personal development on Inadequacy

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

It's important to keep in mind that the lawyerly and perfectionist false self is a protective mechanism for his feelings of not being good enough. Perhaps he was criticized for not being a “good b...

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly...

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: ‘You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?’ ‘No; and I don’t want to know! Leave me alone!’ ‘The whole trouble with you is you won’t listen to w...

To wait on God means to pause and soberly consider our own inadequacy and the Lord’s all-sufficiency, and to seek counsel and help from the Lord, and to hope in Him (Ps. 33:20-22; Isa. 8:17)… The foll...

It’s rare when celebrities acknowledge anything but the carefully crafted image that’s on view to the public. But this excerpt by the singer Madonna reveals that all of us, even celebrities struggle w...

In Disney’s Snow White, when the wicked witch stares in the mirror, she asks a basic question: “Who’s the fairest of them all?” It is a natural, human tendency to measure ourselves against others. But...

All fear stems from either ‘I am not enough’ or ‘I don’t have enough.’

We make the grave error of redefining partial success as “failure."

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you're serving in the wrong place.

There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it. And the more heightened the desire, the greater our satisfaction will ultimately be. It ...

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one needs.

Too many people hear the word capacity and assume it’s a limitation. They assume their capacity is set—especially if they’re beyond a certain age. People give up on the idea that their capacity or the...

Unable to value, unable to enjoy.

As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success.

Like so many people, I once associated excellence with flawlessness. The excellent person never makes mistakes, is always consistent and confident, and is continuously applauded by scores of imperfect...

We don’t believe our ability to bless others might result from our poverty. Our need might be the thing that most blesses the body of Christ.

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have do...

Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us.

When we find worth by our affluence, it promises rest but brings stress, increasing demands, and a greater devotion to a god that will never love us and always forsake us.

Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

God does not choose those who are fit. He outfits those whom He chooses.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.

Although I witnessed the faithfulness of God to meet my basic needs, I used coping mechanisms to meet my immediate, personal needs.