Here’s a picture from Worthy From Within: Break Free & Claim Your Destiny. It was an amazing event. We had 30 smart savvy beautiful women in the room.
I asked one woman at Worthy From Within, ”What is it that you want?” This was when we were setting intentions in the morning.
“I would love to meet the person I’m meant to be with,” she said. “I find it so rare to meet someone that meets me at my level, and someone that is ready for a relationship like I am.”
I then asked, ”What do you feel is keeping you from having the kind of relationship that you desire?”
She said, “I think I don’t feel worthy of it, or that I’m not enough.”
“Everyone feels not good enough. It’s a part of the human condition,” I told her. “Even in parts of our lives where we’ve had a lot of success. It’s a part of the human condition and the ego.
The ego wants us to always feel important and when we don’t, our mind goes into states of I’m not good enough or is there something wrong with me. It keeps our ego in control. But there’s something most people aren’t doing to step out of this cycle.”
In the self development world we read things like, if we don’t have what we want in our lives it’s because we don’t believe that we deserve it, or that we aren’t good enough.
Sure that’s true, and it often doesn’t get at the heart of what’s really going on. To be honest, what do you even do with knowing that? You can try to affirm your way into believing you’re good enough, but that doesn’t seem to stick.
Here’s the problem, if you don’t actually know your particular flavor of why you don’t feel good enough, it’s pretty hard to believe anything different. There is no way to move through it when you haven’t dug deeper.
I then asked her, “Can you recall a memory that sticks out for you from your childhood when your Mom or Dad made you feel like you weren’t good enough?”
“I’m a professional singer,” she said, “and when I was younger I was often told by both of my parents, especially at the dinner table, not to sing. It was a rule.”
“How did that make you feel?” I asked.
“It made me feel like singing wasn’t something I was supposed to do,” she said. “And yet, it was a part of how I expressed myself and I simply couldn’t help it.”
After she said that, my intuition kicked into high gear so I asked if she had any siblings and how she was treated when she was younger. I learned that she was the youngest, most of her siblings were competitive and she got picked on a lot.
I asked how her parents responded to the way she was treated by her siblings. She told me they didn’t do anything because they also really believed in healthy competition and that to be fulfilled it’s important to be focused on accomplishing, so she assumed that it was just what they also believed to be true.
When I asked her how it felt to be picked on by her siblings and for her parents to not have her back, she said, “I would often just shut down.”
I kept probing and asked if she could transport herself back into one of those moments with her siblings, what she thought that little girl chose or decided in that moment of starting to shut down?
She said, “I felt like I just didn’t want to share who I really was anymore.” We both paused and we knew that was the inner block or belief that we were looking for. I told her this is likely a common thread throughout other areas of her life too, feeling like she doesn’t want to share who she really is.
I saw her experiencing one AHA moment after another as she was thinking it through. She then said, “Yes especially in my love life. Of course, how can a man or anyone really get to know me if I’m not willing to share who I really am?”
She was absolutely right. This was her particular flavor of not feeling good enough, and after being able to locate the deeper belief, she can now do something about it.
“It’s important for you to share who you are in more ways with those closest to you, I told her. That can be through your art form or just getting more vulnerable.
And….
To really overturn this belief I encourage you to talk to your parents individually.
Tell them about these memories with your siblings and how you interpreted their lack of reaction to mean that you shouldn’t share who you are. Really paint the picture of what you felt as a child and as their daughter.
You could say something like this ‘I want to hear that to stop sharing who I am is the last thing you wanted me to do, and that you want me to share more of who I am because it’s important. And I’m not blaming you, I’m just sharing my translation because I know I never told you, because I didn’t even know, and as your daughter it would feel good to hear that.'”
She said, “I really see that hearing this from them will really make a difference for me, even though the answer may seem obvious. It will give me permission to really share myself more.”
Even without knowing how the conversation went with her parents, just identifying the unique flavor of her “I feel not enough” was something she wasn’t able to see before. This awareness alone was something she needed to discover to claim her worth.
Now it’s your turn.
Tell me how do you sometimes feel “not enough,” and if you were to scratch below the surface of that thought, can you uncover your specific flavor of what you interpreted to be true when you were younger?
Would love to read what you come up with.
You’ve always been enough,
In Love,
