What do you believe you deserve?

In 2024 I led a private coaching group called Living As If You Matter. At the completion of this group, I gave each of the participants a small silver journal. I invited them to treat the journal as a Dreams and Desires Journal and to write down 100 dreams, desires, longings, or wants in it. I also promised each of the participants a complimentary conversation if they wrote down their dreams and desires, and then reached out to me to let me know that they had completed their list.

The other day I invited a client to guess how many women reached out to me after receiving their dreams and desire journals. My client said, “Well I would hope all of them reached out.” I asked her why, and she said that she would have a hard time coming up with a list of 100, and that she hoped someone else had the courage to come up with a list of 100…

My client captured the essence of what I have heard over and over again during the past seven months in conversations with women about thriving. People are struggling to let themselves thrive. Why? It’s very simple really, they don’t believe that they deserve to.

Some women withhold from themselves so much that they won’t even write down what they want. Others might write down some of the things they want, but they will still be too scared to share it with anyone. Or as my client shared, “I’m afraid that if I write it down, I will feel guilt and pressure to now do something about it, and if I fail, I will feel even worse.”

And here’s the thing, it’s not about doing all the things on the list. It’s more about honesty – which is the second component of THRIVE. Can you be honest with yourself about what you want? Can you be honest with yourself about what you are not going after and why? Can you at least be honest with yourself and express that you don’t believe you deserve good things in your life?

Over the past week I’ve had so many conversations with my clients about deserving. Deserving is one of the biggest obstacles that come up for people when they consider whether they could thrive. It prevents them from going after what they want in life. It prevents them from asking for what they need. It prevents them from being in the consideration that things could be different. And the saddest part of all of it, is that our false story about deserving was learnt.

You didn’t come into this world believing that you were underserving of love, care, compassion, companionship, friendship, joy, success, and fulfillment. You have eroded your own worthiness over time as you latched on to false beliefs and stories about yourself and about Life.

All babies coming into this world trusting and open. They are open to receiving love and care. They are fully trusting and it doesn’t occur to them to question their worthiness and deservingness. However, through enough painful experiences, we can eventually conclude that we are not worthy of receiving, or that we only deserve good things if we have earned them…

I think this piece is timely, given that I’m writing this over Easter Weekend. This weekend we hosted an Easter celebration, and it included a hunt for goodies for the children. They all eagerly ran around looking for the hidden treasures.

This had me thinking. This is how life is. There are many treasures to discover, and we must be willing to go seeking, believing that there is treasure to discover… Will we find duds and obstacles along the way? Absolutely. That is part of the journey.

The treasures are hidden and whether we find them depends on two things: the trust that there is something worthwhile out there, and the willingness to keep going after what we want, even when we encounter obstacles, or when we inevitably stumble into disappointment.

What makes the Treasure Hunt of Life better than a standard treasure hunt, is that it’s infinite. There isn’t a point where all the goodies that can be had, have been discovered and the hunt completes. The hunt ends when you leave your physical form and complete this life. Until then, there is always more goodness to discover. And other people having goodness doesn’t mean there is nothing left for you, or you taking goodness, doesn’t mean that there is nothing left for someone else. The universe is abundant in its gifts.

So, what to do if you don’t believe you deserve to thrive or experience goodness in your life? I have struggled with this question for so many years of my life, and all I can say is that I have yet to find an answer to overcoming a lack of deserving. It’s a slippery slope, because how do you know that you deserve something? When are you deserving, and when are you not? If you have done things in your life that you are not proud of – things that have hurt others, or caused harm – how much punishment is “enough” punishment? When and how will you be restored to wholeness and deservingness?

Some of us – especially the ones with extreme Inner Perfectionists – will hold ourselves to the punishment indefinitely (sometimes all our lives) – because we believe that what we have done is unforgivable. Some of us might swing the other way. We might strive endlessly to be a “good person” or to earn the worthiness to receive, and then we might become very demanding, insisting that we are due our fair share, because we have earned it.

Neither of these options help us thrive. It just set us up for endless martyring or endless hustling. We cycle through overworking and exhaustion. We stay angry, resentful, guilty, ashamed, and fearful.

I have also spent the past three years really trying to understand shame. Brené Brown distinguished between guilt and shame, sharing that guilt is what we feel when our conscience reminds us that we have caused harm to another. Guilt makes us feel bad about the harmful thing we have said or done. Shame is what we feel when we believe that we are bad and unlovable. According to Brené Brown, shame is deeply personal, and related to a belief that there is fundamentally something wrong with us – i.e., that we are broken.

I feel like her definitions are too simplified. Here’s why. Her definition of guilt doesn’t account for the guilt that often comes from obligation – from the fear that we are going to disappoint someone. I have felt this often, and so have many of my clients. Those of us with strong people pleasing tendencies – and interestingly many women, because of societal conditioning – feel guilt when they want to say no to something they don’t want to do, but feel pressured to say yes.

This form of guilt isn’t so much a feeling as it is a thought that actually blocks you from your real feelings. Often your real feelings are that you don’t want to do something, and the guilt you experience stops you from being honest with yourself. The guilt has you collapse into acquiescing, out of fear that disappointing someone will break the connection you have with them. So, you end up self-abandoning to preserve what you perceive to be connection or relationship.

To learn to thrive in this instance, would be to learn to tolerate other people’s disappointment, and stand in your truth. That’s the real stretch, because truthfully, no real connection is possible if you lose connection with yourself. Think about how you feel when you do something you didn’t want to do simply out of obligation and fear that you are going to disappoint someone? I personally don’t feel good about myself or my choice. And I often end up feeling angry at myself, and resentful towards the other person…

When it comes to shame, some of us have lived with shame all our lives. Shame is the most painful experience any human can feel, and we will do anything to avoid feeling it, and yet, so many of us contort ourselves over and over in an attempt to minimize the shame we are already feeling…

Recently, Alison Armstrong shared that “only honourable people feel shame”. Alison Armstrong postulates that you feel shame when you go against your own values, or when you do something that is out of alignment with who you want to be. She calls this “dishonouring yourself.”

I have sat with this new insight for the past few months, and I can see how that has been true for me – how I often feel shame when I go against my own values and beliefs, or when I know that I’m doing something that is misaligned with who I believe myself to be, or who I want to be in that moment. For me personally, some of that feels true.

And, I don’t know if that is the full picture. I personally know that shame can be learnt. That you can learn to be ashamed of who you naturally are, through repeated judgments and rejection. If you are not accepted fully for who you are, it can breed shame and fear that who you authentically are is unlovable and unworthy of acceptance. It can unleash a life-long spiral of performing a role on the outside that wins you approval, and hiding your real self out of fear that your real self will be rejected and abandoned.

These fears are primal, and therefore not easy to simply ignore. True healing, and thriving is available, and it requires working on the root belief or story that created the shame in the first place, and healing that story so you can return to wholeness, and reclaim the parts of you that you felt you needed to abandon to win approval.

What I do know to be true, is that you were never broken to begin with. The story that you are broken is false. It’s a lie that perpetuates the shame. The truth of who you are would be illuminating, and you must be willing to put down the shame story and consider that perhaps who you are underneath the shame, if harnessed correctly, is your gift to this world…

The willingness to put down the shame story requires tremendous courage. It requires no longer arguing for your limitations, and learning to trust that there is value in you being you.

I believe that we can use deservingness as an excuse to not put down our shame story. There is safety in telling ourselves we don’t deserve it. It’s familiar to treat ourselves as underserving. It’s far scarier and more unfamiliar to consider that perhaps we are asking the wrong question… I will say more about his in my next article…