What It Means to Think You Are Enough
Anyone who has paid any attention to what I have been saying over the past few weeks is fully familiar with my metaphor of life being a journey – a road we are on. Here is another part of that story – there is no final destination. Your drive doesn’t end until you actually run out of gas with no filling station in site – if you get my drift! For me, I want to embrace that journey every single day. Always trying to learn more about myself, others, and the world around me. Always trying to be a bit better at something. The first step in being able to accomplish this? First recognizing that I am enough – exactly as I am.
You hear that phrase a lot – you are enough. It may seem counterintuitive to believe you are enough while at the same time trying to grow, learn, and get better. But being enough is not about seeing yourself as a completed project. In fact – it is the opposite. Being enough is about accepting yourself in all your wonderful imperfection. It is about separating our personal value from our personal development.
The challenge is we tend to label ourselves and in doing so we highlight our perceived deficiencies. We think in terms of what we are not, rather than stepping into what we are. We look around at the people we work with, the friends we have, the people in our communities and we compare ourselves. Inevitably, that process leads us to focus on what we imagine creates our interpretation of their “success” as a comparison to what challenges our own.
What we fail to realize is that nobody is everything. The people we compare ourselves to and view as having what we don’t have – also don’t have what we do have. Their strengths are not our weaknesses. Our families, our work teams, and our communities are a combination of people that each bring unique strengths, stories, and imperfections. That is what makes it all work. Embracing who you are, including your jagged edges, is believing that you are enough. It is recognizing how your pieces fit with the jagged edges others offer, in completing a bigger picture. Believing you are enough as you are, is what gives you the courage to lean into your strengths and continue to develop and grow. Leveraging your strengths is far more impactful than being what you are not.
You are not a finished product – neither am I. But we are enough. All the jagged pieces that make us who we are, are more than enough to carry us along the journey to where we want to go.
Stay well,
Paula
P.S. For more thoughts on what it means to be enough, listen to this week’s episode of Beyond Neutral with my guest, Carrie Shigetomi.
