Do you know the difference between being worthy and being deserving? It's a subtle difference but one that needs to be recognised to ensure your progress.
Reding time; 4 minutes; 2 seconds
Reding time; 4 minutes; 2 seconds
What is worthiness and how it affects your choices
We often confuse worthiness with being deserving. Are you worthy of the life you imagine in your definition of financial freedom, or are you deserving of it? Are you worthy of being wealthy or deserving of it? Perhaps more directly, are you worthy of being loved by your soulmate, or are you deserving of it?
Royston Guest
What is worthiness?
We’re all worthy. Let’s put that part to bed right away. Every one of us has the right to live a healthy life and to decide how we define success and financial freedom.
But are you deserving? That’s a different conversation altogether. Worthiness is a birthright but being deserving is something you have to earn.You deserve wealth by making smart choices, being disciplined, and putting in the extra effort it takes to acquire wealth in the first place.
If you squander your wealth, no matter how much money you have made, you are no less worthy of the opportunities life has given you, but perhaps not deserving of them. To deserve something, you must be willing to take it seriously, work at it, be thoughtful and in tune with it, and willing to adapt and make hard choices.
Unfortunately, we often attribute the wrong measurements to determine whether or not we are deserving, many of which can negatively affect our ability to really achieve our goals:
The people who surround you
Some people define themselves by who they know rather than who they are. While there are tremendous benefits to being in a strong, supportive relationship, and it may be exciting to have rich, powerful or even famous friends, ultimately your value is measured by who you are, not who you associate with.
What you do
Some people define themselves by their career and, when you ask them about themselves, the first thing they’ll talk about is their job. They run the risk of negative changes in their career bringing their own perceived status down with it. What you do is only one component of your whole being.
How much money you have
The whole focus article is financial freedom and defining what this means to you. If your quest is to simply have more and more, I doubt you’ll ever be satisfied. With that mindset, even a billion pounds isn’t enough if someone else has 10 billion.
What you achieve
Achievements are among the things that make us bountiful and complex beings, but they can be fleeting as someone else inevitably will do what you did faster, better or for longer. The pursuit of a big achievement can mean many failures along the way, and if the achievement is your only measure, that can eat you alive.
How you look
How you look
It’s no secret that the world celebrates beauty, but if achievements can be fleeting, youthful good looks go for double. Looks fade as time goes by and, ultimately, substance trumps beauty every time.
How what you feel affects your choices
How you measure your worth will greatly influence the decisions you make. You can see the world in two ways: one of scarcity or one of abundance.
If the money lesson you learned growing up was one of scarcity, then it doesn’t matter how much you earn, you perceive the act of ‘buying things’ as making you feel better. So we have this phenomenon of individuals living from payday to payday, stressed out because they are literally one payday away from financial catastrophe. If they lose their job, the weight of their debts and commitments could be enough to leave them destitute.
On the other hand, an attitude of abundance often has precisely the opposite effect. When you focus on what you have, not on what you don’t have, and appreciate the inherent value of money, you’re less likely to spend it so casually.
It’s one of the reasons the poor stay poor as scarcity leads to poor money management as overcompensation, and why the rich get richer, as abundance leads to an appreciation of the value of money, not just the things it can buy.
The path to financial freedom and independence isn’t achieved through a get-rich-quick strategy. Most of us know what we’re supposed to do when it comes to basic money management: spend less than you earn, save an emergency fund, and invest for the future and retirement. That’s most people’s entire financial strategy in 16 words. But – and it’s a big but – establishing your own personalised financial strategy, developing good money habits and sticking to them is always easier said than done.
take action; achieve more
- How you manage, spend and invest your money will have a profound impact on your life. Even if you do not have a great track record, make a change today.
- How do you feel about money? Are you fearful of being without? Change that thought as the feeling of being without enough is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Have faith that you will always have enough of what you need. See your situation as one of abundance
- Start by giving yourself a boost, tell yourself you deserve success and abundance. Repeating the mantra will eventually sink it as your mind recognises it as reality
