112. When Not to Accept "Good Enough"
Have you ever settled into some aspect of your life because it was ‘fine’ or ‘good enough’? Or spent a night on the town in a dress that didn’t really make your heart sing? A life of semi-dissatisfaction and settling is not the only way forward.
Here at Redefining Rest for Public Health Professionals, I encourage my clients to design a life where they are excited, challenged, and joyful. Your ability to show up is drastically different when you are merely meeting your needs versus thriving and living your biggest expression.
This week, I share a conversation that really stuck with me. I break down areas of life where you can accept "good enough" and areas of life where settling should never be an option. There will always be challenges, but remember, your life can be great with diligence and believing big. Tune in and start today.
If you’re not as happy as you want to be, feel like you’ve lost your purpose, or want to have more free time and feel less overwhelmed, I can help. My one-on-one coaching program is about to open up, and it is designed to help women just like you change the way you currently feel in your life. Meeting with me one-on-one every week for 12 weeks will help you trust yourself, feel confident in your decisions, and get your time back without hindering your career. It will change everything. Click here to sign up for the waitlist or join the program now.
What You Will Discover:
How to combat settling.
When ‘good enough’ is okay.
When to take back your life.
How to notice hustling toward perfection.
Resources:
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out if individual coaching can help you!
Follow me on Instagram!
Questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you! Email me at info@mckoolcoaching.com
Join my weekly mailing list to learn about a HUGE Podcast Giveaway, bonus free resources, and coaching opportunities!
Get my free masterclass: How to Delegate and Reduce Your Workload
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hello, hello, hello everyone, how’s it going? Today’s episode is actually going to be a little different. I don’t have any notes. I don’t have an outline. Normally I have drafted things out and really kind of planned for you to learn something. Not that you won’t learn today because I promise you will but yesterday I had such a fascinating interaction with someone that I cannot stop thinking about. And I just want to share with you all what happened and what has prompted for me to reflect on, as it relates to ‘good enough’.
So if you’re new here in the Redefining Rest world, in my rest coaching world, one of the things I talk about a lot is letting go of perfectionism, letting go of doing it all. Letting go of hustle culture and the patriarchy, telling you that in order to be successful, in order to achieve happiness your purpose is to always do everything and do it perfectly. And by even subconsciously believing that, you end up burning out. You end up really draining your energy and wasting a lot of time.
However, yesterday, so as some of you know, recently I have gone back to working out in a studio, meaning I go to a class. And yesterday I went to a class, it was right after work. I showed up a little bit early so I was hanging out where they have benches. And there was this woman sitting next to me and she started talking to me about just the workout class and stuff like that. And I started to ask her questions, “What do you do for work? How long have you lived here?” It turned out she actually worked in an adjacent overlapping field of public health.
And she was probably, I mean it’s hard to tell people’s age and I don’t like to assume. But definitely mid-career at least, if not further along. And the fascinating, fascinating thing to me was any time I asked her a question, “What do you do? Do you like it? How long have you lived here? What do you think?” Her response was always and she said this, “Oh, it’s good enough.” Which was fascinating to me. She would say, “Yeah, my job’s good enough, yeah, living here is good enough. My house, I guess it's good enough. I guess I like it enough.”
And she said it kind of with that tone which implied to me that she knew it could be better. It implied to me, and again I don’t know, I didn’t ask her, I didn’t confirm, so I could be totally off. But the way she was talking, her body language, her tone, I got the sense that there was a level of dissatisfaction and I don’t know if there was disappointment. I don’t know if there was resentfulness, if she was just resolved to the way her life is or stuck. I don’t know. I wasn’t coaching her.
I don’t go out into the world and just randomly start coaching strangers who talk to me, so I wasn’t asking those questions. But I was sitting there just so curious about the way she talked about her life. And how she shared that to her it was just fine, it was just good enough, not excited, not happy, not joyful, but didn’t come off necessarily angry and righteous, just sitting somewhere in the middle.
And it really struck, I honestly had not been able to stop thinking about it because the whole time she was talking I was just thinking in my head, what it’s like to live a life where you are just resolved, settling, accepting, good enough. It's fine. That’s not a great life, that’s not a fulfilling life. Typically what I have found with myself, with all the people I coach and mentor and talk to, when you are in that place of, I guess it's okay, that's not a great place to be. It seems like it's fine. That's why we say, “Oh, it’s fine.”
