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Whether you realize it or not, you’re having a relationship with money. It’s like the relationship you are having with people. If you are not having money in your life then it is similar as if you are not having good people in your life. If you are having a healthy relationship with people, then they will accompany you. If this is not the case then they will keep a distance from you. The same is true with money, if you are not having a healthy relationship with money then it will keep a distance from you. The below excerpt is inspired by ‘You Are a Badass at Making Money’ by Jen Sincero
One of the best ways to find out how you truly feel about money is to write a letter to it as if it were a person. And if you write it with pen and paper it will be a unique experience altogether. I had personally felt that during one of the corporate training programs. When you write (instead of typing), a high level of concertation and related emotions flow from your mind & heart in the form of words in this letter.
Jen personally found this exercise remarkable and has heard from clients and readers that they too were having a similar experience when it came to the relationship with money.
Letters to Money
Here are some snippets of letters sent in by readers to Jen Sincero. By going through these letters, you will realize that you are not alone in your money madness:
#1 Dear money,
I feel confident and secure when you’re here, and I like to spend you when you’re around. I feel generous to others. But sometimes you leave without saying goodbye. You’re like a lover who comes and goes on a whim, and yet I always want you back. It makes me feel resentful and frustrated. I get so scared when you go because I’m afraid maybe you’ll never come back. It makes me feel bad about myself. Why can’t you just enjoy being together?
#2 Dear money,
I love you and respect you and try really hard to use you wisely, but I often feel like I let you down. Unless I work really hard I don’t feel I deserve to have more of you in my life. I know all the wonderful things that we can do together: enjoy amazing vacations, bless my family, give to charities I believe in, and yet I often don’t feel I deserve to have more of you in my life.
#3 Dear money,
I love you and I’m scared of you. It would be amazing to have more of you but I feel weird admitting that. Like it makes me a bad person somehow. I also don’t know what I would do if I made tons of you. I feel like I would just give it all away because I don’t know anything about investing so I’m probably blocking you from showing up so I don’t have to look stupid.
#4 Dear money,
I love having you around and I want to keep you safe so you can help me if an emergency comes up in my life. But I’m afraid if I have too much of you others may be resentful or my husband will try to take you from me. I don’t have an education or skill set that will pay me enough to have as much of you as I want.
#5 Dear money,
I really hate you. I hate that you have the ability to literally cause me physical pain when I look at bills. I hate that my stomach leaps into my throat whenever I look at my student loan balance. I hate that you have this much power over me. I actually would love to dedicate my life to helping people but I feel beholden to take jobs that I dislike so I can make more of you. I wish that I could have a clean slate with you. I want to come from a place of abundance and not one of fear, anger, and regret.
Most people have this type of push/pull relationship with money. They are spending their energy in blocking it but at the same time trying to welcome it.
Way Ahead
So, to know your relationship with money, just go ahead and write a letter to money. Try to complete this exercise in a single sitting & write all the feelings which you have with money. Keep away your consciousness while doing this exercise, so that all the beliefs held in your subconscious mind can be reflected in this letter.
With this, you will come to know all your self-limiting beliefs about money. And once you know these self-limiting beliefs, then you can reset them by taking corrective actions.
You might have heard the Monkey Trap story that’s used as a great metaphor for how we choose to hold on to our limiting beliefs about money. To capture a monkey, what people do is take a box, put a hole in it, stick a banana inside the box, leave it where the monkeys hang out, and wait. When a monkey comes along and sees the box, he reaches in and grabs the banana and gets trapped because his fistful of banana is too big to pull out through the hole in the box. If he wants to be free all he has to do is let go of that banana, and if he insists on holding on he will be trapped.
We choose to stay in our stories because we get what is called false benefits from them—we get to keep our identities as a broke person. We get to blame our brokeness on things outside ourselves (I don’t have time, I have four kids, the economy sucks, I can’t find a pen to write down my to-do list with).
To come out of these traps, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zones and risk failing, looking like an idiot, losing money, changing and becoming different from your family and friends—the list goes on and on and it all comes down to this:
“You have to want your dreams more than you want your drama.”
