If You Truly Want To Be At Peace In Your Life, You Must Decide What Is ‘Enough’ For You
You must decide what is enough.
You must decide what is beautiful enough, what is successful enough, what is stable enough, what is wealthy enough, what is good enough.
You will never be at peace in your life unless you decide what is enough.
So do it. Draw a line in the sand.
You get to decide what a good outfit is, you get to decide what makes you look best, you get to decide what a good day at work is, you get to decide what a healthy day of eating is, you get to decide what a successful week, month and year looks like, you get to decide what constitutes a healthy relationship, you get to decide what’s the right hairstyle for you, you get to decide.
When you decide what is enough for your life, it means you are no longer on the endless, bottomless, vicious cycle of constantly trying to improve.
When you do not decide what is enough for you, you let the world dictate what is enough for them. And you cannot please everyone.
When you do not decide what is enough for you, you ensure that you will never, ever arrive.
Nothing will satiate your need to feel “better” because your emptiness is open-ended. It’s a bottomless well.
The incredible thing about deciding what is “enough” for you is that it directly counteracts perfectionism.
The question is not: “what is the most ideal thing I can fathom here?” it is: “what do I really need to survive, what do I really need to be okay, what is it that really makes me happy?”
When you are thinking of what your dream life would be, you are always going to fall short. This is actually not the foundation on which you can go about building a happy, peaceful existence.
Instead, you have to decide what is enough for you to feel okay.
Decide what kind of home is enough, what kind of clothes are enough, what kind of work is enough. When you do this, you begin to realize how very little you need.
No longer are you trying to fit and meet everyone’s expectations. No longer are you trying to edit yourself into some version of who you might, one day, become. When you decide what is enough for you, something magical happens. Everything around you starts to be enough.
When we are finally conscious of what it is we really need, we set a lower bar for what it takes to achieve it. When we do that, we feel more accomplished, fulfilled and healthy.
We are finally free to enjoy our lives because we are not constantly trying to fix and improve them.
Do you know what happens when we start behaving like self-respecting people who feel worthy, affirmed, and successful? We start creating worth, affirmation and success like never before.
The trick of it is that when we are resistant to determining what is “enough,” we are really hungry to self-hate ourselves into change.
This is not how it goes.
Instead, we become paralyzed and uncertain, we seize up and feel like we can’t step forward. It is from this place that we make our worst decisions. You cannot be a self-hating person and expect to build a loving, healthy life.
When you decide what is enough for you, you become a self-accepting person. Then you start to behave like a self-accepting person. Do you know what happens when you do that long-term? You build a life that someone who loves themselves would live.
You have to do it now.
If the money you have now is not enough, it will never be enough, no matter how much you make. If you are not happy with who you are now, you will never be happy, no matter how much you change. If you do not appreciate your relationships now, you will not appreciate them no matter how many you have.
Successful, empowered, happy people try to tell us this all the time. Only sometimes do we listen.
You are your own foundation.
You have to approach your life from a place in which you feel as though you are not constantly reaching for something unattainable.
This doesn’t atrophy your ambition.
This makes you whole, more motivated and empowered than ever before.
The irony about deciding what is “enough” is that eventually, it creates more goodness than we could ever fathom, far more than we would let ourselves have before. 