Ep #171: Digging Under “Not Enough” and Finding the Goldmine

Imagine for a moment that we were working together, that I’m your coach, I’m sitting across from you, and I am telling you, looking into your eyes and telling you, “You can create anything you want.” What comes up for you then?

Is there a moment of expansion and then you’re off and running? Is there a moment of expansion followed quickly by a recoil or contraction? For so many, I’ve found that the latter can be the case, that even those with the greatest of dreams and a willingness to follow through often will feel a quick recoil or shutdown when told that they can create anything they want.

Because, by a certain point, they’ve achieved a lot and already in their mind they have stacked up all of this evidence about how that actually happens. And they’re already anticipating not only the hard work, but somewhere perhaps the fear that they won’t be good enough.

Now, fear in and of itself isn’t a problem. All emotions have wisdom, including fear. But what often happens is that we take that phrase, “not enough,” And then we take is as truth. And then, from that place, we set goals and we adapt our dreams as if that were true, as if we are somehow lacking or insufficient.

And over the course of the next few episodes, that is something that I want to help you shift. I’m going to introduce some high-level concepts, but also, I want to help you see how the thought, “Not enough,” only can ever create a result of not enough.

And I want to help you shift to a place of sufficiency, so that you’re no longer thinking a thought that always creates a not enough result, and then you’re trapped in this loop of not enoughness. And instead, I want to help liberate you from that into a paradigm where you create from sufficiency. You set goals, you create dreams, you have a vision for your life from a place of sufficiency, and that you know how to masterfully choose thoughts and manage your energy and partner with your central nervous system in order to create abundance and beauty and more meaning and more strength in your life from a place of sufficiency and not of lack.

This is really revolutionary. Because many people look at me with a blank stare like, “Why would I create anything if I weren’t somehow wanting, lacking in some way?” But that’s the cultural norm that we are turning on its head. We’re talking about being Creative with a capital C, and again, moving from a place of not enough to knowing, not only can you climb any mountain, but that you are already sitting on a goldmine and have been this entire time.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Art School Podcast. Now, I know many of you may be coming to this particular episode for the first time. And if so, that is perfectly fine. I also want you to know that this episode is taking place in the context of my entire body of work, including a recent interview I did with Dr. Valerie Rein, where we talked about the millennia of having been oppressed that then creates this intergenerational trauma which creates these invisible barriers to the fullest expression of our lives and to us aligning with our authentic desires and fulfilling our dreams and making them come true.

And one way that I see that we have internalized systems of oppression is we just buy wholesale this idea that it is true that we live in a world of lack, of scarcity, and that we somehow have to solve for some kind of problem of lack or scarcity. How this manifests in our language in our everyday is we use the phrase, “Not enough,” all over the place.

“I’m not good enough. I didn’t get enough sleep. I didn’t have a good enough education. That last launch wasn’t good enough. These paintings aren’t good enough. I’m a good writer, a decent writer, but not good enough. I’m creative, but not that kins of creative, not creative enough. I can be successful, sure. I’m not enough to be that kind of successful that I really want to be. I have relationships in my life, I have love, but not enough. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, there’s not enough hours in the day.” It goes on and on.

And this is just the matrix that we live in when we are plugged into the thought, the meme of not enough. But I was inspired to do this episode after I did the episode on You Are Not Your Problems. Because if you listen to that episode, you’ll see that this work goes right along with that work, but there’s some nuance here that is illuminating and empowering. And so, I wanted to dive more deeply into the nuance.

Also, if you are new to my work or new to coaching, welcome. There is so much here for you. And enter into this from a place of sufficiency and positive expectation, knowing you’re going to get exactly what you need from this episode.

And also, if there are things that I’m talking about and you have no idea, you just feel lost, don’t let that be a problem. Let that be an exciting opportunity because I am diving into this at a more advanced level. Not quite at the level where I would be with a private coach-client relationship or with my masterminders, but still I’m going to go off to the races here because those of you that have followed my work for a while or who geek out on anything that is advanced coaching, advanced thought work, I think this will hit you in a place that is meaningful and inspiring.

