What are the untruths we tell ourselves about money that stop us in our tracks. Money or your life reveals the 6 unconscious lies we tell about money.
Once upon a time
In my 30s I enjoyed a 6-figure salary and a life of relative luxury. I also worked 12-hour days, 5 ½ days a week for it. As a small business we made healthy profits but I felt increasingly out of integrity because the creative talent of the team was contributing to corporate avarice. It didn’t sit well with me.
Then the 1990 recession hit. Our bank panicked and demanded their £100,000 loan back (worth £230,000 then). We’d already invested in the business. I took the call from the Bank Manager. I can still recall the hollow feeling in my stomach as he delivered his piece and the implications sank in.
The marketing consultancy my partner and I had worked hard to create was forced to reduce the 20-person team immediately. Sell off the flotilla of company cars. Reduce the office space by a half and haggle over the lease. Cut expenditure down to the bone. Freeze all pensions. It didn’t seem possible.
I’m sharing this story in case it’s relevant to anyone who is going through hard times under the reign of Covid. It’s also food for thought for those who aren’t. Because what we have in common is the choices we make about our responses to life.
Change my life forever
When I reflect back on 1990, not only did we meet the devilishly difficult requirements imposed on us by the bank but also it made not a dent to our well-being. In fact, once we’d accepted what we needed to do and got onto it two remarkable things occurred.
First, a buyer for the business appeared out of the blue, which allowed us to pay off the bank loan. Secondly, it was liberating for me to be free to consider my real needs. It took me two years because I didn’t have the intuitive vision board process to draw on then for clarity.
The outcome was I retrained in Feng Shui and I’ve been a consultant ever since. It also became clear I wanted to start a family, which couldn’t happen while I was running a business that depended upon me. Yet, if I’d delayed any longer, I would have missed out on the opportunity to become pregnant.
What had initially appeared to be a disaster in 1990 changed the course of my life forever. And I have never looked back.
That’s why it saddens me when I encounter people who want to make life changes for the better but talk themselves out of it. Not only might they be more fulfilled if they did but also the world would be a better place as a result. I’ve been pondering why this happens so often and I believe money is the culprit.
What did Covid teach us about our attitude to money?
At the start of lockdown, when we were the most restricted and some furloughed or bereft of work, many of us got on with projects that we’d wanted to do for a long time.
We started to grow vegetables rather than becoming one.
We turned out the garage and discovered a car buried under the rubble.
We decorated the lounge that had the same décor as when we’d moved in.
We remembered how delightful it was not to be in a rush always and have time to take a walk with the family and speak with friends in a leisurely way.
These pursuits enhanced the quality of our lives yet required only a small financial outlay, if any. Time was the precious commodity.
As the first lockdown eased we returned to a near normal. We were also in danger of reverting to old patterns of behaviour unless we heeded the lessons learned. Some did – moved house, changed jobs and their new normal emerged. For the rest of us, while broad scale uncertainty continues the cage door is still open. We can take advantage of the current Covid hibernation to plan our next moves rather than fall prey to circumstance.
The choices we make
The choice of how to prioritise where we live, work, play, spend money and show up as parents and friends lies in our hands. But it’s useful to be aware of how much our decision-making process is ruled by money considerations. Money is an enabler for sure. But it’s not the only enabler available to us without which nothing would happen. In believing it is we miss out on all the ways we receive what we need because we fail to notice.
When our over-arching goal is to attain the highest income believing this to be the only way to meet our needs, our head is in charge and our thinking blinkered. The rational mind does not see the bigger picture nor recognise that wealth, abundance and success can be measured by other criteria besides money. It matters not that the heart knows this already and the pursuit of money for the sake of it can lead to exhaustion, burnout and depression. And a meaningless existence.
My friend Peter Koenig is a trailblazer when it comes to unearthing our attitude to money and the psychological projections we place on it (read “30 Lies About Money”). How much or how little we have he says is never simply about money. Whatever money represents to us has become the substitute for the real needs we’re trying to fulfil by having more of it. We’re chasing an illusion and not the real thing. We can only fulfil our real and often unconscious needs – for love, freedom, purpose, self-esteem, romance, stability, independence, status, glamour and power – by addressing them directly.
6 unconscious lies about money
How money has become a surrogate for our real needs and robs us of our life.
1. Money gives us personal power.
Or so we believe. Yet we only have to look at someone like Donald Trump to recognise this doesn’t ring true. Trump’s personal power is predicated on his having loads of money. It has become the substitute for Trump and if it were to disappear the man would too.
Rosa Parks, a black woman, had very little money when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus. She changed the course of history in doing so and initiated the civil rights movement. Her personal power came from within and was expressed through her actions.
2. Money equates to value.
The more we have the more significant we are – and the reverse is true we believe. Yet there are many good examples of those who achieve worldly success and make an enormous contribution without the need for the money. Mother Theresa and Gandhi spring to mind.
