Please let me know what you think in the comments, smash the heart if the ideas around finding your enough are helpful to you, and send this to a friend if you think these ideas can support them.
How do you know when it’s enough?
With work: what’s good enough? What’s enough effort? Enough time? Enough energy? Enough credibility?
With your body: Do you know when you have eaten enough? Laughed enough? Rested and recharged enough? Watched enough? Scrolled enough?
With your heart: When is the give and take enough in a pleasant way, and when have you “had enough” in a less pleasant way? When is it time to act on your enough, to stay, to go, or to gather more data?
More than identifying your enough, can you act on it? Are you able to stop yourself? To start? To give? To take? To finally leave? To finally try?
“Enough” is the boundary that we draw between what we want and need and what we don’t.* Your sense of enough determines where you are willing and compelled to spend your precious time, attention, and energy. Think, “it’s enough now, I can stop working for the night” or “I am enough and can handle failing, therefore I’m willing to do this thing I suck at again and again because it makes me feel alive to try.”
The strivers I work with often struggle with answering and defining what’s “enough” in their own terms. They rely upon internalized rules of what is good and what is bad, what is successful, and what is ripe for failure, and what makes someone a winner or a loser. I want to be Partner. To win this award. To be recognized by this committee. To own a home this big. To run this many marathons. Strivers tend to make decisions based upon external standards that come from long ago learned lessons, or what I call “Programming and Conditioning.”*
Programming and conditioning are the rules you learn to stay safe, that you don’t get to negotiate.
The programming is the story you learn to create, and the conditioning is the behaviour you learn to reinforce the story.
Program: Thin is beautiful.
Conditioning: Restrict calories, no simple carbs.
Program: Failure is for losers.
Conditioning: Procrastinate, avoid trying.
Program: People barely tolerate my presence.
Conditioning: Do everything for everyone to be likeable.
Program: Be responsive to be good.
Conditioning: Check email in the middle of the night.
Programming and conditioning prescribe who and how you are supposed to be in the world, in order to be safe, secure, connected. Programming and conditioning happens when we are developing, in our earliest years of life, throughout our lives. The challenge with early programming is that beyond being impressionable, which we are, we also have fewer defenses or alternatives. If we see the adult in charge of your safety in front of a mirror, criticizing their own body and calling it ugly while grabbing their love handles, you don’t have the brain power or experience to discuss patriarchy and beauty standards. You do have the capacity to learn though, no fat is good.
With programming and conditioning, enough is always an external standard devoid of your genius and preferences, your context and experience. Here lies patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, heteronormativity, and on and on. Here we also find the lessons you learned while growing up, as a baby, as a child, as a younger and older person in the world. We all learn and adapt as we grow, we survive by taking in and interpreting the world around us. Programming and conditioning operate in us and our lives, all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not.
When you are trying to decipher your enough, it’s helpful to know the difference between your programming and conditioning (the rules you learned to be safe) and your actual desires, preferences, needs, and ambitions. The key to finding and identifying your enough, is recognizing any rules you are applying and determining whether those rules actually serve you in the present moment. What made you feel safe once, may or may not help you now.
Image from “Zen Art Supplies,” though not an painter, I’ve lost a ton of time on their site looking at their colour mixing posts. It’s all so beautiful.
Programming and conditioning are a part of being human, like paint colours that blend into a “final” colour. The work of identifying your enough, is the work of seeing all the component colours that contribute to the “final” colour. (I am obnoxiously using ““ here because we are ever growing, and final feels to concrete and limiting to not flag and hold loosely together.) Looking at the rules, present and operational in any given moment, allows you to tinker with the paint until the “final” colour reflects what you truly believe, more than what you were taught to stay safe.
You can usually tell if you are being driven by programming by the language you use. If you are explaining or striving with extremes or binaries in mind (be good, be right, everyone, no one, tolerable, ugly, beautiful, etc.), chances are there is a program running. Being an adult means being complicated, and when you are striving more deliberately your words reflect that (“part of me thinks” … or “on the one hand”). Also keep a look out for shoulds in your language, they are vestiges of lessons learned around “who you should be” (perhaps as opposed to who you are).
The intense pressure you feel to take a familiar action often indicates the presence of conditioning. When it feels like you have no choices, like you have to take a certain course (offer to help, to clean up after dinner, to call Mom) conditioning is usually running the show. Think of when you can’t help but check email (the behaviour reinforced by external validation, and the program that you need to be responsive), vs when you are comfortable setting your phone aside.
