What Counts as Enough — Redefining Accomplishment Beyond Society's Standards

Hello, my lovelies. This week, we, as promised, are going to talk about enoughness and what does enough mean? How do you define it in your terms? How do I define it in mine?

And what actually counts as having done enough or been enough or accomplished enough this year?

It's October. We're really starting to feel like it's in the autumn now. And I think the question that so many of us have lying underneath our consciousness or even up in our brain is, "Am I enough?"

"Have I done enough this year? Was this year enough? Is more expected of me?"

I know for myself, I often have that question running, not just this time of year, but all the time is...

"Am I showing up at my full capacity?" And then I have the simultaneous thought about. "Do we need to show up at our full capacity all the time? Is that even possible? Is it necessary?"

And how are other creatures in the natural world handling themselves in the life they're living. I don't know, really, I don't know if we can know that anything other than humans has this demand of ourselves, that we prove our worth or prove our worthiness through some kind of performance that we do.

We seem to always be seeking the approval of parents and friends and family and society in general.

And I think because we have all of those thoughts and engines running all the time and...

It's kind of like the humming juice that is society. It's very easy to internalize that and make it into something that is each of our individual problems that we compare ourselves against a cultural value or an ideal that is pretty impossible to attain.

And I think we've all, by this point, already read stories over the last several decades, maybe our whole lives, of people who have ostensibly accomplished everything where they have millions or billions or trillions of dollars.

Or they've found the marriage or they have the home or they've built the business or whatever it is.

And yet still, they don't feel like they're enough. People with eating disorders, people... who just have problems, right? We know, even though we've been told, and we know this, what the outside doing of things or being of something is and it doesn't provide us with innate satisfaction.

Being something, we're always going to desire more, we're always going to want to do or be more.

And I think it's okay that we have that desire that we want to continue to grow and do and evolve and change and be, but it can become destructive when we're looking at it as this kind of demand that we be different than we are or...

Usually, we phrase it as be more than you are or be less. There's so rarely do we go, like, "You're just enough, you're exactly great as you are," and none of us really believes it when we get told that because we feel like either our emotions and the things that we need are too much of a demand of everything around us.

People that have a lot of energy or have a lot of exuberance around life can often feel that they're too much.

People who feel like they haven't had the outward trappings of the success feel that somehow they've done something wrong or they're not enough, that they either haven't tried hard enough or they're not smart enough. If only they just pushed harder or did more, figured it out, then somehow they'd also have or be or do what everyone they think around them is doing.

So I want to start to break down some of those tendencies, at least for the time being for today.

And to say, what if we looked at ourselves as just ourselves in a context in our own lived year. And this is not to say that we need to inflate the things that we've done or make them bigger than they are in order to make ourselves feel better. And it's also not to collapse down or make smaller things that have happened to make us feel like we're not bragging or being too much or whatever.

This is about really being okay with what is, and being with it without holding it in contempt or being frustrated all the time with whatever it is.

So I think I want to ask, what is the standard that you're using when you find that internal voice judging yourself?

What is the thought that comes up and what's the thing that your inner beast says to yourself, I guess, about your year?

I have talked about in the past not only just on this podcast but also in my previous one, about my internal fear, like my inner demons always say that I'm so lazy, that I never do enough, that if I could get away with doing nothing, that's what I would do. And it will make me feel bad about myself and feel guilty for not doing more.

And it also will spur me to do things beyond what I want to do or at a pace that I don't want to do, or to a level that is beyond where I'd feel comfortable to compensate for that so that I don't have to be the thing that I'm afraid of being, which is lazy, or not trying hard enough or not motivated enough, like all of those things are my inner demons.

And I think all of us have them. I think I also have them around like beauty, like not being pretty enough, not trying to take care of myself enough. Like all of those standards, like they're in there and they knock around the inside of my brain.

We all have something that niggles in there and makes you uncomfortable and sad and stressed out.

So when we notice that that's the inner voice that's talking to us, it can be so helpful to start to recognize it as just a voice, just a thought, just a thing that's coming up in our brain and not to assume that because we're hearing it, it's true and not to just let that voice take us along on the ride.

Because I think no matter where it comes from, you know, we'll have them, but they don't need to be given power over us. And it creates a standard for ourselves that obviously doesn't feel possible and it feels like no matter what we do it's not right. It's not enough.

So this episode is not about like lowering your standards or saying, oh, well then, you know, if I'm not actually lazy, then I'm just going to tell myself that, you know, laziness is great and I should aspire to doing less. Like that, that would be the wrong response, I think, for me anyway, to combat that or to cope with that inner voice.

