189. What You Deserve
Last week, we talked about the idea that you are WORTH your own effort.
Even if it feels inconvenient. Even if you sort of don’t want to do it. Even if it’s comfier to stay cuddled up on the couch.
When you treat yourself like a precious loved one, you may find it easier to overcome the obstacles and put the effort in to attain your desired outcomes.
This week, we’re adding another layer.
We’re talking about the concept of “deserving.”
This one is interesting because sometimes this concept can motivate you and help you reach your goals.
But other times, this concept can backfire and take you further away from your Satisfied AF life. Tune in for a fun and eye opening discussion.
Then hit reply on this email and let me know your takeaways, questions, and how this information is going to change how you show up to your goals and dreams.
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why the idea of “deserving” might not be the most useful frame sometimes.
The difference between “deserving” something and choosing it.
How to decide what to pursue and when.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about what you deserve.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I am going to be honest with y’all, I am exhausted right now. I don’t know if I mentioned on last week’s episode or not, but my partner Alex got surgery recently on her foot/ankle. And the surgery went really well and it’s going great. But just taking care of someone post-surgery is kind of a lot of work, it turns out. Which we knew going in, so we were prepared for that. But it’s also, I’m just experiencing the ramifications of it.
And it gives me so much empathy for all the people who are doing care tasks, which is a lot of people. You know, people raising children, people caring for their loved ones, people like me caring for their loved ones in a time limited capacity as they recover from a surgery or some other kind of situation. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to manage all the things.
And I also have to shout out to our friend, Alex’s bestie has just been tremendous. She has made us so much food. She made Alex a shepherd’s pie and she made me a pot of soup and she made us a chicken pot pie. And then she made another kind of, I don’t know what you call it. It’s not a stir fry, but it’s kind of like another dish, a huge dish of food. And it’s been so helpful. And then we’ve also had some other friends who brought takeout or like made us a meal and we appreciate you all so much.
It is so much work to care for other people. And I think it’s important that we admit that and talk about that out loud, especially because historically, stereotypically, this is work that is done by women and people socialized as women. And it’s undervalued in our culture so hugely, but it’s such an extraordinary amount of work and a huge undertaking. And it deserves to be talked about and it deserves to be seen for what it is, which is just a tremendous amount of labor and care.
Another thing that I’ve been doing that’s actually been really delighting me recently is I’ve been listening to Ramit Sethi’s podcast. IWT is his brand, and I will teach you to be rich is also his brand and kind of his tagline. And he teaches about finance among other things. And he has this concept of living a rich life, which of course is framed in the money sense, like rich.
But what I love about his work is that he also talks about it beyond the money sense. I think there’s a lot of crossover between a rich life, which he talks about, and a satisfied AF life, which I talk about. Which is that for him, it’s not just about the money. It’s not just about hitting the numbers. It’s like, what does being rich mean to you? And one of his main ideas is to spend extravagantly on what you love and to cut mercilessly on what you don’t. I think those are kind of the exact words he often uses in his content.
But something that I hear a lot listening to the podcast, so what he does on his podcast is he brings couples on and he goes through their numbers with them. What they earn, what their assets are, what they’re spending, what their debt’s like. And he has these really intimate conversations with people, which I love deep conversations, obviously, I’m a coach. So I just love being a fly on the wall and listening to them talk.
But something people say over and over again is like, well, I’ve worked hard. I feel like I deserve it. Like they say that about their spending or they’re like this and this and that, I deserve this, or my partner deserves this, or my kids deserve this.
And I think it’s a really interesting thing because something that happens a lot, like people come on the podcast often because they’re having some kind of problem, right? They’re not able to achieve their goals in some way or they’re overspending and they can’t figure out how to get out of it or they’re in debt. And so a lot of times they’re coming on the podcast, not because everything is going great, but because something’s not working.
So something I see again and again, both listening to this podcast, but also in my own work coaching people, and often even with myself observing my own behavior patterns and stuff like that, is that sometimes when people say we deserve it, I deserve it, you deserve it, the choices that they then make based on that justification actually take them further away from what they want in the long run.
So as an example, sometimes people will be spending a lot of money on the day to day because they work a job and they work hard. And so they’re like, well, I deserve to have lunch out every day, or I deserve this and that. Lunch out is actually a thing I remember when I worked at Expedia, a lot of people would buy lunch often and we made, you know, we worked in corporate tech, we made good money.
