What If You Didn't Have to Earn It?
- iona45
- Aug 14
- 4 min read
What If You Didn't Have to Earn It?
Welcome to this Friday's Letter from the Edge of Becoming, our intimate weekly reflection, offering you a quiet pause from the noise of life and a bit of space to listen to what may be stirring within you.
Hello Friends!
This week, I found myself thinking about the word deserving. Not so much what it means intellectually, but something deeper:
What does it actually feel like to feel deserving?
What does it feel like to move through the world without constantly, and often unconsciously, trying to earn the right to receive? The question stayed with me, so I decided to turn it into a personal experiment.
For five days, I began observing my relationship with deserving: what I believed I deserved, the conditions I placed around receiving, what I had learned I needed to do or be in order to feel worthy, and what might change if I began making choices from the assumption that I was already deserving.
It became The Deserve Experiment, and it was far more revealing than I expected.
I have now turned the practice I created for myself into a free five-day experience, with one reflection arriving each day.
If you would like to experience The Deserve Experiment yourself (for free), you can begin here: The Deserve Experiment
I'm sharing this link with you now rather than waiting until the end because maybe you don't need to read anything else I have to say about deserving, you'd simply rather discover it for yourself.
What I Began to Notice...
One of the things I love about an experiment is that you don't have to believe anything.
As with any experiment, you start by observing. And when I began observing myself through the lens of deserving, I started noticing things I hadn't fully recognized before.
I noticed how often I deflected a compliment. Someone would say something kind or appreciative and, rather than simply allowing myself to receive it, I would minimize it, redirect the conversation, or find some way of giving something back.
Receiving it with a simple "Thank you" was surprisingly revealing.
I also began noticing how many seemingly insignificant choices contained an almost invisible calculation:
Will this person approve?
Or perhaps even more powerfully:
Will they disapprove?
It wasn't conscious people-pleasing. It was much subtler than that. It was the realization that another person's potential response could be present in a decision that was supposedly my own. so that made me wonder:
How much of what we do is quietly connected to earning something?
Deserving Is Not Entitlement
As I moved through the experiment, another question arose for me.
Is feeling deserving the same as feeling entitled?
I think this is an important distinction, because the word deserve can make some of us uncomfortable.
We may associate it with believing we should get whatever we want, or that other people should give us something simply because we believe we deserve it. But that isn't what I mean by deserving at all. Entitlement looks outward. It says:
I deserve this, therefore you (or life) should give it to me.
Deserving looks inward.
It says:
I know that my worth does not depend upon whether I receive it.
Feeling deserving doesn't mean believing that another person owes us love, recognition, opportunity, money, attention, or anything else. Nor does it mean that life will always give us what we want. It means we stop using what the outside world gives or withholds as the measure of our worth. There is a quiet sovereignty in that. I can know that:
I deserve respect without demanding that every person respect me.
I deserve love without requiring a particular person to love me.
I deserve rest without waiting until every task is finished.
deserve to have a voice without needing everyone to agree with what I say.
And most importantly, I can begin making choices that honor my own wellbeing and truth without requiring someone else's approval first.
That doesn't feel like entitlement to me. It feels like freedom!
The Question Beneath the Question
What began as an exploration of deserving ultimately became an exploration of something much deeper:
How much of my life am I still spending trying to earn what I believe I am not yet entitled to simply receive?
That question has stayed with me, because many of us have become exceptionally good at earning. We earn
Qualifications.
Positions.
Recognition.
Trust.
Money.
Respect.
We learn to be useful, responsible, capable, generous, resilient. These qualities can create extraordinary lives. But somewhere along the way, it is possible to begin believing that the same rules apply to our inherent worth:
If I do enough, perhaps I will finally be enough.
And that is a race with no finish line.
So maybe the deeper invitation isn't to become more deserving instead it is to notice all the places where we have quietly decided that we aren't.
My Invitation to You
For the past five days, I have been living with these questions myself and while I can't say that five days suddenly removes a lifetime of conditioning. That isn't the point.
But I can say that I am noticing more.
I notice the compliment I'm tempted to deflect.
I notice the moment I am about to make a choice because someone else might approve, or because I fear they might disapprove.
I notice the impulse to earn what is already being freely offered.
And in that moment of noticing, there is suddenly another possibility. A pause. A choice. An opportunity to respond differently.
So this is why I am really excited to invite you into The Deserve Experiment. For five days, you'll receive one powerful reflection and one intriguing experiment each day.
If you're curious about what you might discover, you can begin The Deserve Experiment here
And maybe carry this question with you today:
What might change if you stopped requiring yourself to earn what you already deserve?
With love,
Iona
