"This one is just right."

Do you remember the fairytale “Goldilocks And the Three Bears”? It’s basically a story about a little girl named Goldilocks on her quest for comfort trying out chairs, porridge, and beds, finally settling on what is 'just right' for her. 

We’re all Goldilocks in our own way looking to find what’s ‘just right’ for us and in every aspect of our lives.

The process of discovering your ‘just right’ starts with the basics. We need to be self-aware of what we want (what our preferences are, how we like it, what feels right to us) and we need to accept ourselves and that preference, despite the criticism, judgment, or difference in opinion we might face.

Now how do we figure that out? First we need to understand the spectrum that’s out there. There are few things in life that are truly black and white - we need to find our shade of gray that’s ‘just right’ for us. We get there through trial and error, and experimentation and feedback, to better understand what we’re looking for. 

Like Goldilocks - She had to eat hot porridge and sit in an uncomfortably hard chair to learn what she liked.

Going beyond the fairytale, what’s equally important to accept is that your preferences can change. What you wanted before could be undesirable now. Your definition of success might change when you start a family. 

But you know what? We should change our minds! What’s ‘just right’ should change. As the world evolves around you, your way of fitting into it must evolve as well.

However, we see it as a weakness to change our mind on something. Almost like we’re giving up or quitting and it causes us to stick with things that are not right for us for too long.

That’s when we come back to the basics - Being self-aware of what you want right now, and accepting of that without concern of what others think. We get to run the experimentation process again with curiosity to figure out what feels ‘just right’ now in a different season of life, with different context.

The main source of disappointment I see in people is they fail to live up to the expectation they have for themselves. But when that expectation was crafted in a certain environment, like working out every day for an hour in your mid-twenties, you’re setting yourself up for failure when you hold yourself to that same standard but now you’re in your mid-30s and have two kids under 5.

Just like Goldilocks, feel it out, see what you want, align with your preferences, and boldly state what you think is ‘just right’ for you. And as long as you believe it, that’s all that matters.