How to be Enough

Are you your own toughest critic? Learn to be good to yourself with this clear and compassionate guide.

Do you set demanding standards for yourself? If so, a lot likely goes well in your life. You might earn compliments, admiration, or accomplishments. Your high standards and hard work pay off. But privately, you may feel like you're falling behind, faking it, or different from everybody else. Your eagle-eyed inner quality control inspector highlights every mistake. You try hard to avoid criticism, but criticise yourself.

This is perfectionism. And for everyone who struggles with it, it's a misnomer: perfectionism isn't about striving to be perfect. It's about never feeling good enough.

Dr Ellen Hendriksen - clinical psychologist and anxiety specialist - is on the same journey as you. In How to be Enough, Dr Hendriksen charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have got you. She delivers seven shifts to move you from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment. Each will help you find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we're all craving.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN is a clinical psychologist at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She is the author of How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in the US with her family.A supportive, practical and science-based guide to overcoming perfectionism and restoring balance to your life.