Why You Don’t Feel Good Enough

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. And that's ultimately what I want to help you do. Today, we're going to be talking about why you don't feel good enough. The most common thing that I have seen in the now over 15 years of coaching people is the underlying thread throughout people's identity and their paradigm of themselves of I'm not enough.

0:44I'm not good enough. And the greatest fear that comes from that is if I'm not enough, then I won't be loved. And it can show up in many different ways. It could show up in, you know, being afraid of success because, you know, I'm afraid of success because I don't know if I'm good enough to get there. And if I do get there, I don't know if I'll be able to stay there. I'm afraid of failure because I don't know if I'm enough to actually succeed. I'm afraid of being alone because I don't know if anyone would ever want to be with me forever. I'm afraid of, you know, going broke because I don't know if I'm enough to be able to make money.

1:11I'm afraid of my wife leaving me because I don't know if I'm enough to have her stay with me. And it's all of these little threads of just, I'm not enough. I always say it's like ice cream. All ice cream is different flavors. You might have chocolate. The other person might have vanilla. I might have mint chocolate chip. We have all these different flavors, but the underlying thing is all of the ice cream is ice cream. And so we have all of these I'm not enoughs that just show up and kind of disguise themselves in different ways. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I'm going to give you an example from a coaching session that I had that I think is really going to hit home with you.

1:47And I'm going to actually teach you how to get past this behavioral adaptation that you unconsciously created in your childhood. And so at some point in time, we learned unconsciously, oh, this is how I have to act to get love. This is how I have to act in order to be accepted. And you listened, you understood it, and you adapted. You adjusted who you were, you kind of shape-shifted and made yourself into a chameleon so that your parents or your primary caregivers would accept you the way that you wanted to be accepted. Because ultimately, the only thing that matters to a child is the attachment, the secure attachment to their primary caregivers.

2:29And this didn't happen because you were manipulated. It happened because you were wise, wise beyond your nears because you unconsciously did this. You know, as kids, we scan our environment and we unconsciously ask something along the lines of what version of me do I need to bring into this room? How do I need to act to be accepted and to be loved? Who do I need to be to be an accepted and to be loved? And a lot of times I go back to talking about our relationship with our parents, because that is the most important thing to understand who you are, your relationship with your mother and your relationship with your father.

3:07If it wasn't mother and father, then you're primary caregivers. And it's not that I'm ever trying to trash anyone's parents. I'm just trying to speak honestly and let you know that no parent is perfect. They're human. and they come with their own stories, their own unresolved needs, and their own emotional ceilings and capacity that they really have. So if they couldn't love you the way that you needed, it's not necessarily that they did it on purpose. It's they loved you the best they possibly could, but you could have maybe craved something that was different, but didn't get it. and so you said to yourself, okay, I'll change who I am unconsciously.

3:48Once again, there's no three-year-old going, well, I'm going to change who I am, but we see, okay, if I act this way, my mom loves me. If I act this way, my mom retracts her love for me. So I don't like that feeling of the retraction. It makes me start to feel alone. So I'm going to act the way that makes me get love from her. And that is where your behavioral adaptation began. And I'm going to talk about how that behavioral adaptation is also usually the thing that's holding you back right now in your life. And I'm going to talk about how to get past that behavioral adaptation. So in turn, when you change yourself, you become a high achiever to feel worthy, or you become the chill kid or the good child so that you can avoid all of the drama, or you become the helper because help was what's really what was needed in the household.

4:38Or you learn to become the quiet one so that you don't become a burden or so that you don't get yelled at or get the belt or whatever it might have been. You weren't doing it to fake this. You were doing this because you wanted to belong. And the problem with this is that that adaptation that you started unconsciously in childhood never actually expired. So if you fast forward to now you're whatever, 35 years old and you're in adulthood, you're doing life and you're doing life. You got relationships and you've got work and you've got dreams and you've got everything you're trying to achieve. But it's like there's something that still feels off inside of you.

5:19And it feels like sometimes it feels like you're spinning your wheels, like you're just trying to. The example I always give is the way I used to feel when I was younger before I started to do this work was I started to feel like I was running in water. Like no matter how hard I was running, I was just barely moving at all. And the reason why was because there was this unconscious behavioral adaptation that was keeping me stuck. And so this is one of the things that I coach people through the most because this thing, when you can dissolve this thing, it makes your life so much easier. And it makes achieving the life that you want not even close to as hard because you don't have some invisible force that feels like it's holding you back.

