Being Good Enough

Do you feel good enough?  There is TV programme that I love in the UK called The Great British Bake Off. For those of you not familiar with it, the contestants – who are not professional bakers – create these amazing bakes and one is eliminated until they crown a worthy winner. This year a woman called Candice won the contest. She did some amazing bakes – always going the extra mile – when they called for three flavours she did four – when they wanted two layers she did three. Sometimes she was brilliant and other times it was a bit of disaster.

One thing you could not accused her of was being complacent – and she just knew that to win she had to risk all and use all her skill to make some amazing cakes. When she eventually won I was so surprise that one of the first things she said was (and I paraphrase) – maybe now I can know I’m good enough. Here was someone who was brilliant at what she did, who put in countless hours practising her bakes (her family ate a lot of peacock shaped cake one week – peacock for breakfast, peacock for lunch, peacock for dinner!) and yet she had felt she was not good enough. Oddly enough real peacocks seems to have no such qualms – it displays its tail in all it’s glory and has that look of – yep, I know I’m good enough!

It’s only we as humans who question if we are good enough.

So where does this ‘I’m not good enough’ come from? We are obviously not born with this belief, it is something we have picked up along the way. As children we start to experience this not being good enough when we start to compare ourselves with others. This can happen either because someone says something that makes us feel not good enough or we observe something and we assign the meaning of not being good enough to that situation.

And once we have that feeling of not being good enough our subconscious mind (because it is programmed to look for whatever we focus on) will then look for and show us other circumstances where this could look like it is true.

Now I say will look like it is true because it is purely our own meaning that we put onto things and someone else may see it totally in a different way. A good example of how we assign meaning showed up in a recent retreat that I did with a client in the Alpujarras. She was sharing one sentence of an email that she had received about a possible contract and the person had written something about working out costs when they spoke. They had finished that sentence with an exclamation mark. Her meaning that she assigned that question mark was that they thought that cost was going to be a problem. My take on it was that it was a way of acknowledging that there was going to be a significant cost involved and that it was fine. Interestingly my client found out in that call that my take was the right one!

This was just one small exclamation mark and she was worried about it. Just think what happens to our minds when we take on the belief of not being good enough and then the subconscious shows us multiple times when we can interpret the situation as being evidence for the belief.

And it is realising that it is only an interpretation, it is something we are creating is crucial. At some point we just need to stop and see that this is all just something our mind has made up. We have to stop comparing ourselves to others and know that in our own unique way we are all good enough.

There is no such thing as good enough.

Good enough as what? For what? All we actually need to do is take away the word enough. We can simply state – I am good. Because each of us is good in our own way. We all at any point in time are doing the best we possibly can in that moment. Never do we get out of bed and declare that today I’m going to be bad, we always do the best we can and that is good. There is no enough about it.

Candice is good. She is a good baker and she did the best she could at all times – even when her bakes did not work out well she was still good. We don’t need the comparison with the external world to know we are good. Like the peacock we can be confident in our own vibrant unique colours and go out and show the world just how good we are. The world needs us to show up in all our glory, not to hide our unique goodness like a peacock tail that is not on display.

You and everyone who reads this is good – remember there is no enough about it!

Photo courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@caleb_designe

Join me for a Satsang on being good enough

To deepen the topics of these blogs and hear what you have to say you are invited to join me for a Satsang, a coming together of like minds to explore the ideas in this blog. The Zoom video Satsang which will be around the theme of being good enough and our experience of it and it will be held on Thursday 10^th  November at 6.45pm UK time. You can go to this link to register and you will be sent the link to join on the day.

I do hope you will join us for this conversation and share your experiences as well as bringing any questions you may have. This Satsang is for us all – a conversation of discovery so it not just me talking – I want to hear what you have to say too. I look forward to seeing you all there.