Contrary to ifocusing our working efforts to produce a juicy pension as the best platform for a contented old age perhaps we would do better to invest in our health and keeping fit, hobbies and relationships that sustain us from the inside out. These investments are more difficult to recover once they have slipped away while we were busy pursuing money for the sake of it.
“People know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
3. Money makes for a better life.
Can we absolutely know this to be true? Do we know for example that the American couple who have spent 16 days in Claridge’s over Christmas for the past 40 years at £5,500 a night (Daily Mail) have had a better Christmas than those at home snuggled up on the sofa by the fire with the family and the dog.
Economists and psychologists now agree the correlation between having lots of money and happiness is tenuous. At the other end of the spectrum, being free of the worry of living from pay check to pay check with all its associated stresses, doesn’t make for happiness either. Even so, some of the most financially successful people in the world are the most miserable.
4. Money gives us freedom.
Really? We do not need money to behave as an autonomous human being. It’s a choice we make daily – to be or not to be. We only require money to buy freedom when we’ve bought in entirely to the Western model of success. If being able to do what we want or purchase anything we want when we want it equates to freedom, then we need plenty of money for sure.
But is purchasing power the ultimate point of life? To experience true freedom requires that we first regain our independent spirit. If we’ve squandered this authority over our lives by cossetting ourselves in a safe and secure financial blanket, no accumulation of money will enable us to recover it; we must look within to discover where our autonomy lies and to follow our own star.
5. Money defines our status.
Many will never experience what living on less looks like. We believe we can’t survive without a fat salary (or two) until the time when money is stripped from us and this proves to be untrue. Some will have experienced this already during the pandemic and there will be more to come. Once over the initial shock look out for the silver lining. It won’t be evident immediately. The quicker we face the adversity as presented, the sooner the way forward will become clear – and the gift in waiting.
Others among us may already have embraced the learnings from Covid round one to increase our happiness quotient and natural immunity We have switched to work that generates less money but affords us more meaning and purpose. We have relocated to a place where we can belong to a community rather than inhabit a commuter belt where everyone is on the move. We are making time for the people and activities we love as a priority. For the rest of us, we have a second opportunity now.
6. Money puts us in control.
Only if we allow it. For sure an employer can demand their employees comply by their rules to retain the job. But it’s our choice whether to work for a company we don’t respect and whose values run contrary to our integrity. To know that we’re not producing anything of real worth in a working day, or to produce something that causes more harm than good, is soul-destroying.
Consider what we might do with our time or what enterprise we might create if the drive to generate the most money wasn’t our primary goal. Might we feel better about ourselves and life in general if we were contributing to an organisation that pursued a larger purpose and produced something of value to humanity?
7. Money and profit rule.
To be employed by a company with a profit-making orientation secures the short-term survival of the corporate and is a good place to work if that’s our agenda too. The profit-driven business will certainly grow faster than the alternatives but grind to halt when, like coal, it will eventually run out unless mining isn’t moderated.
The purpose-based business evolves slower and more organically, but like the sun is fuelled by renewable energy. In a healthy economy and society we need both types of business – and make room for charitable and social enterprises too. By leaning too heavily into profit-driven we create imbalance and encourage short cuts, a slash and burn mentality, and unethical behaviour in the drive to be the one who gets there first. Ultimately we as individuals demonstrate our contribution to the world by the work we choose – profit-driven or purpose-based.
Compromises
When we gear our working lives exclusively towards acquiring assets and protecting them from loss, we are not living in the moment nor while we are young and most able. This safe and secure mentality can solidify into an unconscious habit. Working for an anticipated future that may never come, limits our freedom of choice and binds us to a huge treadmill.
Millennials and Gen Z have are already rejected the current paradigm and some assumed a more mature, wiser approach (Greta Thunberg). Besides easy material advancement is not available to them to the same degree as it was to previous generations that raped the world in the process.
According to Peter, the expert in these matters, we must make a conscious choice to be profit-driven or purpose-based? One is driven by money and the other by autonomy. When we compromise our inner flame by trying to do both we dilute our focus, while sitting on the fence is uncomfortable and gets us nowhere.
Do what you love and you’ll get what you need
If we fixate on the view that growth, fulfilment and survival depends on money will blind us to everything else we receive. If what we do has value to the whole then our purpose-based contribution will thrive in ways that can’t be measured by money alone.
Peter’s reframing of the old adage has been helpful to me at times when I doubted myself and my purpose-based business when it was unable to deliver the profits I’d generated in my early career. “Do what you love and the money will follow” becomes “Do what you love and you’ll get what you need”.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this and can make a more conscious choice – Money or your life.
To gain more clarity about what an autonomous life would look like for you and then set about creating it, please ask about my programme – Making Life Changes.
Mary Nondé has pioneered the intuitive vision board since 201O. She is the author of ‘Awaken Your Intuitive Vision – unlocking possibilities you never knew existed AVAILABLE ON AMAZON or from your local bookstore. Mary’s formula works well for procrastinators or people have hit the wall and are wondering what to do next. The IVB can help to get you moving again by envisioning possibilities you never knew existed.