And for those of you who are new to this world, again, welcome. This is a party and it’s a banquet and there is a wealth of opportunity here for you.

Also, if you are listening to this in the month of February 2022, there is even a bigger party going on because, in my Facebook group, TheArtSchool1, the link will be in the show notes – I will be coaching for free, just coaching my face off for the month of February.

For me, the month of February is my birthday. It’s the birthday month of many people I love so much, my oldest son, y brother Andy, my mom, my niece Emery and I share the same birthday. I have cousins, I have so many people that I love whose birthdays are this month. And I wanted to do something also along the line of giving, just forgiving, to demonstrate that part of being creative for us is that we have to give. Not have to, but we’re built for that.

And so, one of the ways I’m doing that is gifting, giving, bringing with full force a whole lot of love and coaching to this free Facebook group. The group is closed, but open to anyone. You don’t have to pay a thing. All you need to do is just answer the basic admin questions so that I know you’re a human and not a robot and not a spammer and not a marketer and not there to solicit or promote your own thing, but just there to receive and be in the energy of this space.

And also, you don’t have to have been a client of mine or alumni. Truly, all are welcome. And I can go deeper into this work if you have specific questions in this group in the month of February. It is going to be just a big love fest and like Olympic-caliber coaching. So, come in, we’re going to be off and running.

So, in this particular episode, I wanted to give the 40,000-foot bird’s eye view of this concept, how when we are in not enough energy and trying to solve for that, that we only perpetuate not enough. When we are in scarce energy and we try to act in a way to overcome our scarce thinking, our scarce emotions, our scarce energy, we can’t.

We can never compensate with our action for what we are lacking with our thinking and with our emotions that are reflecting that thinking. So, you can be doing all of the right things in the world, and this, I know, will land with many of you.

You can be doing all the right things in the world, working so hard. And yet, you are not creating results that reflect that. And a lot of people will say, “Yes, I’m so into mindset work. Just tell me what to do,” and they will just want to talk about the nuances of what they are doing. Even coaches, even myself, people who have been doing this work for a decade, and are advanced thought jedi mind ninjas when it comes to thought work, it is still hard to see your own brain.

And this is why it’s so helpful to get coaching, which is why I wanted to offer this opportunity, this free coaching in the Art School Facebook group for the month of February.

You can be, again, doing all the right things. But without the thinking that comes from a sufficient place and also the companion energy and emotion, that action will just not create the result that you want.

If you are thinking in any way, “There’s not enough…” say there’s not enough time and then let’s say you do all of these things, you buy all the planners, you do all the time management protocol, you are still going to end up in a life where it feels like there is not enough time. Because all of those actions that you’re trying to do are trying to solve for an external reality that is actually just created by your thought that there is not enough time.

So, again, I’m going to go into more specific manifestations of not enough in upcoming episodes so that you can use these all together as a companion. And I also want to point you to the You Are Not Your Problems episode because, whether you’re new to coaching or advanced, getting yourself in the rhythm of this kind of thinking and this kind of coaching is really helpful. And once you maybe find a pathway in through that episode, You Are Nit Your Problems, where I talk about when you’re trying to solve a problem from a place of, “I have a problem, this must be solved,” you will only ever stay in that problem-level energy.

As Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. There has to be a leap, a leap in consciousness that maybe that problem just becomes irrelevant or you see it was never even the point. Which is also the case for this phenomenon of not enough.

Oftentimes, we are setting goals and dreams in order to solve for an error in thinking that we’ve been conditioned to think, that we are somehow not enough. For instance, if I just achieve X, Y, and Z, then I will finally feel good about myself. I will feel valuable.

