Our relationship to ‘enough’ can show up in all the areas of our life. Whether we struggle with discomfort, self-worth, setting limits, or offering ourselves more – we all can consider how the concept of ‘enough’ and ‘sufficient’ can play out in our minds, hearts and lives. 

Key topics in this episode, and related links for more information

• 
  Enough exercise for this season
  
  • TRX videos in my workout playlist of videos I used and loved
    
  
  
• 
  Setting boundaries with our phone
  
  • Intentional phone habits (episode and worksheets)
    
  
  
• 
  Having a constant need for comfort
  
  • Type 9, How the enneagram changed my life
    
  
  
• 
  Times of parenting that are so difficult and what ‘enough’ looks like in those seasons
  
  • Difficult parenting
    
  
  
• 
  Asking what is ‘enough’ when decluttering
  
  • Can A Minimalist Have a Full Kitchen?
    
  • Til We Have Just Enough Stuff
    
  
  
• 
  Struggling with moderation and knowing what is too much and what is too little 
  
  
• 
  Hurdles for women really knowing what is enough, for themselves.
  
  
• 
  Relying on external sources to compensate our ‘not-enoughness’
  
  • 186. Doing life with less (summer challenge)
    
  • 192. Who are you when I’m not looking (internal vs external validation)
    
  
  
• 
  Having a mindset of ‘not enough’ 
  
  • 40. Does the ‘not-enough’ mindset show up in your momlife? (Scarcity/Abundance)
    
  • You Can Simplify Your Life Series
    
  
  
• 
  Looking at this through a faith lens  
  
  • the BEMA episode on Genesis, Creation, Enough
    
  
  

 

Questions mentioned in this episode that you can use for reflection and journalling: 

• What relationship do I have with the terms ‘enough’ and ‘sufficient’?
  
• How skilled to I feel at gauging ‘enough’ for myself?
  
• Where does scarcity show up for me?
  
• Where do I struggle to feel like I am doing enough/am enough/have enouhg?
  
• How has being online made me feel like there is something about me or my life that isn’t enough?
  
• What does the world around me, seasons and nature, teach me about ‘enough’?
  
• Where do I feel like I have too much in my life?
  
• Where do I feel like I have too little in my life?
  
• Have there been times in my life when I felt a sense of ‘enough’?
  
• How do I act, in the different areas of my life, when I feel like there is not ‘enough’?
  

 

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Full transcript (unedited)

Hey friends, it’s Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor. Welcome to the simple on purpose podcast. So we’re coming into April. And this is a weird season. It’s like an in between season for me, because summer is not here, the