Because you might have a job that pays you decently. You might be working in a field you kind of are aligned with or maybe you like, you just don’t love your job. Maybe you just feel okay, you have a house, it does its job. There’s nothing catastrophic happening. All your needs are met. But at the same time, you’re not in awe of your life. You are not fully enjoying it. You are not living into it. You’re not excited about pieces of it. That place where you’re in the middle, it seems inconsequential. It seems like not a big deal. It even might seem like a decent place to be.
But I actually want to encourage you to recognize if you're in that place and challenge yourself to really question whether it’s a good place to be. Because what's happening as you're moving through life just accepting whatever happens to be available. Rather than creating the life you really want, rather than setting career goals, going after them, having the career you want, being in the job that excites you, rather than creating your community you want to be in whether it’s friends or family. Rather than creating a life where you get to do the things that bring you joy, whether it's traveling or hobbies or something else.
Rather than designing a life where you get to try new things, where you get to challenge yourself, where you get to grow, where you get to be excited. When you are just resolved to, my life’s good enough, it’s fine, could be worse, could be better. It seems so innocent to be at that place but you only get one life. Do you really want to spend your life in that place of it’s fine, when you don't have to? When you can create a life where you think it's good, you think it's great, you think it's amazing.
It’s like the difference between putting on a dress for example or a piece of clothing when you’re like, “I guess this does the trick. It’s a little too big. It’s not that flattering in some areas, but it does cover my body so I guess it's fine.” Or putting on a dress and being like, “Damn, that looks good. I love the way this frames my body. And I feel so powerful in it and I'm excited to go wear this out in the world.” That’s the difference.
Now, I don't love the word, settling. But I do think in this context of what we’re talking about, it kind of applies. It’s very easy to kind of settle for the life you have when you're in the place of okay, I’m not in survival mode, I have my needs met but you're not necessarily living a life that really ignites you, that brings your dreams to life. And I think this happens in public health all the time and so many of you listening are experiencing this.
And I think part of this does come from the patriarchy and hustle culture and helping professions of just be happy with what you're given, don't ask for too much, it's selfish. It’s indulgent. Be humble. So you come into public health, it's something you care about, you’ve moved along your career, you’re kind of dissatisfied in your job, whether it's the work you’re doing or the organization or something else. You aren’t in love with where you live or you don't have the best friend group or community.
You aren’t doing that much in your life outside of work and you’re just kind of resolved to it. I want you to know, it doesn't have to be that way. Your life can be so much bigger than I guess it's good enough. Your life can be exciting. Your life can be full. You can have joy. You can have purpose. You can have fulfillment. You can love your life. You don't have to settle for it's fine. You don’t have to settle for that dress that doesn’t really fit, that looks awkward in some places.
You can get the dress that you put on and you feel amazing. You know you can take on anything, you’re excited to wear it. I was thinking about this, of talking about not settling or not being resolved or not getting stuck in accepting a life that's just fine. And I want to be clear, this is very different than when I talk about letting tasks or actual work you are getting done be good enough.
When you are working on your manuscript, when you are drafting an outline, when you are putting together an evaluation plan, you don’t have to aim for those specific tasks to be perfect. You can absolutely accept good enough, this outline, it’s good enough, the same with at home, how I clean the house, it’s good enough. I think this is where we get confused because in our day-to-day life, in our tasks we are executing and the things we are doing at our job or at work, we are driven by perfectionism, by doing it all and getting it all done perfectly.
And we struggle a lot with just letting some of the work be B minus or even C level work. And when you aren’t able to just let some of your work be good enough, you burn yourself out. You get exhausted, you overwork. That is not the same as accepting just good enough for the whole totality of your life, of what your life looks like, of how it feels, of what's going on in your life. You actually need to swap those two. Allow when you're getting tasks done, when you're doing your work, when you’re doing your chores, allow those items, you executing them to just be to the level of it’s good enough.
It’s good enough to go out. This email’s good enough to send out, not perfect. Allow and accept that as good enough. It will reduce so much of your stress, give you so much time back and so much energy. Now, when it comes to your whole life, this is where I encourage you not to accept just good enough or just fine. And really create a life that is good, that is great, that is amazing because you only have one life. And when you do that, when you create that life that is amazing, it doesn't mean you won’t have challenges.
It doesn't mean you won’t have negative emotions, because you will. It doesn't mean everything will be perfect and there will be no problems or you'll never be upset. That’s not what a good, great, amazing life is. It will still be 50/50. You’ll still have challenges, you’ll still go through tough times. But it is so much easier to move through, going through those challenges in tough times when you're living a life that is good, when you’re living a life that is great, rather than just fine or just good enough.