But an external result can never create our belief about ourselves. It might make it easier for us to believe a certain thing, but only for a little bit because any time we give our power to anything outside of ourselves, even a big hairy audacious goal or dream that is like Olympic-level but it’s coming from a place of lack where we are not in touch with an unconditional love, belief, trust in ourselves, we are trying to solve for unconditional love, or lack thereof, with an external goal or dream.

When I say it out loud, you know logically t doesn’t make sense. But this is what we do. I will feel like a real artist when I have paintings. And then, I have paintings, and then it becomes, “Oh no, I will feel like a real artist when I have sold paintings.” And then we sell paintings and we still don’t trust ourselves to be a real artist.

So, we say, “I will feel like a real artist when I have large amounts of commercial success,” let’s say six figures, let’s say multiple six figures, let’s say a million dollars. But that external goal set from a place of not believing you’re a real artist can never then solve for that thought error, “I’m not a real artist.”

And this is the place that blows our mind and is such a revolution because we feel that we’re going to get in trouble for this somehow. Like, who am I to just then have the audacity to say, “I’m a real artist. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have paintings yet. I just know something deep in my soul, I know this to be my truth. I am a real artist.”

And then, if you embody that from that place, then you will create art. You will create art. And if you happen to sell it, you’re knowing that you are selling art is an amazing thing, but not what makes you a real artist.

So then, people will ask, “Well then what does make me a real artist?” And I find it funny that then they’re asking me. Because it’s one more way our brain is looking for someone outside of us to be the authority in our lives, to give us the quote unquote right answer.

It’s one more way we look – even if people are asking me because they want to somehow find a problem with my answer, that’s because part of them hopes I will tell them something that clicks, and then part of them gets some security in being jaded and saying “See, no one knows.”

The thing is, you know. And then you have to ask yourself – this has to be about your connection, your sacred connection with your truth. Whether that’s your truth as a creative, and then also the sacred connection too, I want to be clear, it’s not like something that you find, a box you open full of documents that tells you who you are then you’re like, “Oh god, now it’s clear.”

It is a relationship. It’s a relationship with your psyche, with your soul, with the work that wants to happen through you, that has a life of its own. It’s ongoing. It’s unfolding. It evolves. And it can be known though by trusting yourself to be in conversation with these deep aspects of yourself and something greater than you.

So, I want this collection of episodes to be very interactive, like a workshop. So, they are very much going to be all along the coach with me, the part where you lean in and don’t just listen, but you really work with me and coach with me. So, we’re going to start that right now.

So, consider this. If you think about results you have wanted in your life, if you think about goals or dreams that you haven’t yet achieved or brought to life, why is that? Why don’t you have the results that you want yet? And so, here is where you just write out a stream of consciousness, don’t try to write the right thing, just write down everything that comes up to you as being just matter of fact, why it is that you don’t have the results that you want yet.

So, pause this recording, write those down. And then next, I want to ask you, looking at these results, why do you want these results? And I want you to then take it further and ask yourself, if I have these results, what do I have then permission to believe or know about myself to be true? If I have these results, if I’ve created this dream, if I’ve achieved this goal, what then do I believe I’m allowed to know about myself or the world to be true?

Another way of stating this is, what do these results give you permission to believe about yourself What do these results give you permission to do? What do these results give you permission to no longer think or believe about yourself? What do these results give you permission to no longer do?

I want you to take the time and sit with your answers and look at them. And then, I also want to offer you just a distilled shorthand of answers that I have seen in myself and over the years. And that is that then we have permission to trust ourselves. Then we have permission to trust the dream. Then we have permission to trust creativity, to trust life, to trust the process, to trust that it’s working.

Also, we just have permission to trust life itself, which then gives us permission to feel safe. But giving all the power away to results, to external circumstances will only ever perpetuate feelings of insecurity, lack, not enoughness. Because the only way we can create true safety is by creating it from within ourselves, no matter the circumstance, by trusting ourselves, even though X, Y, and Z, even though other people have told us we don’t deserve it, even though we in the past have told ourselves we don’t deserve our own trust.

