How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

By Ellen Hendriksen

Book Overview

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 criticize yourself. Trying to get it right is your guiding light, but it has lit the way to a place of dissatisfaction, loneliness, or disconnection. In short, you may look like you're hitting it out of the park, but you feel like you're striking out.

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

With compassion and humor, Hendriksen lays out a clear, effective, and empowering guide. To enjoy rather than improve, be real rather than impressive, and be good to yourself when you're wired to be hard on yourself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250291879
• ISBN13: 9781250291875
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Perfectionists Rejoice!

Seen. Heard. Validated. Purchased. I’ve known I’m a perfectionist for a very long time, but what I didn’t know was revealed in this well laid out book. It helped me understand myself better and gave manageable ways to temper these perfectionist tendencies. There’s so many layers of perfectionism I wasn’t aware of. One person could be a few of the layers and another could be a few entirely different layers. I’m so bold as to guess that almost everyone has one of these layers ingrained. This is truly a read for everyone- to understand all of us a little better and build compassion for one another. I appreciated that the material is easy to grasp and anything that feels Big is broken down to bite sized concepts and ideas. Truly recommending everyone put this on their TBR list!