Do you find yourself constantly wanting more, chasing the next big thing, and never feeling truly satisfied? If so, you’re not alone.

In this episode, we explore how discovering contentment with what you have can lead to a richer, more fulfilling life. From personal anecdotes about overconsumption and the mental weight of material possessions, to practical coaching advice on finding your authentic self, this episode is packed with insights that encourage you to pause, reflect, and appreciate your current state.

Plus, stay tuned for our glimmers segment where we share some personal highlights, including Cat’s return to therapy and Andrew’s latest tech find. Tune in and start your journey toward a more content, authentic you!

Do you find yourself caught in the cycle of always wanting more? Today's episode is entitled Embracing Enough, and it's all about being satisfied with where you are and not always in that relentless pursuit of more. Welcome to the five year you podcast, a show dedicated to helping you become the best version of yourself one day at a time. I'm Andrew.

And I'm Cat. And we promise to keep it raw, real, and relatable.

Are you ready to grow? How are you doing today, Cat?

I am pretty good. I feel like I'm still waking up, but I'm here.

I'm here. That's good. We appreciate you showing up. It's always good. I like the energy. You got a nice, relaxed vibe going. It's all good. We were talking about this before we jumped on the show and embracing enough.

What does that mean to you exactly?

I think it means finding contentment with what you have. I think the root of a lot of people's unhappiness is that they always want something different from what's right in front of them. And if we can learn how to appreciate what we have and to want what's already there, that is a very good way to lean into more joy and happiness in our lives.

I like that viewpoint. It's kind of that grass is always greener on the other side. Mindset of whatever I have, it's like you don't value it enough because you have it now, so you're not pursuing it. To me, embracing enough means stopping. Stopping and being okay with an amount that isn't more. There is a place for that. I mean, like, we're meant to evolve into this better person to. We're always growing.

That's what we're all about. But to me, like, embracing enough is being able to leave food on my plate because I'm full, or, you know, or not even full, but, like, satiated or satisfied. And, I mean, we're gonna. We even talked about using the term satisfied in the title, but it just didn't. Kind of didn't have the same alliteration. So we went with embracing enough. You know, like, there's that mindset of, okay, well, if I have a bag of chips, it says I can't eat just one. But the truth is, after, like, four or five chips, I'm not really tasting anymore, but I just want more because I have access to more.

And so to me, part of embracing enough is being able to say, look, I'm not, at least in the food sense, when I'm not hungry anymore. I can stop. My plate doesn't have to be cleaned. I can stop at half the chocolate bar. There's all these. But there's. It's a lot of, like, little, you know, like, fake rules in my head with that stuff. And at the same time, there's that other part of enough, which is, what's the next thing I should get? What's the next thing I want? Kind of finding that balance.

I think that's natural, right? Studies show we get a dopamine hit when we buy something. When we scroll, we get all of these little, like, hits to the pleasure centers of our brain. And that's why there's such an over consumption problem, especially in North America. And, you know, just one of my, like, big icks in this life is going to the mall. And it's not just the crowds. It's just, like, over consumption on display. And of course, I like to buy things every now and then, but I have, like, developed such a discipline of saying, no, I already have this in my closet. Or, for example, I just sold something on Poshmark.

And Poshmark said, oh, I can deposit the money into your account for the sale, or you can use it to buy something else. I'm like, oh, well, that could be a good trade. You know, I sold something, and then I could pick something new out of. So I'm very big on, like, thrift stores, and I get really overwhelmed with clutter. And as good as I am, as frugal as I am, as disciplined as I am, I was so overwhelmed with all the overconsumption on display when I moved out of my house and downsized to an apartment this year. And bless Andrew, he helped me with that process. And I. There just came a point where we were just bringing boxes from the garage and putting them on the curb from the trash, man.

