9 Steps To Financial Freedom - Step 2

 

FACING YOUR FEARS AND CREATING NEW TRUTHS

IN OUR CULTURE it’s okay to talk about therapy we’ve gone through, marital

problems we’ve had, our deepest intimate secrets—but telling the truth about money, confessing our worries to our children, our parents, our friends, just isn’t done. Money is our secret both in private and in public. Imagine going to a dinner party and telling a group of close acquaintances, “I just don’t know what to do. My credit card debt has gone up to $17,000, and I don’t know how I’ll ever get out of it.” The room would fall into embarrassed silence. (Most silent of all would be the others in the room weighed down by the secret of their own credit card debt.)

In the most profound sense our money says nothing about us, about whether we’re kind, generous of spirit, living our lives well. Yet we need money to live, as surely as we need air to breathe, and this need cuts across all races, both sexes, all income brackets.

Almost all of us have, at some level, fears or anxieties about money— but we rarely admit them to those around us. We may not admit them to ourselves. But because they are holding us back, preventing us from taking control of our financial lives, looking these fears in the eye is an essential step toward freedom. This chapter will show you not just how to confront your fears, but how to replace them with new, positive truth for yourself. Remember the goals you set for yourself when we began? You’ll be surprised at how taking this step will free your mind and give you strength to take other action toward those goals.

The Time For Money

Don’t you find it strange that you can raise a family, hold down a job, fix things that are broken, and deal with everything that comes up in your life—except your money? I used to hear it from clients every single day: “I’m too busy at work to deal with my money. I just don’t have the time.” How is it possible that we’re all too busy working so hard to earn our money to be able to deal with the money we’re working so hard to earn? The answer is that it’s not possible. There’s plenty of time for work, barbecues, bike rides, reading books (even books about money), seeing friends, talking on the phone, hanging out on the Internet, knitting, golfing, playing baseball, watching TV … time isn’t  the problem. What prevents you from dealing with your money is not lack of time, but your fear of money.

We saw in the last chapter how powerful our memories of money from

childhood are, even today. In this step we will hold these memories up against our fears. Then we will replace the grooves in our brains that our fears have created with strong new messages to ourselves about what we will achieve with our money, beginning now. The sooner you deal with your fears, the more money you will be able to create. With money, when you heal your heart, you help your pocketbook

Fears: The Weeds In Your Financial Garden

The trouble with fears is that when we keep them inside and refuse to deal with them, they grow, like weeds left alone in a garden. Take the fear of not having enough to cover the bills this month and let it wander around by itself, unchecked. Where will it go? It will become the fear of not having enough in general. Stretch that fear out, and what do you have? The fear of having nothing, of somehow losing everything. Take that fear one step further, and there’s the fear of being worthless, being nothing. That’s a long way from not quite being able to pay all the bills this one month. Even so, that’s a fear too many of us live with, whether we really realize it or not—and we don’t have to.

When you hold things in this way, you give them power. The way to control the fear instead is to voice it. Once you say it, you can see it: There’s no crocodile under the bed. So some bills will be late this month, it can’t be helped, things happen. That’s one reason we say time is money. The less time your fear allows you to devote to your money, the less money you will have. Weed out your fears, so you can give your financial garden what it needs to grow.

 

FACING THE FEAR

 

In the previous step we looked back at our first experiences with money. I found with my clients over and over again that when they examine their fears, they’re connected to those early memories. Understanding your fear often allows you to see what those memories mean. Take Sheila, Mark, and Liz, for example—all paralyzed by their fears.

 

SHEILA’S STORY

 

When asked, “What is your greatest fear when it comes to money?” Sheila answered, “That I will lose everything. That I will not be able to hold on to it, and I will lose it all.” Had she ever lost money before? “No.”

It’s not a money memory exactly, but what comes to mind is that I broke my grandmother’s lobster platter when I was seven, eight, nineI can’t really remember how old I was. But I do remember what happened. Grandma was telling us—my cousins were there, everyone was there—about how in colonial times poor people would eat lobsters, they were so plentiful. But for us they were a special treat, and we had them only in the summers at her house in Maine. She always served them on this huge platter that was shaped like a lobster, and she loved that platter. Anyway, when the lobsters were done, she piled them onto the platter to be taken into the dining room, and I said, “Can I carry them in?” She said no, I was still too little. But I begged and begged until she said yes. There was a swinging door into the dining room, and—you guessed it. One of my cousins came through the door; bang, the lobsters went everywhere and the platter, Grandma’s special platter, broke to pieces. Lobsters and platter everywhere, scattered all over the kitchen floor.

There the memory ended for Sheila, but it was very telling even so: She was afraid that she would lose it, that she couldn’t hold on to it. This was her fear. And how was it playing out in her life?

Sheila and her new husband had come to see me about switching some of his assets into her name; they were both in their sixties, and he wanted her to be safe should something happen to him. Here was a new first for me: Sheila didn’t want to take any of the money at all. She refused to let him give her anything. But what she was really saying was that she was afraid she would break another platter, so he shouldn’t even bother giving her anything to put on it.

