From F*ck Me to F*ck Yeah

7. On Enoughness

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When you're constantly exhausted by feeling like you're never enough, it's hard to get shit done — and even if you do manage to accomplish something, you still feel like sh!t about it. That ends today.

In this episode, you'll learn how to: 

  • differentiate between proficiency and sufficiency (and why it's important not to mistake one for the other)
  • define what success actually looks like for you in any situation
  • use concrete metrics to get closer to success that actually matters to you
  • build confidence and self-esteem while you chose your goals
  • create momentum by stacking your accomplishments

For extra support, use my proven FAFO Method to help you develop your sense of enoughness:

Prefer video? Watch the video version of this episode on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@kristenkingcoaching

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I’m Kristen King, and I’ve been a business coach since before business coaching was cool — since the early 2000s after my first solo business hit six figures less than 2 years out of college. Now, I teach coaches, therapists, healers, and other brilliant service-based entrepreneurs like you how to build their own unique fuck-yeah business.

There's more to me than being a multi-certified coach for kickass entrepreneurs. I'm also a certified hypnotist and a certified mental health and wellness facilitator with an MBA, a master's in publishing, and 15+ years of multi-industry experience.

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If you're ready for entrepreneurship to feel a hell of a lot easier, you're in the right place. Welcome to “From Fuck Me to Fuck Yeah,” the podcast where service-based entrepreneurs learn how to tune OUT all the fear based bullshit that paralyzes you, and how to tune IN to your unique fuck yeah. 

I'm integrative business coach Kristen King, and I'm pretty much the bad influence your mother warned you about. On this show, I'm gonna teach you how to peel back all the layers of perfectionism, people pleasing and pressure that stand between you and how you really want this whole entrepreneur thing to go. And while we're at it, we're gonna do that for the whole rest of your life, too. 

I’m not here to make your business look exactly like mine. I'm here to make your business look exactly like yours. So stick around, fuck around and find out what happens when my bad influence rubs off on you. Your mom's probably going to hate it, but YOU are going to love it. Let's do this shit. 

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Hello hello It is so good to be here today I was not planning to record a podcast today originally

But we had an amazing conversation on today's call in the Fuck Yeah Entrepreneurs Society about enoughness. And I was like, Oh my God, I need to record this as a podcast.

So that is why we are here, even though there's very loud construction happening right outside my office window right now, my dogs keep barking at it.

And there might be a thunderstorm that is about to knock out the power because I keep hearing distant rumbles.

And that's the thing that happens where I live in the summer time. It is July 2024. I just heard some more thunder.

And I'm in Leadville, Colorado, where we have snow potentially every single day of the year, we just had a bunch of hail happening.

I don't know what's going on, but it's going to be good enough for today's conversation about enoughness and we're just going to roll with it and it's going to be great.

So we started talking about this in in the context of imposter syndrome and trying to give ourselves permission to actually do the things that we want to do. And the idea that like we're not good enough, it's not worth enough, it's not going to make enough money, there's all these things we have to do to justify our own value.

And so I want to offer you in today's episode a couple of things that I offered to the folks on that call.

One of them, and I think that this is perhaps most important piece of the conversation about enoughness, is the difference between being proficient at something and being sufficient.

Proficiency or the ability to do something is different from sufficiency, which is enoughness or adequacy. And a lot of times we mistake an earlier stage of proficiency at doing something for insufficiency as a fundamental characteristic.

And these things are really different. Your sufficiency, your inherent adequacy, inherent enoughness is something that you're just born with.

Like you just the fact that you exist means that you are enough to exist. That is not negotiable. That's not something that you need to debate.

It's not something that you need to prove purely by virtue of being here on this planet. You have inherent inborn worth, inherent inborn sufficiently, you are fundamentally adequate to exist.

So that that is not up for debate. And if you want to debate it, you're certainly welcome to leave a comment, email me, whatever.

contact information is all over the place. We can talk about it. But this is one of those things that is probably just going to save you time to just go with me on this one.

Because that is just an inborn quality. You were just fundamentally worthy and valuable and enough by virtue of the fact that you exist.

That is different from being sufficiently proficient at a specific skill in order to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish.

I am good enough just because I'm good enough. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I am a sufficiently skilled cyclist to do the same trails that my extraordinarily skilled cyclist husband can do without getting injured or crashing his bike.