Finally, the presence of these experiences also tend to indicate there is something of what you learned in the past muddying up your sense of enough in the present:
Waking up and lacking the energy to start your day, dreading the inevitable ups and downs the day will bring
The inability to move from reflective to driven, and back, throughout the day (stuck in vigilance or disconnected numbness)
Guilt no matter your choice
Experiencing a tired but wired feeling at night before bed
Feeling trapped and stuck in a life you want to love, but don’t enjoy
What stories and behaviours that you learned to be safe (and didn’t get to negotiate, programming and conditioning) shows up in your life, and determines your boundaries?
You can also go about boundary setting by identifying your enough in the present, the boundary that reflects what makes sense now. Seeing all of the different colours that contribute to how you are experiencing the present moment can help you piece together, and honour with action, your sense of enough. Here are some ideas to hold onto as you navigate your inner colour mixing palette:
(1) Enough isn’t the same as finding satisfaction
Conflating the two ideas is dangerous, and where many of us get into trouble. Show me a bowl of my Dad’s life-long friend’s Pam’s popcorn and I’ll show you the difference between enough and satisfied. You know you’ve edited an email and it’s enough and fine to send, but you may not be satisfied with it. You know it’s time to stop working, it’s been enough for the day, but you feel unsatisfied with the state of your to-dos. Often times, what is enough for us is insufficient to the programming and conditioning we learned growing up. Remember, there are many different parts of us, and sometimes we decide it’s enough even though there are parts of us that find that desperately challenging.
(2) Your enough can bring relief, but it often doesn’t
Your enough is about drawing a boundary between what’s ok for you to keep investing your precious time, energy and attention doing, and what’s not. Sometimes that boundary is the exhale you’ve been craving, and other times it’s awfully uncomfortable. We find familiar comforting, and so doing something new (relying on what’s enough for you as opposed to the story and behaviour you learned that you didn’t get to negotiate) feels unsettling and even threatening at times.
Think of the gruelling feedback conversation you had: sometimes there’s relief that it’s over, other times it lords over you like a tyrant refusing to let any ease breach the perimeter of your being. You know it’s time to stop thinking about it, that it’s enough, but absent relief it’s hard to let go. Don’t let a lack of relief cloud your willingness to draw a boundary when you are learning and practicing something new.
(3) Your enough is about you
Here is where we have to be cut throat: your enough is fundamentally a you thing. When you look outside of yourself, to define what’s enough, you find the claws programming and conditioning sinking their claws deeper into your skin. What’s enough weight for a 5”7 woman? What’s enough exercise to be healthy? What’s enough work to call it a day? What’s a big enough house? Well, I don’t know! Is the 5”7 woman pregnant? Has the person exercising just recovered from surgery? Are you a server still on shift, or a doctor in an ER? How many quilts do you need to store in your home?
Hair has always been a tough place for me to figure out my “enough.” Imbued with ideas of beauty, it’s hard to know what’s mine and what’s not. I have lately used the simple but effective questions, “do I like it?” to determine next steps.
Enough for me, may not be enough for you, or your best friend. In order to know your “enough,” you need to know (and accept) yourself. This is the most stark and daring contrast to programming and conditioning, whose relies on externalized standards devoid of your person. The colour mixing you want to pay attention to here, is the difference between what you had to learn and believe about yourself to be safe vs. what is actually true of you.
(4) Your enough is a moving target
Abundant in your 20s may be just enough in your 40s (I’m looking at you sleep). It may be obvious what’s enough coffee at one point in the morning, and then something happens (you realize you have a proposal due in an hour) and all of the sudden another cup feels important. Your idea of stability between work and home in the summer is different than September. Circumstances change. You change. Staying close to your needs, values, and aspirations can help turn down your programming and conditioning and allow you to see yourself and your context accurately.**
(5) Sometimes, your enough isn’t a helpful metric
I’m looking at you, grief. Sometimes the boundary of “it’s enough for me” doesn’t make sense, isn’t applicable, and is more harmful than not to apply. Enough isn’t about creating control, especially in a life that unfolds, existentially, outside of our grasp. Sometimes all we can do is notice ourselves unfolding, and explore what we find. We can choose what’s enough in terms of that exploration, not so much the unfolding part though.
Your enough is about choosing your effort, your direction, and your care, with compassion. It’s the process of accepting and honouring your worth, regardless of external results and standards, and then entertaining and experimenting with striving according to what you learn.
As always, be gentle, on yourself and with one another
*The definition of a boundary as the difference between “what’s ok and what’s not ok” comes from Dr. Brené Brown.
**Here’s a book I am reading now by Emily Falk to help clarify these ideas, I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.