5:54And so you can find yourself at this moment stuck in patterns where you're constantly trying to prove to somebody else that you're good enough, or you're constantly trying to prove to yourself that you're good enough, or you're a people pleaser, or you're struggling to set boundaries and people are running all over you, or you feel like you're too much for some people. You have too much energy. You feel like you're not enough in some situations, depending on the room that you're in. And you start thinking like, well, you know, this relationship's failed and this relationship's failed. Why do I keep attracting the same type of people in my life?

6:29And the worst part of this is that you think that it's you. You think that, you know, I need to overcome this thing. I need to fix this part of me. I need to get rid of this part of me. I need to push through. But this is where I want to pause here. And I want to give you an example of someone in real life just to kind of put some more context in here and hopefully you can pull pieces from her story. So I was on a call yesterday on Mindset University, which is, you know, I do coaching sessions every single week, group coaching. And I was on a call with somebody who was there and I was doing live coaching with her.

7:05And for those of you guys that always email in, if you want to learn more about Mindset University, you can go to mindsetmentor.com. All of the information is there at mindsetmentor.com. And the question that she asked me and she's like, hey, I feel like I'm afraid of success and I don't know how to to break through this feeling of success. I don't know how to get rid of it. And I said, OK, like if you can if you can think back to your childhood, what does success mean to you? Like, did you what does success mean? Where did this idea of success come from? She started telling this story about her dad and she was in track and field and she would win all of the races.

7:39And no matter how good she was at the races, no matter how many times she came in first place, her dad never praised her. And he would always say like, well, why didn't she get faster? Okay, well, this is the record time. You didn't beat the record time. Sure, you got number one. No big deal. There's a better, you know, somebody out there in the world is better than you. Basically, no matter what she did, even coming in first place, she was never enough. And so in turn, she became an overachiever. And this happens for a lot of people is, you know, it happens sometimes with sports when they're younger.

8:09It happens with a lot of people with parents when in school where, you know, to get better at school or you need to become a master of this instrument. So she became this overachiever. And we started breaking it down in one of the things of the reason why she was afraid of success is because she doesn't even know what success is. She doesn't know what it feels like to be like, ah, I did it. Because she never could feel like she got to that point of, ah, I did it. And so unconsciously, because we have never been somewhere. We have uncertainty and uncertainty creates fear. And so we fear the thing that we've never felt before.

8:45Because even first place wasn't good enough as a child. And so this idea of this fear of success really came from this overachiever, never good enough, no matter what I do, that came from childhood. And so something happened in her childhood. And this happens for everybody, right? Something happens in our childhood. And it's usually with our parents in some sort of way. And we realize, okay, this thing that happened shows me that if I do this, I get my parents' love. Or if I don't do this, or excuse me, if I do this, I get my parents' love. Or if I do this, maybe my parents retract love for me in some sort of way.

9:24And they make me have to earn their love. Or maybe, you know, the love wasn't necessarily unconditional. It was conditional in some sort of way. And so we realized, okay, this is who I need to be. With this who I need to be, we create a behavioral adaptation in some sort of way. The people pleaser, the overachiever. I'll give you a couple more examples. There's something that's in there. The caregiver, the person who has to take care of everybody, the chill kid, whatever it might be. We create this behavioral adaptation, which is not our true self. and then we get older and that behavioral adaptation is actually the thing.

10:02The thing that kept us safe and connected to our parents is usually the thing that's keeping us from taking action and creating the life that we want as we get older. I'm going to pause right there and I'm going to give you an example of my wife and her eczema for this to make sense, right? So it's not going to make sense right away, but it'll make sense as I go through it. My wife, Lauren, used to have really, really bad eczema. And so she would itch it. It was right on her arms and she would itch it and she would eat certain things and her eczema would get worse and it would flare up and she would buy the topical stuff and the skincare stuff and it would just never really truly go away.

10:39And then she realized that usually eczema isn't a skin problem. It's usually a problem with your gut and you have to heal your gut in order to heal the blood barrier in your gut so that the foods and the toxins and the stuff that come in through the foods you eat don't break through the blood barrier of your gut and go into your body. Because then when it comes into your body, guess where? It's got to come out of somewhere. It comes out of your skin. And so she had this eczema problem for her entire life and she heals her gut and her eczema problem goes away. And we will be right back. And now back to the show.

