Why you still feel not good enough no matter what you achieve

I came top of my class. School, college, my coaching certification, all of it. And then in corporate, I had the ratings, the feedback, the promotions. By every measure you could possibly pick from the outside, I was doing well. And still, every single day, there it was. This quiet little voice, very calm, completely sure of itself, telling me you are not enough.

And here’s the thing, the evidence didn’t matter. I could point at all of it, and the feeling just didn’t care. It had its own logic.

So that’s where I want to start today. What do you do when the facts say you’re doing well and some part of you genuinely doesn’t believe it?

And stay with me until the end because I’m going to guide you through something special. A short visualization. It’s honestly the whole point of today.

Welcome back to Unscripted, a Momtoring podcast. The show for the ambitious working mother who is everyone’s default and is finally ready to hear her own voice again. I’m Andi Salcedo. I’m a coach, I’m a working mother, and I’m the founder of Momtoring, the coaching brand and community for working moms behind this show. If you want to go deeper after today, momtoring.com is where you’ll find me.

So last week we talked about the stories we inherit about ourselves, the labels that arrived before we were old enough to question them. And we ended in a real place. Because even when you can see the script, even when you understand where it came from and you know it isn’t the whole truth, there’s still this pull. This voice that says, okay, but find more proof first. Today is for that voice.

And I want to hold two things with you as we go. The first is what I’m calling the lens, the filter that’s making more evidence completely useless. And the second is a zoom out, which is honestly the only move I’ve found that actually changes the reading. We’ll get to both, and at the end we’re going to practice the zoom out together.

So I want to take you back to my first years at P&G. I was in my early 20s and I’d come in as the best in my Business Economics class. And over the next 10 years, I just kept growing. More scope, more responsibility, the ratings that confirmed the performance, the feedback to match. Everything on the outside was telling me I was doing very, very well. And underneath all of it, there it was, the low, relentless hum. Like a radio someone left on in the next room and nobody’s turned it off. Not enough.

And it wasn’t about the performance, because I was performing. It wasn’t the ratings, the ratings were right there. The feeling just wasn’t responding to any of it. It was running on its own track, completely separate from the evidence. And I remember thinking, okay, maybe if I just get one more good review, one more piece of feedback, one more win. Then it’ll shift. It never did.

Ten years later, on my last day at P&G, the marketing team threw me a farewell party. And late in the evening, I’m talking with a close friend from there. And we’re being honest in that way that you can only be honest when you’re finally leaving a place. And we get into this real conversation about the culture, about how at P&G it is genuinely never enough. How there’s no room to actually sit with a win before someone’s already asking you what you’re doing next and where you need to improve. And how exhausting that constant pressure can be. And I remember this enormous sense of relief, like, I’m finally getting out of this, and honestly believed the not enough was institutional. I thought I was leaving it behind when I walked out that door. But I was wrong.

Two years after leaving P&G, I’m in San Francisco doing a job search. And one afternoon I sit down to update my resume. I’m just doing a task and I start filling it in. The roles, the markets, the results, the scope, just facts. And then I stop. Because what’s appearing on the screen, what all of it adds up to. It genuinely shocked me. I remember staring at it thinking, wait, did I really do all of this? I realized that afternoon that I’d been reading one paragraph and calling it my whole life.

And here’s the part that got me. The facts hadn’t changed, not one of them. But there I was, working on my own, outside the institution I’d been blaming, and the hum was still there. Quieter, yes, but still running. And I understood something I hadn’t been ready to see before. This wasn’t just P&G’s culture doing something to me. This was mine. I had to own it. And honestly, I still work on it every day. Finding the perspective, practicing the zoom out. But I can see the filter now. In a way I couldn’t before I sat down to fill in that resume.

So here’s what I want you to hear today. And I really want you to sit with this one. You’re not failing to see the facts. You’re seeing them through a filter. A filter you didn’t choose, that you’ve probably never even questioned, because nobody ever told you it was there. More evidence was never going to be enough. Because the problem was never the evidence, it was the lens.

So let me tell you what that filter is actually doing. Not in clinical terms, just what it feels like from the inside. You know that thing where someone tells you, you did a great job, and somehow your brain finds a reason it doesn’t quite count? The win lands for a day, maybe less. And then it just dissolves into the background, like it was never really yours. But the one thing that didn’t go well, the call that went badly, the presentation that didn’t land, the morning at school drop off where you snapped and then spent the whole commute hating yourself for it. That one lands and stays. Your brain files it carefully and pulls it out exactly when you need to build a case against yourself. So you’re keeping a ledger, except it’s so lopsided, it’s not really a ledger at all. It’s a collection of everything that confirmed the feeling, and almost nothing that didn’t.

And then, and this is the part that took me years to see. The feeling starts doing the job of a fact. The logic goes, if I feel this way, it must be true, because things that feel real are real, right? I mean, but when the feeling is already standing in for the evidence, no actual evidence can get through. You can point at the results, you can point at the feedback, and something in you will find a way to explain why those don’t count this time. Because the feeling got there first, and your brain is working backward from it, building the case to prove itself right.