And when it comes to beauty standards and stuff, to say, like, I should just decide that, you know, being ugly is greater, like swing to the opposite side.

One, I don't think my inner self really believes that. And whenever we tell ourselves a complete oppositeness, like,

You can tell when you feel an inner pull, when you tell yourself something that's a lie or that just doesn't feel true to you. It's not an effective way to overcome false standards or unproductive or painful standards or things that are hurting you in your life.

I think it's important to identify what the standard is or what the voice is that you judge yourself by and that lens that you're using to see it, but just to call it out as a possible lens of many lenses.

And that makes it a little bit easier to recognize that there are other people who could have the same exact year and experiences as you, but they would see it through a different lens and they would have a different judgment and they might see a different benefit or failing than you see.

And that lets you recognize that it's all about perspective. It's not about truth. It's not about capital T truth.

It gets tricky to talk about because I'm so much about finding your inner truth, right, and finding your inner rhythm and what's true and real for you.

But when it comes to deciding what feels good and what's the right level of accomplishment or just things that you do or be or how you react or behave.

It starts to be a difficult conversation because we are talking about emotional things, we're talking about values, and whenever you get into that territory. It's really easy to have platitudes about.

You know, "just try your best." "Everything's good enough," and all of us know that that also feels bad.

We all want to feel like we're living up to our ideals. We all want to avoid the bad voices in our head that say that we're not living up to those ideals.

So I think it's important to not tell yourself always that you're doing great no matter what. It's okay to be honest with yourself and be like, "Wow, I probably could have done better there."

But it's more about redefining what counts in terms of your effort, what is really going on.

And I know we've been talking a lot about that these past few weeks about what it means to show up at your capacity, what the actual capacity of your year was, how it might compare in the grand scheme of your life from month to month, from year to year, from life phase to life phase.

I think that it's important that we understand that a lot of us come about measuring our successes and failures based on things like visible outcomes, productivity, comparison to others, and these standards, like they're...

The reason we do it is because it's the most apparent and visible thing. When you're looking at measuring productivity, like as a life coach, right, you learn how to help people know how to plot and plan and find ways to be productive and how to document it so that you can be accountable to yourself.

And I found that that's like, it's a great skill to have.

And it is true that what you pay attention to, you tend to improve.

However, when you start looking at your measurements as a way to berate yourself or find fault with yourself or to over-inflate yourself and make yourself feel better than you are, that's not helpful.

So something that I'm finding helpful for myself is that when I do decide I'm going to measure something, such as how many days did I go for a walk and did I do a full mile, did I do a half mile, what's going on, is I remind myself frequentl that it's not about trying to set a world record. That's not my goal with it. It's just to notice that I'm doing it.

And sometimes it's helping me get a better baseline for where I'm at and how I'm feeling.

So sometimes I decide that the lens that I'm looking at it through is instead of saying, "I need to go from walking nothing to walking like three miles a day," I will say, "Hey, did I get out and walk?" And then I notice if I am, and then I go, "Hey, did I go out more than once?"

Did I do a full mile? Did I not? Was it indoor? Was it outdoor? And I look at it now as more of a contextual flavor of:

How is it going? What might be influencing my decisions to walk or not walk? To be indoors or outdoors? Is it weather? Is it timing? Is it that my schedule is too busy?

Is it a beautiful day? Did I have companionship? All of it counts. Really, I'm just looking at it as collecting information.

If I can look at things like that in a greater context, looking at my whole year, it allows me to notice the emotional growth that happened.

It lets me notice where my capacity limits actually even are. It lets me understand what my life circumstances are.

And it let me see that some things that I set out to do, like, just as with anything, some of them are more difficult for me to actually accomplish than others and some are much easier.

I always am looking for ways to make things that I want to accomplish that are hard, have opportunities to be easier.

I want to say it's like trying to set myself up so that I'm at the top of the hill and I'm rolling rather than having to push myself up a hill all the time. So if there's something that I want to do and I know there's a way to set it up so that it's easier to do it than not do it, that's how I set things up.

And then I will pay attention and go, "Okay, if I set it up to be as easy as possible, did I still avoid it or did I do it? If I did it, did I only do the bare minimum or did I find that once I got rolling it was easier?"

I prefer using that particular lens for looking at my actions than just having the blanket quick judgment of, "Oh, you did it great, you're wonderful," or, "No, you didn't do it, you're lazy and you suck."

And I know that all of us have those quick-snap judgments. It's so easy to do. It's so human. Don't be mad at yourself for having that.

But you can cultivate in yourself a sense of curiosity about like, okay, what was going on or what happened that might have set this up?

