Enough is a Gift

This is our second post in our series on “Enough”!  Click here to read last week’s post.

Enough as a Gift

“Enough” can be a gift or it can be a curse. If you don’t embrace acceptance and embrace “enough,” it’s a word that can come to torment you. “I’m never good enough, it’s never enough, I don’t have enough.” But the gift of “enough” can remove the pressure to perform, and oftentimes when the pressure is removed, we can actually start doing what we need to do.

Many of us just don’t feel like we’re “good enough” or that we “have enough.” Maybe if we stop trying to hold ourselves to unachievable or unrealistic standards, we’ll begin to recognize that we are good enough, that what we have is enough. We’ll begin to accept the things we cannot change, and we’ll have the space to begin working on the things that we can change.

You’re a human being. You probably get things right most of the time, and sometimes you make mistakes, have accidents, and get things wrong, and that’s okay. The same goes for the human beings around you. They’re not perfect either. So have grace for yourself and grace for the people around you.

I’ve run a service-based business for the past 20 years, so one of the major lessons I’ve learned is that in both life and business, a certain amount of things are going to break and go wrong, and this should be expected. Carpe Diem’s vacuums break; cars have to go the shop; and occasionally an item in a client’s home will be accidentally broken. If we’re doing a perfect job 97% of the time that means that there’s 3% that we’ve gotten wrong.

If you have 100 clients then there will still be those 3 who you get a complaint from. If you have 1000 clients then you’ll have 30 clients calling you. A common pitfall is to misjudge the quality of the service you’re providing because of the number of people calling. The truth is that we’re human, things are going to happen, and you might as well have margin for them and not take them personally. This is just a cost of doing business.

The more clients you are serving, the more homes you are entering, the more items you have to handle to clean, the more that 3% is going to look greater than what it really is. We need to learn to not judge life incorrectly and know when we really have done enough. It’s all about having the margin and expectation that some things in life will go wrong, and it’s not personal.

Enough Said

I see “enough” as a concept of acceptance, trust, and confidence. It is the language of satisfaction. What do you see “enough” as? Is it permission to let go, to do what needs to be done, to have confidence that things are sufficient? Or when you imagine “enough” do you feel like you are chasing something that is just out of reach, unattainable?

When we take the word “enough” and switch it from a context of shame to a context of trust, it can act as a pivot point to allow us to walk in a system of trust instead of a system of shame. In the context of hope and of trust, “enough” is a gift. When “enough” is rightly aligned, it opens us up to receive love.

How does the word “enough” impact your soul?  How does having the confidence that you are enough impact those in your spheres of influence?

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