As their words got harder to understand, my girlfriend’s laugh rang louder and louder, and her mother’s grin got wider.
Where had this gone so badly wrong?
The mystery narcotic that sent us spinning into gales of numb, chaotic laughter? Cranberry sauce.
It was the first Thanksgiving of our dating life. Partly to show that I know my way around the kitchen but also because I enjoy it, I volunteered to cook some side dishes. Future Mom-in-Law, fortunately, had the foresight not to let me prove my mettle with the bird. And we will not speak of the meringue, intended for pie, that refused to set (and was henceforth “egg-and-sugar soup,” until meeting its end in the garbage disposal).
For me, cranberry sauce is whole berries, sugar and water, heated in a saucepan. Maybe add some pieces of an orange or a sliced apple? Sure. But please, don’t bring that canned, slurp-and-glup jelly missile into any kitchen I’m in.
And yes, I also like a touch of clove flavor. A quarter-teaspoon of ground cloves is just enough to flavor a pound of berries, reduced in boiling simple syrup at a 1:1 berry-to-syrup ratio.
Important: Ground cloves.
On this occasion, all I had in the cabinet were whole cloves — and I had never used them before.
For anything.
But, I reasoned in the moment, how do ground cloves happen? Someone takes whole cloves and grinds them. 
It never occurred to me that store-bought ground cloves have been dried, processed, and packaged such that most of their spicy, oily mojo is gone by the time they hit you in the berries. And that oil is serious stuff: strong enough to dissolve plastic, and to numb your mouth before your dentist gives you an injection.*
And, in fact, a quarter-teaspoon of hand-crushed whole cloves turned my cranberry sauce into a mild anesthetic.
It’s way, WAAY too much.
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The ironic sting of being “good enough”
In my working life, I have a complicated relationship with the concept of “enough.”
I’ve long had a hard time buying into the idea, touted by some coaches, self-help writers, the clergy, etc., that whatever adversity someone faces in their lives, that they are “enough” to ovecome it.
“Perfect, just as you are. Strong enough for any challenge that gets thrown your way.”
If the idea suits you, no judgment here. But (for better or worse) I’ve found it hard to accept.
And yes, I’ve dealt with the perfectionist hangups and impostor syndrome that this outlook loves to cultivate. (I’m working on them.)
“Enough,” to me, felt like the poisonous tip of the scorpion’s tail. When one takes a resigned breath and decides that we’ve “done enough,” that our work is “good enough,” that we’ve “moved the needle enough,” that’s the moment of the sting. It can feel like a cop-out, after which point it’s hard to imagine doing or being more. “Better,” it has seemed to me, is always possible, and “enough” is a box waiting to trap me in complacency … and with that, stasis.
When I believed the boss or client who told me I’d done enough, or met the urgent need, and built an idea in my mind of what I thought “enough” looked like in a given context or situation, behavioral conditioning seemed to take over. The desire to push for things like “more, clearer, and better” seemed to diminish. And to advance the work to a place of which I knew I was capable, it would take an extra push or something extrinsic to remember that I could, should, must.
Conversely, at work we’re often shown or told by well-meaning co-workers, bosses or clients, that we haven’t met that definition of enough … without acknowledging how vague and hugely subjective that is as a form of feedback. How is one to know how to bridge the gap between “not enough” and “enough”?
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Great feedback is clear, specific and timely
Giving the kind of specific feedback about what you’re doing right (and should do more of) while you are doing it, what Buckingham & Goodall called our “instinctive and considered reaction to what works,” is a learned skill: too rarely taught, and a low priority in preparing many new managers for their roles. Consider it as a new (and maybe artificially self-aware!) team member might:
“When you only tell me I’m enough, I might believe you. But sooner or later I’ll be surprised by how much it feels like I suck. And if you only tell me I’m not enough, I might believe you, and I’ll try harder, work longer, experiment until something sticks. But unless you tell me where to make changes, I might just become more neurotic, or sadder, or more disengaged.”
Maybe all of the above.
My point of view: Whether corporate training opportunities exist in your workplace (owned by the human resources, employee engagement or, less commonly, communications functions) or whether you, as a leader or team member need to seek guidance yourself, get educated about the most modern and effective ways to give performance feedback. As the workforce gets younger, and generational nightmares (like a global health crisis, and a stubborn, fearful legislature paralyzed against incessant workplace and school violence) continue to change the employer-employee social contract fundamentally, it’s no longer sufficient to call monthly or quarterly “How am I doing?” meetings.
They make it too easy to lapse into lazy binaries like “Good enough,” vs. the similarly vague “Needs improvement.” (This isn’t your third-grade report card.)
Consider instead, as Buckingham & Goodall advocate, catching people doing the right thing and letting them know it (toward building healthier, more durable patterns of behavior, and intrinsic self-worth).
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“Sheckonds, any’un? Ow ’bout a roop canal?”
Nobody joined me in a second helping of Thanksgiving cranberries that year, but there I sat, spooning out Numbberry sauce, determined not to admit defeat** in front of my future extended family.
As I write this, Christmas is a few days away. Stepping into the new year, I’ll be looking for the edges of the “enough” trap and poking at them, as well as pushing for better, more specific and action-focused feedback in the moment, from those best positioned to give it.
But while “enough,” in the past, just wouldn’t have been (I’d have preferred to take aim at “too much”), I’m resolved to pursue enough as I understand it, not as someone else dictates it. And I’ll do so with the confidence that my “enough” is plenty, by comparison.
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* If your dentist wants to skip the lidocaine and instead spoon-feeds you cranberry sauce … run.
** Not true. I totally admitted defeat, and laughed about it as we all poked our gums with toothpicks to see if we were ready for our procedures.
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An earlier version of this essay was published on Medium.com as “Workplace self-management, with a side of cranberry sauce” and has been revised in the present version for clarity.
