Today I wanna ask you a question. What is your good enough list? Do you have one?
I just got done at an appointment for, some mouth work. I am getting done. A few weeks ago I had some lip ties released, lasered and all that good stuff. And today I had my follow-up checkup and I was really nervous about this checkup because I was so afraid that I hadn't done enough, that I hadn't stretched my mouth enough, that I hadn't done the exercises enough, that I hadn't put the vitamin C ointment on often enough or thorough.
Thorough enough. And so I was really anxious about this appointment because I really didn't know what to expect or what the standard was of, you know, what constitutes good recovery
I have been trying to follow the directions for the last three weeks, but the directions were a little bit vague.
Really, there were just some general guidelines and no guidance as far as markers of what a successful recovery looks and feels like. So I go into this appointment and I'm pretty nervous about like, Ooh, what is she gonna think? Did I do a good job? And isn't that the kicker? Like always. Seeking to be pleasing to someone else.
Is she gonna think highly of me? Is she gonna be upset with me that I didn't do a good enough job? And I go into this appointment with all of these thoughts going on in the back of my head, not knowing what to expect, and she takes a look at my mouth and she examines all of the incision points or where they lasered everything.
And she says to me, this looks perfect. You did such a great job taking care of your mouth and doing all the right things. It's healing great. Um, everything's the right color. You're doing perfect. The symptoms that you're having, like that feeling of tightness is completely normal and I couldn't be happier
and. I thought to myself, don't we do this to ourselves as moms too in life? And I think women in general, because we're always trying to find something to compare ourselves to, and it never feels like it's good enough. It never feels like we're gonna get an A plus on the report card. So we rush around trying to do everything perfect, accomplish everything, meet everyone's needs and do it perfectly.
Keep a perfect house, make the perfect meal. Is our meal gonna be healthy enough? Are the kids snacks healthy enough? Are they gonna. Grow up to have healthy bodies because of this one snack. Is everybody sleeping good enough?
Are we performing at work good enough? Are we, you know, making our boss happy? Are we making the husband happy? Are we making the kids happy? Are we making our parents happy? Are we making our siblings happy? Are we making our friends happy?
I want you to stop and take a few moments, grab your pen and a piece of paper and make your good enough list. And what I mean by that is if nothing else got accomplished or done during your day, what. Few things would be good enough, for example, on Tuesdays. Tuesdays are clean, the bathroom days at my house.
But because I am working outside the home, it is now my husband and my daughter's responsibility to clean the bathrooms and to do the daily. Routine. And so, and I even did this when I was at home with just me and my daughter because cleaning two to three bathrooms is a lot of work. And so when it comes to my daughter's bathroom, I want to teach her ownership and responsibility.
But what that does is it challenges my perfectionism, my need for the bathroom to be cleaned perfectly. So what I have decided is my level of good enough for the bathrooms. It is not my standard of perfection. It is not my mother's standard of good enough. I mean, I have these memories of childhood, of like Saturdays where cleaning days and getting into the bathrooms and cleaning, doing what I felt like was my very best.
I was happy with the bathroom. The counters are sparkling, the toilet's clean, the bathroom's been scrubbed, and my mom walks into the bathroom and turns off the lights, looks at the mirror and says, do it again. You missed a smudge over there. You smeared over here. And we would have to do it again. The mirrors, I mean, something about mirrors, right?
Like they are, they're just notoriously tricky to get spotless with no streaks. Okay? They're just, they're challenging, but we would have to do it again and do it again, and do it again until it met her level of good enough. But that level of good enough was bringing so much stress and anxiety into my life and triggering my perfectionism to the point where, well, if I didn't have time to do it to my childhood's idea of good enough, if I didn't have time to get everything perfectly sparkling, then I just wasn't gonna do it.
I just didn't have time. What that meant was that weeks would go by without the bathroom being touched. Well, so that's gross, right? So what I had to do is relinquish my definition of perfection and good enough, and people pleasing, right? Does this meet someone else's standards? In order to allow something to get done.
So if in this example, I allow my daughter to be responsible for cleaning her own bathroom, which by the way. She's always super cheerful about like she goes in, yes, let's clean the bathrooms. I'm gonna get the cleaning cart, and we'll be cleaning ladies as she goes and puts on her cleaning outfit. Okay.
The girl has an outfit and puts this on, gets in there, scrubs the bathtub. She's singing. It's a great time. She's enjoying it. And I'm just like, how are we having this much fun doing gross chores. I hate chores. I hate housework. I have like this really terrible attitude about it. And so I have had to do some self-evaluation about those.
Like, let's not suck the fun out of this for her, because if we can do a task with joy, how much better is that than either one, the task not getting done, or two, doing it with a terrible attitude. So. If I let my child get in there and go to town doing her thing, she's loving it. She's cleaning, she's taking ownership of it, and when she's finished the bathtub's been scrubbed the sink and counter has been wiped, the trash has been taken out, and ev the clutter that was on the bathroom counter has been cleaned off and put away.
And my contribution to it is to make sure that the toilet is sanitized and clean, so it's all wiped down. It's scrubbed, that's my area, and maybe wiping a few like toothpaste spits off the mirror.
I had to do very little, so it took very little effort for me to get the bathroom to a point where it is clean enough to be serviceable. And not gross. And you know what? If it's clean and it's serviceable and it's sanitized, guess what? That's, that's the goal anyways. The goal is not perfection. So. I just, this is kind of my random musings is I left this appointment today thinking, how many other areas do we do this to ourselves in where we run ourselves, ragged, we're anxious, we're worried about things that were perfect.
You did a great job. I couldn't have asked for anything better. But because of the stories we tell ourselves of the expectations we've built up in our own minds, nothing is good enough. And here's what it, it reminded me of the running around and the stories we tell ourselves about the level of perfection that has to be accomplished in our service for others.
And Luke 10 and verse 41, Jesus answers. Martha and he says, Martha. Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Mary chose good enough. And because of that, she was able to have the time and space and peace that allowed her to sit at Jesus's feet and put first things first. It created margin in her life for the important things, and her brain wasn't sitting there spinning. Overall, her undone to-do list, she was able to focus.
Are you creating margin and space in your day and in your life to be able to focus and truly give mental energy to the things that matter, the important things,
or. Are you trying to achieve perfection in everything that you do? So much so that even in your margins, your brain is spinning,
which makes me also realize that my nighttime brain spin, PDF, that's on my website, which is, www.sonshinepaperie.com. Is the perfect place for you to start if you are a Martha, because it addresses one of the biggest margins that sabotages us when we are trying to achieve everything perfectly.
And by the end of the day when our brain is supposed to be quieting down, it is still running. It is cycling through the unfinished to-do list, the unresolved conflicts, the needs, we didn't meet that day. The worry of, oh, did I stretch my lips enough? Did I put the vitamin C off on often enough?
We go through these like checklists of things that we haven't done great. Instead of spending that margin in quiet, winding down, talking to God, focusing on what's important and going to sleep, and allowing our bodies and our brains to rest, which is.
The most important task that it has at night. So I have a routine of things that I do every night that help me unwind, and the minute my head hits the pillow, I'm out.
And so if you want to grab that, it's not another checklist for you to do perfectly. It is a list of step, like it's a process, my routine, but you pick off of it what you want. You choose what works for you. Here's what's works for me, here's how I've solved my brain spin problem at night.
So I sleep well and I fall asleep quickly, and I'm offering that to you. And it is FREE of charge. You just have to put your email in when you go to the free resources page because I've had trouble with robots and spam downloading my free offers.