It also lets you understand kind of like your emotional motivations and the things that either spur you on to have more energy and more desire to do things and the things that crush you a little bit. And a lot of this takes experience. We don't get better at doing anything by just thinking about it. We have to actually put ourselves out in the field and try something.

If I want to like train for a marathon, I'm gonna have to at some point put on shoes and get outside and start moving. I can't just think about it all the time. If I bought the shoes and never put them on, then it's still not happening. So I have to be real with myself there.

But all of it is information. So if you found that you set yourself a goal for this year, that somehow you found a way around that you never actually moved towards it.

That's good information for yourself and it lets you gain something from it by looking at it and going, "Okay, Why might I be avoiding this?"

And when you understand the why you might be avoiding it, then you can find out where you do need nourishment and encouragement and stuff to make it easier so that you do have a downhill momentum versus Sisyphus level energy, like pushing rocks up hills.

I think that when we're looking at our lives and trying to decide if we've done enough, if we're okay, just being who we are, where we are right now in time.

This isn't like a universal measure that works for everyone, like whatever our standard is, it's not repeatable, but we seem to think that it is because we'll use our standard and we build it from what we think is the evidence we see from all the lives around us.

One of my crushing realities is feeling like, "Okay, I don't have a regular 9 to 5 job. I've always been making my own jobs and finding ways to make income is really hard actually, but it's also really rewarding, but it's unpredictable and it's not... It's not easy to set yourself up for like a retirement or looking at later in life when you live that kind of model if you're not working in a corporate world or a place that helps you build that."

I always think of everyone around me, which is like almost everyone around me who has a regular job that has benefits and retirement plans and 401(k)s, with honestly like a level of jealousy, going, "Oh my gosh, why didn't I prepare better for myself? Why have I let myself drift in this way?"

It's my own personal burden to bear, I guess. And I very much appreciate it, all the people around me helping me out and helping make my life possible because I understand that's not always possible.

There is equally, I think, from other people. They'll look at what I do and go, "Oh, you're so creative, you get to do...like choose the flow of your days, you don't have to worry about managing other people when you make a decision, you get to do it and follow through." And this is also true.

So again, it's always about the lens that you're looking at any given situation that makes you feel a certain way or gives you a certain emotional or mental tone about it. The things that you pick up that you see as beneficial or the things that you find is negative, they're all coming from whichever angle you're looking at stuff.

I think that it's... I don't even know if it's possible to get a true blank neutral perspective on anything.

I try too, often to just say like, well, what really happened? What's actually going on? If I took away all of my emotions and my judgments about it, what really did I do or not do what went well, what didn't go well?

And I have to continually, in any of those processes, remind myself to step back and stop getting emotional about it because it's like instantaneous, the level of judgment that we have about when things go well or don't go well, and how we want to justify or fix or tweak any of that.

And I know that's a universal human thing. It's kind of unavoidable.

I think the best that we can do is try to find what our pattern is with it.

Where our judgments come up, the things that make us the most persnickety and tire us the fastest and figure out how that comes to pass, how we can set ourselves up to use that in our advantage rather than against ourselves.

Yeah, I don't think we're gonna avoid our self-judgments, but I do think it's important to recognize that whenever we're setting up a scale of whether we did it good or bad, we're kind of making it up. There is no standard. There is no metric. You don't have a ruler that gets to say, "When you get to X part, you did great." We all just kind of decide where that is.

And so, as frustrating as that is, it also gives you some breathing room to go, "Okay, if I was to look at this," this is my favorite trick, honestly, is to lay out all of the items or things that were happening and say, "If this was my friend, if this was just a random fellow student in a class, and this is what they gave me. How would I take that?"

What would my judgement speed in? If it wasn't me and it was someone else. And this is a very interesting exercise because then you find where you're way more lenient on other people than you are in yourself and where you're really judgmental against other people as much so or more than you are to yourself.

So sometimes when I look at how much work did I do or when did I do it and how much got accomplished and when sometimes I find like, well, I'm really proud that I managed to fit this much in and this amount of time and other times, I'm like, oh my God, if someone came to me and said this is the only amount of things that they got done in this four week period, I'd go, well, what the hell have you been doing?

So sometimes I do have judgment for myself in that way. And I have to answer those questions and be accountable to myself.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't not have a context for what's going on.

Because immediately, right, when you judge your life or judge someone else's, there is a context for their life. There's a reason that you did or didn't do things.

There's a reason that you avoid or don't avoid things. And I think that's the underlying stuff that I'm trying to get at here in this episode is to tell you that whatever happened in your year. However, you're looking at it and your perspective.

You lived in a place in a time where stuff happened. Things happened. You did things. Stuff happened in reaction to that. Stuff happened around it that changed and influenced everything that went on.

