Undoubtedly, you’ve dealt with this concept at some point in your life. Some people are better than others at handling these feelings depending on their mindset, temperament, circumstances involved, etc. If you feel like you’re in the thick of it now, just know you don’t have to stay there. Yes, it can seem overwhelming. Suffocating even. But the good news is, there are things you can do to move past these unpleasant feelings and overcome the fear of never being enough.
Many times, you might waiver back and forth between feeling good about yourself and abhorring yourself, and that might seem strange, but it’s not. It’s a part of being human. It’s natural to question what you’re doing. To feel like you’re not doing enough or doing too much, to feel like you’re making a difference or completely failing at life.
Here’s the Rub
The trouble comes when you start to believe that you aren’t good enough and that no matter what you do, you aren’t or will not be accepted.
It’s when that feeling begins to suffocate you and your potential or cloud your overall sense of self-worth as it clings to you and ever-so-slowly begins to drag you down.
When it makes you question your worth and measure yourself against what our age of overindulgence in social media deems acceptable standards or compare yourself to others based on arbitrary reasoning, that’s when you encounter issues.
It’s because of this that you hold yourself back.
However, the fear isn’t based on anything real.
It’s an illusion you’ve built for yourself over a certain amount of time due to enduring experiences that cause you to think that because this happened, “I must not be good enough, or have enough, or can handle the situation at hand.”
You start to think that being “enough” is something that’s earned. You begin to measure yourself by what you do or don’t do or how you perceive others to see you.
Essentially, you project your fears onto the world around you, often without any validation that those fears are justified.
This is precisely why you need to understand where this fear comes from. You need to challenge this limiting belief system and work to regain your power so that you can begin to live a life of freedom from your own thoughts.
Recognizing the Root Causes
Childhood Influences and Societal Expectations
Let’s face it: every single one of us was raised differently. Even in the same family, siblings can have vastly different experiences between the oldest and youngest; simply because nobody stays the same, the parenting will be different.
You are constantly evolving, and how you did something or handled things several years ago may differ from how you handle them now.
From an early age, you were taught that approval comes with certain expectations. Meet the expectations; you receive approval.
On the one hand, this is normal; it’s how we learn, develop, and grow. On the other hand, it creates walls and barriers, trapping you into the mindset that “this particular behavior” is needed to succeed in life, whether true or not.
Parents, teachers, siblings, friends, society, etc., handed down this conditioning, all the while you went about your business without noticing a thing.
Why It’s Important
Without it, you’re a rudderless ship blown to and fro by the wind.
With it, you’re potentially plagued by someone else’s fear, judgments, and miscalculations about how the world works.
But what are you going to do? You have to learn somewhere; unfortunately, you can’t choose your teachers. At least not when you’re young.
The good news is that just because you were raised a certain way doesn’t mean you must adhere to those beliefs.
Many people struggle with a poverty mindset because that mindset is passed down from generation to generation. Living with a poverty mindset is usually accompanied by the fear of not being enough or having enough.
Luckily, plenty of resources are available to teach you how to overcome that mindset, allowing you to change the course of history for your family!
Now, apply this idea to every area of your life, or at least to the one you struggle with when trying to overcome the fear of never being enough.
The Role of Comparison in Fueling the Fear
One of the significant issues people struggle with is the trap of comparison. It really is the thief of all joy because no matter how much you have, there’s almost always a guarantee that someone out there has more.
If you’re constantly stacking yourself against someone else, how can you expect to ever find peace and joy in your life?
Their abundance, over and above what you have, will continually drive you crazy. This could be an abundance of money, friendships, love from their family, positivity, eloquence in speaking, yada yada, you name it, someone else has more than you! Talent! Being 7’1” like Shaquille O’Neal!
What else…what else…or maybe who else…who else?
Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Ada Lovelace, Galileo Galilei, Nelson Mandela, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Florence Nightengale, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jordan, and Usain Bolt…
The list goes on and on of people better than you, more intelligent than you, bigger than you, faster than you, stronger than you, wiser than you…shall I continue? I feel like the horse is beyond dead at this point, so I digress.
The point is, the more you fixate on comparing yourself, the more intense the fear of not being enough grows. It begins not only to grow; it looms over you like some foreboding shadow waiting to steal your soul.
Because it is.
When you give into it, it’s literally sucking the soul from your body, leaving you a shell of the person you could be.
So, how do you change? What can you do to escape this trap and find a way to overcome the fear?
Shifting Your Mindset: The First Step to Overcoming Fear
Rewriting Your Inner Narrative
The first step is to learn to develop your mindset. There’s a reason meditation has become so popular over the past several decades.
Because it works!
You may not enjoy it, and it may seem like a waste of time or difficult and tedious, but it is excellent for helping you learn to control your thoughts and let go of things.
As you take hold of your mind, you must begin to rewrite your narrative.
Stop Speaking Negatively Toward Yourself
One of the major problems people encounter on the journey to overcome themselves and change their lives is their internal narrative or dialogue.
You often won’t even realize what you’re saying to yourself because it’s the same thing you’ve been saying for so long; it’s become normal.
I caught myself the other day thinking something negative that I hadn’t thought about in a while. It was the phrase “Why does this always happen?” or something similar when, in reality, it doesn’t always happen.
However, there was a point in my life where I conditioned myself to say that because one experience led to the next and then the next, and pretty soon, I found myself believing that “This always happens.”
Think of getting the cart with the bad wheel at the store, picking the longest line, driving behind the slowest driver, or hitting every red light.
After experiencing those experiences so many times, you almost seem to expect them.
Even if it happens every other time, or one out of three times, maybe even less, because of your conditioned response and bias toward negativity, you will forget all the times you didn’t have that experience and remember the odd times you did.
