You've got it made but...

You look around you and life seems pretty good. The business is doing well despite all the challenges, no major issues, touch wood. The family also seem to be thriving and overall, you can pat yourself on the back for doing a good job.

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And yet…sometimes in those quiet moments when you have time to think, there seems to be something missing. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. You look after yourself, eat healthily, exercise, but…

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Could it be to do with that thing at the top of the Maslow hierarchy called self-actualisation? I rather wish he’d called it something else, but it basically has to do with our sense of having fulfilled our potential, expressed and achieved all that we’re capable of.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about living our best lives, being the best versions of ourselves which can be a huge pressure. Has 'best' become a cult? I want to shout, ‘Enough!’ What happened to ‘good’? I’ve been guilty of peddling people being their best in my work.

The child psychologist Donald Winnicott coined the phrase ‘good enough’ when working with mothers who not surprisingly wanted to be perfect mothers. His observation was that what children needed was not perfect mothers (or parents), but those that were ‘good enough’.

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How about if instead of constantly seeking 'best' we started to aspire to good, celebrate humanness, accept fallibility? Perhaps even, that we are ordinary, not special. I suspect we’d get much better at lowering our expectations of ourselves, relieving ourselves and others from the burden of perfectionism.

Taking the pressure off our children for example! Someone once said ‘Many people live the unlived lives of their parents’. So, we’re not perfect, let’s make sure our children are, thereby multiplying the dysfunction in the world. It's about recognising that we’re a work in progress, being patient, not giving up, and not beating ourselves up when it all goes wrong. We have to find our own way and self-actualisation is a lifetime’s work. I came across this quote from the psychiatrist Carl Jung which I think is a good pointer. ‘Your visions will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.’

It's not about perfection set by anyone else’s standards, especially other people’s dreams portrayed on social media. It’s about becoming the people we were meant to be, the people we want to be. Taking time to look inside starts moving us in the right direction, building our self-awareness, understanding and accepting who we are, what we can change and what we can’t, working out what is our ‘good enough’.

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This is the beginning of your life worth living.