And you can't extricate one from the other. Real life is real life. It's not the idealized version of what you think should have happened.

And enough needs to include restraint and things that you didn't force to happen and things that you chose to do or not do.

This is important for me to mention. It's okay when you get to this point in your year and you realize that there are things that you decided not to carry through on.

This is not to say, like give up on everything when it gets hard or just decide not to follow through on things. It's to say your life, in the context of your life, is informed by everything you're carrying and everything you chose to lay down.

There are things that I very deliberately decided not this year, not this time, maybe next year. And there's reasons. There's like the actual lived capacity and energy and timing of what's really going on in my life, and planning for that, and that can be wisdom.

It can be really important contextual wisdom. So I'm wanting to just remind you of that and help you get in touch with everything that's been going on so that you're not your own harshest critic, but instead someone that you can rely on to be with yourself through your own journey.

Maybe as a kind encourager and maybe as your criticizer or I don't want to say like the whipmaster behind yourself saying like, keep going, keep doing stuff. We're all of that for each other and for ourselves all the time.

But when we recognize that we're doing it, I think the journey gets a little easier and you're able to kind of put a name to all of those aspects of yourself and go, ah,

Here's me in another capacity. Here's me from another perspective. Isn't it interesting that I'm going through this journey as I am right now?

I'll be honest, like the year isn't always easy. So...

I think more than ever it's important to be kind to ourselves and nourish ourselves and give ourselves the capacity to continue to carry what we do have to carry right now for the rest of this week, this month, this year.

That's all we really can do. We're all here walking together, living together, and dealing with life.

So my friends, I am sending out so much love and appreciation and patience through the radio waves this week.

And I believe that next week I'd like to talk about how we come to terms with knowing when things are complete.

Because I think that's kind of the conclusion of this line of thought of trying to figure out where we've been, what's going on, what's real, what did it mean to me.

Where do I place myself in comparison to myself and other people?

I think the next step of that is to go, okay, if I've done all of that well and in a way that gives me some information and makes me feel good and gives me some motivation and peace and ability, I guess, capacity to keep moving forward.

Then how do I know what are the things that I still need to carry forward and what it is time to let go of and let just let be complete or even let be set aside for now?

This is a time where I think I'm going to try and check in with our friend Sarah Bush because I really enjoyed our talk about creativity earlier in the spring. And this is, you know, the autumn, and I want to see what got made over the summer, what happened over the seasons and how is the creative process kind of looking now as we're heading into the heart of the autumn?

How do we decide a creative project is complete? How do we decide that the goal we had for ourselves is complete or just set aside or not for now or that it's changed so much that it now needs a different expression and to be something else entirely?

That seems very timely, so I'm looking forward to that.

And I will see you next week. All right, have a great week. I'll see you then.

Related Episodes

Continuing the Honest Year Review series:

This episode deepens the autumn year-review arc. Having laid out what happened, read the feedback, and found what was real, we now face the biggest question of all: was it enough?

• Ep 49: What Was Real This Year — What Your Actions Tell You About Your True Values — Last week's exploration of values vs. performance sets the foundation: once you know what was real, you can ask whether it was enough.
• Ep 48: Reading the Feedback From Your Year — What Your Efforts Actually Produced — The companion piece on reading lived evidence instead of judging outcomes — this episode's "collecting information" lens in action.
• Ep 47: Review Your Year Without Judgment — An Honest Look at What Actually Happened — The foundation of the whole arc: laying out your year without judgment before assigning any meaning to it.
• Ep 11: Mapping the Emotional Weather of Your Year (A Kinder Way to Begin January) — A winter perspective that mirrors this reflection series: looking at your year as a landscape you lived inside, with clarity instead of judgment.

Explore further:

• Ep 13: Motivation vs. Capacity — Why You're Not Lazy (And How to Start Without Forcing It) — Blaze's inner demon calls her lazy; this episode reframes "laziness" as a capacity issue, perfectly complementing this week's honest look at self-judgment.
• Ep 40: Stop Fixing What Isn't Broken: How to Resist the Urge to Optimize Your Life — For the persistent hum of "be more, do more" — dismantling the compulsion to constantly improve even what's working.
• Ep 31: You Don't Have to Say Yes Just Because You Have Energy (How to Stop Overcommitting) — A related angle on enoughness: the "do we need to show up at full capacity all the time?" question, answered.

✨ What counts as enough — by your definition, not society's?

If this episode had you examining the standards you've been judging yourself by, the Living in Rhythm Starter Kit is the natural next step. This free resource helps you identify your true values and learn to move with your feelings instead of against them — so the lens you see your year through is one you chose.

Download the free Living in Rhythm Starter Kit

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