Getting to Good Enough

Since our work and social lives have been curtailed by the pandemic, it seems like it should be easy to get dressed. Not so much. In this episode, Janine and Shannon discuss their challenges around clothing during this special time. Spoiler alert: There's lots of laughter in this one.

Discussion topics include:

• How much we're enjoying pandemic-friendly comfy clothes

• The paradox that it's difficult to get dressed even though we're going nowhere

• Shannon's pull between wanting to be comfortable and wanting to look professional

• How Janine's standards in clothing seem to have plummeted

• How Janine's problem isn't wearing the same thing every day, it's that what she has to choose from isn't very attractive and the pandemic prevents her from shopping

• Shannon's "house fleece"

• The cowl that Janine knit specifically to wear with her bathrobe

• Shannon's layering tips for warmth

• The Wool& 100-day dress challenge

• Project 333

• How perfectionism is part of this problem

• Shannon's desire to dress more professionally when she's working, even though she's on Zoom

• Getting in touch with what's important to you right now to get past the perfectionism around this issue

• Cutting ourselves slack

• The decision fatigue caused by the pandemic

• How a little bit of action now can help us feel better about what we're wearing and make it easier to get dressed in the morning

Note from Janine: I bought the Wool& Rowena dress and have taken on the 100-day challenge. It is fantastically freeing and I'm feeling comfortable and cute every day! Shannon ordered the dress, but unfortunately the wool was too itchy for her sensitive skin.

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links (and a picture of Janine in her dress)

It's the last month of the year and we have some goal-setting resources for you! This week, Shannon and Janine discuss the importance getting clear on your goals, especially after a year like 2020. And we talk about the workshop Shannon is teaching on Saturday, as well as our Good Enough Goal Setting kit.

Discussion topics include:

• We’re looking forward to turning the page on a new year!

• How the challenges of 2020 might affect our planning for 2021

• The (virtual) class Shannon is leading on December 12: New Year Reset

• How some goals (like Shannon’s goals to travel more) were negatively affected by the pandemic

• The benefit of thinking about what you want, rather than about what you don’t want

• Tricky goals like “quit smoking” and “lose weight"

• How knowing what you want guides you in the direction you want to go

• The perils of creating SMART goals that you don’t have any control over 

• Our Good Enough Goal Setting kit

• Getting clear on what you want: the secret ingredient to goal setting 

• The lessons of 2020 and the pandemic

• One of Janine’s goals: preparing for the worst 

• Some details on how LastPass helps you share passwords in an emergency

• Some of the simple pleasures that 2020 brought us

• Thinking about goals as pointing yourself in the right direction

• Being kind to yourself when you evaluate progress on your goals

• Paying attention to what ended up not mattering to you

Important links:

• Shannon's New Year Reset workshop on December 12, 2020: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-year-reset-with-shannon-wilkinson-tickets-121753250249

• Our Good Enough Goal Setting kit: https://www.e-junkie.com/i/ycy8?card

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for more links!

These are stressful times. With the holidays, the global pandemic, passionate politics and everything else that's going on, your mind might be anything but quiet. In this episode Janine and Shannon discuss the benefits of quieting your thoughts and provide some strategies to try. (Spoiler alert: The secret ingredient is breathing!)

Discussion topics include:

• How quieting your mind isn’t about emptying your head of thoughts, but rather about turning down the volume on them

• Brains are brains and they’re designed to have thoughts.

• Avoiding perseverating on your thoughts

• It’s not just thinking negative thoughts that is problematic; you can also latch onto thoughts that have no impact

• How it takes energy when you get caught up in thinking about things that don’t matter much

• How daily yoga helps Janine quiet her mind

• One mind-quieting strategy: Turning your attention specifically to something else (like breathing)

• Box breathing, which can calm your nervous system

• A question to ask yourself, “What’s next?"

• How our brains think worrying about something counts toward taking action, when actually it usually prevents you from taking action

• How our bodies react to worry as if the thing you’re worrying about is actually happening

• How if you are worrying about something you are not in danger

• Shannon’s awesome flow chart for responding to worry

• Some visual metaphors for letting thoughts pass through your mind

Visit the show notes at https://wp.me/pa4yl3-lt to see Shannon's flow chart and for links.

It can be uncomfortable to try new things if perfectionism makes you worry about getting them right. In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss a recent class they took together and how it provided a great lesson in letting go of perfectionism.

Discussion topics include:

• The class on flowcharting that Shannon and Janine took together

•How perfectionism came up during this class for Janine but not Shannon

• How letting go of perfectionism allowed Janine to get a lot out of the class

• Applying flow charting to Shannon’s question, “Is is time to meditate?"

• The question Janine flow charted, “How can I design my schedule to write more?"

• How Janine was glad she let go of her discomfort over not knowing what to expect and signed up for the class

• “Everything you want is on the other side of fear."

• How the technique of flow charting can help you let go of a concern about getting things right

• The imperfections inherent in flow charting

• The benefit of these reminders about the value of embracing good enough

• How handmade things are enhanced by their imperfections

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links and for photos of our flow charts!

The holiday season in 2020 is destined to be strange, thanks to COVID-19. In this episode Janine and Shannon talk about making the best of an unprecedented Thanksgiving holiday. In listening to the episode, we realized that we didn't directly address some important advice: Think about why the holidays are important to you, and what makes them special, and consider how you can bring some of that into your life, even when you can't celebrate as usual.

