Feeling as though you are undeserving can hold you back and cause you to miss out on the best that life has to offer. Unfortunately, feelings of unworthiness are fairly common. You can fight against them and gradually see yourself as a more deserving person with enough persistence, though.
Maybe you deserve the scholarship because of the type of person you are: someone who has overcome adversity, thinks deeply, is passionate about a specific subject, or wants to contribute to their community. In that case, you might simply be able to reuse your personal statement, tweaking it slightly to be able to explain how your personal characteristics or narrative make you a deserving scholarship recipient.
I AM Deserving
In every case, what we find is that our worthiness is not our deserving or meriting or earning, but rather our seeing and savoring something of infinite worth. Our worthiness is our preferring that worth above all things.
While most people feel that plagiarism deserves punishment, some understand that plagiarism is not necessarily deceitful or deserving censure. Today, many writers and writing teachers reject the image of the writer as working alone, using (God-given) talent to produce an original piece of work. In fact, writers often do two things that are proscribed by plagiarism policies: they recombine ideas in their writing and they collaborate with others.
Integrating these various theoretical approaches, we test the general hypotheses that self-esteem (a) will be impacted by the experience of random (mis)fortune, (b) will lead to corresponding changes in feelings of deservingness, and (c) will lead people to adopt self-defeating beliefs and engage in self-defeating behaviors. What is more, across 7 studies that adopt various experimental and correlational designs, we illustrate the feasibility of a causal chain that begins with the experience of random (mis)fortune and, by way of corresponding changes in self-esteem and feelings of deservingness, ends in the adoption of self-defeating beliefs and behaviors.
In Study 2b, participants who described their worst traits and the things they least liked about themselves believed they were significantly more deserving of bad outcomes (M = 2.60, SD = 1.13) than participants in the control condition (M = 2.21, SD = 0.85), t(188) = 2.68, p = .008, d = 0.39.
Effect of recalling bad versus good breaks on beliefs about deserving to fail the upcoming intelligence test as a function of whether participants learned that mitigating circumstances affect test performance or not. Error bars show standard errors of the means.
Mediational model predicting the preference for others to evaluate oneself favorably from beliefs about deserving bad outcomes and self-esteem (Study 5). Values show unstandardized path coefficients. * p
Mediational models predicting thoughts of self-harm and chronic self-handicapping (Study 6) and choosing to self-punish during an intelligence test (Study 7) from beliefs about deserving bad outcomes and self-esteem. Values show unstandardized path coefficients. * p
Interestingly, shown in Table 4, beliefs about deserving bad outcomes correlated negatively with test performance (i.e., percentage correct). The correlations with self-reward were weaker overall (cf. Roth et al., 1980), with only deserving bad outcomes correlating significantly with self-reward.
Findings from seven studies provided evidence for this idea. Participants who experienced/recalled random bad (vs. good) breaks devalued their state self-worth, which, in turn, increased their beliefs about deserving bad outcomes (Studies 1a and 1b).
Study 3b showed that when mitigating circumstances mattered, participants who experienced/recalled bad breaks claimed excuses for potential failure during an ability test to a greater extent than participants who experienced/recalled good breaks, and these effects were linked to participants self-evaluative concerns about deserving to fail. In Study 6, we found that the same processes operated when considering the link between trait self-esteem and chronic self-handicapping: participants lower in self-esteem reported chronic excuse-making and patterns of behavioral self-handicapping partly because they felt deserving of bad outcomes in life.
Remember how happiness is deeply personal? In order to pursue it, you have to define what happiness means to you. Your personal definition of happiness can also help you understand why you feel undeserving of it.
JCAHO declared that pain assessment should be considered a "fifth vital sign," deserving a space beside pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and temperature in the medical record. But there are dangers in translating another's subjective experience onto a scale, a graph, a row of faces ranging from extremely happy to downright miserable [13-17]. Recording data doesn't make the pain empirical, verifiable, or true. It doesn't ensure an appropriate response. What's more, objective language risks stripping pain of the very contextual elements necessary to understand it.
"I believe my previous experience as a full-stack engineer and the skills I've learned in my prior roles make me deserving of this position. I have a strong handle of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and I know how to scale it to support millions of concurrent users. I also think my passion for product design and writing is a great fit for the culture I've observed at your company. I've read that you use writing to create fewer interruptions, opening up hours of uninterrupted time for deep work. I know how valuable deep work is, and I'd love to have the opportunity to code more with fewer distractions." 2ff7e9595c
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