Are Entitlements Ruining Your Life?

What we truly believe we deserve and what we truly believe we do not deserve are entitlements. For example, if a person has a deep seeded belief that they offer more in a dynamic than others, they will feel entitled to more praise, more recognition, and the like. If a person feels like they have an inherent deficit, they will often decide the type of compensation they give others. For example, they may feel like they have to work later or put others’ needs before their own as a way to compensate others for accepting their deficits. Because they feel deficient, they believe others are entitled to compensation for interacting with them. Our entitlement calculations are situation and dynamic specific. Most people recognize that there are areas where they excel and areas where they do not.

Entitlements become an issue when we do accounting that is not true to reality. Entitlements are also dangerous when we let professional, political, and sociological dynamics determine what we are entitled to in interpersonal relationships. If you feel that you need to compensate people for your deficits, that is a clear indication that you have a toxic internal relationship with entitlements. If you feel like the people in your life owe you specifics bonuses and extras, then you have a toxic relationship with entitlements. Once we realize that we are expecting others to give us what we feel owed or are routinely overextending ourselves to compensate them, then we can explore what our relationship with entitlements is.

If you feel owed by the world and chronically undervalued in an area of your life, there is usually a skills mismatch and over-evaluation. When a person feels chronically undervalued at work the solution is to develop new skills or change jobs. If friends and family are undervaluing you, then you need to set new boundaries. If the people in your life are not accepting of your boundaries, then you need to ask yourself: do you have the right people in your life? If you are compensating people for a perceived deficit, then you need to do a very honest bias check. What makes you believe that any particular aspect of yourself means that world is owed compensation for your existence? You are the gift. Your time, energy, attendance, and consideration of others is the correct level of exchange in social settings. In professional settings, it is the job that you do. Feeling owed or like you have too much needs to be pulled toward the middle to centralize and stabilize entitlements.  Once you stabilize your entitlements, the stability in the rest of your life will also improve.