Getting to Good Enough

This week, Janine and Shannon are thrilled to present an interview Christine Platt, author of The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less. Christine offers all sorts of great insights on the benefits of living with less, along with some ideas for getting there. (And we're offering a giveaway of her excellent book!)

Discussion topics include:

• Christine's relationship with perfectionism and how it was changed by motherhood

• The envy that perfectionists sometimes feel toward those who embrace good enough

• How having less stuff makes things easier

• How a minimalist lifestyle is conducive to efficiency and productivity

• The energy expended looking for something that's lost--and how Christine calms herself in those situations

• Minimalist wardrobes

• Christine's suggestion of inventorying your wardrobe before paring it down

• The stark reality you face when you actually count your clothes (Christine had 50 pairs of jeans!)

• The thrill of bargain shopping (and trying to resist it)

• The liberation of less and the ways it can manifest itself

• The joy of being able to deep clean an entire house in two hours

• How living with less allows you to appreciate what you have

• Shifting your focus on what you're gaining, not what you're losing, when you embrace a minimalist lifestyle

• Minimalism: The gateway to living with intention

• How there's no cookie-cutter approach to living with less: The important thing is that it's authentic to you

• Why dressers and drawers don't work for Christine

• The powerful combination of authenticity and intention in Christine's approach to minimalism

• Learning to say no to gifts from others + getting creative with your own gift giving

• Christine's closing advice for perfectionists

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links and to enter our giveaway for a free copy of Christine's book!

When we don't keep the commitments we make to ourselves, we may stop trusting ourselves, which can have devastating consequences. In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss some strategies for keeping the commitments we make and trusting ourselves again.

Discussion topics include:

• Feeling icky when we let ourselves down

• Case in point: Janine's daily yoga practice, which has been faltering

• Shannon's sage advice: Get in touch with why the commitment is important

• Thinking about the easiest thing you can do to get some of the good feeling you're seeking

• How it can feel harder to restart when you've broken a commitment to yourself

• Acknowledging the hard feeling and restarting anyway

• The disappointment of not living up to the identity you set for yourself

• Ignoring that disappointment and instead embracing the identity you seek

• Following an impulse to do something, even if it's imperfect

• Making it easy to act on those impulses

• How a daily practice makes acting imperfectly easier

• Another case in point: Shannon's daily illustrating-her-day creativity practice

• Making your commitment to yourself easy enough you actually do it

• Shannon's amazing Duolingo streak: 599 days in a row of learning Portuguese!

• A self-reinforcing benefit of keeping your commitments to yourself: You start to trust yourself

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for an update.

Those of us who do creative projects do them because they make us happy. But sometimes we get frustrated instead. In this episode, Janine and Shannon discuss how to stay happily creative.

Discussion topics include:

• Shannon's unhappily stalled creativity

• The illustrated story-telling event that Shannon is participating in

• How practicing creativity less frequently can make it less enjoyable

• Shannon's regret that she didn't keep up her visual diary through the pandemic

• Creating parameters to make a daily creativity practice easy

• Turning off your inner critic while you're creating

• Janine's hand-lettered task lists

• How an organizational infrastructure can help you stay happily creative

• How adding limits can increase the happiness factor

• The inspiring daily creativity practice of one of Shannon's friends (check out the show notes to see the images!)

• Pondering letting a daily creativity practice be easy

• How perfectionism can get in the way of happy creativity

• Shannon's question to herself: What's the smallest thing I can do every day that would make me happy?

• The wacky way we came up with this topic

Visit the show notes at http://gettingtogoodenough.com/episode-172-happy-creativity/ for an update and to see pictures!

It's September and that often gives accomplishing projects more urgency. The week, Shannon and Janine discuss some strategies for taking next steps toward your goals. (Spoiler alert: Getting in touch with what's important to you is a big part of it!)

Discussion topics include:

• How September makes us want to get busy and focused

• Revisiting the goals for the year in an effort to restart working toward them

• Thinking about goals in smaller chunks and bigger chunks

• How it's so easy to feel overwhelmed when you're trying to get back into the swing of things after the summer

• Assessing how you want to spend your time and identifying the next small step you can take

• The value of breaking projects down into little tiny steps

•How the unstructured nature of time after kids are back in school might feel overwhelming

• Getting strict with yourself about what is important to you

• Editing out the shoulds

• Start as you want to continue

• Mindfully creating habits to help you finish the year on track

• The value of taking the time to write down all the tiny tasks that comprise a project

• How perfectionism can get in the way of taking next steps and getting stuff done

• Measuring progress (as opposed to quality) when you're working on a project

• Differentiating the different types of tasks in a project

• Shannon's free quiz to help you identify why you procrastinate (and how to work through it)

• Shannon and Janine's snort-worthy Walla Walla "party girl" story

• Letting next steps be easy

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links (including a link to Shannon's anti-procrastination quiz!)

Who doesn't like a nice pat on the back? It can be especially valuable when that credit comes from within. This week, Janine and Shannon talk about giving yourself credit and focusing on what you've accomplished rather than what you still have left to do.