I mean, I thought I was good, and then I was sort of faced with, like, sis, you are not as good as you think about not over consuming. Why do you have so many Halloween skeletons? Why do you have so much Christmas stuff? Why are all these shoes in a box still in the garage? I'm really trying to limit the amount of things coming here because not only is shopping and collecting things dopamine hit, but then you have to, like, actually deal with it and store it, and that creates a lot of stress in people, which makes it really hard to be happy. So overconsumption applies to food. It applies to purchases. It applies to, like, health, you know, I mean, it applies to so many things, and we're not saying to, like, never have a good time. We're just saying that regulating it could be a pathway to a more content life.

I think you're absolutely right with that. And you always make it sound like you had, like, this, just this, you know, Porter's garage worth of stuff that I keep feeling like you. We had, like, levels onto this garage, and it really wasn't that bad.

It was a five story garage lengths deep. I know, but it was. It was a lot. And after I moved, I can't believe how many times I thought, like, oh, my God, I'm so glad I don't have a garage anymore. I didn't realize the mental weight that knowing I had to go through all my junk in the garage was having on me. I didn't realize how often I was thinking, like, oh, I should really go through that garage. And apparently it was a lot because it took a couple months of living here in the apartment to be like, sis, you don't have a garage anymore. You got rid of it, you know? So I think these things weigh on people more than they realize.

And you won't realize it until it's, like, gone.

I agree. I think there is something to be said about when we're embracing enough. Things are always that one that seems very obvious and food's an easy one. Another one, for me is embracing enough is activity and time, and I feel like I need to be bored more often is the lesson I've been taking from what I'm learning about. It's being able to remember that we weren't always go, go, go, even like us kind of, you know, proactive people. There were a lot of times when we just sat around and were quote unquote bored where you didn't feel like reading a book and there wasn't, you know, social media and a million ways to distract yourself. So part of it is feeling like, enough to say, you know, I'm just going to sit here and be with my thoughts without feeling like I have to learn something, take action on something, do something with the kids, go somewhere, shop, whatever. Because I believe, like, embracing that mindset of like, no, this is good.

This is enough. Right now is a pathway to happiness and ultimate success. When you can look at what you've done in a day or you look at a room or yourself or whatever it is, and you're like, this is enough. And I'm good with enough, it really does change your mindset. I don't have those moments too often. I'll be completely honest. I'm coming at the base of the mountain, not from the top on this one. But I really do feel like when you can look at it in a way that makes sense to you and going, look, I'm enough and I'm okay.

That's really what's going on. Because the thing that you're trying to find, the activity you're trying to do, that food to put in your mouth because you're not really hungry, but you don't want to waste food, but you don't want to put it back in the fridge for tomorrow because you don't like leftovers. These are all little rules that you've got going on in your head that are for forcing you beyond enough, I think, as humans and as you know, I've been learning about biohacking and stuff like that. One of the things that I'm really trying to get my head around is that if a little bit is good, a lot doesn't necessarily make it better. It's finding that balance. Like, you know, if you don't get enough water, you're going to have a whole bunch of issues. If you have your eight glasses or whatever to stay hydrated, that's good. If you have too much water, you'll drown or you'll have some, like, really severe health issues.

You can get that from even too much water. So I always like to kind of think of that analogy of, like, where am I on this scale? Am I on the enough in the middle? Or am I very depleted? Or do I. Am I going too excessive with my behavior?

I think that's a good point. I think food and health and eating, you know, it's the same thing with exercise, right? Like, exercise is good for you, but hyper focusing on it hours and hours and hours in the gym every day. I mean, you. You can overdo just about anything, even things that are good for you. If left my own devices, I could just read and listen to books all day long, but then nothing would get done, and that wouldn't be good for everybody that I'm responsible for. We did a podcast episode recently where I was sharing about a no good, rotten day that I had. And it started because we took a walk and there were all these beautiful houses in the neighborhood. And I got really upset because I felt like I wasn't giving my kids, like, the best life possible.

