This is something you can change. Something you must change if you want to improve your quality of life.
Money is everything and nothing at the same time. But let’s not get too abstract here.
The simple truth, one that if you have some common sense you can’t deny, is that money is a resource. A neutral one. A resource that, depending on how much you have and how well you can manage it, will give you a good quality of life.
And, from what I see, the majority of people know very little about money.
What’s worse, they are desperately afraid of it. In a way that money is almost perceived as devil energy, a common enemy. As a thing that controls us and impedes us from reaching what we need or desire.
This fear, instead of being faced and tackled, causes us to come up with different stories and meanings that separate us from the truth, like the story about one of my clients.
Let me tell you a little horror story that will completely change your views about money.
I once talked with a client about the always-taboo money topic. It just came up in the conversation. It was just a very subtle comment that he made. Something along the lines of ‘money is bad’, ‘if we could only go back to exchanging goods like before money existed’, ‘money causes a lot of problems’, etc.
He started rambling about it for a while, so I let him present his case.
And then I started digging.
I love digging and excavating; it is one of my favourite activities when I work with a client.
You think something is a certain way, you dig a little bit and discover a whole lot of different information and gems you didn’t even know existed. Both to my surprise and the client’s.
So, I said to him I was surprised how negative his opinion of money was. I wondered why. I started asking about how money was growing up for him and his family, how things were economically in the household, etc.
And then, all of a sudden, he told me about how his mother used to take him and his three brothers when they were little for a walk around the neighbourhood. This walk consisted of the mother forcing the children to look for spare pennies on the floor.
They needed to collect a certain amount of pennies because they didn’t have enough money to buy food for dinner that day.
Imagine a little boy, no older than nine, with his even younger siblings, walking the streets, looking for spare pennies on the ground, just to have something to eat that day.
This was something they did quite often. So, quite often, the family ran out of money for food.
This is something he remembered with a lot of distress. No wonder.
So I asked some more, and basically, the parents spent their money on other things (no need to get into details here), certainly not as important as food for the household.
Now, who is to blame for this? The money? Or a set of parents that didn’t know how to manage the money, let alone raise their children safely?
Of course, as an adult, you can look back and face the facts, so you understand that your parents didn’t do a good job with your upbringing (doing this could cause a lot of pain, so a lot of people try to avoid it), or try to find another thing to put the blame on, in this case, the money.
Money was for him the reason they needed to be walking the streets instead of being at home playing or finishing homework like other kids would do.
Money was the reason they couldn’t buy food from the shop.
Money made his mother and siblings anxious and tired.
Money…
The list goes on.
In fairness, I didn’t need to do much digging this time. But it was still heartbreaking.
***Big disclaimer for literal people: for confidentiality reasons, I changed a few details of this client’s story, but the main points remain the same.
How you think about money will determine your relationship with it.
Your experiences revolving around money, even if money isn’t the lead character, will determine your relationship with it.
Whether you are afraid of money, whether you feel oppressed by it, or on the other hand, whether you happily manage it or see it as a neutral resource for exchanging goods.
How you feel about money is a knowledge that you learned, that you were taught.
In my experience, this is something completely cultural, but not exclusively. It will depend on the culture your home country has, but especially, the differentiating point will be what your family (whoever brought you up) taught you about money. Like the story you just read.
This includes: what money is, its use, and most importantly, how to manage it.
You are not a victim of it; you are in control. You can either increase it, decrease it, or keep it in balance.
So, my question is:
Are you going to stop putting the blame on money or are you going to learn how to manage it?
Love,
Noemi