The only way we can create safety is by unconditionally loving ourselves, creating an unconditional relationship with ourselves. The only way we can create safety is this unconditional relationship where part of us doesn’t fear that we’re going to pull the rug out from ourselves or beat ourselves up if we don’t meet all of these criteria of how one is supposed to be good enough or deserve to be believed in or deserve to be trusted or deserve to be loved.

So, I want to walk you through a thought model that is a hypothetical but it is actually more than a hypothetical. It is actually an amalgamation of a lot of thought models that I see when people are operating from not enough and trying to do something to overcome their thought that somehow there’s not enough of anything, especially their own value and worth.

So, let’s say someone has anything they want to create in life, a dream, for those of you familiar with thought work, that would be going in the circumstance line, the goal or their dream. And then their thought is, “I’m not good enough.” And then the feeling, the emotion when you’re doing this yourself – I highly recommend just choosing one emotion, one energy at a time.

But it can manifest a variety of ways for many people. So, I’ll mention that this feeling of not enough, it can create a feeling of insecurity in your body, a feeling of shame, a feeling of fear, a feeling of weakness. And then, from that feeling, from that thought, then what do you do? What actions do you take?

Well, the feeling of fear or shame or weakness or insecurity for most of us, puts us into a survival mode, puts us into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It puts us into a state where life feels incredibly stressful and overwhelming.

The researcher Harriet Lerner talks about when we are experiencing this level of stress, where it’s borderline overwhelm, where we feel like we’re not enough to meet the tasks, to overcome what’s in front of us, or just encounter, navigate what’s required of us, that people respond in one of two ways.

That their stress response can be either to over-perform and over-function, or under-function and underperform. So what this can look like for some people, if their response to this kind of overwhelm and the survival mode is over-function, then they will just try harder, they’ll try more things, they’ll try many different things.

It could look like signing up for new programs, it could look like more research. It could just look like overworking, overexercising, overthinking, overcomplicating, trying everything, exhausting yourself.

If you are someone who is on one of the people who tend to under-function when you are in this kind of survival response, then you will pull back. You’ll contract. You’ll make yourself flatter, it’ll be harder to do things. You’ll feel more lethargic.

Maybe you procrastinate, you’ll avoid. So a way I think you could summarize either one of these things is that when we are coming from a thought, “Not enough, I am not enough,” and then it creates a feeling of fear, scarcity, shame, weakness, we either try to outrun, overcome that, we try to prove it wrong, or we try to hide from it so that it can’t be proven wrong.

We don’t even try because then we don’t even know for sure. Even if we still suspect that it’s true. But no matter whether you are someone who over-functions, over-performs, or someone who under-functions and underperforms, the result is still going to be the same.

Because the result is not created by the action. The result is created by what fuels the action. The result is created by the thought. The thought will always end up as the result. Yes, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you cannot overcome the prophecy with action.

The thought and then its companion energy, or the energy which gives rise to those kinds of thoughts of not enoughness are like the soul, the spirit. And that’s what animates the action. And it’s not the action, it’s the soul or the spirit that ends up being the result, the soul or the spirit of the life that you live, the life that you’re creating, the experience that you’re creating.

And so many of us really want to solve for not enoughness, a belief like that, in the spirit, in the soul, in the energy, we want to try to solve for that or compensate with more action, more trying.

A lot of times it’s just getting better. If I could just be better. But we can never overcome the thought, which is always ever going to create a result, can only create a result of we’ll never be enough, we’re not enough now, it’s only ever going to create a result of not enough.

So it doesn’t matter how many degrees that you get, how many books you’ve read, how many trainings that you take. That action is not going to overcome the spirit, the energy, the fuel of that thought and energy, not enough. It’s the thought, the energy, the emotion that is creating the result.

You can’t outrun it. You can’t hide from it. Both things in the action line. You can’t prove it wrong. And that’s what I mean when I say setting goals from insufficiency only ever perpetuates insufficiency. So many times, if I can just achieve this goal, then I will no longer feel this inner lack.

