Episode 5: When Doing Everything Right Still Isn’t Enough
You’re doing all the things — taking care of everyone, getting the work done, staying kind, showing up. You check the boxes, juggle the lists, and somehow still end each day with that whisper: “I didn’t do enough.”
You’ve tried to fix it by doing more, controlling more, organizing more… but that sense of “not enough” never goes away. And it’s exhausting.
In this episode, we talk about why more effort isn’t the answer, what’s really fueling that inner pressure to “do it right,” and how to start changing the way you measure your worth — so you can finally exhale and feel like yourself again.
A Sneak Peek of What You’ll Find in This Episode:
The Real Problem:
Sometimes, we mistakenly tell ourselves that if we could just get on top of it all, just make a really good to-do list or just get more organized, then we’d feel better. Then we’d have time to reconnect with ourselves or with our people.
We want to control our way out of it with organization or a little more effort. (As someone who likes control or order, I easily fall prey to this.) But here’s the important mind shift we need to make: doing more won’t fix us feeling we’re “not enough.” Even if you were getting it all done, you’d find something else that would make you feel inadequate.
That’s because the problem isn’t actually what’s on your to-do list — it’s what you’re using to measure your worth. You’re equating productivity with value, or caretaking of others as the measure of your worth, and that scale will never balance because there will always be more you could do.
Most of us pin our worth on a couple of things:
What we really want when we say we want healthy boundaries:
- How we feel like we are performing in life based on what we think other people expect from us. Did I get enough done today, was I patient enough, thin enough, organized enough, calm enough, kind enough, successful enough? That word enough speaks to unseen standards that we are holding ourselves to
- How well we are taking care of the people we love—motherhood, friendship, sisterhood, marriage—because we value our relationships so much and feel responsible for making them good. I should have been kinder to my kids or more patient with my husband. I should have spent more time listening without multitasking or I should have gotten down on the floor to play with my kids. Should is another word that speaks to things that we are measuring our worth by.
Additional Resources to Help You Feel Like Enough:
- Take the Self-Silencing Quiz to spot which pattern keeps you in “doing more” mode — and how to start loosening it
- Join the 30-Day Challenge for gentle, daily prompts to reconnect with yourself — not by doing more, but by doing differently
