The BOLD (What’s Enough)
Insufficiency. Not Enough. Imposter syndrome. There is a little voice that follows us about questioning our fitness for the task at hand, our eligibility for success, our right to the awards we’ve earned. It is a particularly insidious form of resistance. The voice tells us stories and the first story is, “You can’t tell anyone you feel this way or they really will figure out what a fraud you are.”
The secret, though, is that everyone else’s voice is telling them the same thing. Let’s spend some time, together, challenging that story. How do we answer the accusations of the voice? Perhaps we don’t have to. Perhaps “Am I enough?” is the wrong question in the first place.
The Whisper (Enough is Enough)
Janice rubbed her eyes, weary from effort and bleary from looking at the computer screen. The alarm told her it was time to prepare for her meeting and she reluctantly abandoned her task to check her slides for the last time, to smooth her hair, straighten her outfit and square her shoulders.
“This is it,” she thought.
She’d worked for months to find her way to the aspirational contact to whom she would be presenting. With this person’s support, she could begin to build her project to scale and make the impact she’d been yearning to create. This should be the happiest moment of her week, her month…perhaps her life.
What, then, was blocking her joy? Janice’s stomach roiled with anxiety. Her head echoed with one question.
“What if I’m not good enough?”
We can only imagine how Janice’s demeanor was impacted by her anxiety. What were the unintended consequences of her fear driven reluctance?
The voice in her head asked a question that most of us have heard in our own internal PA system. The startling truth is that she probably isn’t, in this moment, good enough. By tapping into that truth, the voice is exerting control and creating an outcome.
“Wait,” you’re thinking, “Aren’t you supposed to reassure Janice…and me…with a gentle, loving message that she’s enough? What kind of motivation is this?”
Stay with me here. Janice is not enough because this version of enough is not the right metric. This version of the question implies that she is only enough if she has everything she needs in this moment—every skill, every bit of mastery, every ounce of clarity, every resource.
This is a moment of beginning. We pack our bags with what we have to set out on a journey but we don’t begin the trip with everything we will eventually acquire. Is she as masterful as she will be later when she’s had the chance to practice, to build, to fail, to learn? Of course not. Can Janice single handedly deliver the outcome for the project she’s proposing? Probably not. She will need a team of people with different skills and experience. Is Janice completely prepared for every little thing that might happen and every challenge that will arise? Nope. Janice is, by this definition, not enough.
Is Janice an enthusiastic cheerleader for her project? Absolutely.
Does she have skills and abilities that she can invest in making the work successful? She is very talented and has grown her skills in a variety of environments.
Does Janice have a network of people on whom she can call for support, resources, feedback, and inspiration? She does.
Does Janice have a capacity to learn and grow? Janice is open, curious and loves to learn.
Janice is not good enough to execute this project because of what she already knows, already has and has already done. Janice is good enough because she is a person capable of learning, enthusiastic about possibilities and connected to a community of support. Janice is enough because she’s willing to start in the place where she is less than enough and then put in the work and tolerate the risk to become more than she is. She is enough because she has the courage to endure the discomfort of living in the gap between what she has and what she needs while she cultivates her success.
To be clear, she does not need to change to be enough. That is why I suggest that “Am I Enough?” is a false question.
Enough for what, really? The role of the voice is to protect us. Unfortunately, it goes about its job with a challenging degree of venom. The voice is often cruel. The resulting anxiety can inspire a mindset that drives us to the very outcome from which the voice is seeking to deliver us. The voice believes that it is better to suffer a little anxiety, pain, and disappointment now in order to protect us from devastation later on.
The problem for the voice is that the cost of improvement, of growth and of success it being willing to risk devastation. We risk it while we maintain hope that we will not have to endure it.
Janice stood, pushing back from her desk, and the framed photo by her phone caught her eye. Her own face smiled back at her from the center of her team, posed in front of the doors to the venue where they received their performance award for the project they completed just a few months before. Janice smiled back.
That project had not been without its challenges. At the awards banquet, she had joked that had she known when she started the work what she knew at the end, she would have started the work months earlier.
It had been a stretch to accept the assignment but the rewards had been great. In that project, she had built a team three times larger than any she had managed before. Three separate unexpected challenges had prompted her to learn three new skills. She had discovered new sources to provide resources that were essential to the success of the project. And she had enjoyed the process, most of the time. Even the stabs of frustration, the waves of uncertainty and the momentary disappointments hadn’t squelched her enthusiasm for the project.
“And this, “ She thought with a hum of anticipation, “will be just the same.”
Let’s do this.
Leave a Reply