I’ve often referred to ‘that douchebag in your head’ in various blogs, Facebook posts and podcasts. What I’m referring to here is, essentially, the voices in our heads that continually chatter to us about everything that’s negative in our individual worlds. Why we can’t do this and shouldn’t do that. There have been times in my life where I’ve been absolutely crippled with all this stuff. Listening to this douchebag, believing every word he says and allowing him to keep me stuck. I would try to keep going. And listen to all the YouTube talking heads telling me that strong people just “hustle harder” and “never give up”. But I’d always seem to find a way to sabotage everything and maintain my ‘stuckness’ and unhappiness. Identifying the Douchebags Things didn’t start to change until I actually fronted up and looked at what was going on in my head. There were so many voices saying so many things about what I should and shouldn’t do and tying me up in a world of confusion that saw me just completely frozen. From dealing with this myself and talking to many others about it, I’ve found there are a few ‘common’ douchebags in our heads. Ones that show up time and time again saying the same things for many of us. In essence, we all seem to have several ‘douchebags in common’. So in this post I just wanted to identify these and talk through some ways both I and people I’ve helped have dealt with them. #1 The “Not Good Enough” Douche I’m not sure there’s anyone out there who hasn’t thought this at least once in their life. But it’s all too common to have this douchebag continually running around screaming this in your ear. Where it leaves us is in a constant state of putting stuff off into the future. Because in the future we will be good enough at some point. Only, that point never seems to arrive. We just continually keep loading ourselves up with degrees, qualifications, experience and fiddling around procrastinating with anything we possibly can in order to justify delaying doing ‘the thing’ we really want to do or be the person we really want to be. This thought also brings about somewhat of a nonsensical situation. We feel like we’re ‘not good enough’. But then this begs the question… Not good enough for what? Success? Happiness? Love? Really? We’ve all been through varying amounts of various ‘stuff’ in our lives. But I guarantee you are good enough to receive any and all of the success, happiness and love we desire. Otherwise, when will you be ‘good enough’? How will you know when you are? It’s like running a marathon to find that some fuckwit forgot to paint the finish line. So you just go on some epic Forrest Gump style run hoping that one day someone will come along and paint that finish line for you. Tying it to Self-Worth But it all comes back to and is rooted in our self-worth. Or, more specifically, how we tend to measure our self-worth. For me, the mistake we make is tying our idea of self-worth into our performance and the results we see in our life. If everything isn’t perfect and we aren’t performing better and better and better each day in any and all areas of our life, then many of us ultimately come to the conclusion that we are not worthy. That we are not good enough because we didn’t achieve ‘this goal’ or beat ‘that person’. And it leaves us in a position of continually needing to justify our own worthiness to ourselves by beating others and winning and being the best. Then, if we don’t see this in our lives, we just assume we ‘aren’t good enough’. We don’t see evidence of us ‘winning at life’ and so assume we aren’t worthy of winning, or maybe even existing at all. We’re told growing up that you must do well in school. You must pass your exams. Go to university and/or get a ‘good’ job. Progress in that job. It’s ingrained into us, inadvertently I might add, by society that we must achieve to b