The Story of Meh, Eh and Good Enough
This is the article I wrote about last Friday, when I emailed you about doing my first Facebook Live and how close I was to bagging on it when I remembered the article I'd just been writing which inspired me to just do it. (You can read that article here in case you missed it.) Hope you find some inspiration in the story below too : )
Once upon a time there were three friends, Meh, Eh and Good Enough. They each longed to do something meaningful with their lives, and had enough gumption to just go ahead and try, and so they set out to change the world.
Meh got right to work with a whole file full of ideas, a ton of webinars to listen to, and a grand vision of herself accepting an award for Best Entrepreneur Ever on the stage of her TED Talk while receiving a standing ovation. The only minor problem was that every time she put an idea out in to the world, it didn't immediately catch fire. 50,000 people didn't sign up for it right away, the phone didn't start ringing off the hook with ideal clients clamoring to work with her, and the idea itself didn't look quite as shiny and exciting as it had in her head.
It soon got to the point where, before an idea even had a chance to breathe, Meh would feel the spark of possibility and then immediately squash it, knowing that if she launched one of her visions it would end up, well, kind of meh. So why bother? And so, after a time, she stopped bothering.
Eh took a little more time to settle into his process. He leased an office in a sweet co-working space, bought an Aeron Chair for all the meetings he was going to be having, and launched a slick, mobile-responsive website. He loved going to networking meetings, especially the evening ones that involved drinks, laughs and hearty handshakes. He loved meeting people for lunch and shmoozing with the other hip co-workers. What he didn't love so much was figuring out how to actually get clients. Or following up consistently on leads, connections and opportunities. Or looking into ways he might be sabotaging his own success, and ways he might change that.
At some point the effort just didn't seem worth it anymore. Another networking meeting? Eh, nothing ever comes out of them anyway. Picking up the phone to see if he could help someone out? Eh, if they need me they'll call me. Writing or speaking or finding some way to share his vision? Eh, the world seems to be functioning without it. And so, after a time, Eh stopped bothering too.
And then there was Good Enough. Good Enough was thoughtful, committed and willing to do the work, but didn't overthink or over-plan. She experimented and observed. If things went well, she looked for why and did more of that. If things went badly, she looked for why and changed her course. And, most importantly, she did not take it as a sign that her ideas (or her entire being) had no value when something didn't work out they way she expected it to.
Good Enough aimed for a healthy balance of keeping her expectations low enough and her sense of self-worth high enough to navigate the constantly changing tides of life and business. Real life sometimes surpassed her most audacious dreams, and sometimes looked so much crappier than what she expected she just didn't know what the hell had happened. But she KEPT GOING.
In my own life, I've lived more than my fair share of Meh, as well as a healthy dose of Eh. Now I'm learning to get comfortable with Good Enough.
And it is freaking HARD sometimes. The voices that want to convince me that I'm doing things wrong can get VERY LOUD. The "proof" shows up all over the place, like when I expect things to turn out one way (like assuming my Visionary's Dare would lead directly to a huge number of people signing on to work with me privately) and finding that they look quite another way in reality (like realizing that it was actually going to be the beginning of my relationship with most of these extraordinary people, not the part where we jump into bed together; or that people can't say yes to something I don't actually offer).
Lately I've been spending a lot of time studying Good Enough because the Good Enough who was probably a natural part of me when I was born seems to have gotten buried under a whole lot of perfectionism, expectations, judgment, "supposed to," comparisons and not-good-enoughness. Understanding how she works and practicing her methods is one way I can dig out from under all of it.
It seems that Good Enough is able to put things out into the world and detach from them. It seems that she is able to pivot based on what happens in real life, and not get knocked over by unexpected outcomes. It seems that Good Enough expects things to work out / not work out / work out differently than planned in pretty accurate proportions, rather than expecting them to always work out exactly the way they looked in her head and then feeling like a failure when they don't. Good Enough seems awfully healthy to me.
And so my wish for you is to bring a little more Good Enough into your life. Take something you've been wanting to do but have been procrastinating and decide to just be Good Enough. When I did that last week with the Wonder Woman video it completely freed me to just try. It also opened up the exact way I needed to do it--instead of sending out an email with an official time at which I'd be speaking live on Facebook, Good Enough gave me permission to just hop on quietly, whenever the time felt right, and try it when no one knew I'd be there so I wouldn't have to worry about being any good at all!
And I ended up having FUN! So much that I'm going to do it again this week, and I'll be talking about Moana's Visionary's Journey--though I can't tell you what time, because I'm still practicing being just good enough. Let me know how you're letting go of pressure and expectations this week and making room for Good Enough!
JOY!!