A client sat opposite me this week, hands wrapped around a mug of tea and said the words I hear more than almost any other in this job: "I know what I should be doing but I just can’t seem to start."

She isn't alone. I've heard versions of this from Sixth Formers staring at a blank revision timetable, the widower who hasn't opened his wife's wardrobe in over a year, the client three weeks into a bereavement who can't face answering the phone. All of them are waiting for something to arrive before they act. A feeling. A readiness. The right day.

It doesn't come, because that’s not how it works.

We've got the order backwards

The Good Enough Teacher: What Winnicott Can Teach Us About the Classroom

I loved teaching but it took me a while to embrace the concept of being good enough. Not good enough but good enough. What I mean is to be comfortable with being good enough, to have boundaries, to maintain a work-life balance, to work smarter rather than harder and to have a personal wellbeing target on your annual appraisal which was more meaningful than ‘go for a ten minute lunchtime walk once a week’. (This was a real target!)

A lifetime ago, when I was a young Mum at home with her three very small children I stumbled across a copy of D W Winnicott’s book The Good Enough Mother and it changed my life. Some time before I had been gifted Gina Ford’s The Contented Little Baby (AKA Infant Boot Camp) I love a routine but this one read like a survival manual written by a drill sergeant and so I had successfully ignored other parenting manuals until I came across Winnicott in a charity book shop.

Winnicott offered relief. Guess what? You don't have to be a perfect mother. In fact, he argued, you shouldn't try to be. What children need is "good enough”; someone who meets their needs closely at first, then gradually, tolerably, fails to meet them, giving children room to discover their own resources.

Like all good ideas it's a simple but with large implications. And it turns out that it translates remarkably well from home to school.