As an entrepreneur with your share of
past money troubles, you’ve experienced the gamut
of financial states and the emotional roller-coaster
that accompanies them. Is this what inspired you to
write Build Your Money Muscles?
Yes. I wanted to help people understand the dynamics
behind their financial behavior, because prosperity
is really an inside job. You don’t have to be
a millionaire to be rich—wealth comes developing
a loving relationship with yourself and finding your
creative expression. Build Your Money Muscles is more
than a book on finances, it’s a pathway to prosperity
through personal growth.
What personal challenges and successes provided the
basis for Build Your Money Muscles?
As the child of a compulsive debtor, I learned early
that debting was just what people did. My dad sat me
on his knee and said, “If you need money, you
can borrow it from the bank,” but he never mentioned
that you have to pay it back! I went on to marry two
compulsive debtors, then I got very ill and had trouble
making money, which led to more debt and dependency
on my family for help. In the early 1980s, after my
family came to my rescue for the umpteenth time, I realized
I had to do something. So I joined Debtors Anonymous,
which helped me learn and grow from my financial experiences—the
beginning of a long path of financial and spiritual
lessons that I now share with my private clients, on
my Web site ProsperityPlace.com, and in Build Your Money
Muscles.
What do you mean by building money muscles?
Building money muscles starts with looking at how money
is a reflection of the person you choose to be in the
world. Money is a symbol of the energy of relationship,
and how you deal with money is a reflection of how you
relate to yourself and others. Your money isn’t
separate from you, it’s a part of you. So building
money muscles begins with improving your relationship
with yourself.
Your focus on money as a symbol of relationship is
really what differentiates Build Your Money Muscles
from other financial books, isn’t it?
Absolutely. Other books tell you how to make a million
dollars, but they don’t talk about how to build
the inner strength to handle that much wealth. They
say, “Spend less, save more,” but if it
were that easy we’d all be doing it.Build Your
Money Muscles asks, “What’s keeping you
from spending less and saving more?” You might
be able to save $4.00 a day by not buying a latté,
but what about that inner child that feels deprived
if you don’t have the latté? I look at
what it takes from an internal perspective, as well
as financial management skills, to change your relationship
with money. Once you have a loving relationship with
yourself, you can make a million dollars if you want
to. Changing your approach to yourself and your life
changes your finances.
What does it take from an internal perspective to change
your relationship with yourself so you can make more
money?
One of the main internal blocks people need to become
aware of is what I call the Identity Factor. This is
a crucial element that holds people back from advancing
financially—one I discovered the hard way when
I kept finding myself in dire straits over and over
again. The Identity Factor is an inner mechanism that
protects your concept of who you are and your place
in the world. This self-concept is the greatest block
to financial well-being. It puts up enormous resistance
to increased cash flow, decreased debt, and other financial
improvements because they might affect your status in
your family and community which in turn challenges your
identity. If you’re a $40,000-a-year laborer living
in a $40,000-a-year neighborhood and you suddenly acquire
$100,000, your neighbors aren’t going to relate
to you anymore.
Meaning that your identity will resist the influx of
more money so you can continue fitting in with the people
you’re used to?
Right. When your financial position changes, so does
your relationship with the world around you. Moving
up the ladder means people start treating you differently.
It’s hard to say to them, “I have a lot
of money and it makes me really uncomfortable.”
Your friends wonder why you don’t pick up the
check for lunch, and your family might tease you. These
new reactions from peers and family members can be scary,
because what people fear more than anything else is
being alone, and moving out of your accustomed financial
position could mean ultimately isolating yourself. So
seen through another lens, fear of running out of money
is really fear of running out of people.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. So
people really want other people more than they want
money?
Sure, money is representative of people. After all,
money doesn’t fly in the window by itself—it’s
always attached to someone. Money by itself has no energy;
it’s just a lump of metal or a sheet of paper.
It gains energy only when it’s used as a means
of exchange between people. When someone pays you, they’re
saying, “I acknowledge you, I appreciate you,
I support you,” and this exchange creates a relationship
between the people involved. Money problems are never
about money; they’re about our connections with
humanity. If you think, “I never have enough money,”
it really means “I never have enough people,”
or—more accurately—“I feel alone.”