Discussion topics include:

• Deep cleaning a basement (or not)

• The weird unwritten rule that can prevent us from appreciating our successes until our projects are completed

• The value of looking back on your successes periodically

• Setting up your task list so you give yourself credit for each thing you do

• Giving yourself credit for moving away from perfectionism

• How you deserve credit for learning new things even if you feel you should have already known those things

• Shannon's almost-complete decluttering project and how she's paying attention to what she has yet to do rather than what she has accomplished

• The unfortunate tendency to move the goal post, rather than giving yourself credit for progress.

• Making a practice of noticing what you've achieved every time you notice a problem

• Tracking your accomplishments

• How we tend to focus on negative feedback and ignore the positive feedback

• The feedback sandwich! ("It's like a pat on the back wrapped around a wish.")

• Janine and Shannon's commitment to trying a daily feedback sandwich in their own lives

See the show notes on www.gettingtogoodenough.com for an update and link on the feedback sandwich.

Everyone has a bad day some time. On the day we recorded this episode, Janine was experiencing a bad day that left a dark cloud hanging over her head. Shannon was able to make suggestions that helped her (and can help you) make a bad day better.

Discussion topics include:

• How it's possible to reset bad day

• Janine's terrible, horrible, no good very bad day

• Taking a step back during a bad day and looking on the bright side

• Wallowing vs trying to snap out of it

• "Yes, and..."

• The importance of acknowledging when something sucks; it allows your unconscious mind to feel gratitude

• Learning from our bad days

• Giving yourself a reset by moving your body and shifting your energy

• Getting in touch with what's important to you to help you get past a bad day

• The value of a good laugh on a bad day

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

We've all felt the Fear of Missing Out. It can prompt us to do things that might not be in our best interest. In this episode, Janine and Shannon discuss FOMO and some strategies for not falling prey to it.

Discussion topics include:

• Janine's love for her Wool& wool dresses (despite the summer heat)

• How a fear of missing out may have prompted the purchase of her sixth wool dress

• Shannon's desire for Janine to get a seventh wool dress and embroider the days of the week on them

• Shannon's recognition of FOMO as a reason she was tempted to take a third cartooning class

• How getting in touch with what was important to her helped her decline the opportunity

• One antidote for FOMO: Reminding yourself of the things you're saying no and how it hasn't been a problem

• FOMO as it relates to the crazy used car market

• Our recurring theme: The value of getting in touch with what's important to you to quell FOMO

• Weighing the effort required and whether it's worth it to act out of a fear of missing out

• The relative nature of "too much work" and recognizing your threshold for what is too much

• Checking in with your values when you realize you're acting out of a fear of missing out

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

Letting go (of things like negative emotions, beliefs and physical stuff) is a recurring theme in the podcast, especially in recent weeks. So we decided to re-run this episode on letting go, recorded in January 2019. Spoiler alert: It was during this episode that we decided to change our tag line!

Janine and Shannon are experts in letting go. Janine helps people with tangible stuff and Shannon helps them with intangible stuff. So we have a lot to say in this episode about the benefits and process of letting go!

Discussion topics include:

• How January is a great time for letting go

• That Janine rarely, if ever, regrets having let go of something (and neither do her clients)

• How the various terms for decluttering process can change the way you feel about it--and the importance of finding the language that works for you

• How letting go of beliefs (like perfectionism) can allow you to open up space to do more of what you love

• A change to our podcast’s tagline!

• A deep dive into the process for letting of thoughts and beliefs that aren’t helpful

• How your goals can help your underlying beliefs come to the surface

• The magic of thinking about your beliefs that might not be serving you and recognizing they’re not true

• The perfectionistic beliefs Janine had to let go of in order to start a daily yoga practice

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

Many of us yearn for balance in our lives. But perhaps that's not the healthiest thing to strive for. This week, Janine and Shannon discuss letting go of the urge for balance and instead looking toward adding harmony in our lives.

Discussion topics include:

• The elusive nature of "balance"

• The pressure of feeling that everything has to be in balance

• How trying to maintain balance can be paralyzing

• Shifting to a goal of harmony, rather than balance

• The ebb and flow of harmony and melody

• The effect of little changes in maintaining harmony

• How a shift in language can make a difference on the unconscious level

• The vast difference in the feeling that the word balance evokes, compared with harmony

• Another possible goal: equanimity (which is easier to achieve when harmony is your guiding principle)

• How balance feels more effortful than harmony

• Allowing space for ebb and flow in a harmonious life

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

Words matter. This week Shannon and Janine discuss how shifting our language just a hair can shift our outcomes.

Discussion topics include:

• Shannon survived the Portland heat wave!

• The value of shifting your language

• Changing "should" or "need to" to "choose to" can be very powerful

• How "need to" puts you into flight or fight mode

• The calming effect of "choose to"

• How digging into why some tasks are important can help you choose to do them

• Reframing your language to shift you into "good enough" mode

• The power of the name you give a space

• Experiencing the impact of subtle shifts of language

• How changing language requires changing some habits

• Janine's hand-lettered "What do I choose to do?" note that you can download from the show notes

• A living example: We changed our podcast tagline from "overcome" to "let go of" in early 2019

• Cutting yourself some slack as you make things changes in your language

• Thinking about the language you use in communicating with others

• How a shift in language can make you more productive

Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com to download a reminder about language you can use on your own bulletin board!