Whether you have plenty of cash or just barely scrape by every month, your current financial situation points directly to your attitude about moolah. Few of us understand how the monetary system works, how the economy operates, and how our beliefs about the combination of the two affect every choice we make in life. This lack of information and clarity is the breeding ground for our strongest fears about threats to our very survival.
Most people have a love-hate relationship with money. We love the rush of excitement we feel when we buy new things. We’re downright giddy when we get our tax refund or a bonus at work.
We envy the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We dream of winning the lottery. And it warms our hearts to give money to a charity that provides assistance to our community.
But at the same time, we abhor money’s power to seduce and destroy. We fear we’re in danger of being lured by the siren song of the almighty dollar—becoming obsessed with it, losing our family and friends, and ending up lonely, bitter and selfish.
Love of money is the root of all evil, religions exhort. The fear of morphing into Ebenezer Scrooge or Bernie Madoff drives us toward the poverty end of the financial spectrum.
Which end of the money scale you’re on today can also reflect your level of self-confidence as viewed through the lens of monetary worth. Weak self-esteem will spawn the belief that you don’t deserve abundance and that you don’t have any skills that someone would pay you a hefty salary for.
But strong self-esteem uses a completely different lens. A confident person believes they can create financial abundance as an act of self-love and to help others. They embrace the power of abundance as their own, and use this unlimited resource to create a balanced, fulfilling life.
They also think that everyone has the potential to create their prosperity. They’re confident that they can create as much money as they need, and they support others in claiming their financial power.
Get Your Fix
You may think that money can ruin lives, but that’s not completely true. Yes, cash has a lot of power in our society, but it’s up to each of us to manage our relationship with it and define the purpose of it.
And like food, money is often used inappropriately—to fill an emotional vacuum. You can turn to shopping and spending as emotional experiences to try to fill the emptiness inside. Indeed, hoarding has reached near epidemic proportions in this country.
Easy access to cheap products feeds the need: having more stuff means I can feel better about myself. My stuff is an extension of me. So if there’s more of me, I’m more important. More is better. The opposite, having no stuff, means I don’t exist; I don’t matter.
But after the buzz comes the bill. To put it in physical terms, you’ll become “overweight” with debt when you exceed the limit of financial “calories” your fiscal “body” can “digest” each month, thus you’ll “gain” debt.
And when you exhaust your financial resources, no longer able to spend money to lift your mood, you’ll find yourself financially “ill”. Declaring bankruptcy can feels similar to liposuction. Make the fat go away fast.
So, like physical health issues, our financial health improves when we stop using money as an emotional fix.
Consider this: money is a neutral form of energy that can be used either to destroy or create. Ultimately, you define what money means to you, then choose what you’ll do with your money and how you feel about it.
When aligned with your values, money becomes one of many tools you use to create the life and lifestyle you want.
Abundance Abounds
True wealth isn’t a stock portfolio. It’s an emotion—the feeling of being completely free to enjoy life on your terms. Irrespective of your assets. Financial considerations are part of, but don’t necessarily weigh heavily in your lifestyle choices.
And abundance isn’t a bank balance. It’s an attitude.
Abundance is personal and subjective. You define what prosperity means to you, and what it looks like when you have it. When you’re prosperous, you have enough that you don’t feel pinched, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed, like you’re suffocating in stuff.
Prosperity evolves with your life, always reflecting what you value most. I feel more abundant and free now than I did five years ago, when I had four times more possessions and two more zeros on the end of my savings account balance.
As in all facets of life, abundance is an ongoing balance you strike between various forms of freedom and restriction: comfort and lack, simplicity and excess, stability and uncertainty, flow and hindrance, ease and effort.
In a sense, you’re Goldilocks: searching for the chair that feels “just right.”
Your abundance can take nearly any form. Prosperity is about appreciating things you have that you give importance to. So...you have an abundance of what, exactly? Anything that’s precious to you.
Right now, you could be enjoying an abundance of love, laughter, joy, freedom, inner peace, health, friends, pets, ideas, support, spaciousness, bath salts, drill bits, potato chips or paper clips. The possibilities are as endless as your desires.
But there’s no deferred gratification here! The point is to fully appreciate the abundance you have today by expanding your notion of prosperity beyond dollar signs.
Financially Free At Last
Similar to the freedom you can find in all of the other aspects of your life, pursuing your truth will inevitably lead you to financial freedom. When you feel powerful with money, you give yourself the space to create the path to feeling fiscally free in this and every moment.
You see, while getting out of debt is one experience of financial freedom, you don’t have to wait until you’re debt free to feel free. The key is to claim your financial power now, then choose only thoughts and actions that align with being financially free.
Even before you have made one more payment or one more financial decision, you’ll have shifted your whole perspective. And the difference is huge.
This simple shift will change the power dynamic between money and you.
The power of money is now yours to wield as you see fit. You’re no longer stuck in a money pit. You’re in charge of the trail you’ll blaze to your fiscal freedom.
From here, every action you take is an act of a free, powerful person who is headed toward what they want. To me, financial freedom is the level of prosperity that George Bernard Shaw meant when he wrote: Money is worth nothing to someone who has more than enough.
So open up your wallet and dump out the limitations on your prosperity. Then stuff a bunch of abundance in your wallet and you can laugh all the way to the bank.
Give Up The Chase
Self-help gurus will advise you to begin the financial planning process by setting specific goals about how much money you want to earn and how much you want to have in the bank.
But chasing arbitrary numbers is meaningless and ultimately less motivating than focusing on what you want that money to buy, and why you want it.
For example, if money represents a home, traveling, or taking 6 months off, ask yourself why you want the house, the trip or the sabbatical. Are you after freedom, security, adventure, excitement, or something else?
Whatever your why****, passion will follow. You’ll immediately feel a shift. Before you lift a finger to act on your desire, you’ll feel more open, more engaged, more motivated.
Igniting your passion ups the ante—you want it even more. So naturally, you’ll start thinking about how you can get it. But do you immediately fall into the trap of thinking that a lack of funds is an obstacle to attaining your desires?
On the contrary, paying full price isn’t the only way to get what you want. This is where you can get the greatest leverage on the power of your passion.
Focusing on your passion automatically triggers your intelligence and creativity—two tools you can use to create anything you desire.
Instead of chasing money, you can generate the means to attain anything you desire by shifting your focus to creating and delivering value. You provide value to others through your creative self-expression, and there are infinite ways you can create.
So open up a can of cream of creativity soup and pour yourself a bowl of...whatever you desire.