How the Negative Belief of “I Am Not Enough” Sabotages Your Happiness

For high-achieving women—whether you’re the boss of a business or a boss at work—these two core beliefs, "I am not enough" and "It’s never enough" can manifest in profoundly negative ways. They often sabotage your happiness and success, despite all the achievements you’ve already attained.

Today, I’ll break down how "I am not enough" shows up in your life. I’ll cover “It’s never enough” in the next blog.

Even if you think, "I don’t have that problem," you might! I wouldn’t have thought so either because I have a lot of success and happiness. But when I reflect—whether through coaching others, receiving coaching, or guiding women in my Dynamic Year program—I find that 95% of the time, the underlying limiting core belief is "I am not enough."

Thankfully, Brené Brown’s research confirms this to be true. So let’s dive into the details.

I’ll walk you through some key indicators to see if this belief might be affecting you. Be honest with yourself as we go through them.

(This is part one of a two-part series. In my next blog, I’ll discuss "It’s never enough.")

How "I Am Not Enough" Shows Up

1. Perfectionism Overload

You’re striving. You’re going towards these unsustainable standards, which can lead to burnout, self-doubt, or a lack of confidence. Fear of failure is stopping you or basically paralyzing you, and preventing you from moving ahead. 

It might prevent you from taking a healthy risk, a good risk for your business or your career, like going for a promotion or even some innovation in what you're doing. 

2. Imposter Syndrome

It’s where you feel like a fraud despite the awards, the accolades, the success, and what everyone says about you. BUT you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Oftentimes these women, they don't celebrate themselves and their achievements. They dismiss their achievements as, “Oh yeah, I just got lucky there” or “Other people helped me.” 

For years and years, I quoted the Business Insider’s quote around how women and men view success differently. Men attribute their success to their innate skills and talents, while women attribute their success to luck and help from others. That's BS. It's great for men that they have this positive view of it, but come on, ladies, we got to step up in this way.

3. People-Pleasing

You're over committing because you want to gain validation from people. You're doing everything for other people's agendas. You have no time or energy for yourself, for self-care, for your hobbies, for personal joy, for just downtime or doing nothing. 

That's because when you're feeling like “I'm not enough” you have big difficulties setting boundaries and then sticking to them, which causes you to feel overwhelmed, burnt out, maybe even a little resentful. Is that true about you? 

4. Chronically Comparing Yourself to Others

When you're comparing yourself to others, you're viewing them as 

• more successful than you
• more attractive than you
• more capable of you

Which really feeds those feelings of inadequacy inside of you, and I don't want you to feel that. Then you start feeling this unrelenting feeling of, “I'm falling behind” even though you're excelling. 

5. It’s affecting your decision-making

You take on too much because of, as I said before, the boundary thing, you feel like you can't say no, or you're making poor decisions because you're not in your own confidence. 

Wrapping Up

All of these things will eventually affect your self-worth. I've mentioned it along the way, it's going to start eroding your confidence, if it hasn't already. Even if you say, “I am a confident person,” you have to think how much of your confidence has been eroded up until this point. Then you question yourself:

• Is this good enough? 
• Am I good enough for this position? 
• Could I do that? 
• Is the client happy enough with what I did? 

There's always that feeling of inadequacy. You can see how this mindset, this core negative core belief, this limiting belief of “I am not enough” can really be detrimental even to confident women, successful women, high achievers, and bosses. This is one that you really have to take a look at and ask yourself, “How many of these pieces are true about me?” If any are, then have a good, hard look at where and what's underneath this “I am not enough” feeling.

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog, where I share about the other belief “It’s never enough.”

You can also listen to the podcast episode where I talk about these two core beliefs or watch my YouTube video for it. 

Read this blog:

1. Building My VA Business: What to Delegate and Why it Matters for Success
2. The 5 Ways You Know You Have Created Your Ideal Life
3. 6 Reasons Why High-Achievers Often Feel They Need to Do or Be More to Feel Valued