11:13Interesting. It was never an actual eczema problem for her. I'm not saying everybody's issue is this with eczema or skin issues. It was a gut issue. We were trying to fix the wrong thing when really what we need to find was the root of all of it. The thing that we're looking at is we're going, okay, in the case of the lady that I'm coaching in Mindset University, we're going, okay, the fear of success. In her mind, she's like, I have this fear of success and that is the problem. And I'm going, no, no, no, no. We need to rewind a little bit and we need to figure out the other problem. Instead of looking at the eczema, the fear of success, we need to look at the gut and figure out the gut actual is.

11:47So we need to fix the problem, not the response to the problem. The problem was that she never felt like she was enough to her dad. And not feeling like enough, not getting love means I need to change myself. That's the behavioral adaptation that pops in. And so what do we do in this case if you don't feel like you're enough? You work tirelessly. You don't know how to turn off as an adult. It turns into the afraid of success or afraid of failure or the feeling of not being good enough. And so we identify with the fear or the behavioral adaptation and think, that's the thing I need to fix. I need to fix this.

12:29When it's like trying to fix the eczema. It's not the real problem. Following? And so examples of this is like, I see a lot of people that are overachievers. I was this, 100 % an overachiever. if I do well they'll notice me if I'm impressive then they'll give me love and I'll finally feel like I'm worthy why because my father wasn't around and I thought maybe if I succeed maybe if I become better maybe if I become amazing then my father will come around more and he will love me and so a lot of people will get into being really good in sports and becoming an overachiever or getting straight A's so that they feel valued from their parents or their teachers or being like the golden child or the one who never causes any problems or trying to earn love through performance.

13:14And we tie like our self-worth to our productivity. And that turns into like feeling anxious during downtime. Even if you check off all the boxes in life, I know people that have all of the boxes checked off in life. They can't turn it off because it was never about the boxes and never about the success. The thing that was driving them was this, like the eczema in the gut. It's the gut issue. And so no matter how successful people become, they struggle to enjoy success and they're constantly trying to get to the next goal, even when they hit a goal. And so the reason why is because they have this unmet need of just simply feeling valued for existing and not having to perform.

13:55Another one that I see very often is like the peacemaker. If I keep everyone happy, then I'll stay safe and I'll feel loved because conflict is dangerous. And so, you know, this pops up because people are, you know, they have parents who argue a lot. They have a crazy household that they're raised in. So they're trying to calm everybody down and be the peacemaker. Maybe they have created themselves to be the emotional buffer in a really tense household. Maybe they avoid expressing their needs when they get into relationships as an adult so that therefore they don't cause any fights or they push down their anger so that they can keep the peace and they avoid difficult conversations and they say yes and when they really want to say no.

14:39And then they feel resentful towards themselves or resentful towards somebody else, but they don't want to rock the boat. And this really what it comes down to is this unmet need of emotional safety and permission to just simply take up space, even when things get uncomfortable. And then the last example I'll give, and there's many, many examples, but these are just very common ones, is like people who become the caretaker. You know, maybe they're the first child out of five and they learn I have to take care of everybody because my parents are not taking care of them or my parents are forcing me to take care of them because I'm older.

15:13And they get this idea of like, if I take care of others, well, then my mom and dad are going to love me. And as they get older, they think, well, if I take care of others, maybe they'll love me back. And it turns into like my needs are not as important as everybody else's. And so, you know, they become the emotional support for everybody. And, you know, they learn to be the mature one early on in childhood and try to learn to anticipate others' needs and pay attention to others' needs more than they pay attention to their own. And then they feel guilty for not prioritizing themselves. If they do prioritize themselves, they feel guilty for it that way.

15:51They start attracting people into their life that need rescuing. And they get exhausted from always having to be the strong one and they have difficulty asking for help and receiving help. And the unmet need here is like, I just want to be nurtured as well. Like I just want to be supported. I don't want to feel like I have to earn it. And so we develop these adaptations, as hopefully you can see now, in order to get what we need to in childhood. And as we become adult, that's still running the show and actually holding us back from us becoming the next version of ourself, the free version of ourself.

16:24So the adaptation, although it might seem like the enemy, it's not the enemy. It's a spotlight showing you where you need to be healed. You didn't develop the pattern to ruin your life. You developed the pattern to save your connection with your primary caregiver. So the real work is not to fight the adaptation. It's to love the part of you that created it. You get that? That's the really big switch that you need to understand. So instead of saying like, why am I doing this? There's something wrong with me. I need to fix this. You need to take a step back and go, oh, this makes sense now. The part of me that I developed this behavioral adaptation was just trying to protect me when I was younger.