But if we are believing in the inner lack and then trying to solve for that, we’re staying at the level of the problem. One image that I’ve used to describe this to clients is thinking of this tangled yarn ball. And the more you try to unknot it, untangle it, not only does the tighter the knot gets, but the more it’s like your hands are stuck in it.

You are enmeshed in this problematic ball of yarn. And not only that, but with time, you become so absorbed in why can’t I solve this tangled knotted mess, that you realize the yarn has become like, balled up barbed wire, and now your hands just get all bloodied and cut, but you just dig in more.

If I could only solve this, the pain will stop. When the entire time, you’re actually free, what is available to you is to drop it. To drop that. There is no solving for that. There is no solving for not enoughness by trying to gain something from the outside to prove it wrong.

Also, what we give our attention and our energy to, what we give our focus to is what grows in our life. What we give our energy, attention, and focus to is what we experience in life. So while you are trying to solve for not enoughness by achieving a goal or a dream, trying to outrun, prove it wrong, or hiding from it is also giving it attention, it’s the elephant in the room, then it’s actually what is growing in your life.

So learning to shift your attention, having the audacity, it is a revolutionary act to say I am no longer going to worship in the church of I am not enough, or that there is not enough. I’m going to walk out of those dark doors and into the sunshine.

What I want to offer you that is a shift that I work on with my clients, we’re so programmed to think that not enough is actual reality, and that if we just do enough things in the world, manage our time correctly, get enough degrees, just work harder, become a master at your craft, then those actions will solve for the thought error that I am not enough.

Now, I am not disparaging action. Action is awesome. Creativity loves to be in action. What I am talking about is the soul, the spirit, the fuel that animates the action. So it’s very different to create from a place where you’re trying to solve for an inner lack versus creating from a place of loving your craft and loving the work and wanting to be a vessel and wanting to experience the fullness of human life.

What I do want to emphasize, why I do feel so passionate about shifting our attention away from not enough is that thinking not enough in some regards, whether it’s about our time, or our money, our own inherent worth, our love, our lovability, thinking it could somehow be true that that was not enough, that there is not enough in our life actually prevents us from having the fullness in our lives that is already there.

It prevents us from having ourselves. It prevents us from having the love that we do have. It prevents us from – just this week, I was coaching someone who was saying they just hadn’t had the right kind of coach or mentor, and if they could only have the right kind of coach or mentor or teacher or program, that then that would solve everything.

But then what this person was cutting themselves off from was not only their own inner wisdom, but also accessing the wisdom that all of these people and all these experiences had been offering them. Just because the filter of the thought not enough meant any other possibility could not come through that filter.

No other possibility can come through the filter of not enough, other than just it’s true, there’s never enough, there’s not enough, not enough wisdom, not enough teachers, not the right kind of thing, I’m not enough. So again, I’m so passionate about this because I want you to have the fullness of yourself and your life, experience the fullness of your own creativity.

And so a shift that I offer my clients is to drop that barbed wire tangle, that knot that we bloody our hands on, and instead think about how is it true that you are already sitting on a goldmine. And now, this is a place where you really have to move beyond just being kind of curious about this coaching thing.

You have to move beyond just being kind of curious about this idea that you are the creator of your life and that your mind is so powerfully creative. You have to move beyond merely being entertained and curious about these things and listening to videos on YouTube, to being like, alright, all in, I am shaping my mind to be a powerful creator.

How is it true that I am already sitting on a goldmine? What would it be like to be someone who knows that they are already sitting on a goldmine? That they literally have within them a genius, a vein of gold running through them, just waiting to be released into the world. How would you create differently? How would you trust yourself differently? How would you show up in the world differently?

