodness already. And I will show you how to believe in yourself, and that is where everything changes.

[00:13:41] If you'd like that, go to dexrandall.com and book a time to talk.

[00:13:47] Also, please, if you know somebody else who would enjoy this episode, please do share it with them, because many people suffer in silence and shame.

[00:13:56] Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with you next week.