 

MARK’S STORY

 

“The thought of having a joint checking account with my wife—I just can’t do it” was Mark’s problem. “It’s as if I just don’t trust anyone when it comes to my money.” I asked Mark if he loved and felt safe with his wife. “Yes, of course.” Had she ever given him a reason not to trust her? “No. Never.”

The big joke in my family was that I saved everything, just hoarded it all away. I had all these different banks and would move money— we’re talking pennies and dimes here—from one to another, counting it and playing with it. I guess I was about nine, and I had twenty- seven dollars in my room saved up in my banks, and I felt so rich. I was thinking I wanted to buy something, and what I wanted to buy was a trampoline. It cost forty dollars, so I kept saving. I added more and more money to the banks, then went to count it up again, to see how much closer I was. And there was only twenty-four dollars! I couldn’t believe it. I knew my sister had stolen the money, I just knew it. She denied it. And when I told my parents, they said I had probably counted wrong, how could I accuse my sister of stealing? And she was standing there in the room, smiling. I knew she stole it, and she knew I knew.

Having a joint checking account? When a sister you love steals your money, isn’t it possible, too, that she also stole your trust in those you love? I could see Mark’s face drop at the possibility.

I was the fourth financial planner Mark had been to see, after he no longer trusted the first, second, and third. Not only did he not trust his wife enough to pool their resources into a joint account, he didn’t trust anyone when it came to his money. Coincidence?

 

LIZ’S STORY

 

Liz’s biggest fear was being audited by the IRS. Had she ever cheated on her income taxes? “Absolutely never.” Had she ever been audited before? “No.” Had her parents? “No.” Had anyone she knew ever been audited? “Not that I know of.”

It was Halloween, and we all had bags, for candy, and also cans, to collect for UNICEF. But it was chaos—we were running everywhere, and sometimes the UNICEF money went into the bag instead of the cans. I tripped over a curb and dropped my bag. All the candy and UNICEF money went flying. I recovered what I could but knew a lot was missing. The next morning I went back and found forty-five more cents right where I had fallen. I kept looking, and then I saw a drain. As I looked into it, I could see all these bright shiny pennies, but there wasn’t a thing I could do to get them back. I never told anyone to this day that had happened, but you know I still feel just like I did then: as if I had stolen money from UNICEF and if anyone knew, they would put me in jail.

Liz’s fear was an IRS audit. Most people fear an IRS audit when they’ve hidden something from the IRS, and are correct to fear an audit. This was not the case for Liz, who had never remotely tried to steal or hide anything from anyone. But she felt as if she had. Those coins for UNICEF had been collecting interest in the form of fear for long enough.

I asked Sheila to go out and buy a big new platter, the biggest she could find, and to begin using it. I asked Mark to write a letter to his sister, saying he forgave her. Liz wrote a nice-size check to UNICEF right then and there, which she mailed immediately. They had started to connect the dots from their pasts to their fears today. It’s a slow process sometimes, this kind of healing, but the relief each expressed to me after doing this step was extraordinary to witness. More important, they were ready to move on, toward financial freedom.

What Is It You're Afraid Of?

Struggling to remember defines so much of our lives—to remember birthdays, dentist appointments, turning off the stove, where we put the keys, when the dry cleaning will be ready, what time the children need to be picked up … the rituals and obligations of everyday life.

Find yourself with a money problem, on the other hand, and just try to forget it. You can’t. It will be with you day in, day out, at the movies, when you’re trying to sleep, always there, never far from center stage of your consciousness. The fear is, very likely, powerful enough to keep you silent, too all-consuming to talk about, too big to take action against.

 

YOUR EXERCISE

 

Most of us push away our fears without even knowing it. I am asking you now to step into them instead, pull them closer for a moment. What is it that you’re afraid of? If nothing profound comes to mind, just give it time; often we block what we don’t want to face. Here, to give you an idea, are some of the other fears that I have heard over the years:

I’m afraid I’m going to be a bag lady.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to support my family.

If something goes wrong at work, what other job could I possibly get?

I feel that I can’t keep up.

I’m afraid that if my friends find out how much money I have, they

 won’t like me.

I’m afraid that my wife is going to make more money than I am.

I’m afraid because I don’t even know the right questions about money to ask.

I’m afraid that my husband will leave me, and then how will I get   by?

 

If my wife dies, who will take care of me?

What if my parents have to go into a nursing home?

I keep having to use my credit card just to cover the bills each

 month.

How will I ever pay for my children’s college expenses? I’m afraid I’ll have to support my ex if we break up.

I am afraid I will lose everything I have.

Now take your fear and write it down. As you read it back to yourself, go back to the piece of paper on which you wrote your childhood memory, the one you recovered in the last chapter. Do you see an obvious connection? You might not at first. Give it time. You’ve opened your memories of money, long forgotten, and you’ve faced the fears long held inside you. The connections will come, too.

New Truths

The mind gives us thousands of ways to say no, but there’s only one way to say yes, and that’s from the heart. It’s great when you start to make the connections between your memories and your fears. Now you have to make sure those fears stay far away; they will try, if you let them, to keep coming back. We have to retrain our minds away from thinking that we can’t control money, that we don’t deserve to do well, that not enough money is going to come in, that we don’t have enough now, that we won’t have enough tomorrow.