All of you listening right now are so resourceful. You have already created so much in your life. You went and got degrees. You've gotten jobs. You've moved. You’ve gone out of your comfort zone. You’ve traveled. You’ve tried new things. You know how to create a life that's more than good enough. But some of you have stopped doing that. You’ve thrown up your hands, you’ve hit the brake, whether you’re doing it because you're burnt out or because life has turned out a little different than you thought, because you don't believe you can dream like you did in college or when you were growing up.
None of that's true. You have the skills. You have the resourcefulness. You have the ability to intentionally create the life you want to live that’s beyond just fine, a life where at the end of it, you look back and you are so proud of yourself for all you were able to experience, the good and the bad, and how you really took charge and took the driver’s seat of your life. If you’re in that place where you’re kind of settling for a life that's just good enough, you feel stuck. You might not even really see that that’s where you are.
And I hope that this episode is helping you reflect and question if that's where you are. I want you to know, one, you have it in you to get out of that space. You have it in you to ignite desire and hope and belief and confidence and take actions to take back control of your life and create one you want. And number two, you also can get support doing this. You don't have to do this alone, whether that's hiring me as your coach, joining one of my courses, a therapist, a mentor or someone else.
Your life is so precious and life is too short to settle just for it’s fine. You are able and capable of so much more, of creating a much bigger life, one that’s fulfilling, where you have purpose, where you get to do things that excite you, where you have capacity, time and space, where you don’t have to be stuck in resentfulness or frustration or guilt or shame. And listen, part of your brain unconsciously might be questioning whether you deserve that because we hear this a lot, well, there’s a lot of other people suffering. Other people have it worse.
Listen, it’s not about deserving. It’s not about earning. Everyone has access to create the life that they want to create. Yes, we all have different resources, different privileges, different barriers. But in the face of whatever barriers you face, privileges you do or do not hold, you get choice. You get to create the life you want to create even with the barriers, even with the challenges. You just have to take control. You have to get in the driver’s seat. It is available to you.
So I want you to really notice if you are accepting your life as just good enough and start challenging yourself to create a life that’s more than good enough. And I want you to notice where you are not allowing the tasks you do, the day-to-day to-do items to be good enough and you’re hustling for perfection and accept good enough in your day-to-day work, in the office, in your day-to-day chores. I promise you, make these shifts of where to accept good enough and where to not. It will make a huge difference in your life.
Alright, you all, so that was that. I hope you got something out of this. Again, I didn’t take notes, it was just a stream of consciousness from what I’ve been thinking in the past 24 hours. Real quick, if you’re new here, if this is your first, second, maybe third episode, make sure to hit that subscribe button because starting next week we are announcing a huge podcast giveaway. We’re going to be giving away a spa gift card, a much higher value than we did last year. Some books around burnout and rest, some newer books that are available.
I have a collab with a colleague of mine to give away some of their merch, so it’s really, really exciting. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any of it. And with that, I’ll leave you all and we’ll talk next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hello, hello, hello everyone, how’s it going? Today’s episode is actually going to be a little different. I don’t have any notes. I don’t have an outline. Normally I have drafted things out and really kind of planned for you to learn something. Not that you won’t learn today because I promise you will but yesterday I had such a fascinating interaction with someone that I cannot stop thinking about. And I just want to share with you all what happened and what has prompted for me to reflect on, as it relates to ‘good enough’.
So if you’re new here in the Redefining Rest world, in my rest coaching world, one of the things I talk about a lot is letting go of perfectionism, letting go of doing it all. Letting go of hustle culture and the patriarchy, telling you that in order to be successful, in order to achieve happiness your purpose is to always do everything and do it perfectly. And by even subconsciously believing that, you end up burning out. You end up really draining your energy and wasting a lot of time.
However, yesterday, so as some of you know, recently I have gone back to working out in a studio, meaning I go to a class. And yesterday I went to a class, it was right after work. I showed up a little bit early so I was hanging out where they have benches. And there was this woman sitting next to me and she started talking to me about just the workout class and stuff like that. And I started to ask her questions, “What do you do for work? How long have you lived here?” It turned out she actually worked in an adjacent overlapping field of public health.
And she was probably, I mean it’s hard to tell people’s age and I don’t like to assume. But definitely mid-career at least, if not further along. And the fascinating, fascinating thing to me was any time I asked her a question, “What do you do? Do you like it? How long have you lived here? What do you think?” Her response was always and she said this, “Oh, it’s good enough.” Which was fascinating to me. She would say, “Yeah, my job’s good enough, yeah, living here is good enough. My house, I guess it's good enough. I guess I like it enough.”