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kids are still in school. But hockey is over which hockey took up for weeknights, and most weekends. So there’s a definite, like, calm period, I would say, the boys are playing more Xbox. But they also move their backboard out of the basement, which is really nice. So they’re out in the yard, shooting pucks, and I kind of get the basement back again, I can put the TRX up and I can do a TRX workout, which I really enjoy the TRX it’s something that you hang from the ceiling or a door and has these two straps that you can like adjust with handholds, and it’s a weight trainer, there’s some really great videos online that I like to do. And I always feel it after even if I’m doing like a really quick workout, like, even 20 minutes, it’s all my workouts are 20 minutes. It’s something that I really am enjoying, too, I think it’s really important to find a way to move that you enjoy. And really one of my goals is strength training. So I’m really happy to reclaim that my basement from hockey and many sticks. And I think, I don’t know, maybe this kind of nicely goes with the topic of the month, which is the theme of balance and moderation. It’s something I’m going to be actively talking about in the Patreon as well as we go through the month. So I want to talk more about the concept of enough. And with this topic, I have a lot of thoughts. It’s like walking through different rooms in one house. So I want to share some different ideas. And I’m going to approach it to be almost kind of meditative, like reading a bunch of daily bread pages, did you grow up with those little daily bread books or daily bread? My mom always had them in the bathroom. She had a lot of bugs in the bathroom, actually, which I find myself doing like my mother now. But a book in the bathroom, it kind of just keeps me from bringing the phone in, which I think is a good boundary. Anyways, the daily bread, they’re like these little books in each page, there’s one page for a day, and has little story, a little thought and then some scripture. So as I drafted up these notes for this episode, I kind of laughed at myself, because I thought it’s not a Reader’s Digest version. And it’s not like 10 points on something. It’s kind of a daily bread version of thoughts. So let’s just start with the first thought. And the first thought is me kind of first thinking about the concept of it enough, the first time I actually really thought about it as an adult. And there was that time in my life where I had my first two kids remember, they were 16 months apart. And it was really overwhelming probably the most overwhelming time of my life because I had a toddler and a baby. But this baby only wanted to sleep on me and was quite mad when she wasn’t sleeping on me. I felt really up against my personal limitations, one of them being a need for constant comfort. And at that time I had written on my chalkboard in my hallway, My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in your weakness. And man did I want power I wanted the power of God coming into my life and rescuing me. And I clung to this verse, My grace is sufficient. In some translations, it says My grace is enough. And that’s the part that stuck with me this concept that enough? Is a version of satisfied or sufficient. And I don’t think I let enough really be the same as satisfied because enough felt lacking somehow. There’s no extra buffer, there’s no security. But enough is sufficient. Isn’t it a sufficient amount? It’s what’s required? No more, no less. When I was decluttering, I would think about the word enough quite often. What’s enough forks for one house? What are enough pairs of tweezers? What are enough pairs of jeans? What’s enough bars of soap in the drawer? What’s enough cleaning products? And of course these are personal questions. There’s no one right answer. But it’s a question that we need to engage for ourselves in all areas of our life. What is enough? What’s enough hours of work? What’s enough hours of time online? What’s enough space in a home and how big should a closet be? What’s enough? What’s enough stuff in the cupboards? What’s enough food for me? What’s enough for drink? What’s enough shopping? And enough is that limit between too much and too little? How do we know we’ve crossed that line into too much or too little? And more importantly, how do we recalibrate, settle, rebalance into enough A lot of the women I work with struggle with moderation with knowing what is enough and remaining in what is enough. For lots of us, it’s either too much or too little also known as all or nothing. Too much shame and criticism too little love and grace, too much distraction, too little intention, too much stuff, too little of the right stuff. How skilled Are we at gauging what is enough for ourselves because the world doesn’t help us with this, the world tells us all of the time, we aren’t enough. We aren’t youthful enough, attractive enough, healthy enough tanned enough vacationed enough, our teeth aren’t brushed enough, they need that special toothbrush, we aren’t smart enough, intuitive enough. We aren’t gentle enough, we aren’t assertive enough. We are energetic enough. So we buy and accumulate a lot of stuff and products and content, so that we can finally be enough. I’ve got an interview coming up in the Patreon with Renee Ben is and she shared this sentiment about her Shopaholic times, where she said she was some something to the sentiment of I was buying all this stuff to feel like I was enough. But then I was just in a constant state of seeing all the ways I wasn’t enough. It’s a core issue. Its core fear that we all need to reckon to some extent. And my enough, what’s our default answer to that question? It’s no, because saying no, you’re not enough, that’s gonna protect us. Because if we’re not enough, we can figure out a way to be enough, and then we’ll be safe. I was looking in the bathroom the other day. And I noticed I have this shelf of lotions and potions that I thought were very necessary when I bought them online at midnight. But now I think they just confused my skin and make me feel like I am now in this lifelong contract with hyaluronic acid. And I can’t do life without it. It’s something I shared when we were doing the live with less challenge in the summer, there are these products that have become my baseline for living. Like I’m just not enough on my own. I need these. I need that daily coffee, I need that certain type of food, I need this beauty product just to be enough. When did I decide I needed these things? When was what I had and who I was not enough? I think what would my grandma’s say? What did her generation think was enough? Surely they did not have a row of skincare products for all the different components of their skin in areas of their face, they probably didn’t have five different types of socks, they probably didn’t have all the streaming services we know they didn’t. But here we are, with more and more options each year on the things we think we now need to make us enough they become a necessity of life. When I approach my life with this underlying thought that maybe I need these things, this puts me into a place of lack of not enough, I have eyes for that now, scarcity, we call it Where does scarcity, not enoughness show up for you? Where do you struggle to feel like you are doing enough or that you are enough? It’s one thing to just be a human in the world and struggle with this question. But we now live in a time where we have to ask how is being online made me feel like there is something about me or my life that isn’t enough. A while back in a simple Saturday’s email, I shared a podcast that is one of my staples. It’s called beyma B E M A. It explains the ancient Middle Eastern culture as the Bible was written in it. And if you want to understand the Bible at all, this is a must listen, it has transformed my faith. But on this podcast on beyma, they were talking about Genesis the story of God creating the world and how we approached creating the world by knowing when to say enough. God said it was good and then they rested. So if you consider things through a faith lens at all, this is kind of a beautiful image to remember that there is such thing as enough and see it displayed all around us. We have seasons and oceans and this natural cycle all around us. We have daylight and nighttime we have limits on how much energy we need. On how much sleep we need. We have limits on time and space. Enough who needs to honor the season it is in. And now if we are creators, our own little world, if we don’t stop and remind ourselves that we are the ones to say enough in our own worlds. Then we become overrun, overwhelmed, and spread then trying to do all the things be all of the things have all of the things all of the time