I only bought lunch once a week. And I did that because I looked at the numbers and I was like, how much lunch costs, like it’s not cheap. Like if you’re buying like, you know, we had a Thai restaurant near the office that I liked. And to get the Thai food and to tip was, I think like, I don’t know, probably $20. And I was like, I’m not going to spend a hundred dollars on lunches a week. That’s $400 a month. To me, I was like, that doesn’t make sense.
But I realized that a lot of other people don’t think about money that way. They’re like, I work hard. I deserve to just get lunch if I want it. Whereas I was like, I deserve to have this money. So I’m willing to put in the effort to make lunch all these other days because what I deserve is the cash.
And it really relates to what we talked about last week about how you’re worth your own effort. So sometimes we’re like, well, I deserve to sit on the couch because I worked hard all day. So we don’t put in the effort, but then we don’t get the thing we want, which is like, for me, it’s these really little things sometimes of like, well, I just want something that’s upstairs and it’s, I don’t need it. It’s not actually going to change my life overall, but I just want it.
And so treating myself like I’m a precious loved one and going to get the thing because what I’ve decided I “deserve” is having the experience I want and giving myself that through my own effort and labor. But a lot of times what happens is people will prioritize what they want and feel like they deserve in the short term, but then they don’t get to have what they want and feel like they deserve in the long term, right?
It’s like if they want to retire early and they feel like they’ve worked hard their whole career, but they’ve been spending their whole career and then they haven’t saved up the necessary money to retire early, then that’s not something that they can financially do in a feasible way.
So the reason I wanted to do a podcast about this is because I have a strong opinion about it. And I think my opinion is probably, I don’t know if it is the same as Ramit’s or not, or if he would agree or disagree. And that kind of doesn’t matter because this is my podcast. But my opinion about that is you deserve everything. You deserve the moon. You deserve anything you want because you’re a hundred percent worthy all the time.
That’s like a belief that I just choose to have about people. I think when I was younger it was more like good people, bad people, blah, blah, blah. But what I’ve seen is that I weaponize those kinds of ideas against myself. I’ve watched my clients weaponize them against themselves all the time. And that’s a frame that people usually use to make themselves feel bad. And so I instead just choose to believe everyone’s worthy.
Everyone’s worthy of love and belonging. But just because you deserve something doesn’t mean you can have it without work or without consequences. And I think this is where things get really interesting. So for instance, like I think you deserve a career that feels really yummy and delicious to you. I think you deserve a relationship that feels connected and safe and also fun and interesting. I think you deserve a vibrant, delightful friend group. I think you deserve a beautiful, safe home.
And honestly, I would love to live in a world and in a country where there were more social safety nets and more things were provided to us as citizens. Like I believe we all deserve really excellent, low cost healthcare. I live in the United States of America, I don’t have that or I only have access to that like through certain ways, right?
Like for the whole time I’ve been in business, I’ve gotten my healthcare through my partner’s employer. And that has been a way to get excellent, low cost healthcare. That’s probably not available to me on the open market. That’s one of the, in my opinion, huge flaws about our country.
But this is also really interesting too, because like there’s what I think you deserve as a person, as a human being, and then there’s the world that we live in. Which of course we can use the coaching tools to make changes to the world, and I want us to. And also we start where we are. We start with what we have.
So this is why I think thinking about what you deserve can be something that actually motivates you and helps you go towards your goals, but it can also be something that gets you in trouble along the way as well, because sometimes it’s something we use to give ourselves things that then actually take us off track from having the thing we want overall.
So let’s get into it. There are some really specific things I think you deserve, but I also think you deserve everything, just period. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can have everything or you can afford everything, to put it in the financial point of view, or that you want to do the effort to have the various everythings, right?
So if we think about like I think you deserve a really satisfying, delightful career that pays you well, but that’s not going to just be delivered just because I, Kori Linn, think you deserve it. In order to have that career, you’re usually going to have to do a lot of work, right? If you already have skills and expertise, you still have to do work to get the job. And then you also have to do the job, right? These are the things that are required to have that.
I think you deserve a connected, yummy, sexy, fun relationship. And also there is labor to put in to get that. And then there’s labor to put in to keep that.
I think you deserve to feel happy and satisfied in your body. Also, we all grew up in a culture that basically taught us to hate our bodies, especially if you were socialized as a woman or a girl. So even if you deserve to feel good in your body, there’s probably going to be effort to put in to change your mindset and to change your thinking patterns and to detox from the terrible body image culture that you’ve been fed since you were zero years old.
