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In today's episode we're going to talk about enoughness. This is the belief that you are enough and that you're doing enough. A balanced life is a life where you don't constantly feel like you should be doing more. A balanced life is a life that doesn't feel like you're lacking anything. A balanced life is a life of enough. So today I'm going to focus on three “not enough” thoughts that are causing imbalance and then teach you how to turn those around so that you can begin to create balance by feeling enough.
Topics In This Episode:
Why you need to feel enough in order to feel balanced
3 common “not enough” thoughts that are causing imbalance
Why you shouldn’t believe your “not enough” thoughts
How practicing sufficiency can counter the feeling of not being enough
How over-working is connected to feeling not enough
3 ways to practice your enoughness
Show Notes:
Want to learn the building blocks to creating a balanced life and join other working moms who are doing the same? Check out the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective, a lifetime membership that includes 30 videos and workbooks, weekly coaching and an exclusive community to support you in creating an ambitious and balanced working mom life no matter your circumstance. Check it out at: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective.
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Transcript
Intro
Hey, ambitious working moms in today's episode we're going to be talking about enoughness. This is the belief that you are enough and that you're doing enough. A balanced life is a life where you don't constantly feel like you should be doing more. A balanced life is a life that doesn't feel like you're lacking anything. A balanced life is a life where you feel really good about YOU. It's a life of enough. So today I'm going to focus on three “not enough” beliefs that are causing imbalance and then teach you how to turn those around so that you can begin to create balance by feeling enough.
Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it!
I was on a breakthrough call the other day and the woman asked me what work-life balance really meant to me personally and how I created it in my own life. I thought about it for a moment and I said it's because I think the amount of time that I spend with my kids is enough and the amount I work is enough and the impact I am making through my work is enough.
My life feels like enough. That's why I feel balanced. On some level a balanced life is a life of “enoughness” and I wanted to spend some time talking about this idea of enoughness today because for sure the opposite is a life of overworking, proving yourself and lack of confidence...
All things that cause imbalance.
So I really want to walk you through how a life of lack, or a life where you don't feel enough or like you're doing enough there's a life that feels unbalanced. And then we'll talk about how a life that feels enough, that feels just right, is a life of balance. And then ultimately as I do in all my podcasts I'll give you a few ways of shifting your brain so that life feels enough.
So here's what we have to remember as we begin this conversation about enoughness. You need to remember that your thoughts generate emotion in your body and your emotions are what fuel your actions.
Common thoughts when you don’t feel enough.
So the most common “not enough” thoughts sound like this:
I'm not doing enough
I'm not good enough
I’m not enough
How does ‘I’m not doing enough’ feel for you?
Let’s talk about each of these: Really take a moment and close your eyes and think about the thought “I'm not doing enough”. When you say that to yourself how does that make you feel? What comes up for me is failure and anxiousness. I'm not doing enough feels like I should be doing more because as an ambitious person, I know I can do more. So if I'm telling myself I'm not doing enough and I'm feeling anxious and like I'm failing - the most likely thing to do is to keep doing. To keep working. To check more things off the list. To simply keep taking more and more action until it feels like enough and I no longer feel anxious. It’s that feeling that we get at the end of the day when we didn't get a particular task done, and so we jump online and keep on working a couple more hours at the end of the day because we don’t want to feel anxious anymore and because we think if we just keep working, just keep doing, we are going to end that anxiousness. And on some level it’s true...but it is also all of the action that we don’t want to be taking. An imbalanced life is a life when you keep on doing and overwork, so ultimately it is not the action we want to take. We have to shift the thought ‘I'm not doing enough’, and remember - we will talk about this a little later in the podcast, just because you think you’re not doing enough isn't actually true. It’s just what your brain is offering up to you.
What emotions the thought ‘I’m not good enough’ creates.
So let’s talk about this second thought “I'm not good enough”. How does that make you feel? For me it makes me feel inadequate. Where I'm not doing enough is more centered on taking action, I'm not good enough feels very personal. Like I don't meet the standard, like there's something wrong with me like I have what it takes but I can’t meet the goal. And when you're feeling like something’s wrong with you, like you're inadequate, you tend to do one of two things: either beat yourself up and self-judge or you move into people-pleasing and you say yes to everything just to prove yourself and your value.
