Telling Your Money Story

by Sherri Richards

When I left the corporate world 13 years ago to venture into the world of entrepreneurship and opened my consulting company, I had no idea that my mixed up and very dysfunctional money beliefs would show up so big and bold. After all, I have a master’s degree in Finance. I know this stuff. HA!

It was easy to know what my salary and benefits should be in the corporate world. Where I worked, there were always salary systems to say this job pays in the range of this much. It was relatively unemotional, (except at review time when raises and bonuses were discussed). I generally knew what to expect. When I left that world to venture out on my own, I found thant money was a ticking time bomb. The truth was the hot mess had always been there; the steady paycheck had just kept the wolves at bay.

In our society, almost 60% of us have less than $1000 in savings, leaving us one small disaster away from a financial crisis. The number one cause of divorce is related to conflicts around money. It’s not just the fighting, it’s also the lying, (often to ourselves), passiveaggressive behavior, and associated guilt and shame that gets us. This is even before we get to the actual mechanics of working with our money, i.e. paying bills and investing. I can say that I have lived this experience myself. It was not pretty.

While money is a complicated topic, it doesn’t have to be. In many ways, it is no different than any other subject that we choose to learn. The uniqueness is that from our youth we developed so many underlying beliefs that we are not aware of. These have a significant influence on how we behave with our money. One example of this is, “It’s not polite to talk about money”. Seriously, if you were at a dinner party, and the guest next to you turned to you and asked you how much money you made, you would look at them and gasp at their rudeness! In my experience, after working with hundreds of clients, most people just don’t want to know. They say things like, “I am not good with numbers”. Therein lies the problem. When we don’t know, we make up stories. These stories often lead to anxiety, worry, and living from a place of reacting vs. creating the money story and life we want to live.

My journey into first understanding my current money story, then creating a new one, started when I had to establish pricing for my new consulting service. I literally froze when someone asked me my rates! What the heck was going on? I went in search of understanding this new fear and found Barbara Stanny, (now Barbara Huson). Barbara has an amazing story and an enlightening course on, Overcoming Underearning. I immediately signed up, to not only take it, but be trained to teach it. One of the first things I learned was that money is simply a metaphor for our personal power. In fact, after reading dozens of money books, including The Secret Language of Money, by David Krueger, M.D, NeuroWisdom; The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness and Success, by Mark Robert Waldman & Chris Manning, Ph.D.; and Money, A Love Story, by Kate Northrup, I found they all started with the same focus on creating awareness around your money beliefs, and money mindfulness. When I was in college and learning about finance from textbooks, there was never any discussion about neuroscience, emotions, or subconscious beliefs. It was all numbers and ratios. This was a huge AHHA moment for me, and the hundreds of people who went through my Overcoming Underearning workshops.

One of the most illuminating exercises from Barbara’s Overcoming Underearning course, was called Digging Down to the Roots. In this exercise, you may see where some of your underlying limiting beliefs might come from. Complete the sentences below with the first words that pop into your mind. This is a great thing to do with your partner. Take the quiz separately, then compare notes. 1. My biggest fear about money is ________________________________________. 2. My father felt money was ________________________________________. 3. My mother felt money was ________________________________________. 4. In my family, money caused ________________________________________. 5. My early experience with money was ________________________________________. 6. Money equals ________________________________________. 7. I’m afraid if I had more money, I would ________________________________________. 8. In order to have more money I need to ________________________________________. 9. When I have money, I usually ________________________________________. 10. If I could afford it, I would ________________________________________. 11. People with money are ________________________________________. 12. I’d have more money if ________________________________________.

What did you learn? How did your early experiences effect you? What would you like to change?

Remember you won’t earn more if your belief is that money equals conflict, or people with money are greedy. A number of my clients uncovered the belief that if they had more money, they would blow it. This held them back from earning more, and once they became aware of this limitation, they consciously changed their belief to, “If I had more money I would invest it wisely”. This created a big difference in their earnings.

In The Art of Money, by Bari Tessler, she says, “Deep money work isn’t magic, it’s conscious transformation: tiny step after tiny step, day by day, breath by breath.”

We always start where we are, and that’s OK.