So I think this is a really interesting way to think about things of like, okay, if I deserve everything, but everything also takes labor, effort, and there are limits to how many hours there are in the day, how much effort I can put forth, how many dollars are in my bank account, then what kind of choices do I want to make?
So here’s what I love about this frame, I think choosing the idea that everyone deserves everything really just opens things up. Like if you’re like, oh, I want to move to Aruba and you get stuck in like, well, do I deserve to move to Aruba? Have I worked hard enough to move to Aruba? I don’t think those are the right questions. That’s like getting into your worthiness. Worthiness actually isn’t what you need to move to Aruba.
First of all, I just think you have a 100% of it, that’s what I choose to believe. But whether you believe that or not, and even if you believe you have a 100% of it, it’s going to cost money and take planning to actually move to Aruba. You’ve got to figure out like, are there jobs in Aruba? Can I do my current job from Aruba? I have no interest in moving to Aruba. I’ve never been there and I am using it as an example, but these are the kinds of questions, right?
So I think people get really caught up in this idea of like, do I deserve it or I deserve it, right? And then they use those to either stop them from going after things that would be really meaningful for them. Or they use that idea of like, I deserve it to pursue things that will feel good, but may also put them further away from their goal in the long term.
Like when I worked at Expedia I really wanted to pay off my student loans. That was really important to me. I really didn’t like having that debt hanging over my head. Now, with everything I’ve learned from Ramit Sethi, I maybe should have actually, well, there’s no shoulds, right? But it might’ve actually been wise to be prioritizing saving and investing more money. But one of the things he teaches and talks about how money is actually really emotional for a lot of us.
And it’s not just money, right? I coach on all kinds of things. Things are really emotional for us. There’s like the cut and dry facts and the math, but that’s often not what we make our decisions about. So anyways, when I was younger, I really wanted to pay off those student loans. And that’s part of how I was able to say, like, I’m not going to have as many lunches because I want to pay off the student loans and that’s where I’m going to prioritize my money going.
Now, I don’t think we should have the huge student loans we have in the United States of America. I think higher education should, I will say it in this sense, I think it should be much lower cost for people. That’s not the reality we live in.
So the reality we live in and the math that I actually had to deal with was I have student loans. They are this much, they are increasing and compounding at this rate. What am I going to do to get out from under them? What kind of lifestyle do I need to live? What kind of income do I need to have?
Deserving is an interesting concept, but it has nothing to do with my ability to pay my bills because deserving doesn’t stack up anything in your bank account. It might make you feel a certain way. If you feel like you deserve, that might feel good. If you feel like you don’t deserve, that might feel bad.
It’s definitely going to impact your behaviors, right? If you feel like you don’t deserve, you might not pursue something. If you feel like you do deserve, you may pursue it. But it doesn’t necessarily have to do with if you actually have the resources that the thing is going to take.
Because as we know, you can spend resources you don’t actually have, right, through things like credit cards or running all the cash out of your bank account before the end of the month. But also sometimes people have a lot of resources, but if they think they don’t deserve, they don’t pursue the thing even though they have the available resources. And I think that’s really sad.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Whether you think you deserve or you think you don’t deserve, and whether that is motivating you or causing you to make choices that are actually going to mess things up for your bigger goals down the road, or whether you believe you don’t deserve and that’s blocking you from taking action where you actually do have the resources, all of that’s actually changeable. And the thing that helps you change that is coaching.
Because what coaching can come in and do is coaching can come in and help you understand what are your current belief structures? How are they creating emotional experiences for you? And is that ending up with you taking the actions you want to take, both in the short term and in the long term? And how are we balancing the short term and the long term?
For a lot of people, for myself, for all of my clients and for a lot of these people I’m hearing on Ramit’s podcast, and just people I observe like in the wild, there are internal struggles here between what we want and our ability to go after it and our ability to stick with our plan.
And as a coach, that’s exactly the kind of stuff I work with people on, right? So we take a deep dive into your beliefs about yourself, your beliefs about what you deserve, right? And we look at where is your belief about what you deserve holding you back? Where is your belief about what you deserve pushing you forward, but in a direction that’s actually taking you further away from what you want?
Where is your belief about what you deserve actually taking you in the right direction, but maybe we need to look at the math of the resources and tweak it a little bit so that it’s actually going to be sustainable and you’re going to be able to continue to move forward in the long term?
