The feeling of not being good enough can stem from our own personal high expectations of ourselves and comparing where we are in life to others, which can later be triggered by other things.
It happens to us all, you’re scrolling through Instagram or Facebook and you happen upon a photo of someone around your age. Our comparison can often begin to niggle it’s way in when triggered by someone within the same age range or younger than us. This, I believe, goes back to childhood, when we were compared to peers, siblings and friends.
You pause, you look, you read the caption and you compare their life to yours.
You’re overcome by a wave of Not Good Enough. Maybe it’s their job, their salary, something they own, their social circle or a stage they’re at in life, but there’s something there that is causing you to see that they have whatever ‘it’ is and you don’t.
The world around us has a massive impact on how we think and what we believe we should have achieved by a certain age/time in our life. Our own expectations of ourselves are usually set by taking in what is going on for the people around us, without really noticing the rest of their lives.
I would hazard a guess that whilst past generations have, of course, had feelings of not being enough or doing enough, they haven’t felt it quite as strongly as we do now. They didn’t have this continual viewpoint into other’s lives. The view of other’s lives we had previous to social media was a more realistic one, of course we have never really known exactly what is going on in each other’s lives, but right now there’s a lot of sharing the good bits, the success moments the memorable stages in life and not so much the sleepless nights, the worries and the failures.
This feeling of not being or doing enough can be triggered when we make mistakes, fail at something or we’re just feeling a bit down.
How can we deal with this feeling and understand where it comes from? Be kind to yourself, comparison is to be expected, it’s only natural.
Pay attention to the things you're comparing your life to:
- What is it exactly?
- Is the comparison telling you something about what you would like in your life or where you want to be?
- Why are you feeling as if you’re not enough?
- If you were enough or doing enough, how would you act? What would an average day look like for you? What could the repercussions of that be?
- If you find you’re comparing yourself to a specific person, are you taking in the whole picture of their life? Maybe, for example, you see that they have their own business or have a high flying career and you get that feeling of not being enough. Are you considering the implications of having that? The long long long hours? The lack of social life? The working multiple jobs? The networking? Less family time? The late night and early mornings? The people they have around them? The place they live? Would you like to have their life with all of those things?
- What have you achieved in your life so far? Don’t be shy, list them. It’s easy to say “nothing” but I’m sure you have achieved wonderful things.
- What would you like to achieve? You have your life in front of you to achieve these things, what’s stopping you?
