March Mindset Makeover: Entitlement

I have a question for you, but I don’t want you to answer it out loud! Are you ready? Okay, here we go! How many times today did you find yourself thinking “I want it (my goal) now, I shouldn’t have to work so hard for it (my goal), I deserve it (my goal), and I’ve earned it (even without exerting your best effort)”? It’s okay, you can be honest! This is a judgment-free zone. The truth is, no one can read your thoughts, but we can easily interpret your actions which reveal your thoughts.

Your mindset includes conscious and subconscious beliefs that are reflected in how you conduct yourself, treat others, and navigate through everyday life. Although your mindset is hidden and most people are not able to read your thoughts there is still a way to recognize harmful thought patterns and address them.

This is how your mindset shows up in your life. If you continually “program yourself” to think thoughts that are conducive to what you want to achieve, the kind of person you want to become, and the value you want to leave in people’s lives then you are better equipped to get the exact results that you want. However, the opposite is true as well. When you fill your mind with distractions, insecurity, gossip, anger, bitterness, jealousy, and self-doubt your chances of success are massively reduced. You end up trying to pursue your goals like everyone else, but you never get the results because your core, internal beliefs are in direct conflict with your actions. You don’t believe in yourself, you’re not in full alignment with your vision, you haven’t demonstrated personal integrity. In simple terms, you are holding yourself back when you don’t clean up your mind before pursuing a goal.

An entitled mindset manifests in many different ways. You could feel angry at someone for achieving a goal that you have dreamt about achieving for years like weight loss. If you’ve been trying to lose 10 lbs for the last 3 months and then all of a sudden one of your girlfriends post a before and after picture on social media celebrating her progress you might feel jealous and automatically think “she’s nothing special, why did she lose weight and I’m still struggling to drop one pound?” or “she always gets what she wants because she can afford to hire support. I deserve the same results, but I can’t afford to hire a fitness coach.”

Both of these different reactions reflect an entitled core belief and will only serve to sabotage any effort you put into losing weight because when your mind is not in complete agreement with your goal you end up self-sabotaging whether you’re aware of it or not. It always happens.

I remember years ago whenever someone within my circle of acquaintances would attain something that I had planned on achieving I would automatically feel jealous instead of encouraged. It’s as if I thought that their success would diminish or take are away from mine. I felt entitled to become successful first. Although this might sound crazy and it’s far from who I am today, I didn’t want to share the victory of overcoming the challenges and weaknesses that I faced with anyone else. I wanted to experience the glory of accomplishing a goal all by myself. I didn’t view others as a source of inspiration or as a road map to show me how I could achieve my goal. I viewed them as a competitor who was ahead of me and I needed to catch up.

This caused my personal destruction in several ways. First of all, I wasn’t able to connect with others on a genuine level because I was in competition with most of them. I was afraid to share my goals with people because I thought they would steal my idea’s or discourage me from pursuing it. I lived in fear, regret, anger, discouragement, and loneliness. I would repeatedly set out to crush the same goal and get no results year after year because I was out of alignment with myself. The core of who I was was not in agreement with the goal that I was pursuing. It was terrible. I believed that it was my destiny to be successful in specific things, but my entitled mindset kept me from experiencing them.

I had to address this issue first before I could become the woman that you see today. I had to accept my beliefs, clean them up by investing in myself and putting in the necessary work to change and then overtime as my mind was renewed my actions changed and I became a totally brand new person.