For a lot of people, for a lot of my clients, they can get very caught up in the deserving thing versus thinking through the math and the resources of here’s where I am now, here’s where I want to be. What do I need to believe is true about myself in order to get there? What do I need to believe is true about the world in order to get there?
And then we can’t just believe things are true and then get there. What action am I going to take? What labor am I going to do? What resources am I going to spend?
And the reality is we have to spend resources to get places, whether we’re spending the resource of our own time, whether we’re spending the resource of our money, whether we’re spending the resource of our labor, like the labor that I’ve been doing to care for my significant other, or the labor that I do to get off the couch and go up the stairs when something I want is upstairs. But I care about myself like a precious loved one, so I’m willing to put that effort in and to spend those resources to create a more satisfying life for myself.
And that’s what I want you to think about for yourself as well. No matter who you are, there’s probably some things in your life you’ve already created that are spectacular. And there are other things you’re itching and desiring to create that you haven’t done yet, or maybe you’ve pursued them and it hasn’t worked out. Maybe you’ve tried six or seven or 70 times and you haven’t been able to get to the place you want to be. Maybe you’ve never tried because it feels so scary.
And I want you to think about like, what is your satisfying AF life? What does it entail? What are the things that matter most to you? And then what needs to happen for you to move towards those things in a sustainable way?
And this, I think, is also where that deserve thing comes in as well, right? Because these people on this podcast where they’re talking about their finances, it’s like, yes, you deserve everything, but if everything costs 150 and your resources are 100, you’re going to be 50 in the red. So do you also deserve to not be in the red? And if so, which of these things can we cut out to give you that bigger, beautiful thing of not being in the red?
And sometimes we need help. We need someone else to sit down with us and kind of work that through. So I want you to think about what the resources are that you have to spend and how you want to spend them.
So I make the podcast free and I don’t even put advertising on it. I subsidize it with my own business income so that it can be free for you. And so for some people, they’re going to be like, well, I’ve got time and I’ve got energy, and I’m going to use the podcast as the free resource and I’m going to go make these changes in my life.
And for other people, they need support. They need someone to sit down with them on a weekly-ish basis and say, what’s going well? What’s not going well? What’s getting in the way? Let’s look at the math again. How can we shift things around? And that’s the kind of thing that we do in one-on-one coaching.
And I love that because first of all, I think it’s so much easier to make changes when you have someone else in your corner with you. I’ve also hired coaches, both one-on-one and in groups so many times, and it gives a sense of accountability, which is really helpful. But it also gives a sense of camaraderie, like someone is in it with me. And it also gives me a really intelligent person who has different perspectives.
Here’s the other thing, I’m super smart and I do this for a living, but sometimes I can’t see my own things. Like I can’t see where I’m getting in my own way. I know something is in my way. I know there’s an obstacle, but sometimes I need a person who is outside of my own head to help me with that. And that’s another thing that coaching can do.
So again, you have resources available to you. You have time, you have money, you have your own effort and labor, and you deserve everything you want. But when we look at the math of it, we might have to pick certain things and not other things. Or we might have to say this is the priority this year and then next year the priority can be something else, because as much as you deserve everything, you have limited resources and that’s okay.
That being said, when you take the resources you have and apply them strategically and thoughtfully, you can get to really amazing places, especially because so much of the stuff that is part of the life that would be satisfying AF for you is probably habits, right? So the cool thing about habits is when you put one in place and then you make sure it’s solid, then usually it’s sort of self-sustaining and then you can move on to the next habit.
So even if it feels like there are so many different things in your life that you need to work on, that’s okay. It actually makes a lot of sense just to pick one and work on that. And sometimes the first one is the hardest, so that might also be a time when having a coach in your corner would be really useful because it’s probably going to feel the most impossible. It’s going to feel the most uncomfortable. It’s going to feel super risky to believe in yourself at that point.
But once you get some shifts and changes under your belt, you’re going to have an easier time being like, oh yeah, I can do this. I can change my habits. I can shift what’s going on in my life. I can go from being a person who’s kind of stressed and dissatisfied at work to a person who’s confident and courageous at work.
I can go from a person who has an okay relationship but we kind of fight a lot, to a person who is deeply invested, highly in love and able to handle the conflict that does come up because guess what, relationships are to have conflict. So what I want you to know is that you deserve everything. And also it’s okay if you can’t pursue everything at once, you’re not actually supposed to be able to, that’s not how math works.
But together, either via the podcast or via one-on-one coaching, we can pick something that really matters, pursue it, create a change, and then you can go on to create more changes too. The time is going to pass anyways, you may as well spend your life creating a really delicious world that really feels wonderful to you.
That’s what I have for you this week. I will talk to you next time. Have a lovely week.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I am going to be honest with y’all, I am exhausted right now. I don’t know if I mentioned on last week’s episode or not, but my partner Alex got surgery recently on her foot/ankle. And the surgery went really well and it’s going great. But just taking care of someone post-surgery is kind of a lot of work, it turns out. Which we knew going in, so we were prepared for that. But it’s also, I’m just experiencing the ramifications of it.
And it gives me so much empathy for all the people who are doing care tasks, which is a lot of people. You know, people raising children, people caring for their loved ones, people like me caring for their loved ones in a time limited capacity as they recover from a surgery or some other kind of situation. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to manage all the things.
And I also have to shout out to our friend, Alex’s bestie has just been tremendous. She has made us so much food. She made Alex a shepherd’s pie and she made me a pot of soup and she made us a chicken pot pie. And then she made another kind of, I don’t know what you call it. It’s not a stir fry, but it’s kind of like another dish, a huge dish of food. And it’s been so helpful. And then we’ve also had some other friends who brought takeout or like made us a meal and we appreciate you all so much.
It is so much work to care for other people. And I think it’s important that we admit that and talk about that out loud, especially because historically, stereotypically, this is work that is done by women and people socialized as women. And it’s undervalued in our culture so hugely, but it’s such an extraordinary amount of work and a huge undertaking. And it deserves to be talked about and it deserves to be seen for what it is, which is just a tremendous amount of labor and care.
Another thing that I’ve been doing that’s actually been really delighting me recently is I’ve been listening to Ramit Sethi’s podcast. IWT is his brand, and I will teach you to be rich is also his brand and kind of his tagline. And he teaches about finance among other things. And he has this concept of living a rich life, which of course is framed in the money sense, like rich.
But what I love about his work is that he also talks about it beyond the money sense. I think there’s a lot of crossover between a rich life, which he talks about, and a satisfied AF life, which I talk about. Which is that for him, it’s not just about the money. It’s not just about hitting the numbers. It’s like, what does being rich mean to you? And one of his main ideas is to spend extravagantly on what you love and to cut mercilessly on what you don’t. I think those are kind of the exact words he often uses in his content.
But something that I hear a lot listening to the podcast, so what he does on his podcast is he brings couples on and he goes through their numbers with them. What they earn, what their assets are, what they’re spending, what their debt’s like. And he has these really intimate conversations with people, which I love deep conversations, obviously, I’m a coach. So I just love being a fly on the wall and listening to them talk.
But something people say over and over again is like, well, I’ve worked hard. I feel like I deserve it. Like they say that about their spending or they’re like this and this and that, I deserve this, or my partner deserves this, or my kids deserve this.
And I think it’s a really interesting thing because something that happens a lot, like people come on the podcast often because they’re having some kind of problem, right? They’re not able to achieve their goals in some way or they’re overspending and they can’t figure out how to get out of it or they’re in debt. And so a lot of times they’re coming on the podcast, not because everything is going great, but because something’s not working.
So something I see again and again, both listening to this podcast, but also in my own work coaching people, and often even with myself observing my own behavior patterns and stuff like that, is that sometimes when people say we deserve it, I deserve it, you deserve it, the choices that they then make based on that justification actually take them further away from what they want in the long run.
So as an example, sometimes people will be spending a lot of money on the day to day because they work a job and they work hard. And so they’re like, well, I deserve to have lunch out every day, or I deserve this and that. Lunch out is actually a thing I remember when I worked at Expedia, a lot of people would buy lunch often and we made, you know, we worked in corporate tech, we made good money.
I only bought lunch once a week. And I did that because I looked at the numbers and I was like, how much lunch costs, like it’s not cheap. Like if you’re buying like, you know, we had a Thai restaurant near the office that I liked. And to get the Thai food and to tip was, I think like, I don’t know, probably $20. And I was like, I’m not going to spend a hundred dollars on lunches a week. That’s $400 a month. To me, I was like, that doesn’t make sense.
But I realized that a lot of other people don’t think about money that way. They’re like, I work hard. I deserve to just get lunch if I want it. Whereas I was like, I deserve to have this money. So I’m willing to put in the effort to make lunch all these other days because what I deserve is the cash.
And it really relates to what we talked about last week about how you’re worth your own effort. So sometimes we’re like, well, I deserve to sit on the couch because I worked hard all day. So we don’t put in the effort, but then we don’t get the thing we want, which is like, for me, it’s these really little things sometimes of like, well, I just want something that’s upstairs and it’s, I don’t need it. It’s not actually going to change my life overall, but I just want it.
And so treating myself like I’m a precious loved one and going to get the thing because what I’ve decided I “deserve” is having the experience I want and giving myself that through my own effort and labor. But a lot of times what happens is people will prioritize what they want and feel like they deserve in the short term, but then they don’t get to have what they want and feel like they deserve in the long term, right?
It’s like if they want to retire early and they feel like they’ve worked hard their whole career, but they’ve been spending their whole career and then they haven’t saved up the necessary money to retire early, then that’s not something that they can financially do in a feasible way.
So the reason I wanted to do a podcast about this is because I have a strong opinion about it. And I think my opinion is probably, I don’t know if it is the same as Ramit’s or not, or if he would agree or disagree. And that kind of doesn’t matter because this is my podcast. But my opinion about that is you deserve everything. You deserve the moon. You deserve anything you want because you’re a hundred percent worthy all the time.
That’s like a belief that I just choose to have about people. I think when I was younger it was more like good people, bad people, blah, blah, blah. But what I’ve seen is that I weaponize those kinds of ideas against myself. I’ve watched my clients weaponize them against themselves all the time. And that’s a frame that people usually use to make themselves feel bad. And so I instead just choose to believe everyone’s worthy.
Everyone’s worthy of love and belonging. But just because you deserve something doesn’t mean you can have it without work or without consequences. And I think this is where things get really interesting. So for instance, like I think you deserve a career that feels really yummy and delicious to you. I think you deserve a relationship that feels connected and safe and also fun and interesting. I think you deserve a vibrant, delightful friend group. I think you deserve a beautiful, safe home.
And honestly, I would love to live in a world and in a country where there were more social safety nets and more things were provided to us as citizens. Like I believe we all deserve really excellent, low cost healthcare. I live in the United States of America, I don’t have that or I only have access to that like through certain ways, right?
Like for the whole time I’ve been in business, I’ve gotten my healthcare through my partner’s employer. And that has been a way to get excellent, low cost healthcare. That’s probably not available to me on the open market. That’s one of the, in my opinion, huge flaws about our country.
But this is also really interesting too, because like there’s what I think you deserve as a person, as a human being, and then there’s the world that we live in. Which of course we can use the coaching tools to make changes to the world, and I want us to. And also we start where we are. We start with what we have.
So this is why I think thinking about what you deserve can be something that actually motivates you and helps you go towards your goals, but it can also be something that gets you in trouble along the way as well, because sometimes it’s something we use to give ourselves things that then actually take us off track from having the thing we want overall.
So let’s get into it. There are some really specific things I think you deserve, but I also think you deserve everything, just period. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can have everything or you can afford everything, to put it in the financial point of view, or that you want to do the effort to have the various everythings, right?
So if we think about like I think you deserve a really satisfying, delightful career that pays you well, but that’s not going to just be delivered just because I, Kori Linn, think you deserve it. In order to have that career, you’re usually going to have to do a lot of work, right? If you already have skills and expertise, you still have to do work to get the job. And then you also have to do the job, right? These are the things that are required to have that.
I think you deserve a connected, yummy, sexy, fun relationship. And also there is labor to put in to get that. And then there’s labor to put in to keep that.
I think you deserve to feel happy and satisfied in your body. Also, we all grew up in a culture that basically taught us to hate our bodies, especially if you were socialized as a woman or a girl. So even if you deserve to feel good in your body, there’s probably going to be effort to put in to change your mindset and to change your thinking patterns and to detox from the terrible body image culture that you’ve been fed since you were zero years old.
So I think this is a really interesting way to think about things of like, okay, if I deserve everything, but everything also takes labor, effort, and there are limits to how many hours there are in the day, how much effort I can put forth, how many dollars are in my bank account, then what kind of choices do I want to make?
So here’s what I love about this frame, I think choosing the idea that everyone deserves everything really just opens things up. Like if you’re like, oh, I want to move to Aruba and you get stuck in like, well, do I deserve to move to Aruba? Have I worked hard enough to move to Aruba? I don’t think those are the right questions. That’s like getting into your worthiness. Worthiness actually isn’t what you need to move to Aruba.
First of all, I just think you have a 100% of it, that’s what I choose to believe. But whether you believe that or not, and even if you believe you have a 100% of it, it’s going to cost money and take planning to actually move to Aruba. You’ve got to figure out like, are there jobs in Aruba? Can I do my current job from Aruba? I have no interest in moving to Aruba. I’ve never been there and I am using it as an example, but these are the kinds of questions, right?
So I think people get really caught up in this idea of like, do I deserve it or I deserve it, right? And then they use those to either stop them from going after things that would be really meaningful for them. Or they use that idea of like, I deserve it to pursue things that will feel good, but may also put them further away from their goal in the long term.
Like when I worked at Expedia I really wanted to pay off my student loans. That was really important to me. I really didn’t like having that debt hanging over my head. Now, with everything I’ve learned from Ramit Sethi, I maybe should have actually, well, there’s no shoulds, right? But it might’ve actually been wise to be prioritizing saving and investing more money. But one of the things he teaches and talks about how money is actually really emotional for a lot of us.
And it’s not just money, right? I coach on all kinds of things. Things are really emotional for us. There’s like the cut and dry facts and the math, but that’s often not what we make our decisions about. So anyways, when I was younger, I really wanted to pay off those student loans. And that’s part of how I was able to say, like, I’m not going to have as many lunches because I want to pay off the student loans and that’s where I’m going to prioritize my money going.
Now, I don’t think we should have the huge student loans we have in the United States of America. I think higher education should, I will say it in this sense, I think it should be much lower cost for people. That’s not the reality we live in.
So the reality we live in and the math that I actually had to deal with was I have student loans. They are this much, they are increasing and compounding at this rate. What am I going to do to get out from under them? What kind of lifestyle do I need to live? What kind of income do I need to have?
Deserving is an interesting concept, but it has nothing to do with my ability to pay my bills because deserving doesn’t stack up anything in your bank account. It might make you feel a certain way. If you feel like you deserve, that might feel good. If you feel like you don’t deserve, that might feel bad.
It’s definitely going to impact your behaviors, right? If you feel like you don’t deserve, you might not pursue something. If you feel like you do deserve, you may pursue it. But it doesn’t necessarily have to do with if you actually have the resources that the thing is going to take.
Because as we know, you can spend resources you don’t actually have, right, through things like credit cards or running all the cash out of your bank account before the end of the month. But also sometimes people have a lot of resources, but if they think they don’t deserve, they don’t pursue the thing even though they have the available resources. And I think that’s really sad.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Whether you think you deserve or you think you don’t deserve, and whether that is motivating you or causing you to make choices that are actually going to mess things up for your bigger goals down the road, or whether you believe you don’t deserve and that’s blocking you from taking action where you actually do have the resources, all of that’s actually changeable. And the thing that helps you change that is coaching.
Because what coaching can come in and do is coaching can come in and help you understand what are your current belief structures? How are they creating emotional experiences for you? And is that ending up with you taking the actions you want to take, both in the short term and in the long term? And how are we balancing the short term and the long term?
For a lot of people, for myself, for all of my clients and for a lot of these people I’m hearing on Ramit’s podcast, and just people I observe like in the wild, there are internal struggles here between what we want and our ability to go after it and our ability to stick with our plan.
And as a coach, that’s exactly the kind of stuff I work with people on, right? So we take a deep dive into your beliefs about yourself, your beliefs about what you deserve, right? And we look at where is your belief about what you deserve holding you back? Where is your belief about what you deserve pushing you forward, but in a direction that’s actually taking you further away from what you want?
Where is your belief about what you deserve actually taking you in the right direction, but maybe we need to look at the math of the resources and tweak it a little bit so that it’s actually going to be sustainable and you’re going to be able to continue to move forward in the long term?
For a lot of people, for a lot of my clients, they can get very caught up in the deserving thing versus thinking through the math and the resources of here’s where I am now, here’s where I want to be. What do I need to believe is true about myself in order to get there? What do I need to believe is true about the world in order to get there?
And then we can’t just believe things are true and then get there. What action am I going to take? What labor am I going to do? What resources am I going to spend?
And the reality is we have to spend resources to get places, whether we’re spending the resource of our own time, whether we’re spending the resource of our money, whether we’re spending the resource of our labor, like the labor that I’ve been doing to care for my significant other, or the labor that I do to get off the couch and go up the stairs when something I want is upstairs. But I care about myself like a precious loved one, so I’m willing to put that effort in and to spend those resources to create a more satisfying life for myself.
And that’s what I want you to think about for yourself as well. No matter who you are, there’s probably some things in your life you’ve already created that are spectacular. And there are other things you’re itching and desiring to create that you haven’t done yet, or maybe you’ve pursued them and it hasn’t worked out. Maybe you’ve tried six or seven or 70 times and you haven’t been able to get to the place you want to be. Maybe you’ve never tried because it feels so scary.
And I want you to think about like, what is your satisfying AF life? What does it entail? What are the things that matter most to you? And then what needs to happen for you to move towards those things in a sustainable way?
And this, I think, is also where that deserve thing comes in as well, right? Because these people on this podcast where they’re talking about their finances, it’s like, yes, you deserve everything, but if everything costs 150 and your resources are 100, you’re going to be 50 in the red. So do you also deserve to not be in the red? And if so, which of these things can we cut out to give you that bigger, beautiful thing of not being in the red?
And sometimes we need help. We need someone else to sit down with us and kind of work that through. So I want you to think about what the resources are that you have to spend and how you want to spend them.
So I make the podcast free and I don’t even put advertising on it. I subsidize it with my own business income so that it can be free for you. And so for some people, they’re going to be like, well, I’ve got time and I’ve got energy, and I’m going to use the podcast as the free resource and I’m going to go make these changes in my life.
And for other people, they need support. They need someone to sit down with them on a weekly-ish basis and say, what’s going well? What’s not going well? What’s getting in the way? Let’s look at the math again. How can we shift things around? And that’s the kind of thing that we do in one-on-one coaching.
And I love that because first of all, I think it’s so much easier to make changes when you have someone else in your corner with you. I’ve also hired coaches, both one-on-one and in groups so many times, and it gives a sense of accountability, which is really helpful. But it also gives a sense of camaraderie, like someone is in it with me. And it also gives me a really intelligent person who has different perspectives.
Here’s the other thing, I’m super smart and I do this for a living, but sometimes I can’t see my own things. Like I can’t see where I’m getting in my own way. I know something is in my way. I know there’s an obstacle, but sometimes I need a person who is outside of my own head to help me with that. And that’s another thing that coaching can do.
So again, you have resources available to you. You have time, you have money, you have your own effort and labor, and you deserve everything you want. But when we look at the math of it, we might have to pick certain things and not other things. Or we might have to say this is the priority this year and then next year the priority can be something else, because as much as you deserve everything, you have limited resources and that’s okay.
That being said, when you take the resources you have and apply them strategically and thoughtfully, you can get to really amazing places, especially because so much of the stuff that is part of the life that would be satisfying AF for you is probably habits, right? So the cool thing about habits is when you put one in place and then you make sure it’s solid, then usually it’s sort of self-sustaining and then you can move on to the next habit.
So even if it feels like there are so many different things in your life that you need to work on, that’s okay. It actually makes a lot of sense just to pick one and work on that. And sometimes the first one is the hardest, so that might also be a time when having a coach in your corner would be really useful because it’s probably going to feel the most impossible. It’s going to feel the most uncomfortable. It’s going to feel super risky to believe in yourself at that point.
But once you get some shifts and changes under your belt, you’re going to have an easier time being like, oh yeah, I can do this. I can change my habits. I can shift what’s going on in my life. I can go from being a person who’s kind of stressed and dissatisfied at work to a person who’s confident and courageous at work.
I can go from a person who has an okay relationship but we kind of fight a lot, to a person who is deeply invested, highly in love and able to handle the conflict that does come up because guess what, relationships are to have conflict. So what I want you to know is that you deserve everything. And also it’s okay if you can’t pursue everything at once, you’re not actually supposed to be able to, that’s not how math works.
But together, either via the podcast or via one-on-one coaching, we can pick something that really matters, pursue it, create a change, and then you can go on to create more changes too. The time is going to pass anyways, you may as well spend your life creating a really delicious world that really feels wonderful to you.
That’s what I have for you this week. I will talk to you next time. Have a lovely week.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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