You might be doing many of the same kind of actions that you did in the past, but once you learn to really embody, to own and embody the belief that you’re sitting on a goldmine, that in fact, there is a vein of life, a life-force of creativity that runs through you that is pure gold and has been there all the time, and if you only learn to trust and open up and let it flow, gold is going to flow in and out of your life in as many ways as you can apply that metaphor.

What would it be like to try to stop compensating for an underlying fear that you’re not enough and to instead embody I’m sitting on a goldmine, I am literally a goldmine?

This is relevant whether you are beginning and you have very little skill in your work, because knowing that there’s something in you that wants to flow, than rather giving all the power away to skills you don’t have yet or knowledge you don’t have, and then giving all your power away to I have to acquire these things.

You will instead approach it, if you know you’re sitting on a goldmine, you will approach it as I’m not deficient and I need to get these things to be good enough. You will approach it as these are tools that are going to allow me to mine and flow the gold more freely.

Oh, these are mediums which are going to allow me to just flow more of what is mine to flow in the world. I am already valuable, I have value to share, and now these are just processes that are going to help me, not that I need to have in order to someday be good enough, to hopefully strike gold.

But no, there’s a nuance and there’s a shift there and this is also relevant for those of you who have large bodies of work already, who have years of expertise and training and experience behind you, and who still feel like you’re not quite flowing, channeling what your true potential is.

How are you already sitting on a goldmine? And how can you realize that by letting go of these constructs that continue to create paradigms where there’s more evidence that you’re not good enough? There’s more evidence that you’re not good enough.

And again, in upcoming episodes, I’m going to walk through a few more specific models so that hopefully this will illuminate areas in your own life where you’ll be able to see it objectively from the outside in, and it can help you create shifts and start to see daylight.

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Art School podcast. If you’d like to learn more about this work, you can go to my website, www.leahcb.com and sign up for The Art School newsletter. You’ll be the first to know about upcoming Art Schools, masterminds, and also free workshop opportunities. If you have any additional questions about working with me, you can email support@leahcb.com.

To close today, I’d like to continue the coach with me by offering you a challenge. This is a challenge that I have offered to clients in the past and it has produced epic-level turnarounds. And when I say epic, I mean epic. Like, moving from bankruptcy to 18 months later being in the black

Moving from being depressed and lonely and alone and hopeless to storybook relationships, even though I wasn’t relationship coaching, it was creativity coaching, to six-figure book deals, to surprising synchronicities. Really, this is a way to allow yourself to not only see the goldmine that you’re already sitting upon, but to let it be known in your life.

And so here’s the challenge; it is to go problem-free and not-enough-free for 30 days, and then for 60 days, and then for 90 days. But start with 30 days. For 30 days, I challenge you to go without looking at your life as there being all these problems.

To not talk about your problems, to not look for problems to solve, to not stay in the energy of problems. And extending that, extrapolating that to the specific problem of not enough. Watch for all of the places in life where you really want to worship the idea, believe in the idea of not enough as if it’s the truth.

And see if you can break that habit. Break the habit, the addiction to not enough, to scarcity. And then you will find that your mind, it draws a blank. It’s like, well, what else are we supposed to believe in?

And that is a golden opportunity because that is the moment that you get to choose to direct your mind. You will see how automatically it just wants to go like a magnet to not enough. This is just the process of you rewiring your brain and saying no.

Hard stop, we are not doing that anymore, we are not creating that in our life. We are not available for that anymore. Having that kind of commanding energy, it’s the year of the tiger, having that kind of tiger energy, and instead say I’m cultivating joy, I’m cultivating abundance, I’m cultivating all of these other things.

So of 1000 thoughts I can choose to think right now, 1000 places I could choose to direct my attention and focus, we’re going to direct it to a place of sufficiency, to a place of enough, to a place of okay, to a place where, heck, how can I imagine how I might already be sitting on a goldmine? How might that be true?

Try it, my friends. First 30 days going problem-free, going not-enough-free. Have a beautiful, abundant, golden week everyone, and I look forward to talking with you next time.