I feel like I had it. Then I got divorced, then I had to, like, downsize. And I wasn't seeing this move to the apartment as the positive that it was. I was really getting into my own head and getting into a comparison trap. And as we joked on that podcast episode, Andrew even bought me a chick fil a cookie and like, nothing was getting me out of the funk that day until I went back to sleep. But I share that, and I'm resharing that. I guess I should say today because I wanted to reiterate that this is something we are still working on, too. I am still working on being like, no, I'm really happy with the place that I am in today.

I am doing better than I was before. I am doing financially better than I was before. Even though on the outside it may look like I don't have as much as other people, I'm currently in a mode of, you know, saving and building things for the long term. I think that we need to give ourselves more credits and I think we need to express more gratitude in order to feel content.

I was thinking comparison that you slipped into a comparison trap. And I just love when you use the same words that I was thinking of, but it's hard to know that. Yeah, exactly. I always use the expression, it's good to step outside your painting so that you can see it. And so often we forget to. When you look around it, if you can look at yourself objectively and see that you are doing things from a perspective of not being your best self, meaning like you're in a comparison trap, you're believing what other people are saying about you, you're trying to impress people. All these things are just foundationally bad for your happiness. They're just going to poke holes in it.

So, embracing enough. And it reminds me of the Saturday Night Live sketch with Al Franken. He was Stuart Smalley and he would look in the mirror, and every time he would look in the mirror, it would be like, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dag nab it. People like me or something. Something like that. And it sounds corny because, you know, it's SNL, but there is something valid about that. To be able to look at your life and go, this is pretty good. In fact, it's enough.

Yeah. And yeah, I still want things. I can want things. We're not vilifying that, but wanting them for the sake of feeling it, of it's a little more from your soul and from who you are than wanting it to fill the space, to get the dopamine hit, to do all these things. Those are very different places. And that's what we teach in our coaching is like, you have to come from the inside out and stop going from the outside in, because nothing out there is going to make you feel enough. I can sit next to you, Cat, for the next 20 years, and I probably will. But if I tell you you're enough every day, it doesn't matter.

You have to buy it. You have to believe it. Everybody has to really buy into the sake that they are enough. And when you get to that, that's where true happiness starts. I'm not going to sit next to you for 20 years saying you're enough, but, you know, I know you're going to. I'll do the rest of my life. That sounds good, but I'm not going to say the same word over and over again. I'm really hoping that, you know, we adopt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I want to give a good example of how we would help someone with this in our coaching practice. So we do coach people here at five year u, and we use our framework, the layers of life, which you can go back and listen to our. I think it's our, what, second or third podcast. I really should look that up, where we explain the layers of life. But really what we're teaching with this process is how to live your life authentically. And the way that you do that is you go deep within yourself. You start with your inner layer, your soul, your spirit, your true preferences, and you make decisions from there, rather than from the outside in, which is societal expectations and the checkbox things. So in this situation, if I was coming to Andrew and I was like, I feel like garbage today.

I took a walk and there's all these beautiful homes, and I'm feeling like the worst mom. And I feel like I let my kids down. And now I'm in this little apartment. Andrew, as the coach, could come to me and say, take some time and pause and look within your deepest layer and tell me, what do you really want for your home? Where do you actually want to live? And I would say, honestly, I really like my smaller space. I don't know what got me thinking about these big houses and stuff, but when I had a big, beautiful, pinterest worthy house, it was so much to keep up. The property taxes were so expensive. It felt so overwhelming. It felt like the kids were like, far away from me.

It felt like we were in all these different areas of the house. And I love keeping my, you know, the doors open in this apartment at night and, like, hearing their little sounds and breathing and knowing we're all like, cocooned in. And even as I'm saying that, I'm letting a deep exhale. And it's like, these are the types of exercises we go through in coaching, and Andrew and I consistently coach each other. But having a coach walk you through these types of exercises and these questions can actually show you either one, that you are actually living the life you really want, or two, it can reveal things about your hopes and desires and preferences for your life that you might not have even realized you had. From there, we can take the next steps to implementing and taking to action and helping you become your best self. So that's just a little example as far as overconsumption. What I actually do like a little apartment, it just takes some mental exercises and some thoughtful time to actually reach that conclusion.

