I am enough, I deserve to be me

“We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.” ~Lori Deschene

It is easy to get stuck in the cycle of prioritising others over ourselves, thinking that everyone else's needs usurp our own, being a harsh critic of all that we do wrong, comparing ourselves to others and feeling despair, thinking that others are judging us.

As a woman, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, a lover, an employee, a business owner, the demands of others can seem like an endless request for you that quickly pushes your own needs to the bottom of the pile.

And then one day, you wake up and wonder when and where you got lost. I have heard this so many times – I don’t know who I am, I don’t even know where to begin.

You weren’t born dismissing your own needs, far from it! As a baby, a toddler, you will have vocalised your needs until they were met. As a young child, you would have found it easy to ask for what you needed and possibly throw tantrums if you didn’t get it. So, what happened? How did an assertive youngster become a subdued and passive adult?

We could spend hours looking at the why, I’ve found it far more beneficial to begin the journey of ‘how’. How do you change things for the better?

Knowing that you are enough is a good place to be, knowing that you deserve to be uniquely you is an even better place to be.

If you don’t feel that you are already good enough, then it is likely that you have some saboteur behaviours. They might be eating, drinking or other addictive behaviours or they might be unhealthy shopping habits. They can be the inability to say no or to set clear boundaries. You might allow yourself to be walked all over and suppress feelings of injustice or unfairness.

We tell our children that they are beautiful as they are, yet do not believe that about ourselves. We are accepting of others’ flaws yet berate ourselves if we are lacking. The traits of perfectionism, people-pleasing and subservience can create quite a pit that feels almost impossible to escape.

Yet who are we to decide whether we are enough.

I personally uphold many idealisms that for me, help make a kinder, more inclusive, accepting and forgiving way of being. One of them is ‘everyone is doing the absolute best that they can at the time’. As a former perfectionist and brutal self-critic, this gave me permission to forgive myself and others. This paved the way to understand that, as humans, we make mistakes, we aren’t perfect and were never designed to be so. As a former people-pleaser, I then began to uphold the idealism that I am equal and as deserving as anyone else is. Having negatively compared myself to others, another perfectionist trait, this allowed me to create a level playing field on which, I was an equal player to any of the other ‘players in life’ so that I could begin to see myself as equal to others.

Once you begin to realise that you are good enough as you are, that you deserve to be your unique self and that prioritising yourself, not necessarily over others but alongside others, you can then free yourself to be you.

If you’re unsure of who you are, then I tend to advise my clients to start living life like a 4-year-old in a Batman cape, try things. See what hobbies, adventures, pastimes you like. A bit like shopping for clothes. You try a few outfits on, keep the ones you like and return the ones you don’t – simple. This can start the foundations of the ‘who am I’ question which can then be built upon in terms of your values, morals and boundaries as well as goals and desires.

The Optimal Mind Body Gut Programme was designed to incorporate ways of resolving the many aspects that keep us stuck in a cycle of despair, not quite knowing how to move on. Working on the whole person as a being leaves no stone unturned or unresolved. The mind and body are in constant bi-directional communication and sometimes that communication can be wildly inaccurate. Knowing how to change this and putting it into practice elicits powerful, positive, and long-lasting change.

Learn to captain your own ship as your time as a passenger is past its use-by-date.