So once again if you are constantly judging yourself beating yourself up you have a lot of negative self-talk or you're in constant people-pleasing mode trying to prove yourself and your worth to everyone, it will be really hard to have a balanced life because you don't feel really awesome about you and you're not really living the life you want to lead, you're living the life you think other people want you to lead.
OK so this last thought seems similar to the last one except it has a little bit of a different flavor, the thought is “I’m not enough” – it still feels very personal it's not necessarily focused on action so much is just on you as an individual, but what I think makes this different is that this one feels like you're insufficient. Like you weren't born with the right stuff. You're innately lacking. When you feel insufficient the two common actions are: to give up before you start, like you're very risk-averse and you tend to not try things for fear of proving you're not enough or you move into a lot of action to make up for what you lack innately.
How I handle the thought ‘I’m not enough’.
This last thought I'm not enough and feeling very insufficient is one of the most common loops in my head. For most of my life, I think this is what drove me to achieve, to get top grades, to go out for asb, start college when I was a junior in high school, make friends with my teachers. There's a constant need to prove myself. And then as I started my coaching business, I needed to get everything right, this showed up as perfectionism and although I would take a lot of action I never really believed I was enough to accomplish the goal and bring in clients and make the money I wanted to make so I would self-sabotage before I even started. So this thought was really patterned into me. I'll pick up the story a little bit later as we talk about ways of feeling enough and how I have worked on that since but all that to be said I'm very intimate with feeling not enough and insufficient.
OK, just to recap for a moment we have 3 not enough thoughts that cause imbalance in our life because they push us to overwork, prove ourselves or feel bad about ourselves. Those thoughts are:
I'm not doing enough
I'm not good enough
and I'm not enough
These are the source of so much of the imbalance that we create in our life. And, these thoughts aren't even true! As I was saying before, just because we think them, doesn't mean that they are true. There are so many other types of things that we can be thinking about ourselves and our work and what we do that are so much more useful than thinking that you aren't good enough and that you aren't doing enough, and you’re not enough. And these thoughts just become a trap that is patterned into us and causes a whole lot of havoc.
OK, so let's talk about thoughts that bring about a feeling of enough.
My favorite enough thought is “I'm exactly where I should be”. This thought makes me feel very grounded like I don't need anything more, I don't need to be anywhere else, I'm exactly where I should be. For me this thought really counters the need to keep doing more. That thought like I need to keep working or I should get to the laundry, that pull that we have into action that can sometimes feel like we have no control over it this thought really counters that because it focuses you right here in the moment. When you're on the ground playing Jenga with your 4-year-old like I was this morning, and you're having that thought I'm exactly where I should be, even though breakfast needs to be made and even though I still haven't made the kids lunches and even though none of us are dressed yet for the day, I'm exactly where I should be reminds me that I don't want to be anywhere else than this moment with my son is more important than all of us other things, in fact, we could even be late to school and it would be OK.
How to practice ‘I am enough’ feelings.
A second favorite thought that brings about enoughness in my life is simply the direct thought, “I am enough”. It's a focus on your value and your worth. Another similar thought is, “I have everything I need right now”. This is a thought that focuses your brain on what you have instead of what you don't. It focuses on your strengths and the potential inside of you. You don't have to go out and do anything more or find something else or learn something, you are enough, you have everything you need right now. These two thoughts really make you feel sufficient. Like you're not lacking in anything. When you're feeling sufficient, it also brings about a natural confidence. I have everything I need right now to make this decision. I don't need to go out and research more, I don't need to go and ask another person's opinion, I can simply decide I have everything I need. I don't need to ask permission for my husband to go take some time for myself or to invest in coaching as I speak to a lot of women about. I am enough, I'm worth the time and the money, and the resources of our family.
When you feel enough you don’t need anything outside of yourself for validation or to feel complete.
When you feel enough, adequate, sufficient, you don't have to prove yourself to anybody. You celebrate your accomplishments instead of focusing on what you didn't get done. You don't go around searching for something to kind of fill you up whether that's work or more time with your kids or even your health, you don’t need those things…you already feel like you are enough, the time you spend working or with your family is enough. It’s a life that feels more calm, focused, and balanced.
Why trying to stop overworking isn’t actually going to solve anything.
