What do you deserve? Feelings of worth and deservingness underpin our relationship with money. If we don’t feel that we deserve a good, comfortable life, we would be wise to work on ourselves to turn that sentiment around. But what if you’re already feeling that you are a deserving person, does that mean you have a healthy relationship with money? Surprisingly, no. Because the mindset around what you deserve is tricky. Oftentimes, an “I deserve” statement reflects someone who is underselling themselves. Other times, it’s an empowering statement. It’s important to know the difference. Watch this video and be sure that your “I deserve” beliefs are truly empowering.

TRANSCRIPT:

I know I’ve said this before but the worst limiting beliefs, with respect to money, are the ones that sound positive, happy, and powerful but are actually traps. In this video I have another example of such a mindset – one that sounds great but in reality is pretty sad. It has to do with what we deserve.

I want you to think twice when you hear someone, or even yourself, say a phrase that begins with “I deserve” and includes things like going out to nice restaurants, clothes, or cars. The person saying this “I deserve” statement usually mentions something about how hard they work. When was the last time you heard yourself or someone else say something like this? It hasn’t been that long since I heard this come out of someone’s mouth.

At first, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable expression by someone with a healthy self-esteem. But that’s not how I hear it. Listen, we already know that we cannot make ourselves happy by trying to fulfill the desires of our egos. The ego is never satisfied for long, it is an empty pit of never ending wants and needs.

Happiness comes from spending time and money on that which we value and find meaning in. Happiness is not the quick hit of dopamine we get from getting a new item that’s going to be hardly remembered when the next hot thing comes along. What most of us value is freedom, like freedom from debt, peace of mind, a sense of security.

So when I hear someone say that they deserve nice shoes, I think “Oh, that’s what you think you deserve? That’s it? Why do you think so little of yourself?” To me, all that is actually a low, cheap level of deserving. Call me crazy but I think you deserve so much more than the appearance of a good life. I think you deserve an actual good life.

I hear people in my generation, Millennials, say this so often because we do work hard and we have had it rough in terms of the timing of economic cycles. And these things that we say we deserve, we had this stuff and went to these restaurants growing up. So we took these things as the signs of a good life and understandably, think that since we work hard like our parents, we deserve these same things.

Maybe, but maybe we actually deserve more. They may have deserved more too but had no way to improve their financial well-being because financial education and coaching wasn’t as readily available as it has been for just the last 10 years or so. I mean, think of how long the term “financial coach” has been around.

When a workshop participant asked me to be their financial coach and help them in their business finances, I had never even heard the term before. This was about 10 years ago. Honestly, I felt like the first financial coach ever, and I’m sure I’m not but if someone who was an executive director of a financial literacy non-profit had not heard of it before, then you know that financial coaches were not very common.

So we have access to more information and support so we actually don’t have to settle for what our parents deserved. It’s not that we deserve more or better stuff, we can actually transcend all that, and level up our lives in terms of meaning and value, where true happiness lives. Deserving stuff at the expense of our mental health is the old way, the new way is to deserve the life that actually feels good not just looks good.

Yes, we will always need stuff and I’m not here to demonize it. My intention is to help you remove a limiting belief, one that’s posing as an empowering one, by reminding you that you deserve a real, authentically good life – a life of value and meaning, with mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health and happiness. So next time you hear someone say they deserve something lame, go ahead and turn them on to this channel.

Please let me know in the comment if this video resonates with you. Do you think that “I deserve” beliefs are limiting ones or positive, healthy ones?  I’ll see you in the next one.