And then everything starts reading as all or nothing. One forgotten permission slip, one rushed bedtime where you were half present and you know it, one quarter at work that didn’t go the way you need it to. And suddenly, it’s the whole picture. I’m not managing any of this. I’m not cut out for this. Something fundamental is wrong with me. There’s no middle ground. No, this was a hard week and I’ve also held a lot together. The filter doesn’t hold both at once. The one hard thing always wins.

And the thing about this filter is you can’t see it. Because you’re not looking at it, you’re looking through it. Which is why you can’t fight it with more evidence. You’re not adding new information to a neutral ledger. You are adding it to a ledger that’s already decided how to count.

So what changes? Distance. That afternoon in San Francisco was not extraordinary in any way. I was filling in a resume. But for the first time, all the evidence was on the page at once. And I had no choice but to count all of it. And the ledger looked completely different. Not because the facts had changed, because I was finally counting all of them. All. Including the ones the filter had been quietly filing under irrelevant for years. The ledger looks completely different when you zoom out. Not because the facts changed, because you’re finally counting all of them. And that’s what we’re going to practice together in a few minutes.

But before we get there, I want to tell you about a friend of mine from P&G. Because her story shows this from an angle I couldn’t show you from the inside. She was about two months in the job. She was smart, talented, exactly the kind of person the company hired on purpose. And she was convinced she was failing. And I don’t mean the normal new job adjustment thing. No, no, no. Genuinely convinced. So she did something that took real courage. She went to HR.

And the director’s response wasn’t reassurance. No. It wasn’t, don’t worry, everyone feels this way at the start. It was diagnosis. She said, you were hired well. And I want you to understand something about how you’re wired. We could put you in charge of managing the printing copies, and you would still be stressed out. Convinced there must be a better way to do it. That drive that’s making you question everything right now, it’s not fighting the self doubt. It’s coming from the same place.

The drive and the self doubt are the same engine, which is why telling yourself to just be more confident has never, not once, really worked.

And I want to sit inside that for a second before we move on. Because if you are an ambitious working mom, you just heard yourself in that sentence. The drive that keeps you performing and growing and pushing, and the voice that says, it’s still not enough. Those aren’t opposites. They’re the same engine running. Which is why confidence as a goal has never gotten you anywhere. Because confidence was never the thing that was missing.

My friend’s story is the view from outside the paragraph. That HR director could read the whole book because she wasn’t living inside one page of it. And my story, the P&G years, the farewell party, the San Francisco afternoon, that’s the view from the inside. And the pattern that shows up in both is this. The lens follows you. It isn’t the job. It isn’t the performance cycle. It isn’t the particular season at home. It’s the way you’re reading your whole life. And it was running long before motherhood made everything more complicated. Which means it isn’t a symptom of your circumstances. It’s the lens underneath them. And lenses, lenses are something you can work with.

Okay, so we’re close to the end and I promised you something. A visualization I developed for you. So if you can close your eyes or just soften your gaze wherever you’re listening. Let your focus go a little soft. Take a breath in. Take a breath out. Relax your body. Relax your jaw. Your shoulders. Anything that feels tense or uneasy.

I want you to think about the paragraph you are in right now. Not the whole story. Just the one paragraph you’ve been inside this week, this month, this season. Maybe it’s a project that isn’t working. Maybe it’s a stretch at home that’s harder than you expected. Maybe it’s just a feeling that arrived quietly and hasn’t left. Whatever it is for you, find it. And let it be there.

Now notice how close you are to it. How much space it’s taking up. How it’s filling the whole frame. That’s what being inside the paragraph feels like. It’s not that the thing isn’t real. It is. But when you’re this close to it, it looks like everything.

And now slowly, I want you to pull back a little farther. The paragraph is still there, it doesn’t go away. But you can start to see what’s around it now. What else is on this page? What else is in this book? And it might show up as phrases you haven’t been noticing, or images, or just ideas. Notice how they feel. They feel different. They feel better.

And from here, from this distance, I want to ask you a few questions. You don’t need to answer out loud, just let them sit with you.

What have you built or achieved or held together that you let land for a day and then put down? What’s still in this book that you stopped counting?

Where have you been using the feeling as the evidence? What would the facts say if you separated them from how you feel right now?

And what’s true about this chapter? Not the hardest moment in it. The whole thing. What else is here?

Take a breath and when you’re ready, start moving your hands. Wiggle your fingers and open your eyes.

The facts haven’t changed. They were always there. You just read a little more of the book. And that paragraph is still there. It’s just not the whole book. It never was.

If you stopped reading only the paragraph you are in and looked at the whole book, what would you find that you’ve been filtering out?

If this episode landed for you, share it with another working mother who needs to hear it. And a rating on your podcast app takes 30 seconds and genuinely helps another working mother find this show.

And remember to subscribe to Unscripted wherever you listen, because next week we’re going somewhere more personal. The moment you realize you’ve been dressing for a version of yourself you already left behind. That’s next week on Unscripted.

I’m Andi Salcedo, this is Unscripted, and I’ll see you next week.