Believing, really believing, other realities makes other realities true:

that we can control money, that we do deserve to do well, that there will be enough. How do we replace the old fears, the old reality? With new thoughts. With new truths.

I grew up with the belief that pervaded our household: “We don’t have any money” was the message. “You’ll always have to do without, so you had better learn how.” I did learn how to do without—so you can imagine the shock I felt when I applied for a job as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in 1980 and was actually accepted. All I could think was, Wow! My dad is going to be so proud of me.

It didn’t start well.

I wore my best outfit to the interview, my blue silk shirt over red-and- white-striped Sassoon pants tucked into my white cowboy boots—and you should have seen the looks on all the interviewers’ faces. When they saw me, they actually asked if I had dressed that way to insult them. If there had been a rock in that conference room, I would have crawled under it.

Taking that job was breaking away from everything I had ever known. I was so out of my league. The most I had ever made before was $400 a month as a waitress, and even that was more than most of my friends were making back then. Every morning I would get up and feel sick to my stomach, but off I’d go to work with all these men in their pin-striped three-piece suits. When everyone else would go to lunch at their fancy restaurants, I’d get in my car and go to Taco Bell. It was the only part of the day when I felt comfortable in my surroundings.

The job itself was quite scary, telling people what to do with their money—and me having to make money just to keep my job. I had to go through a training program, but it didn’t train me for the pressure, and it didn’t give me the confidence. I was a commissioned salesperson, and either I generated commissions or I would soon be looking for another job. It was a never-ending battle: Would I meet my quota each month, or would I be out on the street? I needed something to override the fear that was eating me alive. I decided to change my perception of my situation and create a new truth for myself.

I created what I wanted for myself first on paper. Every morning before I went to work, I would write over and over again: “I am young, powerful, and successful, producing at least $10,000 a month.” Why did I say “at least”? Because why limit it? What if the world wanted to give me more? Why did I use the present tense? Because this was the life I wanted to live in the present tense, not tomorrow, not someday. Now.

I wrote down that truth twenty-five times a day, said it to myself in the mirror, thought it each time I went up and down in the elevator. That’s what I would say, and that’s the truth I created. I still carry that truth around with me like a lucky charm in words, and it still works. I replaced the message of fear, and my belief I was inadequate, with a message of endless possibility.

You can, too, once you pull the fear out from wherever you’ve pushed it away to, face it, and use the power of your mind to put it behind you.

For twenty, thirty, forty years, or more, we’ve all been creating paradigms about ourselves, telling ourselves who we are, financially and in every other way. Part of this comes from what we were told about ourselves as children (“You’ll be a secretary just like your mom”; “You’ll be a gambler, just like your father”; “You’ll never amount to  much unless you do X, Y, or Z”). The rest is what we tell ourselves, fears and all, over and over until we believe it absolutely.

Your new future begins with your new truth.

 

 

YOUR EXERCISE

 

The power of positive thinking is not a new idea, but when it comes to money it is, because we’re still so afraid. We’re a culture of slogans—in ads, on bumper stickers, on T-shirts, needle-pointed onto pillows. Call it what you like—a financial mantra, a new truth, a new belief in yourself

—but you must create a positive, empowering message for yourself and instill it into your powerful mind to replace the fear you’re leaving behind, beginning now.

Install it, instill it, retrain your mind to believe it. Write it down twenty-five times a day, have it stamped on a T-shirt and sleep in it every night, say it to yourself on your way to work, when you pay your bills, when you begin to worry about money, when you feel afraid. Say it when you’re shaving, when you’re in the shower, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. A positive message to yourself, a message of possibilities. Do it when you resist it, do it when you don’t believe in it, do it when you feel as if it’s a useless drill, keep doing it until you believe it. Then it will be true. Three rules for your new truth:

Make it short enough so that you can remember it exactly, word for word, so that it’s easy for you to say, “I have more money than I will ever need.”

Put your message in the present tense; the future begins today: “I am in control of all of my affairs.”

Make it an unlimited truth, to open the way to receive: “I am putting at least $200 a month into savings.”

Sheila is starting to put the lobster platter incident to rest with her new truth: “I hold and benefit from everything that comes my way.”

Mark is saying over and over again his new truth: “I have the power to put my money in good hands, and I trust the people I’ve chosen to keep it safe.”

Liz is on the path to forgive herself the UNICEF mishap with her new truth: “I am not afraid.”

Fears hate more than anything else to be defeated. They will try to invade your new truth like a virus, telling you what you can’t do, not what you can do, telling you what you can’t be, not what you are becoming, telling you what you aren’t—not what you  are  and  have every right to be. Don’t listen. Just keep repeating your new truth the way I did in the elevator.

What is “income”? Something that comes in. Have your new truth with

 you as you now open the door to new wealth. Your new truth is bigger than your fears, bigger than your debt, bigger than your worries about the future, bigger than all the things you’ve meant to do with your money but haven’t done. Now we will do them.

 

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