That doesn't mean I'm not good enough to ride a bike. It doesn't mean I'm not good enough to learn how to develop the same level of proficiency that he has.

But it may mean that I don't have the level proficiency that's required to keep up with him on all of the trails that he wishes that I could keep up with him on or all the trails that he'd like to take me on.

That doesn't mean anything about me. That is just a straight fact about my level of skill in a particular area.

And one of the problems that folks often run into one of the things that often makes us feel insufficient is that we don't differentiate between that fundamental sufficiency, that fundamental worthiness that we always already have and feel in a specific area.

So in any place that you're feeling like not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not competent enough, whatever the thing is, it's possible that there's part of that that's true.

You may not be good enough at speaking Spanish to be able to survive in a Spanish-speaking country without having to look up every third word, but that doesn't mean you're not good enough to go there and find out and that there's anything wrong with you looking up every word.

It's just a simple statement about your level of proficiency. So look at the areas where you're struggling with that sense of enoughness and let's get really clear on what it is that we're talking about when we say, I'm not good enough for that.

It's not about you not being sufficiently valuable as a person, it's just not. But we equate our skills in specific areas, particularly ones that we have not examined and looked at with nuance, with fundamental value in our existence and that's just incorrect, it's just not a useful way to do things.

So if you're not sure, if you're good enough to have a successful business, I want you to really stop and look at what does a success

to business look like, what are the, what are the, with the goal that I'm working toward? What things do I need to be sufficiently skilled at doing in order to create the specific outcome that I want?

Something I hear from a lot of my clients, especially very early in our work together on their business is that they've quote unquote tried everything and nothing is working.

And first of all, you definitely haven't tried everything because there's like infinity things to try. So get that thought out of your head.

That's not a useful thought. Just take that thought, throw it away because there's always something else to try just because you don't know what that thing is doesn't mean it exists.

You may have tried everything that has occurred to you to try, but you haven't tried everything. That's a whole other conversation we can talk about another time.

But the idea that nothing is working is equally not helpful in this situation. What does it mean if something is working?

We want to get really, really clear on what working actually means. What that actually looks like. How would I know if it

is working. If I have decided ahead of time that nothing is working, then it doesn't actually matter what working looks like, because I've already decided it's not going to.

But if I want things to work in a way that feels good for me, I need to get really clear on how I would know if that was even happening.

So, for example, people will say, well, I'm doing all this marketing and nothing is working. okay, well, what does working mean?

Does it mean people haven't bought anything for me? Does it mean no one is seeing my content? Does it mean people aren't interacting?

Does it mean that I'm asking questions and people aren't answering them? Like, what is the thing that we wanted done?

What was the job we asked that activity to do for us? And did or did it not happen? There's lots of metrics that we can use to define and measure success in any number of areas.

Social media is a really easy one for us to look at because a lot of us are familiar with it.

lot of us have the thought that marketing on social media isn't working. But there's also lot of different numbers and things that we can look at, those metrics, a lot of them around engagement that we can look at for concrete evidence to determine whether something is working in the way we intended it to and to determine whether adjustments make a difference when we try them.

So for example, how many views is something getting? Is getting views actually a goal that's relevant to us? How many interactions did we get?

Whether they were some sort of like a reaction click, like a like or a heart or whatever it is, depending on the platform you're on, was the interaction sharing the content by reposting it or retweeting it or whatever the it is on threads, rethreading it.

don't know what it's called, sharing it on Facebook, whatever. Was the reaction commenting? Was the reaction people unfollowing or blocking us?

I don't know what those interactions are going to be, but that's another part of it. And then the quantity of interactions that people have with a piece of your content.

and the quality of those interactions are two different things. So the quantity is the straight number, but the quality can be multiple things.

It can be the actual characteristics of those interactions, are people agreeing? Are they adding? Are they disagreeing? Are they sharing something that's completely irrelevant and you don't understand why?

So what are the actual characteristics of those interactions? And is the characteristics of those actions in line with what you were hoping they would be?

So there's the quality of the interaction in terms of whether or not it is doing what you wanted to do, such as moving people toward sale or something like that, or the qualities of the interaction in terms of what's the actual nature and content of them.