This is a good point that isn’t
touched on by most financial books. If earning more
money can be isolating and being isolated is our greatest
fear, how can we get beyond that to become financially
successful?
Having the external support you want begins by
creating an internal environment of support by loving
yourself. I help people do that by addressing their
relationship with themselves in four main areas: thoughts,
beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. These four areas create
your reality—thoughts and beliefs stimulate an
emotion, which then instigates a behavior. When you
change one area, your whole reality changes. So when
you shift your relationship with yourself and start
treating yourself like someone you love, you’ll
draw in what you need to support yourself.
Please explain how thoughts and feelings lead to a
behavior that inhibits or fosters prosperity.
Suppose you see a sweater you really want that costs
$100, but you usually don’t spend more than $40
on a piece of clothing. You reach for your credit card
to pay for the sweater, and suddenly you get a gripping
feeling in your stomach, accompanied by a thought like,
“I’m a bad kid and I’m doing something
wrong, so I’m going to get punished.” You
might feel shame that you’re buying something
expensive you don’t really need.
But if you can’t afford the sweater, wouldn’t
that gripping feeling be a good thing?
I wouldn’t say it’s good or bad—it’s
just a signal telling you to develop a more loving relationship
with yourself. Next time you could ask yourself instead,
“Is it worth it to buy this and experience the
thoughts and feelings I’m going to have?”
If you find it is worth it, you would buy the item knowing
what you’re getting into. If it’s not worth
it, you might either feel proud of yourself for changing
a habitual thought pattern, or feel deprived for refusing
to allow yourself to buy something. Feeling deprived,
of course, isn’t really about not having things—you
aren’t deprived of sweaters!—but about not
having people’s love. So treat yourself like someone
you love, and you won’t need the sweater.
Are you saying that it’s mistaken to think, “If
only I had the sweater, I’d be happy,” and
that actually the opposite is true?
Of course, because if you are happy then you can have
whatever you want, or not have it and still be content.
For example, I have several clients with a net worth
of over $5 million, which to most of us is a dream come
true. But they’ll say, “If only I had $10
million, I could feel secure.” My job is to help
them see that feeling secure has very little to do with
how much money they have. In fact, financial advisers
often tell me that their wealthiest clients are the
most insecure because the more money they have, the
more they’re afraid to lose.
What about people who really do need more money? Won’t
being more solvent make them happy?
Not necessarily. Typically, expenses rise to meet income,
so a raise or inheritance doesn’t actually result
in having more money. If you have an extra $200 today,
what will you do with it? Most likely you’ll spend
it, because you’re comfortable with having a certain
amount of money relative to expenses—a habit that
keeps you having less than enough, just enough, or more
than enough. Most people need to get out of the less
than enough or just enough habit by establishing new
habits of financial management, and my goal is to help
them develop a more than enough habit.
So having more money can be achieved simply by changing
habits?
Basically, but changing habits isn’t easy. Because
a financial position is habitual—just like the
clothes you wear, the foods you eat, and where you put
your toothbrush—changing it means going through
an adaptation period. I call this time the “moving
stupids” because it’s like what happens
when you move to a new house. You’re in an unfamiliar
place, you don’t know how to behave, you can’t
find your keys, and you make stupid decisions. People
get the moving stupids when they have more money. They
might dream about what they want to buy, but they don’t
face the reality of what happens when wealth comes to
them.
How might improving our relationship with money help
others prosper?
When you take care of your money—which means you’re
taking care of yourself—you become more peaceful,
less stressed, and more able and willing to reach out
generously to others. Build Your Money Muscles presents
an integrated approach to personal financial health
as a catalyst to collective well-being. The objective
is not to make tons of money, but to love yourself more
and deepen your relationships with yourself and others—all
of which contribute to a better world. On a practical
level, I encourage people to get a prosperity buddy
to share with, and eventually I’d like to see
people starting prosperity circles like the one I hold
regularly in Santa Fe. This sharing builds community,
and when people feel connected, money flows easier to
everyone.
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