The Fire Alarm

“Will this ever be good enough?”

You know that feeling when a fire alarm goes off?

You’re not expecting it. You’re just doing your thing. And then suddenly — everything stops. Your whole system goes on alert. Should I stop, drop and roll? Or run… fast?

That’s what it feels like when the “Will this ever be good enough?”  trigger kicks in.

Someone says our work is … Fine. Good. Even great sometimes. And before you’ve had a single conscious thought — the alarm is going off.

And here’s what most perfectionists do next.

We believe it.

We go back in. Fix more. Rethink it. Redo it. Work harder to earn the approval that was actually already there. Spend hours trying to put out a fire that was never burning.

Because the filter running underneath everything isn’t asking “is this meeting the need?”

It’s asking “will this ever be good enough?”

And a filter like that isn’t designed to let approval in. It’s designed to find proof that there’s still more to do.

So no amount of doing more turns it off. It just resets it.

Here’s what I’ve learned — from doing this work and from being a recovering perfectionist myself.

We don’t have to believe the alarm. And we don’t have to fight it either.

We just have to pause long enough to ask one question.

Is this true?

Not to logic your way out of it. Not to convince yourself everything is fine. Just to create a tiny wedge between the alarm and the response.

Because in that wedge lives the choice.

Believe it and run. Or get curious and check.

I literally did this recently. Someone used a word that set my alarm off. And instead of running to try to figure out what to fix — I paused and asked. Did you mean that the way I heard it?

Turns out there was no fire.

There rarely is.