“Don’t disappear when you feel inadequate.”
I heard that line in Ted Lasso recently, and it stuck with me.
Not because it’s some grand motivational statement about believing in yourself. I actually think there’s something more interesting buried in it.
Feeling inadequate is part of life.
There are going to be rooms where you’re not the smartest person. Jobs you’re not ready for yet. Conversations where someone knows far more than you do. Skills you haven’t developed. Roles you care deeply about but still don’t feel particularly good at.
The instinct, when that happens, is often to disappear.
Maybe not literally.
You stop talking in the meeting. You stop asking questions because you’re worried the question will expose what you don’t know. You don’t apply for the opportunity. You avoid the people who make you aware of your own limitations. You stop sharing your work.
Sometimes you stay physically present while making yourself smaller.
And I think that’s worth paying attention to.
Inadequacy Is Probably Never Going Away
There’s an odd assumption hidden inside a lot of self-improvement advice: that if we just improve enough, we’ll eventually stop feeling inadequate.
I’m not sure that’s true.
The more you learn about something, the more clearly you tend to see how much more there is to learn. The better the people around you become, the easier it is to notice the gaps in your own ability.
You can become highly competent and still regularly encounter situations where you aren’t competent enough.
So perhaps eliminating inadequacy isn’t a realistic goal.
Maybe becoming comfortable with inadequacy is.
Because if you need to feel competent everywhere you go, eventually you’ll start choosing environments based on where you already feel competent.
That sounds comfortable.
It also sounds like a pretty effective way to stop growing.
Inadequacy Can Tell You Something
There’s another side to inadequacy that I don’t think we talk about enough.
Sometimes the feeling itself contains useful information.
I’m inadequate at all sorts of things.
I’m sure I would be a terrible violinist. I would probably be a terrible ballet dancer. There are sports, trades, academic disciplines and artistic pursuits where my ability would be somewhere between beginner and completely useless.
That doesn’t bother me.
I don’t walk around thinking, “Jeremiah, you really need to work on your violin.”
Why?
Because being a good violinist isn’t particularly important to me.
But inadequacy feels very different when it touches something we actually value.
If someone feels inadequate as a spouse, a parent, a leader, a business owner, a writer, a friend or a professional, there may be a reason the feeling has more weight.
It may be because being good at that thing matters to them.
So instead of immediately trying to eliminate the feeling, there may be value in asking:
Why does being inadequate at this bother me?
That’s a much more useful question than simply asking how to stop feeling inadequate.
Not Every Inadequacy Deserves Improvement
There’s an important qualification here.
Just because something makes us feel inadequate doesn’t necessarily mean it reflects something we truly value.
Sometimes we feel inadequate because we’re comparing ourselves to someone else.
Sometimes it comes from family expectations, professional culture, status, social media or some old idea of who we thought we were supposed to become.
You can spend a lot of energy trying to become good at something you never actually decided was important.
So the question has to go one level deeper.
Why does this bother me?
And then:
Is this something I genuinely value, or something I’ve been taught that I should value?
Those can lead to very different decisions.
Comfort Comes Before Correction
This is where I think becoming comfortable with inadequacy matters.
When inadequacy makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to react before we’ve properly assessed it.
We might withdraw.
We might pretend we’re more capable than we are.
We might start working frantically to fix the weakness.
All three can come from the same place: wanting the feeling to go away.
But discomfort isn’t always a great decision-maker.
Before deciding whether an inadequacy needs to be corrected, I think there’s value in getting comfortable enough to simply say:
I’m not very good at this.
And then stopping there for a moment.
Not:
I’m not very good at this, therefore I’m a failure.
Not:
I’m not very good at this, therefore everyone else must think I don’t belong here.
Not even:
I’m not very good at this, therefore I need to fix it.
Just:
I’m not very good at this.
That can simply be a fact.
Once you can acknowledge an inadequacy without immediately turning it into a judgment about yourself, you’re in a much better position to decide what to do with it.
Then You Get to Choose
Once you’re comfortable with the fact that you’re inadequate in an area, there are at least two perfectly reasonable responses.