And then there's the whole other piece of your experience of putting out that piece of content. Did you feel comfortable?

Did you feel confident? Was it something that you enjoyed? Was it something that you plan to do again? do learn something about yourself from it.

You know, there's so many questions that we could answer from it. So if you come to me and you say, I've tried everything and nothing is working, I wanna know what working looks like.

What were you trying to accomplish? What did you literally do in an effort to try to accomplish that thing?

And then what literally happened because some things will have done what you expected and what you hoped and other things wouldn't.

we need to know what each of those things is. There's a, we can get into a lot of detail here.

There's a lot, a lot, a lot, lot. We can get into specifics around this. But that social media piece is just one easy example.

And anything else you have going on in your life, whether it's stuff related to your business, stuff related to your romantic relationships, stuff related to your employment, stuff related to your career overall, your education, your karaoke skills.

That's the thing I think about all the time. love me some karaoke. There's so many different pieces that go into each of those things that it's,

It's grossly reductive to just say, I'm good enough, I'm not good enough, especially if we're not happy with the answer and we want to get better and more successful and more comfortable with the thing.

So, the first thing we need to do when we're talking about enoughness is we need to differentiate between proficiency or skill level in a variety of areas and sufficiency, which is something that you just have by virtue of existing, We to do with that.

What is the goal? What's the thing we're trying to accomplish? Are you trying to make enough money to quit your job?

Are you trying to get an on American Idol? Is that even a thing anywhere? I don't know if people still even do American Idol.

Whatever the thing is, we need to know where we're headed in order to figure out if we're there or not.

If we don't have a destination, then, like, either we're always there or we're never there, right? Like, you get to pick, but we want to be clear on what that is.

Then, once we know what the goal is, we're going to break down what's required to get to it. If you want to get on a

I don't know if that still exists or not, you need to be able to sing. You need to be willing to sing in front of a crowd.

You need to be able to hit notes. You need to be able to control your breath. You need to know songs.

I mean, there's a lot of different pieces that go into that. And each of those has many, many sub components.

So when you know what it is that you want to get proficient at and why, where you're headed, then you can break down those metrics, those skills that are required and the level of skill that's required for you to be successful in those things.

And from that, you can actually make the plan to go after these different pieces of the path to get to whatever that goal is.

And you can tell yourself useful feedback, useful information about the level of your proficiency in each of those areas.

So you know exactly what's already good and already done and what still needs your attention. You can see where the goal

gaps are and you can figure out how to plug them. That's really different from being like, la, la, and then not getting a record deal and deciding that you'll never be a singer because nothing will ever work and you're not good enough, right?

That's really different. Now, to be fair, we don't always want to like go to that much effort. Sometimes it feels good to be all like, Whoa, it's me, I'm terrible at everything and nobody loves me.

Somebody can comfort me. I don't, I don't have a problem with you doing that. If that's what you are like consciously choosing to do and that feels great for you, like have at it.

don't care. However, if this is something that you want to have go differently, if you want to actually gain confidence and certainty and a sense of centeredness and groundness in your ability and your success in an area that matters, then I would invite you to really take this on as a project, not just decide that things aren't working, not just decide that you're not enough, but show yourself the things that are working, show yourself the, the things that

is that you were already sufficiently good at, things you're already good enough at to move forward and build on them.

Because that's going to be a much more efficient, if not satisfying, but probably also satisfying way to get to where you want to go.

A lot of times, folks will, instead of taking this work on, they will really work hard on convincing other people that they are legit, that they're credible, that they're valid, that this thing is real, that they can do it.

And they don't usually feel better from the practice of doing that. Any time you think you need to convince another person, my opinion is that the person you really need to convince is yourself.

Let's say that again. Any time you think you need to convince another person, you really need to convince yourself.

When we are over-explaining and over-justifying ourselves-justifying ourselves, we're validating ourselves to other people to try to get them on board with what we're doing.

What's actually happening is we're trying to convince them of our worth and sufficiency and enoughness and validity so their belief in us can convince us.

So instead of working on convincing us, we're convincing them so they can then convince us. Does that make sense?

