Lack of money/ lack of abundance in your life has everything to do with your sense of self-worth.
Anxiety about money is based on the misguided notion that love and fulfillment are on one end of human experience and money is on the other; that love and money are in opposition.
Morgana Rae of Charmed Life Coaching recounts a story of her own financial struggles in her professional coaching practice, in which she admits to feeling "embarrassed" about asking to be paid. She says on some level she didn't want people to think she didn't care about them.
Your Relationship with Money Is A Relationship The shift in her thinking came out of her experience as a relationship coach. She saw that many people who are having money issues are also having relationship issues, so she thought:
"Okay, let's approach this problem as if Money were a person...If Money were a person, who would he be?"
The Personification of Money Morgana realized that her personification of Money -- as an Archetype or Character -- basically boiled down to: A big, dirty, scary biker guy who caused fights at parties. The kind of person she would general hide from and avoid…
Money = Scary and Violent -- the way she felt about this Guy was the way she felt about money…
Her solution? First, she fired the Biker.
Then, she developed a personification of Money based on the kind of man she'd like to have as a partner or friend -- a tall, dark, handsome, romantic guy wearing tails and carrying a bouquet of flowers.
How would you respond to Money if he or she was a gorgeous person who was in love with you and wanted to give you a gift?
To address the self-sabotaging impulse to talk people out of hiring her, Morgana sat Money down and had a talk with him:
"What do you want from me now to make this relationship better?"
And Money said back to her "Stop treating me like a monster. Appreciate me. Honor me by asking the people who owe you money to pay you..."
When the Money goes down, it means he needs something from you… So, you need to start having Conversations with Money. You need to start asking Money questions.
How do I hear those answers? If you aren't getting the answers, you may not have developed a strong enough Money character.
Explore the Story about Your Relationship with Money:
- Who is the Old Money?
- Who is the New Money?
Keep developing this Character. Changing a relationship with Money comes alive with Imagination and Intuition.
*Note: Your concept of Money may be a woman - or an animal, or a mythological creature, or something else entirely. You've heard all the talk about "connecting with your inner child" - well, your creativity is the link to your divinity - here's a perfect place to be a kid again. (I think this would be a fascinating game to play with children.) This is YOUR creative concept. I'm using the masculine pronoun he throughout this article because like Morgana, I perceive the personification of money/abundance as a man. It's just an example to give you ideas -- the sky's the limit on who and what Money may be for you. The purpose of this exercise is to find out...
I don't hear anything yet… You're stuck in your Thinking Head, where the ego lives, and you're too busy trying to justify or rationalize this imaginary, intuitive relationship.
- Figure out what Money looks like, how he behaves, and how you act toward Money
- Talk to Money and see how Money responds
Negotiate with Money He tells you want he wants, and you offer what you'll do for him.
Money is the #1 excuse people give for not living their lives.
Money is just a stand-in for the Universe itself...
How do you get past the imaginary character and bring it into real-life? You don't.
Maintain the character; like any relationship, it's dynamic. You already know you don't tell your partner "I love you" once and then let it coast from there. How long would that marriage last?
The Challenges in your Relationship with Money will keep coming up. You become anxious, or you get that feeling in your gut, or sales go down, you find yourself slipping back into negative thinking.
The only power you have is to be a great relationship partner.
We're raised to achieve, be something special - but nobody tells you how to get there. We grow up without a roadmap. We're just told "Do more. Be better." But nobody tells us how that's supposed to play out.
When the Honeymoon is over... Morgana tells the story of how she thought she had her issues with money licked -- everything was going along great -- a month after she started this new relationship with Money, she was overflowing with clients… She was on Cloud 9…
But a year later, she found herself backsliding. The money flow wasn't happening, there were more clients going out than coming in -- Money was becoming absent.
So finally she said to Money "Okay, what's wrong? What have I done here to offend you?"
Morgana says she was pissed off -- she thought she had their issues worked out, and here were problems coming up again. She sat Money down again and said "We need to talk. Something's wrong...Money, I want to make this better. I want it to be great between us like it was, I want us to be close again. What's wrong? What can I do to show you that I want to make it better."
Money told her: "You've been carrying clients without being paid. You've been telling them 'Oh, no, it's okay, you can pay me later.' You've been putting it off -- putting ME off -- you've been telling them and yourself that Money doesn't Matter. I heard you. I took the hint. So I started pulling away…"
Then it hit her - she had been putting her clients and their projects first. She'd been spending all her time with them, and giving them all her attention. Giving them all her value and energy. And she wasn't asking for anything for Money. She was devaluing her relationship with Abundance, and caring more about other people's relationships with THEIR Money. She was actually coaching other people in how to have better relationships in their life, at the expense of her own.
It was unconscious. It's always easier to have the perspective to help others.
"Money is value. We keep it at a distance from ourselves and that just validates the message to ourselves that we aren't valuable."
This is a part of our culture.
Coming from a place of love, it changes the situation when you imagine someone you care about telling you "You're failing me. You're disrespecting me."
Because of Morgana's gesture of stepping into the power to say to her clients who owed her "I deserve this, you need to pay me" Money was so thrilled with her efforts, that he lavished a new wave of gifts on her.
"When you're busy giving away -- with attachments -- it doesn't feel like you're getting back because you're clutching so hard."
When you have an expectation -- which is an attachment to an intention -- you're limiting the entire experience to a Pass or Fail experience.
It's simply a confusion of jobs
- My Job
- The Universe's Job
Here's some homework Morgana gave to a salesman she was coaching: His job was not to sell a single thing, but just to be curious and care about the people he's talking to. The Universe's job is to make sure that the people who are right for what he's selling are going to buy.
She instructed her client to simply show up and be curious and caring.
Because we have agendas, nothing ever turns out like we want it to. Humanity has these fantasies about the way things are going to turn out, and yet we don't tell anybody about them, and then we're disappointed that they didn't do what we wanted them to.
Try putting out to the Universe by saying things like:
- "It would be nice if…"
- "I believe it's time for…"
Life is magic -- when you're trusting life, trusting the Universe, and trusting your integrity.
Seek Wisdom - Practice Love
Let me know what you discover from engaging in this exercise. What I realized about my ideas concerning abundance was truly an epiphany -- a turning point that I can only call life altering.
Source: This concept was developed by Morgana Rae of Charmed Life Coaching YourFinancialAlchemy.com