Why Your Work Never Seems Good Enough

Week 1 in Seeing Good at Work invites us to question our reactions. If you are a perfectionist, this is going to be an excellent opportunity to see if what you're telling yourself about your performance is accurate.

Wanting to do better at work is natural. Being disappointed when you don't do as well as you wanted, is natural. Being habitually mean-spirited to yourself with your inner dialogue is self-defeating and counter productive.

One of the reasons your work never seems to be good enough may have something to do with your thinking, your reactions, or your inner dialogue.

 “Nothing’s good nor bad but thinking makes it so.”
—William Shakespeare

Here is part of the text from week one:

Have you ever noticed how babies and very small children experience an injury, react to it, and then move on to the next adventure with the adverse event forgotten? Such minimal reactions to a physical injury can amaze adults who might expect the child to respond in quite a different way. 

As we grow older, we are more apt to judge things as “bad” or “good.” Over time, when something “bad” happens, our reactions become stronger, and we hold on to them longer, as they carry with them memories of a history of past hurts. In this way, we pass from the realm of purely physical reaction into the realm of memory reaction, associating with the memory of what is bad. 

This is where we find ourselves as adults, mentally carrying around a detailed list of good things and bad things. And as we go through our daily lives, we continue to judge the things in our lives as either good or bad.