When she did just pause and think about that for a second. We are going out in order to come back in and it is a lot faster and a lot more effective just as work on convincing you and the way that you convince yourself isn't like I'm good enough and I'm smart enough and gosh darn it people like me you don't have to stand in front of the mirror and like repeat the same thing over and over every day and especially please don't do that if whatever the thing is that you're saying doesn't feel true because then you're just gaslighting yourself and that's not helpful.

The way that we convince ourselves of our enoughness is by looking at and actively building our proficiency and things that matter to us.

Said another way, the way that we develop our self-esteem is by doing is steamable acts. The way that we develop pride in ourselves is by doing things that we feel proud of.

And the way that we convince ourselves of our own value is by doing things that we ourselves find valuable.

You can spend all day, every day trying to convince other people of something that is you want them to believe is true about you.

But if you do not yourself believe that thing is true about you, it doesn't matter how much other people believe it because it still won't feel real.

And over time, other people's belief in something you've convinced them of but you have not convinced yourself of is going to make you feel worse and less sufficient.

Not better and more certain of your own enoughness. So it has the opposite effect So I want to be really clear the impulse to over Equally impulse to over justify is very normal.

It is very normal It is very common and it is in Most maybe most isn't fair for a lot of people I don't know what the actual numbers are but for a lot of people.

It's a trauma response It's somewhere in the fight or Fawn trauma response zone. There's there's four trauma responses. They're flight flight Let me say that again cuz I think I stumbled over my word there.

There's fight. There's flight There's freeze and there's fun and when we are fighting against someone's Misperception of us our field whatever the thing is or Or when we're trying to convince them give them lots of information make them make them believe make them believe

We're fawning. It's either fighting with them or it's fawning, but either way we're having a trauma response to what we're perceiving as rejection or being dismissed by them.

And particularly for those of us who were socialized as women, for those of us who are neurodivergent, for those of us who have communication differences, for those of us whose brains maybe work differently from the folks around us, whether or not we're neurodivergent and they're neurotypical or everybody's neurodivergent or everybody's neurotypical, if your brain operates a little differently from the folks around you, regardless of how you identify, that can also be a thing that happens.

And this sense of being misunderstood or not believed starts to erode our cell concept. And for a lot of us that started in childhood and it often continues well into adulthood.

It certainly has for me and a lot of the folks that I know. So this impulse to over-explain to convince is a trauma response and trauma responses are survival mechanisms.

So I want you to know how to do it. that , because your life could at some point depend on it.

But if your mom just thinks your career choice has been good enough, then like you should have become a teacher instead or something like that.

That's not something that immediately threatens your current existence. That's not like a saber-tease tiger or like a guy with a knife.

It's not any of that . It's just uncomfortable in that moment. And it may bring up a lot of stuff that had to do with your survival earlier in time.

So if you notice that you have this impulse to over-explain to convince and persuade and get people on your team or whatever, don't make yourself wrong for it by any means.

I want you, again, to know how to do that stuff. But I also want you to recognize that when the only person we're trying to convince is someone outside of us that does not actually help us feel more certain of the thing, particularly if the person we're trying to persuade convince, inform, justify to, isn't interested in changing their thoughts about that thing.

So that's not a great use of your time. Someone who is sincerely interested in you and sincerely interested in what you're up to and what you have going on is going to also be watching what you're doing and they're going to see how you're showing up and the way you show up in your certainty of that thing is going to do a much better job and a much more lasting job of persuading them of what's real because you're going to be demonstrating it instead of purely talking about it and you're going to feel better because you're going to be demonstrating it instead of purely talking about it.

So when you determine what you're aiming toward and the proficiency you need to develop in order to accomplish it then you have concrete definable measurable things that you can focus on.

This idea of but it is not in itself a clear definition but can And I accurately roll my R's when I pronounce Spanish words, regardless of the sounds to come before or after the R.

And like, what percentage of the time can I do that? Is something that I can actually define and measure and track over time?

Am I good enough to learn Spanish? Is not a thing I can define or measure or track over time?

And it's not something I can convince other people of, but just talking about it often and loudly. Also, it doesn't really matter if they believe me or not, like it might matter to me, but it doesn't have any impact on whether or not I'm capable of doing that thing.

So if I really want to feel sufficient and adequate and sufficiently skilled and proficient at the things I want to do, the best way for me to do that is to develop the skills that are required for the thing that I want to do.

