It's hard when your worst enemy is the one living inside your own head. Many of you know what I'm talking about. It's that pesky, grating voice that whispers in our ear about how we should have handled that situation better. Or tried harder at some particular task. Or that we're simply not good enough.
I'm hard on myself. I always have been. But lately I've grown tired of living in the world of "shoulda, coulda, wouIda."
I think women especially struggle with the need to be the best at everything we do. No wonder we feel so pressured! We're constantly blasted by magazine ads and television commercials touting the road to perfection. Statuesque models with perfect faces and bodies. Ads and movies depicting perfect families, perfect homes, perfect children.
Well, guess what? There is no perfection except God. That exquisite model's face and boobs are going to wrinkle and sag one day, just like ours. Material things only last for a season. And a family without struggles or dysfunction only exists in fairy tales.
To do our best isn't a bad thing. It helps us achieve our goals in life and instills a strong work ethic that, hopefully, will be passed along to our children and grandchildren. The struggle is when we don't realize or appreciate what we've accomplished because we always feel we could have done a better job somehow. It's mentally and physically exhausting.
My new motto in life is "good enough." I can't tell you how freeing those two little words can be! I'm slowly learning to apply it to my writing, my work, and my home. I even say it aloud sometimes when I get that urge to go back and "fix" something that, in my mind, wasn't done to my expectations.
When we're confronted with a long To Do list, a challenging work day, or a problematic relationship, take reasonable steps to do what we can and then say to ourselves, "Good enough."
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