Topics we did address include:

• The importance of keeping everybody safe by limiting social gatherings, even on Thanksgiving

• Shannon’s “traditional” Popeye’s Thanksgiving

• How Janine’s decades-long Thanksgiving tradition is impossible this year

• Our compassion for people who aren’t able to see their loved ones this year

• Creating 2020 holiday memories and stories 

• Using the extra time you might gain this year to reach out to others

• Making yourself feel better by reaching out to someone else

• The plan Shannon and Janine hatched to play Yahtzee or Scattergories over the internet on Thanksgiving

• Cutting yourself infinite slack if you can’t do the traditional things you do at the holidays

• Remembering what we have to be grateful for

• Accepting the way things things are to reduce stress

• Recognizing that there’s no perfect or ideal way to spend your time during the pandemic

• The value of embracing good enough, especially now

• The wonderful sense of community created by Yoga with Adriene

• Inviting a friend to do things with you (the internet makes that easy!)

See the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links

This week, we're re-running Episode 21 from October 2018. It gets to the heart one of our most important recurring themes, so we thought it would be worthwhile to revisit.

The bedrock of all the advice we offer on this podcast is, "Know what's important to you." In this episode, Janine and Shannon discuss how to get in touch with your values so that you can more easily embrace good enough.

Discussion topics include:

• The importance of knowing your core values

• Evaluating what’s important to you

• The secret sauce of the process: Repeating the question “What else?”

• Using your core values to help you decide what good enough means to you

• Trying a Word of the Year exercise

• How getting clear on your why makes everything easier

• Getting in touch with your body’s “yes” and “no” signals

• Shannon’s “Boring Change” technique for making ridiculously easy changes

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for show links.

This week, we're re-running Episode 7, from way back in July 2018. It presents a core message of our podcast that we thought was worth another listen. Enjoy!

It's hard to know how to stop at good enough if you haven't identified what good enough means to you. Shannon and Janine discuss why it's important to understand your own standards of good enough--and how those standards are very personal.

Discussion topics include:

• How standards can vary depending on the importance of what you’re working on

• How living with teenagers has caused Shannon to embrace a different standard of good enough in terms of housekeeping (spoiler alert: the word “botulism” is part of her standard)

• The challenge of living with people whose standards of clutter are different than yours

• Shannon’s technique for avoiding over-researching purchases

• How Janine straddles the divide between the future and the ancient ways

The prospect of changing a habit can feel difficult--but it doesn't have to be. The pandemic has given most of us a crash course in habit changing! In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss some of the habits we've changed recently, along with some ways to make habit changing easier.

Discussion topics include:

• How under the right circumstances, habit change can be easy

• Some of the many habits the pandemic has required us to create

• How the pandemic has changed the way we feed ourselves (and our families)

• Shannon’s strategy for creating a meal-planning habit

• How Janine’s using her Trello daily task management board to re-create a habit of taking her supplements twice daily

• The difficulty in remembering whether you’ve done certain daily tasks (and some solutions for that)

• How the pandemic revealed our capacity to change

• How these new habits are probably here to stay (and that’s probably for the better)

• The importance of time of day for certain habits — it can be worthwhile to play with that

• The value of attaching a habit to an existing one

The notion of choosing imperfection (rather than striving for perfection) is counter-intuitive to folks with perfectionistic tendencies. But it can be a helpful way to approach things. In this episode Janine and Shannon discuss the benefits of choosing imperfection and the joys of welcoming imperfection into our lives.

Discussion topics include:

• How Janine chose imperfection when she made a flyer recently

• The lasting impact of the confetti reward in our Trello task management boards

• How choosing imperfection allowed Shannon to start communicating regularly with her email list subscribers

• How Janine has chosen imperfection in her monthly newsletter for more than a dozen years with no ill effects

• The fact that inaction, as well as imperfection, can sometimes be a choice

• How Shannon is choosing inaction (as well as imperfection) when it comes to her creaky old website

• How this topic relates to Janine’s childhood garage burning down

• Requiring imperfection in our upcoming Zoom presentation, “The Power of Enough"

• The joy of welcoming imperfection into our lives

• Choosing imperfection in Shannon’s Vote Forward letters

• The value of choosing imperfection before starting a project rather than settling for it at the end of a project

Go to the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links.

Shannon and Janine both embrace being authentic. But we understand that if you have a tendency toward perfectionism that it can be hard not to strive to appear perfect. In this episode, we discuss the value of authenticity and how it can make your life easier.

Discussion topics include:

• How perfectionism can make it harder to show up authentically and be your true self in public

• How sharing your own imperfections can help you help others.

• Shannon and Janine’s “warts and all” approach to presenting themselves

• How this podcast helps us be authentic

• The value of being approachable and human

• How Janine came terms with being authentic about being messy as a professional organizer

• The imperfection that is baked into our podcast

• How being authentic is much less stressful!

• The self recrimination behind not living up to a persona that you created

• Saying what you think even if you think the other person won’t want to hear it

• Making (sometimes false) assumptions about what people are asking

• Shannon’s trick: She assumes that anyone who asks her something is thinking, “Doesn’t hurt to ask"

• The freedom of not caring how you’re perceived as long as you’re being authentic

• Shannon’s approach to authenticity when she was dating