So the next time that you are wondering if you are enough for something or you are good enough for something or you have done done enough

fun enough for something. I want you to check in with yourself and say, am I asking a legitimate question about whether or not I have the level of proficiency required in order to safely do this thing?

Or am I arguing with something that's already been decided, which is that I am fundamentally worthy because I exist?

If it's the second one, let's redirect and let's look at something that you actually can control because you can't actually control your level of fundamental sufficiency and enoughness.

It's just infinite and it's just always there. So like you can't you can't up it, you can't down it because it's just always like at maximum level.

You can't change that. You just are enough by virtue of the fact that you exist. But that doesn't mean you're good enough at cycling to not crash your bike on that trail because you may not be sufficiently skilled at how to steer and pedal and breathe at the same time.

That's what I ran into this weekend when I fell off my bike twice because I didn't know how to breathe and pedal and steer all at the same time.

could only do one at a time and it was required to do all three of them on the trail that I was on and that's why I fell over.

So like, it's a useful inquiry to say, do I have this efficient level of skill to do this thing?

But if the answer is no, that does not mean you're not good enough. It means that you have some work to do to develop your skill.

And if you want to be sufficiently skilled at that thing, to be able to do it the way you want, then that work is probably a worthwhile endeavor for you.

But if you don't actually want to be that good at cycling or speaking Spanish or marketing on social media or thinking professionally, like, you don't need to do that work and it's not going to be worthwhile for you, regardless of what other people believe about you, because what you know about yourself is you don't want to do it.

So getting really good at you don't want to do also does not increase your sense of personal enoughness. What increases your sense of personal enoughness is actually giving yourself evidence to look at and to show yourself the ways in which you are proficient and you are capable, the ways in which you are proud of yourself because

you have done something really good, the ways in which you have self-esteem and esteem yourself by doing things that you hold and esteem.

So that is your homework. Go forth, find those things that you actually want to do, that you actually enjoy and want to be great at, and make your plan for what that's going to look like for you.

And as you go through, look at how that plan is going, give yourself credit for all the stuff that you accomplished along the way, get creative about how you want to develop those skills, be resilient.

You don't have to just try it one time and you crash, you never get on your bike again. Oh my gosh, if I never got on my bike again after crashing, I wouldn't have a bike.

I would, that thing would have been gone after the first time I tried. This is how we learn. This is how we develop.

And the more willing you are to take that on, the more confident you're going to feel, the better you're going to feel, and the more sufficient and enough, you are fundamentally going to feel throughout your whole

life until one day, that feeling of sufficiency and enoughness is going to match the reality that you are already infinitely sufficient, no matter what.

So that is your work. If it would be helpful to you to have a structure to go along with that, I want you to pop down to the show notes, click the link and get on my email list.

If you're not already there, you should already be there. If you're not already there, get on my email list and get yourself my FAFO Method Workbook.

The FAFO method is the Fuck Around and Find Out method of creating your next yeah. And in this workbook, I walk you through the steps of designing experiments to help you get to those goals, those things you actually want to accomplish in a very simple way that is laid out for you page by page step by step.

You're going to find what it is that you're trying to do. You're going to design an experiment to help yourself get closer to it, you're going to evaluate the results of that experiment, and then you're going to roll those results into the next round.

And what happens over time when you just keep using the FAFO method and FAFOing over and over again, is that you start to see yourself picking up momentum and building speed and creating the things that you want to create, because you were focusing your energy and your attention on creating the stuff you want, not debating whether or not you're good enough as a human being.

There is also a podcast episode, I can't remember what number it is, but I'll drop that in the show notes too, that is specifically about the FAFO method and the workbook goes along with that.

So go ahead and get yourself the FAFO method workbook and listen to that FAFO method podcast that explains it in more detail, and I will see you on the next episode.

I can't wait to hear what you do with your increased sense of enoughness and what happens when you decide to fuck around and find out with the thing that you actually want to create for yourself. I'll see you next time. Bye.

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If you liked this episode, you're gonna love the rest of my content. Visit the show notes for links to all the good stuff I've created to help you go from “fuck me” to “fuck yeah,” be sure to follow me wherever you hang out on the socials, and for insiders-only info get yourself onto my email list. My email subscribers are the first to know about new content, new tools and new ways to work with me. 

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Kristen King

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