Unpacking Your Relationship with Money

How do you feel about money?

To some, this may sound like a weird question.

But for most, it brings up a range of emotions: frustration, anger, fear, sadness, shame, hopelessness and the list goes on.

And it's no wonder. Money is heavily tied to our survival. It's how we pay for our housing, buy food, clothes, etc.

Yet we have a lot of stories, programming, and conditioning around money. If you think about how our subconscious minds were like sponges up until the age of 7 or 8, creating many of our belief systems, that means that everything we heard about money from our primary caregivers can still impact us today and we may not even be aware of it.

To take that a step further, our subconscious is actually in the driver's seat of our lives most of the time. 90% of the time we are running in autopilot from these same beliefs that were created before 7.

And this is why taking the time to look at your beliefs and stories about money is one of the first steps to changing your relationship with money.

Awareness is always the first step.

So how do you start becoming aware of your money story? Below are 4 steps.

But first, I want to encourage you to take money deep breaths, shake your hands, get outside in nature, or listen to calming music before, during, and after you do these exercises.

1. Journal or reflect on how you feel about money. How was money managed in your home as a child? Was it an obvious source of stress? Was it an open conversation or was it hidden?
2. Write down the beliefs - the thoughts and words that you underlie your feelings. It may be things like, "I can't afford that", "I have to work hard if I want to make more money", "rich people are greedy", etc.
3. Start to unpack them. Are they true? What is the evidence that those are true? Can you find evidence that they aren't true? This step can take a while - give yourself time and space to find evidence that goes against your beliefs.

For example, my parents worked ALL of the time when I was a kid. I think that they took 3 or 4 days off A YEAR, worked 12-16 hour days, 7 days a week, and still didn't make a lot of money. But they always said, "you have to work hard for money". I grew up believing that. What's interesting is that they worked incredibly hard but we were still lower working class. So as I got older, I worked 2-4 jobs at a time, hardly taking days off, not knowing how to rest, and still just making ends meet. Even the belief that "you have to work hard for money" was still untrue because my parents worked extremely hard and still didn't have money.

It wasn't until I started to look at my relationship and stories with money did I realize that I was burning myself out just to scrape by. I had to make a conscious effort to find people who work smarter, not harder, who understand the value in rest, and learn from them.

4. Write new stories and beliefs and start asking yourself better questions. Now that you have found evidence that goes against what you have believed for probably most of your life, you get to rewrite those stories. This takes time, energy, and commitment. But as you keep practicing new beliefs, asking yourself better questions - like when the thought comes up that you can't afford something - ask yourself HOW you could afford it? Or when you find yourself saying that you should be working instead of going out for lunch with a friend, ask yourself if that's true. Is one more valuable than the other? Your brain is always looking to answer questions, so when we ask ourselves more empowering questions instead of running from autopilot, we can start to find new answers.

There is sooo much I can say on this topic. And I will in future posts.

But for now, become aware of and then start to question your current money beliefs.

I desire for you to have more ease with money.

What came up for you? What beliefs did you notice that you may not have been aware of? Share them in the comments or DM me.