For the Love of Money
All the money coaches and manifestation gurus will tell you it’s vital to cultivate a positive mindset and be aware of your core beliefs about wealth and prosperity. This is, of course, good advice, but sometimes hard to pull off.
There are many ways we humans get twisted up around money—we even talk ourselves into problems—or at the very least reinforce them. “I’m bad with money,” we might say. And then there’s the unconscious messages that run through our minds such as the common, “Money only causes problems,” or “Money is the root of all evil.”
Some people say that it’s not actually the money we seek, but the fill-in-the-blank feeling, that money provides. Something to consider because those feelings are important and may impact our mental health. This perspective also helps us make peace with our desires and wants—which can allow us to weave new stories about our worthiness (check out Brené Brown’s large body of work for more on this topic).
What else happens when our emotions about money get out of whack? There are some typical pitfalls. First, general financial anxiety can be quite pervasive. It’s usually seated in a feeling of lack of control. Focusing on what is within your sphere of influence and taking positive action might help (e.g., creating a budget, consulting with a professional).
Another frequent struggle is compulsive shopping. This type of impulse buying can stem from feelings of scarcity, but other times from a sense of boredom or even depression. As a wise friend once joked to me, “I like what I bought in my retail therapy session, but it didn’t actually help me feel better.” Often the satisfaction we get from spontaneous purchases is fleeting (though some experts suggest that small mood-boosting splurges are fine).
Speaking of spending habits, I have spent the last 11 months conducting an experiment—a “buy nothing year”—to explore some of my own “stuff” around money. I wanted to know if I was buying things I didn’t need. Indeed, I was. Was I making deliberate, conscious choices about my spending? Not so much. However, I did learn to temper my desire to spend frivolously. True confession: I hadn’t gotten two months into it before I bought a wool dress so I could do a wear it for 100 days challenge. I went from the frying pan into the fire!
This second experiment was also, technically, a failure (as I only lasted 50 days in the dress). But it unearthed some interesting money beliefs and hurts in the process. I discovered some underlying worry about how others perceive me—what would people think when I showed up in the same dress for the fifth time? Having been raised working-class, this touched a deep sense of not belonging. But what a gift to discover I had been carrying that junk around, because you can’t heal what you don’t see.
To close I’ll quote Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money. She said, “What you appreciate, appreciates.” This simple statement hacks your “monkey mind” and brings you back to gratitude, which might be our greatest source of abundance—and maybe even the key to happiness, which we all already know, money can’t buy.