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for me to go back 11 years and tell myself with a toddler and a baby, that God’s grace was enough for me it was sufficient for me this was not fun is not what I wanted. I didn’t want sufficient. I wanted overflowing prestige. Easy Button Godsend a live in nanny who makes gluten free waffles. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want enough. But as I would see that written on my chalkboard all the time, I knew I had to get familiar with what enough sufficient looked like, and what it felt like because it was uncomfortable to be in a place of enough. Because I had always been scrambling for the sense of what I would call plenty and comfort. And now I had to trust it. Now I had to look for it, I had to appreciate it. And most importantly, I had to be responsible with it. As we wrap up, I want to offer you some reflective questions for yourself. I’m going to put them in the show notes. So you can go and refer to them. Maybe pause and think about them, maybe use them as journal prompts. And yes, making a bulleted list counts as journaling guys, however you get it out of your head and reflect about it that counts. So here are some questions. Where do you feel like you have too much in your life? Often we have too much consumption, too much accumulating too much hoarding too much maxing out our resources, which are time, energy, space and money. And we have too little creating too little generosity too little margin too little saying not yet to ourselves. Have there been times in your life where you felt like something was enough? I think this is a double question because it really requires us to ask if we’ve ever really felt paid attention to what it feels like to have a sufficient amount to have enough. And probably one of the more interesting questions you can ask yourself, How do I react when I feel like there is not enough? This is just really great to notice about yourself. Think about the areas of your life, and how you act within that area when you feel like there’s not enough. Thanks for coming on this kind of metaphorical tour through the House have enough with me. I want to keep this conversation going in the Patreon. I’m going to be sharing that interview with Renee Bennis from unstuffed. And I’ll also be sharing a podcast episode on what is enough in terms of parenting and teaching enough to our kids. I also want to talk about that related topic of scarcity and abundance. Because really, that’s the mindset behind deciding what is enough. A reminder that life on purpose community, Patreon, it’s a members community, it’s a way to support simple and purpose kind of like buying me a coffee to keep fueling all the things I share here through simple on purpose, but really ultimately want it to be a place where people join in, so that we can grow as a community together and a place for me to just show up in one place. center my time and energy into one place. And that’s the Patreon so check it out. If you’re at all interested, you can always try it out and leave if it’s not for you. I’ll link a post in the show notes about that. Show Notes are fun guys go and check them out. I tried to fill them with a lot of links on related episodes I’ve done over the years and blog posts I’ve written over the years because like we’re coming on to almost 13 years of blog posts and many many years of podcasts so go and check that out if you want to keep digging into this topic. And if you feel so inclined as always I don’t ask for it but I’m always thinking about asking for it is to leave me a rating and review some of you guys message me your thoughts on the podcast in I would love it if you would put that in a rating and review on your podcast player. Those really helped out All right friends. Sometimes I sign off simple Saturdays with this reminder and I’m going to share it with you here. Of course it’s so fitting the reminder that you are enough. You do enough and you have enough. Have a great week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai