You Deserve Success. Or Do You?

Posted on April 06, 2016 by Alessandro Carli, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

These magic words always come up in every good sales pitch: “… because you know, you deserve to have success!” That makes you feel good, doesn’t it? There’s a guy out there that somehow knows that all your efforts and the pains you have to go through should be rewarded. Oh, man, that really strokes your Ego right, doesn’t it?

The point, though, is: how does he know that? What makes him think that all my efforts and pains indeed entitle me to be successful? Having worked with many entrepreneurs (usually small) as a trainer and coach, I never happened to find any relationship between the amount of effort they’ve been putting in their work, and the success they actually gained. So, where does this “deserving success” come from?

It depends on the level you’re operating from. At every level, “being deserving” acquires a different meaning. There are three levels involved: the technical/rational thinking level, the emotional thinking level, and the systemic thinking level.

By operating at the first level, your lack of success may be blamed on the fact that you’re not knowledgeable enough, not skillful enough, you don’t have and implement the right strategies, and so on. So, someone comes up and tells you that you deserve success because you are a hard, honest, and committed worker who has good products and services to offer. However, those lacks will prevent you from achieving success.
You are “potentially” successful. However, by acquiring the knowledge, the skills and the strategies they have to offer, you will be able to achieve the long-waited success that you deserve.

At the emotional thinking level, you deserve success for what you believe in and how you behave with your fellow man. You live up to your values, you’re a good and sensitive person, you care about people, you are truly committed to making the world a better place.
What’s still keeping you from getting the success you should have is the fact that you are perhaps struggling with limiting beliefs, with an unclear value system, with ineffective emotional patterns of behavior, etc. You fix these problems with the advice of a good coach or counselor, and success will deservedly smile at you, at last.

Although we have two very different situations, here, they in fact share the same viewpoint. Whether or not a person deserves to have success is based on moralistic assumptions, i.e. based on desirable social patterns of behavior. In this case, on what you do (first level) and on what you are (second level). Being a hard, honest, committed, caring and sensitive worker is “good” or “right”, while the opposite is “bad” or “wrong”.
The problem with this is that reality does not operate according to our moral standards at all. It operates according to the laws of Nature, where things are not good or bad, but where they either work or they don’t. Being a good person can mean dozens of different things, depending on a given individual or collective culture, and it has nothing to do with deserving success in any way whatsoever.

The third level of thinking, which is systemic, takes a totally different angle. Achieving success does not depend on how morally deserving you are, but on whether or not you are structurally prepared to receive it, and simply being a good hard-working person may just not be enough for that.
Suppose that a poor person wins the lottery. Chances are, as often happens, that he will lose everything in a very short time because he’s not psychologically and spiritually equipped to be rich. The same thing applies to success, love, relationships, health, power, or whatever.

At the systemic level, which actually precedes the other two, “not deserving” means “not being ready… yet”, and that you need to do something about it. This work involves a lot of stuff, which can’t be discussed here, but it involves Self-Esteem, Abundance, becoming acquainted with the Metaprinciples (basic laws of Nature) and much more.