And she said it kind of with that tone which implied to me that she knew it could be better. It implied to me, and again I don’t know, I didn’t ask her, I didn’t confirm, so I could be totally off. But the way she was talking, her body language, her tone, I got the sense that there was a level of dissatisfaction and I don’t know if there was disappointment. I don’t know if there was resentfulness, if she was just resolved to the way her life is or stuck. I don’t know. I wasn’t coaching her.
I don’t go out into the world and just randomly start coaching strangers who talk to me, so I wasn’t asking those questions. But I was sitting there just so curious about the way she talked about her life. And how she shared that to her it was just fine, it was just good enough, not excited, not happy, not joyful, but didn’t come off necessarily angry and righteous, just sitting somewhere in the middle.
And it really struck, I honestly had not been able to stop thinking about it because the whole time she was talking I was just thinking in my head, what it’s like to live a life where you are just resolved, settling, accepting, good enough. It's fine. That’s not a great life, that’s not a fulfilling life. Typically what I have found with myself, with all the people I coach and mentor and talk to, when you are in that place of, I guess it's okay, that's not a great place to be. It seems like it's fine. That's why we say, “Oh, it’s fine.”
Because you might have a job that pays you decently. You might be working in a field you kind of are aligned with or maybe you like, you just don’t love your job. Maybe you just feel okay, you have a house, it does its job. There’s nothing catastrophic happening. All your needs are met. But at the same time, you’re not in awe of your life. You are not fully enjoying it. You are not living into it. You’re not excited about pieces of it. That place where you’re in the middle, it seems inconsequential. It seems like not a big deal. It even might seem like a decent place to be.
But I actually want to encourage you to recognize if you're in that place and challenge yourself to really question whether it’s a good place to be. Because what's happening as you're moving through life just accepting whatever happens to be available. Rather than creating the life you really want, rather than setting career goals, going after them, having the career you want, being in the job that excites you, rather than creating your community you want to be in whether it’s friends or family. Rather than creating a life where you get to do the things that bring you joy, whether it's traveling or hobbies or something else.
Rather than designing a life where you get to try new things, where you get to challenge yourself, where you get to grow, where you get to be excited. When you are just resolved to, my life’s good enough, it’s fine, could be worse, could be better. It seems so innocent to be at that place but you only get one life. Do you really want to spend your life in that place of it’s fine, when you don't have to? When you can create a life where you think it's good, you think it's great, you think it's amazing.
It’s like the difference between putting on a dress for example or a piece of clothing when you’re like, “I guess this does the trick. It’s a little too big. It’s not that flattering in some areas, but it does cover my body so I guess it's fine.” Or putting on a dress and being like, “Damn, that looks good. I love the way this frames my body. And I feel so powerful in it and I'm excited to go wear this out in the world.” That’s the difference.
Now, I don't love the word, settling. But I do think in this context of what we’re talking about, it kind of applies. It’s very easy to kind of settle for the life you have when you're in the place of okay, I’m not in survival mode, I have my needs met but you're not necessarily living a life that really ignites you, that brings your dreams to life. And I think this happens in public health all the time and so many of you listening are experiencing this.
And I think part of this does come from the patriarchy and hustle culture and helping professions of just be happy with what you're given, don't ask for too much, it's selfish. It’s indulgent. Be humble. So you come into public health, it's something you care about, you’ve moved along your career, you’re kind of dissatisfied in your job, whether it's the work you’re doing or the organization or something else. You aren’t in love with where you live or you don't have the best friend group or community.
You aren’t doing that much in your life outside of work and you’re just kind of resolved to it. I want you to know, it doesn't have to be that way. Your life can be so much bigger than I guess it's good enough. Your life can be exciting. Your life can be full. You can have joy. You can have purpose. You can have fulfillment. You can love your life. You don't have to settle for it's fine. You don’t have to settle for that dress that doesn’t really fit, that looks awkward in some places.
You can get the dress that you put on and you feel amazing. You know you can take on anything, you’re excited to wear it. I was thinking about this, of talking about not settling or not being resolved or not getting stuck in accepting a life that's just fine. And I want to be clear, this is very different than when I talk about letting tasks or actual work you are getting done be good enough.
