deserve – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Treat “deserve” like a curse word.

The word curses your behavior. As a result, you instantly become transactional.

It starts building the imaginary scoreboard in your head. It doesn’t come alone, either. Soon there are imaginary teams and an imaginary ranking system.

The only thing that isn’t imaginary is the mental overhead it adds to your work.

“I deserve to get that contract; I showed up every day.” This becomes “The sales team didn’t cooperate with me as much as they did with Susan.” That turns into “The sales team is out to get everyone, except Susan.” Ultimately you arrive at “Fuck Susan and her friends who are on the sales team.”

This overhead affects every decision you make with Susan, and it has the potential to ruin your team and its dynamics. It hurts you more than Susan because you are now fighting a war that doesn’t exist.

Even worse, Susan has some insight that you don’t. There is an opportunity to ask and become better.

Worst of all, “deserve” keeps you stagnant. If you have someone to blame, you never grow because it is never your fault.

Don’t use it.

I keep a list of words to not use

There are a few words and phrases I am not fond of. I don’t like them because I find that the act of using them changes my mindset, allowing me excuses instead of investigation. I’ve struggled with this internal fight, dealing with words that stir my ego into protecting itself.

I try to understand these words and make an effort not to use them by putting them on a mental list (one I should admittedly write down) while I use the blog to work out why I don’t use them.Lately, I have thought about the word “deserve,” and how it feeds my ego and keeps me blind to possibility.

I deserve…

Ego – When I say the word “deserve,” I turn whatever conversation we are having into a conversation about me. I turn the discussion into a projection into what I want and instead of compromise, this now turns into a war*. Instead of a listening mindset, I am now working with a wanting mindset.
Blind – The wanting mindset gets me focused on one thing, “what I deserve.” I turn off my awareness and now I “lock in,” thinking about things that are completely abstract, such as what I’ve “earned” and missing out on what is in front of me.

Excuse words get you no where

I realize that “deserve” is an “excuse word,” or rhetorical device I’ve made to get out of dealing with the real underlying issues I have at the time. They keep me in the “yes” space, a place where I live on unintentional scarcity. Scarcity puts me in the mindset of taking what I see instead of learning what I need.

*In my experience this is not the same as boundary setting. When I say deserve in a conversation I have already missed the boat with establishing what I need. I more than likely went into that conversation unprepared and scrambling for something