The Fear Of Not Being Good Enough

Common in both work and personal situations.

The fear of not being good enough is fairly pervasive in most first-world workplaces, I’d argue. (Hell, it’s fairly pervasive in life as a whole.) There is legitimate research that most people’s №1 fear about work is being seen as incompetent. That’s essentially the same thing as a fear of not being good enough.

This isn’t necessarily surprising to me — and probably shouldn’t be to you either. We have a lot of outdated notions around work, and many of those are tied to employee performance. Managers tend not to focus on employee strengths, instead focusing on concepts such as “the performance improvement plan” or ideas like “He/she is a bad employee.” In short, much of management is about getting worried about hitting targets (“a fear of not being good enough”) and, rather than rationally evaluating your team, immediately putting people in boxes as “good” or “bad” because you’re scared of what your boss is about to say to you. It’s a fun little cycle. It repeats endlessly in many jobs, which might explain some of our issues with turnover and retention.

Now that we have a little bit of the landscape here, let’s talk more about this fear of not being good enough.