You Can Grow
If the inadequacy touches something you genuinely care about, then maybe it’s telling you where some work needs to happen.
If being a better leader matters to you and you recognize that you’re not very good at difficult conversations, that’s useful information.
If writing matters to you and you realize that you struggle to explain ideas clearly, that’s useful information.
If being a good spouse matters to you and you recognize a weakness in how you communicate, that’s useful information.
The inadequacy has shown you a gap between where you are and where you would like to be.
Now you can work on the gap deliberately.
Not because feeling inadequate is unbearable.
Because the thing itself is worth becoming better at.
Or You Can Accept It
The other option gets less attention.
You can decide:
I’m inadequate at this, and I’m completely okay with that.
We’re all going to be inadequate at thousands of things.
There simply isn’t enough time to turn every weakness into a development plan.
And I’m not convinced that a good life requires us to.
There can be maturity in recognizing that something isn’t worth your limited time, attention and effort.
The goal doesn’t need to be universal competence.
The goal can be understanding which competencies are worth pursuing.
Why Disappearing Makes the Decision for You
This brings me back to the original line.
“Don’t disappear when you feel inadequate.”
Because when we disappear, we never really make the decision.
We don’t decide whether the inadequacy is worth improving.
We just escape the situation producing the feeling.
Someone feels inexperienced in a meeting, so they stop contributing.
Someone joins a professional group filled with people further along in their careers, feels inadequate and stops attending.
Someone starts learning something difficult, realizes how much they don’t know and quietly gives it up.
Someone feels inadequate in a relationship and withdraws instead of talking about where they’re struggling.
The retreat provides some immediate relief.
But it can also preserve the exact inadequacy that caused the retreat.
The person who feels inexperienced stops putting themselves in situations where they could gain experience.
The person who feels less knowledgeable stops asking questions of people who know more.
The person who feels like a beginner avoids being a beginner.
And there’s no real way to become anything other than a beginner without spending some time being one.
The Edge of Competence
I think a lot of inadequacy shows up near the edge of our competence.
Inside that edge, we know what we’re doing.
We’re comfortable.
We can rely on experience.
Then eventually we encounter something that stretches beyond what we currently know.
Suddenly the confidence disappears.
That can feel like failure, but sometimes it simply means we’ve reached the boundary of our current ability.
Growth requires moving that boundary.
And moving it usually requires spending at least some time on the other side of it.
That doesn’t mean discomfort is inherently virtuous. There’s nothing magical about struggling.
But if we disappear every time we become aware of the edge of our competence, the edge never moves.
The “I’m Not Good Enough” Paradox
I’ve written before about what I called the “I’m Not Good Enough” paradox.
The basic idea is that feeling inadequate can cause us to behave in ways that reinforce the inadequacy.
You feel like you’re not good enough, so you withdraw.
Because you withdraw, you get less practice, less exposure, less feedback and fewer opportunities to improve.
Then your lack of improvement becomes evidence for the original belief that you weren’t good enough.
This idea sits slightly before that paradox.
What if we could become comfortable enough with feeling inadequate that the feeling didn’t immediately control our behaviour?
What if “I’m not good enough at this yet” didn’t require either retreat or frantic self-improvement?
What if we could just sit with it long enough to understand what it means?
Don’t Disappear. Get Comfortable. Then Decide.
When inadequacy shows up, maybe the sequence can be fairly simple.
First, don’t disappear.
Stay in the room. Stay in the conversation. Keep asking questions. Remain present long enough to understand what you’re feeling.
Then admit the inadequacy.
You don’t need to pretend you know something you don’t know or can do something you can’t do.
Get comfortable with the fact that there is a gap.
Then ask why the gap bothers you.
Does it touch something you genuinely value?
Is the standard actually yours?
If it is, grow.
If it isn’t, perhaps the healthier response is to accept that you’re inadequate there and move on with your life.
Some inadequacies deserve our attention.
Some deserve our acceptance.
But it’s difficult to tell the difference when feeling inadequate itself feels like an emergency.
So maybe that’s the skill worth developing first.
Be comfortable enough with your inadequacy that you can choose what to do with it.
