Am I good enough?

Yes, you are! Stop asking this question and quell your inner critic.

How many times have you avoided doing something because you were worried about what people might think or believed what you were doing was not good enough?

Many people, especially women, suffer from feeling they are not good enough; not pretty enough, not clever enough, not rich enough, or not successful enough. Sometimes It doesn’t matter what you do, it just isn’t good enough.

There are numerous reasons to feel this way. Maybe your parents had extremely high standards that you could just never attain. At school, it didn’t matter how well you did you never lived up to their expectations. Maybe they could have had hopes for you to become a doctor or lawyer or follow in their footsteps in some way, but you were just not interested and they did not bother to hide their disappointment. Maybe your sibling excelled at sports, music or chemistry but you were only good at art and they could not see any value in that. There are endless reasons but the result of this tends to have a very harsh inner critic constantly reminding you that you are unworthy. Unworthy of love, of success or of just being happy.

No one is immune to this. Even people who appear brimming with confidence, sail through life without a care in the world while achieving great things without seemingly having to try. You can bet they occasionally have a little devil sitting on their shoulder telling them just how worthless they are.

Years ago, I started creating a course on fairy tales and archetypes, but this course was never completed and never released. The major reason for this is that I never thought it was good enough. I still have the work I did for this course and one day will release it, but currently, it is in a folder on my pc waiting for me to come back to it.

I finished writing the How to Become a Wise Woman course around two years ago. I released it on the Teachable platform around a year ago. Last week I finished transferring it to my own website, The Ancient Wisdom of Women.

How many people know about this? Hardly any. This is because I haven’t told many people. The reason for this is I am just not sure it is good enough. What if no one likes it? This is rubbish because I have given to a couple of friends to check over and they love it. I have been over it many times and every time I do I feel proud of it and want other women to benefit from my experience. So why am I not shouting about it from the rooftops? Fear that it, and therefore I, am not good enough.

As I was writing this course, part of me felt a fraud. Who was I to be writing about being a wise woman if I still thought I wasn’t good enough? Surely I should have sorted all that out by now. But I’m not perfect, I am working on myself and especially on those traits that I think are holding me back and preventing me from reaching my full potential. So, I can say that I am a wise woman because I am aware that I am not a finished article, I am a work in progress that is changing and improving myself all the time.

We are all works in progress. And to be wise we must be aware of this and be prepared to work with the areas of ourselves and our lives that we feel could be better.

What can you do when your inner critic just won’t stop that nagging?

When the annoying devil on your shoulder starts with that old familiar chatter stop and ask yourself the following questions:

• • What does not good enough mean?
  • Not good enough for what?
  • For whom?
  • How could you become good enough?
  • What exactly would you have to do?
  • Who says you are not good enough?

When you start asking these questions the whole idea of not being good enough starts to fall apart.

Stop comparing yourself to others. We all do it, you can guarantee that the person whose life you envy wishes they were someone else too. People’s lives are rarely as perfect as they sometimes make them seem. Instead, see them and yourself as human beings getting on with their lives and doing the best that they can.

Think about all you have achieved. Instead of thinking about how you would like things to be think about how far you have come and the things that you have achieved. Look at the progress you have made rather than what you would like to accomplish in the future.

Let go of your expectations. If you expect something to happen and it doesn’t happen, then you’re going to feel disappointed. Instead of concentrating on the results spend your time and effort on the progress and how you are going to get there.

When your inner critic is being particularly cruel ask yourself if you would speak to anyone else the way did you well speaking to yourself. If the answer is no, then why are you doing it to yourself?

I have a quote sitting on my desk it’s by Katharine Hepburn and it says, If you always do what pleases you, at least one person is satisfied. You will never make everyone happy so really there is no point trying. But the one person whose approval you do need is your own. This doesn’t make you selfish or I mean you don’t care about anyone else; it just means that you do not need validation from others to feel worthy. So, if you start to feel self-doubt creeping up on you remind yourself that you are good enough, even with or maybe even because of all your flaws and imperfections. You, along with everyone else in the world, are a work in progress.

If you want help overcoming your inner demons my How to Become a Wise Woman e-course will help you with this and many other dilemmas.

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