What If You Are Already Enough?

What would change in your life and work?

Hey there 👋

Welcome to Enough Already!

This newsletter is all about living from enoughness, and yet I’ve never really tried to define it and speak directly to my experience of it.

So let’s try to do that today. I’m writing this for anyone who subscribes to this newsletter as well as for my coaching clients, as our work often orients to this question of enoughness.

If you connect with today’s essay, please hit like or comment or reply! It lets me know I’m not just shouting into a void.

Alright, now for today’s essay…

Perhaps it would be helpful to start with what enoughness isn’t. Or what it’s like to live from not-enoughness.

To live with not-enoughness is to believe that you are broken, and that some accomplishment, or improvement, or change will fix you.

For most of my life, at least as long as I can remember, this is how I lived. There was a core belief that I am not enough, and everything I did in my life was part of a strategy to fix myself.

The way I would interact with people, the goalposts I set for my career, how I built businesses and communities, how I created art, how I approached romance…all of it organized around this core belief.

Maybe, just maybe, if I achieved the right things, or married the right person, or was charismatic enough, then I would be enough.

Of course, it never worked. Because enoughness can’t be earned. If we believe enoughness is something to be achieved, then we’ve already deluded ourselves about what enoughness is.

So what is enoughness?

Enoughness is already here.

It’s not something we create, it’s something we discover.

I know when I’m living and working from enoughness because there’s a sense of surrender. A “trust fall” with the universe. I’m not attached to any outcomes. I’m not clinging to any stories. I’m present. Enoughness is presence.

I am whole and complete as I am, no matter what I do or build, no matter whether or not people accept me, no matter what I create, no matter how I live my life.

Living from enoughness doesn’t mean experiencing it at all times. Not to say it’s not possible. I don’t know if it is. But for most of us, it’s less about experiencing it at all times and more about holding faith that it’s there.

It’s like the sun. Even when the clouds cover the sky, we know the sun is there. That’s how it is with enoughness. Even when we’re swirling in stress, and overwhelm, and stories, we can remember our innate enoughness.

In a recent essay, Colin Beavan speaks to this as “a vow”. It’s a commitment to enoughness. “It is a spell. An incantation that creates a sense of ease with life.”

At some point in your life, you experienced enoughness. We all start there as babies, I think. But we forget. We’re convinced otherwise, often starting with the way our parents show or withhold love. We learn the conditions to be worthy of love.

Enoughness is to know you are always worthy of love.

Beyond our parents, it’s our peers, teachers, coaches, and society, all telling us what we need to do in order to be worthy. Worthy of love. Worthy of inclusion. Worthy of remembering.

Enoughness is radical inclusion, no matter what.

Daniel Thorson talks about the idea of “unconditional relationship,” which I LOVE and think is pointing to enoughness.

It means that every single part of me — no matter how angry or sad or riddled with shame or guilt, no matter how deeply buried — can all be brought to the light, and I can be in relationship with them.

If it’s been a long time since you’ve experienced enoughness, perhaps you can’t recall what it’s like. Therefore, how can you believe in something if you haven’t experienced it firsthand?

Perhaps enoughness is a lot like God, in that way.

It’s only recently, in the last few years, that I’ve been able to experience enoughness firsthand. Usually, it’s only for a few moments. In Zen Buddhism, this is known as “kenshō”, or a brief glimpse into the true nature of reality. But a glimpse has been enough to root the faith, for me, that it’s there, not just for myself, but for all beings.

As I move through life and work, as I coach, as I parent, as I write, as I play basketball, as I clean the dishes, as I fold laundry, as I cook meals for my family, as I sit there suffering with a migraine, in every moment of life, I can ask this question:

Am I living from enoughness?

Think about what it would mean for your life if you already understood yourself to be enough. If you didn’t have to do anything. If you were inherently worthy.

For some, it can feel terrifying. Because if you’re already enough, why do anything? At least when we’re striving for enoughness, it gives us something to do. If you’re already enough, you’ll have to actually figure out what it is you want to do.

But that is what happens. You start doing things because you want to, or genuinely have to, but no longer because you think you’re not enough if you don’t. Life and work become an expression of your essence. You’re dancing with the universe.

There are days when connecting with my enoughness feels really fucking hard, if not impossible. I am just overwhelmed with emotion or anxiety. And enoughness just feels so far away.

So I try to just remember that enoughness is there. To remember my vow to enoughness. And know that even if I can’t see the sun behind the clouds, it is still there.

What would change in your life if you knew that you were already enough?

Thanks for reading! For those who are ready to step into this kind of work, you can learn more about my coaching practice here.