Yeah, it does. And let's be brutally honest with this. We've been conditioned our whole lives to believe that bigger is better and more is needed and all these things. So when you decide to stop walking with the masses in the direction that everybody else is going, it's gonna feel weird. It's going to. And you can be great for weeks, months, years at a time, but once in a while, you're gonna have that. You're gonna have that thing that kind of just gets that little barb in you and you're like, oh, that hurt. Why am I feeling like this? And it's because you have a neural pathway that's showing you you're not fitting the norm.

That's why having a community is such an important thing of people that go, I may not agree with the less is more kind of mentality, but I encourage you to be your authentic self. And that's really what we're about, is acknowledging that you are answering your soul's purpose in this lifetime, and that doing that is a day by day activity. And you have a lot of undoing to do. And I know for myself, and I'm pretty sure I can speak for you on this, is a lot of good days. But then you have that other day where you're with other parents at an activity, or you're in an airport and you see people with all these things that you're like, oh, I want that. And then you kind of feel bad for wanting it because you're like, but my suitcase is good enough. My headphones still work. My phone still does the thing.

My watch tells the time like it's supposed to. There's nothing wrong with what I have. And you might have that little guilt about it, but it's okay to want those things. It's just finding that place where it comes from a true purpose rather than how most of us are living. As we all walk with the crowd, we're not really thinking about it. So we're all living life accidentally, and we are really about showing you how to live life on purpose. And when you do that, life is better. It just is.

So when it comes to embracing enough, your enough and my enough are very different. And that is okay. It's not necessarily just a stuff thing. It's. You could want a whole bunch of things, and I might want very little. But there's one aspect of life, like tech probably, that I want way more, because that's me.

It works the opposite way, too, because one of my closest friends is building her dream house right now, and her and her husband love entertaining, and they've been so bummed out because they've been in this little house where they could only invite another couple over, and it kind of spills out to a tiny backyard. They can't wait. They are so giving and generous, and they love hosting people, and that is their joy. They're building a bigger house so that they can love on more people by barbecuing some more ribs. You know, they're thrilled, and I'm so happy for them. And just to say that we're not against buying things or having beautiful things, we are simply trying to encourage people to embrace what they have, appreciate what they have. Look, Sarah Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx, still uses her original apple iPod. I had to get the right words, the original apple ipod, to listen to music on airplanes.

She's very, like, sentimentally attached to it, and she can buy anything she wants. I love that she has a little, like, emotional attachment to the ipod. I'm like, what's it called?

IPod. That click wheel is so satisfying. I get it.

I get it. Our kids will never know the pain of having to roll your finger around to refine your song. Can't just ask Siri for it now.

Yeah, exactly. But that's just it. Hopefully, you don't have to, I mean, get to a billionaire status if that's what you want. But most of us don't need to go that far to start realizing and going, you know, I like simple things, or I like very elaborate things in this area, and that brings me joy, and that is my purpose. Your friends that like hosting barbecues, I'm like, great, I will show up, but I probably will never be the one to have that barbecue. I've done that. And while I liked doing it, we.

Will treat you all to dinner at a restaurant, but please intervene.

So much easier. I think it's just being truthful to yourself with that and also not criticizing others for their path, which we don't do. We always accept people where they're at because that's how we want to be treated and to acknowledge that difference and that that difference doesn't need to be us. It's not looking at them going, well, then I should be getting a bigger house or I should be doing this, or I should, I should, I should. And it's like, wait, do you want to? Not should you. Do you want to? Is that really what you're all about? My mom and dad are a great example of embracing enough. Like, they have this lifestyle that they truly enjoy and they like fishing, they like the cabin, and they like their.

Books, and they like their home that they lived in for a long time.

Yeah, they've been in that since before I was born. But there's something about that where it's, you know, when you get around people that are embracing their enough, it's refreshing because you start to realize that so much of your mind chatter has really been telling you that you're not enough. And when you can accept yourself, there is this sense of calm and inner peace that comes around that goes, you're good. Maybe I'll go get another book, maybe I'll get this or that when I feel like it. But I'm good, I'm happy. And isn't really that the point of life is to find your happy and live it.