When you are working on your manuscript, when you are drafting an outline, when you are putting together an evaluation plan, you don’t have to aim for those specific tasks to be perfect. You can absolutely accept good enough, this outline, it’s good enough, the same with at home, how I clean the house, it’s good enough. I think this is where we get confused because in our day-to-day life, in our tasks we are executing and the things we are doing at our job or at work, we are driven by perfectionism, by doing it all and getting it all done perfectly.
And we struggle a lot with just letting some of the work be B minus or even C level work. And when you aren’t able to just let some of your work be good enough, you burn yourself out. You get exhausted, you overwork. That is not the same as accepting just good enough for the whole totality of your life, of what your life looks like, of how it feels, of what's going on in your life. You actually need to swap those two. Allow when you're getting tasks done, when you're doing your work, when you’re doing your chores, allow those items, you executing them to just be to the level of it’s good enough.
It’s good enough to go out. This email’s good enough to send out, not perfect. Allow and accept that as good enough. It will reduce so much of your stress, give you so much time back and so much energy. Now, when it comes to your whole life, this is where I encourage you not to accept just good enough or just fine. And really create a life that is good, that is great, that is amazing because you only have one life. And when you do that, when you create that life that is amazing, it doesn't mean you won’t have challenges.
It doesn't mean you won’t have negative emotions, because you will. It doesn't mean everything will be perfect and there will be no problems or you'll never be upset. That’s not what a good, great, amazing life is. It will still be 50/50. You’ll still have challenges, you’ll still go through tough times. But it is so much easier to move through, going through those challenges in tough times when you're living a life that is good, when you’re living a life that is great, rather than just fine or just good enough.
All of you listening right now are so resourceful. You have already created so much in your life. You went and got degrees. You've gotten jobs. You've moved. You’ve gone out of your comfort zone. You’ve traveled. You’ve tried new things. You know how to create a life that's more than good enough. But some of you have stopped doing that. You’ve thrown up your hands, you’ve hit the brake, whether you’re doing it because you're burnt out or because life has turned out a little different than you thought, because you don't believe you can dream like you did in college or when you were growing up.
None of that's true. You have the skills. You have the resourcefulness. You have the ability to intentionally create the life you want to live that’s beyond just fine, a life where at the end of it, you look back and you are so proud of yourself for all you were able to experience, the good and the bad, and how you really took charge and took the driver’s seat of your life. If you’re in that place where you’re kind of settling for a life that's just good enough, you feel stuck. You might not even really see that that’s where you are.
And I hope that this episode is helping you reflect and question if that's where you are. I want you to know, one, you have it in you to get out of that space. You have it in you to ignite desire and hope and belief and confidence and take actions to take back control of your life and create one you want. And number two, you also can get support doing this. You don't have to do this alone, whether that's hiring me as your coach, joining one of my courses, a therapist, a mentor or someone else.
Your life is so precious and life is too short to settle just for it’s fine. You are able and capable of so much more, of creating a much bigger life, one that’s fulfilling, where you have purpose, where you get to do things that excite you, where you have capacity, time and space, where you don’t have to be stuck in resentfulness or frustration or guilt or shame. And listen, part of your brain unconsciously might be questioning whether you deserve that because we hear this a lot, well, there’s a lot of other people suffering. Other people have it worse.
Listen, it’s not about deserving. It’s not about earning. Everyone has access to create the life that they want to create. Yes, we all have different resources, different privileges, different barriers. But in the face of whatever barriers you face, privileges you do or do not hold, you get choice. You get to create the life you want to create even with the barriers, even with the challenges. You just have to take control. You have to get in the driver’s seat. It is available to you.
So I want you to really notice if you are accepting your life as just good enough and start challenging yourself to create a life that’s more than good enough. And I want you to notice where you are not allowing the tasks you do, the day-to-day to-do items to be good enough and you’re hustling for perfection and accept good enough in your day-to-day work, in the office, in your day-to-day chores. I promise you, make these shifts of where to accept good enough and where to not. It will make a huge difference in your life.
Alright, you all, so that was that. I hope you got something out of this. Again, I didn’t take notes, it was just a stream of consciousness from what I’ve been thinking in the past 24 hours. Real quick, if you’re new here, if this is your first, second, maybe third episode, make sure to hit that subscribe button because starting next week we are announcing a huge podcast giveaway. We’re going to be giving away a spa gift card, a much higher value than we did last year. Some books around burnout and rest, some newer books that are available.
I have a collab with a colleague of mine to give away some of their merch, so it’s really, really exciting. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any of it. And with that, I’ll leave you all and we’ll talk next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Enjoy the Show?
Don't miss an episode, follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.