So here's what a lot of women do, they know that they need to stop overworking, that they need to hold better boundaries around work, that they need to say no to their boss more, that they need to make time for themselves, it doesn't feel like rocket science, this is just what we all assume a balanced life entails. So most women when they try to create work-life balance just try to fix these things they just try to stop overworking, they just try to say no more and go get their nails done on occasion. The reason this doesn't really work or tends to fail after a short period of time is because you haven't changed the thought driving these actions in the first place. They're trying to put better boundaries around work and stop overworking while still thinking they're not doing enough. The big conflict there.
If you want to stop overworking and create a better work-life balance in your life then you have to believe, you have to train your brain to believe that you're doing enough and that you are enough.
How to train your brain.
So let's jump into talking about training your brain. Because remember your brain is always going to offer up to you the thought that you think the most, doesn't mean that thought is true, it just means it's a thought that you have patterned into your brain. And you have to actually retrain your brain by patterning something different into it, something you believe, something that's helpful and useful to you in order to stop overworking and take all of the balanced actions you want to take.
I want to give you 2 suggestions on how to start training your brain to think “enough” thoughts.
The first step before we get into those is to figure out which of the three thoughts I gave to you, the I'm not doing enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not enough, which of these or some flavor of these is causing you to feel imbalanced. Really the first thing you need to do is name that.
Once you do that then you can pick a thought that counters that. I gave you several here in this podcast like I'm exactly where I should be or I'm enough or I am doing enough. Pick one of these and then spend some time journaling around how that thought is true. How do you know that you're exactly where you should be? How do you know that you are in fact enough? How do you know that you don't need to be doing anymore and that you do enough? Really dig into the truth behind that. You might have to come back and journal about this multiple times in order to really let it sink in and it doesn't really have to be all that long. I think consistent action is better than the length of time you spend doing an exercise like this. So it would be better for you to spend 5 minutes every day than it would be 30 minutes one time in the week because we're talking about patterning, we're talking about creating a new way of thinking and believing and that takes consistency.
And the second suggestion is to really practice sufficiency. I really think sufficiency is the opposite of feeling not enough, it's the opposite of lack. It’s feeling sufficient. And as I mentioned before, when I really got into my business and I started to see how feeling insufficient was causing me to take a whole lot of action but not get a whole lot of results and then ultimately feel terrible about myself, I started to really work at feeling sufficient. So this is a really simple practice of feeling sufficiency.
A practice for creating the feeling of sufficiency.
What I would do is sit in a comfortable chair, and close my eyes, and take a few really deep breaths, and focus on how I feel sufficient right here in this very moment. How I am warm enough, my belly is full enough, how I'm not thirsty, how I am safe enough, how this chair is sturdy enough to hold my weight. I would literally just focus on things that in this moment felt like enough and I would let that feeling of sufficiency well up in my body and then I would focus on it. I would focus on how good it feels, how warm and cozy that feeling is, how it kind of radiates from my chest outward. I would literally just practice this feeling. This would help me turn a moment around almost instantaneously. When my brain might trail down to not enough land, this would focus me back.
Countless times I would use this practice and still use this practice to really feel like my life is enough and that who I am is enough. Because a life that feels enough is a balanced life. A life that doesn't lack is a balanced life. A life where I feel enough is a balanced life. A life where I'm not overworking is a balanced life.
Ambitious working moms, I hope this topic really spoke to you as it has for me. I have lived a life always striving for more, never feeling very satisfied, happy, or balanced until these last five years of my life and I genuinely don't want that for you. That is why I created the ambitious and balanced working mom collective. I want you to feel like the life you've created is enough. I want you to feel like you have everything you need. I want you to feel that sense of calm and balance and control. I don't want you to wait until you've burned out, or till your kids reach a certain age, or you get a new boss, I want you to feel that right now. And in the collective, I teach you a step-by-step process to really create work-life balance today. It doesn't matter your job, it doesn't matter how supportive your husband is, it doesn't matter any life circumstances that you might blame your imbalance on, the collective is the place where you get back in the driver seat of your life and create the balance that you want. The group starts on June 29th and if you get on the waitlist for when doors open you'll receive a few special perks so I encourage you to do that by checking out www.rebeccaolsencoaching.com/collective.