So what would you tell somebody would be a good action step after listening to this episode and they're thinking about the topic and they want to be happy with what they have. What do you think is a good first step for somebody?

I think like reflecting on what they are doing for others and what is truly for themselves. Of course, we always offer that intro coaching, call if they want to talk with us and see if they want to join our program. And that's complimentary as we can help people. I think that that first step is just asking the question is, is this really me or is this what everyone else thinks I should be? It's a hard question. Not a lot of people ask it, but the ones that are brave enough to ask it are brave enough to take that step towards their best version of themselves, towards their five year you. And that's when the journey is so much nicer. Because you know you're living in authenticity. You know you are breaking away from the herd mentality that you went with because you didn't know any better, and it's okay to have done that.

But when you start to realize that you might be living in a way that isn't congruent with your lifestyle, just having that moment of awareness changes everything. And then having the. The next step is finding your path. And you're always finding your path. And that's the beautiful part about it.

I love that. I think that's really good advice. And honestly, I think it's a good place to put a pin in the episode and move on to our glimmers. And our glimmers are happy, fun things that we like to share. It could be a book we're reading, an app we tried out. Andrew frequently has tech toys that he talks about something funny about the kids, or just something that we're doing to improve our lives a little bit more on the personal side that we just like to share with you, I say that as though we're not like, always just personal, oversharing type people.

Yeah. Right now, the thing that came to mind is that transformer table that you, you helped me kind of source on Facebook marketplace and so good. If you have a small place like I do, it is so nice. It literally folds up into like a 1ft depth desk with a bench that does the same and tucks in nicely underneath it. But it can convert to like a twelve person table.

Yeah. For that feast we're definitely not gonna have.

For that hosting of people we're definitely not gonna have. But I might use it for a puzzle at some point. And I'm very excited about that. It's been really nice when the kids come over, they're able to have a space to work at. And before, we really didn't have that. So super happy about it. How about you, Cat?

I don't know if it's glimmery, but I think it's a good, like, positive thing. And I headed back to therapy this week. I moved. Yeah, I moved to the Chicago area a couple months ago. And although I was in regular therapy in Michigan, a lot of therapists are state specific as far as their licenses go. So I kind of came here, moved here, and was kind of floating along for a few months, and then I realized, you know, I really missed that. And although nothing is like a cure, acutely wrong in this moment, I think the worst time to go to therapy is like, when you're in a crisis and the best time to go is when you're kind of living your everyday life because you build tools. And hopefully I like her she has really good reviews online and I don't know, it's always hard to go to someone new.

So, like, I'm a little nervous because the last one I had, I had for several years, and she's sort of like, knew all my stuff and knew all about me. And so I kind of feel like I have to start over. So that's what's new. I'm actually feeling nerves right now. So, yeah, I am nervous to go, but I still think it's a glimmer positive thing that I'd recommend anyone do.

Oh, thank you for sharing that. And, yeah, I get the nerves. I think the easiest way of going into those situations has been to just verbal vomit. But that's me. I mean, other people are, you know, dig a little bit at a time, but congratulations for doing that and for sharing it because I think it's a very real thing. I'm definitely glad I didn't go second this time in the glimmers.

Your transformer table is super cool, though, and you've got a great deal on it. These are really expensive tables and Andrew found one on Facebook marketplace for what, like a quarter of the price or something?

Yeah, it was really, really good, and you helped me clean it up and make it look good. So thank you for sharing your glimmer and wishing you all the best. Let us know. Let me know how I can help, as always. And I think that's a great place to end off. So have a great week, everyone.

Oh, and don't forget, if you want to get that advice from your future self, head on over to fiveyearyou.com future to get signed up.

Just a reminder, we're two people on the Internet. We're not doctors or anything else, but we do want to help. If you feel that you need professional medical care, please see a licensed medical practitioner.