Stop Telling Yourself You're Not Good Enough

There is a bizarre kind of pleasure in repeating to yourself the message that you hear from your worst critics. You’re not good enough. It narrows the vision to a single pinpoint. It makes the world very simple. It doesn’t matter what you want anymore. All those complicated, big dreams that you have—forget about them. The people who love you—they don’t matter. Your world narrows to one reality: not good enough.

I am not sure why this particular negative message is so attractive to so many of us. I suspect there is a component of mental illness there. Possibly bad childhoods where we heard this message so often that it became familiar to us. And we humans will almost always choose the familiar, no matter how bad, over the unfamiliar. Good things, no matter how much we want them, often require us to change because they are new. It can be easier to turn away from them and go back to what we were used to.

To crowd out this message sometimes takes me hours of intense concentration. I have to force myself to make a list of 3 good things to tell myself about myself. It feels like this is wrong somehow. We aren’t supposed to compliment ourselves, especially women. It’s not proper. It’s bragging. It shows you think you’re better than other people. It’s an invitation to be cut down by God, the universe, or by anyone around you.

But if you keep telling yourself you aren’t good enough, you make it come true. You stop trying. You stop putting yourself out there. You stop taking risks. You stop wanting more. You stop imagining a larger future with you in it.

I know that you think it’s the truth. I can’t tell you how many times I have argued with myself (and with other people I am close to who have this same problem). It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not true. There is no “truth” about such a subjective thing or not. Newton’s laws aren’t even one hundred perfect true. What makes you think that this is more true than that? It isn’t. So stop telling it to yourself. Stop making it true.

Start making a new truth. You are good enough. In fact, you’re better than that. You’re incredible. Maybe people around you haven’t realized it yet. Maybe you haven’t realized it yet. Maybe you’re still an embryo of awesome. Let yourself grow. Be your own womb. Be a mother to your tiny ego and tell yourself all the things that you should have been told, if you weren’t.