Vedere Consulting

We all have a relationship with money. We either care for it, nurture it or we abuse it. Many of us are anxious about our finances. It’s a relationship we can’t escape—and it’s complicated, if not sometimes dysfunctional.

So what constitutes a healthy relationship with money? Interestingly, it’s not about having a lot. Research indicates that more money increases happiness when people move from poverty to the middle class, but falls off after that. Real satisfaction with money comes when we spend, save and acquire money in a way that is consistent with our deepest, most fundamental desires and values. It happens when we are able to be grateful for what we have, when we learn to be satisfied now rather than believing happiness will come when we move to a bigger house or buy the latest gadget. It comes from taking control of our finances instead of letting them control us.

This kind of satisfaction and gratitude is hard to sustain because our relationship with money is influenced by attitudes about money, our money “scripts,” that we have developed over many years. Money scripts are patterns of thought about money that are so habitual we are usually completely unaware of them. We develop our scripts from the way our parents dealt with money, cultural messages, and our own interpretations of events in our lives. One woman who always wore hand-me-downs is now determined to have “the best of everything.” A colleague whose parents taught him that being successful meant earning lots of money measures his success by how much money he makes. A woman learned from her parents that “the money will come when you need it,” used a credit card when she couldn’t afford something until she was in deep financial trouble. And all of us are bombarded by a culture that tells us every day that what we have and who we are is not enough.

The first step in developing a healthy relationship to money is to do some soul searching, to reflect deeply on what is most important to you. The second step is to identify the unconscious money scripts that create dysfunction in your relationship with money. The third step is to create healthier beliefs that will enable you to do the financial research and take grounded action that will move you toward a relationship with money that serves your deepest self. These three steps are vital because without them, your unconscious patterns will repeat themselves no matter how much planning you do.

Labels: A Healthy Relationship with Money

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.

A client of mine is, like many others, afraid at some basic level that he does not have enough to survive retirement. By “survive” I mean having enough money to get through the remaining years of one’s life without worrying that the money is going to run out.

If you knew my client, you’d be wondering why the concern. A successful executive at a mid-sized company and a wise investor, he has amassed a comfortable nest egg. My client knows this. Yet, at some visceral level, the he believes he has to fight for survival—that he still has to “make money” or it will run out.

This fear is deep. It isn’t limited to people thinking about retirement. It isn’t even really about money. Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, says we all, rich or poor, are suffering in our relationship to money—that no matter how much we have or don’t have, we worry that “we will never have or be able to keep enough of it.” She says our relationship to money is largely unexamined and unconscious.

Twist should know. As a fundraiser for The Hunger Project and other humanitarian organizations, Twist has gotten to know people with great fortunes and people who have virtually nothing. She tells us that this niggling fear, this unhealthy relationship with money, is surprisingly similar in both groups. So-called “rich” people worry just as much about getting and keeping money as “poor” ones do.

Twist says our relationship to money is based beliefs about money that aren’t really true. The biggest assumption of all is the “lie of scarcity.” The lie of scarcity tells us that “we live in a world where there’s not enough to go around and someone, somewhere is going to be left out.” We are forced to do what it takes to make sure we’re not left behind. We also believe that the more we have the better we are. The final belief—the one that leaves us paralyzed—is that even if we believe the lie is morally wrong, we think that this is just the way the world works and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The radical and surprising truth, according to Twist, is that while at one time the world did not produce enough, humanity has crossed “the most important threshold we will ever cross.” We are at a point in our history where, because we can do so much more with so much less, that we have enough for everyone everywhere to lead a healthy and productive life. It turns the win/lose proposition of the lie of scarcity into the win/win of enough. It is policy and our beliefs that create lack, not productive capability.

Where does this leave my client? You? Me? What can we do with such large issues, such pervasive beliefs? Twist says that if each of us can let go of trying to get what we don’t really need, it frees up “oceans of energy to make a difference with what you already have.” Twist invites us to connect our souls and our money, to treat our money as a means to live the values we most cherish. If we can appreciate what we already have, if we can see the wealth that is already ours, it increases our longing to share what we have in the way that is most meaningful to us. Seeing what we do have releases the fear of what we don’t have.

As I write this I realize how easily I’ve been slipping into the lie of scarcity. That I am forgetting all I have and worrying about where the next client is coming from or the next lucrative piece of work. I am realizing again how stressed out I feel and how overworked I get when I operate from this perspective. This is what the lie of scarcity does to us. Twist invites us to think and act differently--to pay attention to all we have. I believe thinking this way can set us all free.

Labels: A Healthy Relationship with Money

Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.