This is because you’ve created a narrative that says, “When I do this, I get this result,” and then you believe it to be true.
The Power of Self-Compassion
As you go through this process of rewriting the narrative, you must also begin practicing self-compassion.
There’s a tendency to be harder on yourself than others are on you. We’re often our own worst critics.
So, as you begin to reinvent yourself, have grace with yourself. When you stumble and fail because fail, you will; don’t beat yourself up.
Give yourself grace for being human. Understand that everyone has experienced trial and error, failure, and feeling incompetent at some point in their life.
Learning how to generate self-compassion will go a long way in overcoming the fear of never being enough.
Embracing Imperfection as a Strength
This can be another great tool because once you realize that you aren’t perfect and never will be, you can relax a little.
It also allows you to see that no one else is perfect, either. Some people who seem to have everything lined up exactly how it should be and, from the outside looking in, have everything together are actually miserable.
As the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Practical Strategies to Overcome the Fear
Step 1: Reframing Limiting Beliefs
Learning to reframe limiting beliefs such as “I can’t do this,” to “How can I do this?” is a simple step that can help you quickly change the way you view life and yourself within the world.
You often don’t do what you know you need to do simply because you’ve adopted a limiting belief and refuse to give it up, usually out of fear. The fear of failure, what others might think, being wrong!…
Write down what you know to be limiting beliefs in your life. Physically write them down, and then write down what you can do to practice not giving in to those beliefs when they arise.
Step 2: Setting Realistic Expectations for Yourself
If you set a goal to overcome everything by next week—you will fail!
Miserably!!!
I don’t know if that was enough exclamation points, so let me add a few more for good measure!
!!!!!!!! Is that…!!!!! Nope!!!!! Must!!!!! Have!!!!! More!!!!! Exclamation!!!!!!!!
I think it’s out of my system now!
Seriously, though. You cannot set unrealistic expectations. You need to plan to be in it for the long game. What does that mean? Give yourself a five-year time horizon.
This doesn’t mean it will take that long, not even close in some instances, but it gives you room for failure. It gives you room for growth, for studying, learning, practicing, adapting, changing, and practicing again until you’ve figured out a system that allows you to move forward quickly and systematically.
Step 3: Building Confidence Through Small Wins
Understand that each small step you take builds confidence in your ability to make the changes you’re looking for.
When you set a small goal and then achieve it, you get a small hit of dopamine, which makes you feel good about yourself and makes you want to do the same thing again.
This is why social media is so addictive. Each time you use your phone to scroll, you get little dopamine hits as you view and consume the content.
It’s the same reason video games can be so addicting. You have a main quest with a bazillion side quests. As you complete each quest, you get a small hit of dopamine that makes you feel like you’ve done something good, so you keep playing and attempting to complete quests because each time you do, you feel like you’re accomplishing a lot, even though you haven’t done anything tangible in the real world.
If you turn this reward system on yourself, whenever you do something you said you’d do, even if it’s a small, menial task, you can feel good about doing that task, and the more you do this, the more you develop your confidence.
Step 4: Surrounding Yourself with Positive Influences
Here’s the long and short of it. They say you are the five closest people you associate with.
If you hang out with negative people who only discuss negative things, you will likely have a predominantly negative mindset.
However, if you hang out with positive, optimistic people who want to do things in the world, you will begin to adopt that same positive mindset.
The choice of who you want to hang out with is yours, but at the end of the day, the only person you can blame for staying stuck where you are in life is you.
Step 5: The Importance of Seeking Help and Guidance
Sometimes, you just need to get help. There are some things you can overcome on your own, and there are other things you need someone else to walk you through.
Often, it’s because you can’t see the forest for the trees. This phenomenon can be observed when someone does something they think is very impressive. Maybe it is from their point of view, but from the outside perspective, with the wealth of information to draw upon based on experiences of seeing something almost identical, what you might think is impressive is child’s play in the eyes of others.
It’s not until someone points this out to you, however, that you have the revelation that whatever you are doing is subpar and not good enough to garner the attention you were hoping for.
The same thing happens when dealing with some of these emotional issues you might be going through. You’ve been inundated with them for so long that you don’t consider them a problem. Instead, you point your finger at the person you’re angry with or the situation that continually drags you down.
Having someone there to walk you through various thoughts and emotions can be very beneficial. They can show you what’s happening in your life and why you can’t seem to overcome the fear of never being enough.
The Long-Term Benefits of Overcoming Fear
Greater Self-Acceptance and Freedom
You learn to love and accept yourself. You feel lighter and more at peace with yourself.
Instead of struggling through each day, you have a sense that you flow through it instead.
In many instances, you still deal with the same people and situations, but they don’t bother you as much. You don’t feel as afraid or fearful as you used to.
As you continue to develop yourself and work to gain more freedom, you will begin to unlock your full potential.
It probably won’t happen all at once. Instead, if you continue to work, you’ll start to see glimpses of who you might be.
This can be exciting and cause you to want to continue on the path of self-discovery and growth. As you do, you’ll experience more freedom, and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
The key to turning this into your reality is to take action today.
I outlined five steps you can take to begin making that change in your life. Choose one to work on throughout the rest of this week.
Try to be as conscious of your actions as often as possible. Remember, muscles grow through repetition and consistency when working out. The same is true for your mind. The more intentional you are with your work and stay conscious of what you’re doing, the sooner you’ll overcome yourself and find the freedom you’re looking for.
If you enjoyed learning how to overcome the fear of never being enough, please share this message with someone who could benefit from it.
I hope you have a fantastic day!
Josiah
