The Daily Struggle of Never Feeling Good Enough
By: Dayana Sabatin
Tags: Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Self, Insecurity

If you’re anything like me, you’ve struggled through phases in your life where you simply felt not good enough.

Perhaps it was in relation to a new job, a new relationship, maybe a family member made a comment that stuck with you, and you still haven’t recovered.

You go through life in a constant state of anguish. You feel unworthy, undeserving, and simply… not enough.

You probably don’t even remember the last time you told yourself:

“I deserve this.”

Everybody has an inner critic. Sometimes, that inner critic could be a positive thing. It pushes you to keep going, and it pushes you to strive for more.

However, sometimes that same inner critic controls you and limits your potential.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with my own inner critic. I used to tell myself that the moment I would see growth in my business endeavors and life overall, I would be exceedingly happy. I would finally feel like I was headed in the right direction — I needed that validation.

I craved it.

However, instead of jumping for joy at the little wins, I’ve had — I’ve been getting more and more anxious, all the while, my inner critic has been chatting up a storm:

“You’re an imposter.”

“This is it; you’re not going to get any more wins.”

“You’re not that good.”

The moment you see anything good resulting from your hard work and dedication — your inner critic attacks and undermines you to protect you from the shame of failure.

Shame, also called the “master emotion,” is the feeling that you’re not worthy, competent, or good enough — in a sense, you’re rotten at the core.

Shame is what stops you from trying because the message it conveys is that you won’t be good enough, so you might as well not even try.

The little wins and achievements that I’ve had have always felt conditional.

Leon Seltzer, a psychologist, says: “The inner critic won’t let you see past your achievements as ‘real’ for fear that, if you do, you’ll slack off and end up a ne’er-do-well (a person who is lazy or irresponsible.)”

As a result, you push yourself even more, with diminishing returns, driven more by fear of failure than inspiration.

The Solution:

I used to think that the solution was that I had to shut down my inner critic.

Somehow.

Magically, I would get rid of it altogether. I wouldn’t ever hear another pip or squeak from it ever again.

I tried meditation first. Then journaling, I would write 5–10 affirmations every single morning. Yet, despite feeling more positive in the morning, the positivity would soon burn out as the day went by.

According to Ethan Kross, of the University of Michigan’s Emotion & Self Control Lab, shutting that voice down is not the solution. It won’t work because “the voice will return no matter how hard you try to suppress it. Nor is it always effective to analyze the emotions it rouses; that opens you to the risk of ruminating or reliving those feelings and getting stuck in a negative cycle.”

The best intervention may actually be to respond from a detached perspective — almost as if you were another person.

This is called self-distancing.

To self-distance, one replaces the first-person pronoun I with a non-first-person pronoun, you or he/she, when talking to themselves.

Example:

“I didn’t want to make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James and what would make him happy.” — Basketball player LeBron James describing his decision to leave his old team.

Essentially, when people referred to themselves in the second-person or using their own name, they were able to improve their ability to detach emotionally from the situation.

The theory behind this is that people tend to display high levels of wise reasoning when they give advice to others, but not when they decide how to act themselves.

However, when people use self-distancing techniques, by asking themselves what kind of advice they would give to a friend if they were in the same situation, people are able to reduce this asymmetry in their insights and apply the same reasoning skills to their own dilemmas as they would to those of others.

Another great tool is self-affirmation. It’s a helpful tool to offset self-criticism. When you hear a voice saying you’re inferior or deficient, you need to try to see the evidence that refutes it in our mind’s eye.

Affirmations can revise the negative messages we hear — or think we hear.

Final Thoughts:

Your self-critic will never truly go away. And, in all honesty, you don’t really want it to.

Your inner critic is what can push you to run the extra mile, stay up the extra hour, wake up a little earlier, and strive for a bit more each day.

It’s only when that inner critic begins to control your life that it gets dangerous.

The next time something happens and you feel the voice in the back of your head call you an imposter, or say that you aren’t good enough, utilize self-distancing, say positive self-affirmations, and remember that you’re good enough.

Every negative situation that happens to you is a lesson learned, an obstacle you overcame, and an achievement.

Why? Because you survived it — despite it hitting you so hard.

The level of self-awareness you’ve obtained and the amount of knowledge you gained is significantly higher than those who seem to have it easy.

Learn to be more kind to yourself. You’re more than good enough.