Sometimes the simplest things fascinate me the most— and the thing that has been fascinating me lately is how we program our mind to what we think we deserve.
It’s a nutty concept really— how we perceive ourselves directly correlates with what we think we deserve. So if we don’t see ourselves as worthy of good things, we won’t set the bar very high to expect to receive good things. This idea, in theory, seems ideal to ensuring the avoidance of getting disappointed when expectations aren’t met, and pleasantly surprised when people do more than you expect them to.
But this type of thinking is actually programming your mind to do less effort because you expect others to do less effort. You might say to yourself: “I’m not good at ___, so I let others do it.” But if you made it a priority to practice the thing you’re not good at, you wouldn’t avoid it so much— and if you didn’t avoid it so much, maybe you would think more highly of yourself and in turn think that you were worthy and deserving of greater effort, because your output of effort is higher.
In the same way, that pit in your stomach feeling when you know something isn’t right for you long term, and you keep getting affirmation after affirmation showing you that an experience or a person isn’t “right” for you, but it’s not “wrong enough” to leave, goes back to our own thinking of what we think we do or don’t deserve.
The fact that we have a threshold of “not wrong enough” is absolutely baffling. How wrong does something have to be in order for you to leave? How many times does God have to play whack-a-mole with you so you stop popping that head of yours back up into the very situation that is slowly eating away at you and not causing you to be better because of it’s existence?
As for me? I allow a lot of things, but if my backbone has taught me anything, it’s that cowering in fear of the unknown is not an option.
Why? Because staying in the exact same spot denying the severity of poisonous circumstances is a far worse reality. And the longer you live in it the longer that poison sinks into your mind making you believe you deserve to live in it. That you aren’t worthy of anything better than less than subpar.
This mindset comes from knowing my effort, knowing myself, striving to compromise and meeting half-way. I know what I won’t stand for because I’ve spent far too much time discovering and setting boundaries, and understanding that no one is going to fight for me except for me.
And I am worth fighting for.
I deserve that level of effort, and only I will give it to me by knowing when it’s time to fight and being humble enough to know when it’s time to go.
And have the courage to actually GO.
andrea statler 