"Not Good Enough" Runs our Lives

     I'll never forget an instructor in first year dentistry - Dr. S. Each time I'd show him something I had just finished working on, he'd look at it for 30 seconds or so with a disgusted look on his face, then inevitably say "Ehhhh, do it over again." What he meant of course was "not good enough!"
     Like Dr. S, our parents likely meant well by repeatedly urging us to improve on various activities - HOWEVER - after a steady diet of this, doesn't a distinct impression form that WE are not good enough? And what do we do about this deep sense of insufficiency? WE STRIVE for ACCEPTANCE, which deep down we know we can't ever achieve, because ... we're simply "not good enough." 
     So we sense that we're perpetually running after (praise, acceptance) some elusive "must have" thing - like the fake rabbit that's always just out of the reach of the hounds on race tracks. Is this at least partly why some of us will "never retire"? At the same time, we're running from criticism, rejection.
     Maybe "not good enough" not just runs, but ruins lives. Is there any wonder why self-acceptance is a critical part of various psychotherapies?

Simulated Town, Palestine - Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Readiness to Evolve

     The stories we continuously tell ourselves, about ourselves, form a seemingly stable self-image, giving rise to a false security AND inertia. "That's who I am" - is a mirage, a deluded attitude, the "autopilot" that flies our "momentum of our life." At some level we know that a solid self-concept is untenable because everything is obviously constantly changing, including our opinions and even our memory of past actual events.

     We retain a heroic death-grip on our fossilized self-concept (ego) because few of us are adequately informed about the normal evolution of human consciousness, self-transcendence, hypo-egoic states etc. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=self-transcendence  
     Even fewer among us know & trust that we have agency over this process, and an even smaller proportion regularly practice to promote this process. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2014/02/500-changes-ambivalence-progress.html

     "Change readiness (is) defined as an individual’s 'beliefs, attitudes, & intentions regarding the extent to which changes are needed and the (the individual's and) organization’s capacity to successfully undertake those changes.'

     ... social psychologists have defined attitudes as 'evaluative summary judgments that can be derived from qualitatively different types of information (e.g., affective & cognitive).'

       Rafferty AE, Jimmieson NL, Armenakis AA. Change readiness: A multilevel review. Journal of Management. 2013;39(1):110-35.

Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia