MONEY

The importance of money psychology is becoming more and more evident. It is gravely needed.

It’s like water.

Most of us are cracked mud on earth. Dry and crunchy from trying all the things only to move a little further in our wealth. Pulling more and more resources from ourselves even though it feels like it’s not working.

Burnt out, dehydrated, out of hope, and still young, it can feel quite damming and scary to ALREADy feel burnt out, to already feel like you’ve tried all the things to make money and your only option at this point is to keep doing what you’ve been doing even though it’s sucking the soul out of you.

So what do you do when you feel you’ve done it all?

Just keep going?

For many many people, this leads to extreme thoughts.

It leads to hopelessness that gets stimulation through thoughts of ending it all, suicide, disappearing into drugs or alcohol.

These thoughts can be even more shame inspiring.

Especially if you’ve had a relatively “good” life, at least HAVE a job, and you should be grateful every single day to be alive.

Though there may be truth to that, denying the misery around this daily experience does no-one any service.

Trying to bully yourself into gratitude when your body feels like it’s out of resources and death might be a possible release, is cruel and a waste of your limited resources.

So what do you do then?

What do you do when you’ve done better than your family has in some respects, or your job is relatively fruitful and helps you maintain your lifestyle when you dread Sunday because Monday is soon after.

What do you do when people depend on your paycheck? What do you do when you’ve built your whole world to depend on you devoting your time and attention, up 5+ days a week, to something you could not care less about or something that is taxing on your hope, your inspiration, creativity, and motivation to live?

Let’s begin.

First, take inventory…

ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴀ ʟᴏᴏᴋ ᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ ꜰᴀᴍɪʟɪᴇꜱ ʜɪꜱᴛᴏʀʏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴍᴏɴᴇʏ

As far back as you can go, try and see what the “story” was for your parents (or whoever raised you), their parents, their parent’s parents. What happened to them and their finances?

Did they always have money? If so, what was the story around why?

Maybe it was one grandparent’s hard work that made the family all its money and now the rest of the family is freeloading.

Maybe it was a communal effort in a family business that could have never happened without the loving support and unity of the family unit.

Maybe your grand-dads best friend stole all the family’s money and is still alive somewhere in a different country, living the dream with your family’s hard-earned wealth.

Maybe the women in your life have never worked and you were taught that women were made to be mothers.

Maybe you saw that women have to work and make their own money because men cannot be trusted.

Maybe you’ve seen that the man has to support the whole family no matter what and can never ask for help or show how scary having multiple people depend on you and your performance is.

There are thousands of stories…

There are thousands of beliefs that you are being raised with.

It might not be outright, maybe no one in your family sat you down and told you what to believe.

But you can bet your butt you were observing and ingesting their relationship to money, to wealth, to finances.

Just like you would observe and digest the beliefs your parents had about relationships, the opposite sex, each other, love, trust…this is what we do with money.

Without taking inventory and looking at the beliefs we may have picked up, we can unconsciously recreate and play out our family history emotionally and financially for eons.

ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ᴀ ʟɪꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴍᴏɴᴇʏ ᴏʀ ᴡᴇᴀʟᴛʜ.

Here’s a list of the most common things I hear around money…

You have to work hard to make money.

You can only be rich if you were born into it.

Women can’t make as much money as men.

Money and friends don’t mix.

Women are irresponsible with money.

Men are controlling or reckless with money.

Not having money means your a failure.

Money doesn’t grow on trees.

Save every penny.

You’re throwing away your money.

Save on everything.

Spend money to make money.

You can’t spend any money - save it all.

There isn’t enough money for self-care.

I sacrificed everything for my kids- or- my parents sacrificed everything for me.

Self-care is a waste of money.

Having a lot of money makes you greedy no matter who you are.

Money changes people.

LIfe is money.

Money is the only way to get what you want in life.

People will always use you if you have money.

People are always trying to steal from you or leech off of you- possibly including banks, businesses, friends, and family.

I am bad with money.

I am good with money.

I mean the list is endless… make your own list. Just look at what you believe around how hard you have to work to deserve money, look at how you think about your relationship with money, and see if there are any interesting correlations between your beliefs and your family’s financial history.

ᴛʜᴇɴ ꜰɪɴᴀʟʟʏ ʀᴇᴀʟɪᴢᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴍᴏɴᴇʏ ɪꜱ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇx ᴛʜᴀɴ ɪᴛ ʟᴏᴏᴋꜱ

It’s your relationship with how much your time is worth, your attention, your ideas, your self.

It’s your relationship with abundance, scarcity, freedom, and prison.

Your relationship to entitlement, to deservingness.

Your relationship to value.

You can’t magically become rich by changing some beliefs inside of yourself. No one will pay you for that.

But you might stop seeing things as impossible, your fault, or as failures, if you understand your beliefs around money and why they are there.

What you learned about money may not have been your fault, but it is 100% your responsibility to change it (if you want to).

Here’s an example of someone with an abundance belief vs. a scarcity belief.

A person who sees a failure as a successful lesson is much less likely to give up on the 5th or 6th job they’ve had that they hate and quit. That person will keep quitting until they find a job they can’t fucking imagine not doing because they love it so much.

A person who quit 6 times and believes it means a whole lot of garbage about the kind of person they are, or aren’t, will most likely not quit again and just try white knuckle through it to prove to themselves and others that they are not quitters. An unsustainable motivation in the long term.

One of these people gets MORE wealth by quitting. That person has GAINED value from something that is typically judged by society as a bad thing. They are functioning from an abundance belief that is naturally motivating because there isn’t a perception that something is “lost” by powerfully choosing to fail at something and move on to the next thing.

The other person is functioning from a scarcity mindset. “Well I failed at the other 5 jobs I’ve had, why would the next one be different?”. This person most likely believes all the good jobs are already taken. Or that they would need to have something they can’t have (education, money, free time) to be able to do something they love every day. This kind of thinking serves to keep you in a situation you hate by convincing you it’s better than nothing.

It’s a not enough-ness experience that bullies you into gratitude to keep you waking up every day and robotically producing what you believe you need to produce. This person is LOSING value from this experience. Being in it leaves them believing that this is the way things are and burns through their internal resources… which is a colossal waste of time.

All of the energy that you aim at yourself that is self-deprecating, that is of the flavors of not-good-enoughness, that is aimed at convincing you that YOU are the special one out there that can’t change your circumstances, is a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME AND ENERGY. This energy could be used to get you a new job, to change a lifestyle habit, to work on your mindset and beliefs, to do the work to figure out what it is you want in life, to mow the lawn, to spy on your neighbors…I don’t care what you do with it…but the point is, aiming this time and energy at yourself in the form of self-flagellation is a dumb habit to keep practicing. And one that will not change if you believe that habit is who you are vs. something you inherited, picked up from society at large, or decided you were after a few experiences you declared as failures.

Figure out the thing in the way of you pursuing what you want and then devote yourself to shifting it. No matter how long it takes.

Are you bad with money? But you want money? You don’t know how to get money?

Great, first let’s define what being “good” with money looks like to you.

THEN see what beliefs are in the way of you pursuing this goal. Figure out how those beliefs, no matter how f’d up, are serving you. Maybe if you don’t TRY and get money then you can never fail. FIND IT.

Then google how to overcome the fear of making money, or whatever it is you are struggling with and begin to search for free tools on the web you can try to shift this money mindset.

Find people who have at one point been where you are and changed their circumstances.

DO this so you can show your body and brain EVIDENCE of what is possible. Even if these people are celebrities and you only get access to their online story.

Get a coach, therapist, behavior analyst, whatever floats your boat, ask for help if you need it, to change this behavior, and be held accountable to what it is you want in life.

And GET STARTED!

One last thing,

I’m all for having a job that enables you to keep looking or doing what you love on the side.

Some situations are less extreme than what I describe above. Maybe you don’t mind the day to day job because your outside life brings you so much comfort and pleasure that THAT in itself is motivating your day to day at a job you don’t love. This can be quite a balanced life.

But if you’re living through a job you hate, with people you hate, if you are living in hatred every day, it will have an impact on your perception of everything. If you spend 8 of your waking hours a DAY baring your teeth just trying not to blow up at people- this is a state of being you are practicing that will inevitably bleed into your outside life, relationships, self-worth, and perception of what is possible in this life.

The good news is that this perception is wrong. You can change what you practice daily. You can change your beleifs. You do have power over your financial future. And it can start today.

If this resonated with you in anyway or you want to contribute to the subject, leave a comment or message me directly. I always I appreciate what you have to say as it helps me expand, learn, and connect.