17:08Because as a child, your brain is in sponge mode. You absorb everything going on and you figure out very quickly who you need to be to stay close to your caregivers. and these messages and these ideas get stored into your implicit memory. And that's the kind of memory that doesn't feel like a memory at all. Like, oh yeah, we went to Disney World. That's a memory. An implicit memory doesn't feel like a memory. It just feels like truth because it's just stored so deeply inside of you. So now you're 35 or 40 or 52 years old and you might think, well, I just don't like asking for help or I don't trust people very easily or I'm just not very emotional or you know what I'm super independent but those aren't truths those are just adaptations and they're they're kind of like adaptations that got you the loving connection that you wanted and they were installed in you when you were little and they did their job but now you get to decide if you want to actually keep them and so what do you do well if we go back to the story of me coaching the lady in mindset university I told her it's not about overcoming the adaptation.

18:15It's not about fixing the fear of success. It's about giving yourself now what you didn't get then. So let me say this again. It's not about fixing the adaptation. It's about giving yourself now what you didn't get back then. What do I mean by that? Is that if you give yourself now what you didn't get back then, guess what happens to the adaptation? over time it starts to dissolve which means it no longer runs the show because here's what you really need to do okay and so I asked her and I said hey you know when if you think back to your childhood how many times do you think that your dad said I'm proud of you and she's like I don't think he said he was proud of me once and I was like do you think that you probably wanted to hear that when you were a child she's like I would have loved to hear that when I was a child and I was like cool how many times have you told yourself that I'm proud of you She's like, I never say that.

19:10And I was like, what you need to do is you need to understand that you develop this fear, this behavioral adaptation because you didn't get something when you were younger. Now that you're a mature adult, you need to give that to yourself. And you need to remind yourself that you're in the mode of reparenting yourself and giving yourself what you need. The biggest connection and relationship in your life that you need to heal is the relationship with yourself. And if you do that, everything starts to fix itself. And so what you need to do is you need to name the pattern without shaming it. Maybe you say, I learned to play small so I wouldn't get yelled at.

19:43Or I became overly helpful so I would be the good kid. Or I avoided my needs so that I wouldn't be a burden. Naming this lets your nervous system see it and witness it instead of actually living from it. Oh, I see that thing. I'm distancing myself from it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you need to ask yourself, what did you need in that moment? Maybe it was emotional safety. Maybe it was being celebrated. Maybe it was being seen without having to fix yourself. Find out what you needed. Maybe in her case, it's like, I just needed someone to just be like, you're doing a good job.

20:18I'm proud of you. You're enough. Okay, cool. So then number three, you need to give that to yourself now. Through your words, through how you parent your own inner child, through, you know, who you let into your life now and how you let them treat you. And I said to her, what I want you is I want you to find a picture of yourself when you were young and in track and you were that little eight or nine year old girl. I want you to find a picture of yourself when you wanted to hear from your father. Great job. I'm so proud of you. And I want you to take that picture. I want you to put it on the background of your phone so that every time you look at your phone, you remember I'm trying to connect to her more deeply.

20:57I'm trying to build my relationship with her. That the more that I can heal this little girl in this picture on the phone, that's my background that I see in the wallpaper all the time, the more that I can help that relationship get better, the more that my problems in my behavioral adaptations in my fears dissolve themselves. Because if I give myself what I wanted back then, then the behavioral adaptation dissolves. I don't need to fear success because I'm giving myself that thing that I wanted when I was younger, when this behavioral adaptation started. So you need to give it to yourself now.

21:30And then you need to really sit down and go, okay, I'm going to build a better relationship with myself, with myself, with my inner child. I'm going to start to give it to myself. And as you do that, I promise you, it's not like everybody wants everything to happen immediately. It's not going to happen today. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen in the next month. But as you do this over time, you start to develop that relationship, you'll notice the things that felt like they were keeping you stuck just slowly start to dissolve. They're not around anymore. They don't disappear 100%.

22:01I promise you that. But if they're screaming at you, if they're like at a level 9 or 10 now, you fast forward six months, a year, two years from today, they're at like a level two. That's a big difference between level 10 to level two. Do you know how much less resistance you have that's in your life when you can start to do this? And so what I would recommend for all of you that are listening is figure out what you needed when you were a child and start to give it to yourself today. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. if you love this episode, I'm sure there's people who follow you on Instagram and other places that need to hear this.

22:33And so if you would share that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate so that we could impact more people's lives with these podcast episodes. The only way it grows is from you guys sharing it. So if you do that, I'd greatly, greatly appreciate it. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.