Program yourself for wealth.

Worried about money? Who isn’t these days, right? Well…I’m not anymore because I spent the last 99 days working with neuro-linguistic programming to train my mind and spirit to view wealth in a new way. My husband and I completed a Feng Shui wealth ritual that lasts 99 days. We focused our intentions on having plenty of money. And we began talking about money in a new, more positive way.

During the process we worked through our superstitions, childhood beliefs, limiting thoughts, and fears of not having enough. We battled the Inner Critic. We brainstormed ways to make more money and to do more with what we already have.

One of the most powerful transformations of the exercise was how we ended up thinking about ourselves. We began to see ourselves as wealthy people regardless of what we actually have in the bank. That in turn, has changed how we interact with the world. It has changed our behavior by giving us that extra ounce of courage needed to make a phone call or ask for help or promote ourselves.

Here’s an exercise for you to try. First write this: I am wealthy. Then finish these two phrases in as many ways as you can as specifically as possible:

I have money to…

I have money for…

The more real you believe the possibilities are, the more you’ll begin to see yourself having money. And then you’ll start figuring out ways to make it.

Managing the Inner Critic after you’ve lost your job.

In the last few days I have been in touch with many friends and readers of this blog who have lost their jobs. While having lunch with an extremely talented friend who was laid off from a job she loved, she described how the Inner Critic had more power over her than ever before. With every emailed resume she didn’t get a response to and every minute she waited for the phone to ring, the Inner Critic leapt into the communication void to whisper in her ear.

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? “You don’t have the right experience. You’re too old! You suck at interviews! You’ll never find a job! You’re not talented enough to get a job in this tight economic market!”

If you’ve lost your job, or are a freelancer like me and have to create jobs on a daily basis for a living, then we must battle that Inner Critic minute-by-minute. My Dad always use to say, “It’s easier to change lanes when you’re in the traffic than when you’re stopped at the side of the road.” True. But what if you are stopped on the side of the road by forces outside your control? Here are some things I’ve been stewing on lately.

Get dressed. I’ve written about this one before, but it’s so important. Put on the clothes you would wear to work so you’ll feel more confident. If you’re in your pjs or sweats, it’s easy to slip into inaction. Right now? I’m in my pjs. Whoops. One moment please.

Persue every lead. How do you figure out which opportunities to take? I believe it’s my job to put myself out there in as many ways and as often as I can. What comes back to me, is not up to me. So when doors open, I walk through them to see where they lead. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the right thing for me, I always learn some valuable lesson that serves me later in unexpected ways.

Face the worst-case and plan for it. What is the absolute worst thing that can happen? You’ll lose your house? And then what will you do? Lose your car? Then how will you get around? Though your circumstances may change in unpleasant ways, there is always a way through. Sometimes you have to change your career or your attitude, or your living arrangments. But there is always a way.

Be proud of yourself. Make a list of the moments in your life when you have been most proud of yourself. What did you do? What did you achieve? How did you handle a situation? Remember those moments now.

Do something that makes you feel confident. Make another list of moments when you have felt the most confident. What were you wearing? How did you walk? What are you really, really good at?

Find allies. If you have people in your life who take energy from you instead of helping you feel courageous, then ditch those friends or family members for a while. Call up the confident people you know and align yourself with them. Instead of hanging out with people who are scared and in fear spirals, find those who are scared and are rallying themselves for the fight with optimism and hope.

Use this time for self-exploration. Last week on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, they ran a story about a 40-year-old woman who was in the financial industry and lost her job. Instead of returning to the same industry, she decided to go to school to become a chef. These stories abound during times like this. But if you view this time as an opportunity, then you will not only survive this turbulent era, you will thrive.

How about you? Let me know how you continue to smackdown your Inner Critic while you hunt for work or have to make a scary transition so we can all benefit! And please remember to do something kind for yourself every single day. This is especially important right now.

Why do you want money?

This morning I read a post on MFK’s blog Open-Source Career called Economy Hits Home. She listed the friends she knows who are being affected by the current state of affairs. I was just talking about this yesterday to a friend because for the first time I, too, am finding that everyone I know has been touched in some way by the financial challenges our country is facing.

Normally when I am working on creating something in my life, such as more money, I refuse to listen to any negative stories and focus only on successful, abundant tales. But what do you do when everyone you know has a negative story?

The truth: When I think about how much money I lost or how I will find a way to continue to make money, I want to throw up. But when I focus on all the opportunities that this kind of financial climate provides, then I am able to rally and get to work on the next thing.

I’m reading Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life by Harvard Business School professors Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson. (A brilliant book, by the way.) One of the exercises asks you to list why you want money to get at the underlying emotional reasons that drive you.

So today ask yourself this: Why do you want money? Ask the question over and over again until you can get by the fear voice of the Inner Critic and can excavate your deepest answers.

Give money away anonymously.

Doing things for other people is a fantastic way to silence the Inner Critic because it feels so good. Know someone in need? Slip over to their house in the middle of the night with an envelope of cash. Write their name on it and put it in the mailbox. Or give to someone who doesn’t necessarily lack cash, but needs a message that the universe is a magical place where surprising things happen to support us. What would you do if someone put $100, $50 or even $10 in your mailbox? How would that make you feel? Imagine what your friends, family, neighbors, or a complete stranger would feel: Like they just won the lottery!

Money is love.

The word “fetish” probably has some pretty weird associations in your mind. Let’s not specify them, shall we?

But by the original definition, a fetish is any object without a history. It’s an object that you treat like a magic trick, deliberately forgetting all the effort other people contributed in order to make that object appear in your life.

For example, if you were holding a peach and somebody asked you where the peach came from, you’d say “the grocery store.”

“Yeah, but where is it from originally?”

“Um, a peach tree?” And you’d probably stop the peach’s story there.

What you’re not thinking about is all the workers who contributed to the epic journey that peach took from its seed to your hand – the worker who picked the peach that bore the seed, the farmer who decided to plant the seed, the inventor of the machine that planted the seed, every person who worked on that machine to get it out of the factory door, the retailer who sold the machine to the farmer, the employees of the farmer who tended the tree, the author of the almanac the farmer consulted and every person who helped publish the book, the banking representative who granted the farmer a loan during a rough season and the clerk who made the copies of the loan agreement and filed them, the workers who picked the peach and inspected and packaged it for shipment, the drivers of the trucks who transported the peach to the grocery store, the store workers who unloaded the peach and wiped it and placed it in a pyramid, and the cashier who rang up your purchase. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Consider how many people it took to put the gas in your car to make that trip to the grocery store, never mind the crowd it took to build your car.

For an object to feel useful and convenient for you, you have to forget its history and all its players. If you looked at each object in your life and de-fetishized it – if you imagined every object’s “family” – you’d be overwhelmed by your own connection to millions of other people on the planet. The speed of our society does not allow for this.

But the future of our society relies on this. We’ve seen what happens when billions of people live without compassion and empathy. The results are catastrophic.

When you part with a dollar, you link yourself to a long chain of neighbors. So, are you paying a fair price to people who were treated fairly? Are you loving those neighbors, or are you using them?

 

(If you’re kind of freaked out by all this connection and responsibility, consider the plus side: you’re never, ever alone.)

You’re already rich.

Psst. Don’t tell the Secretary of the Treasury this, but it’s easy to be happy on a low budget!

Just dig out your favorite CD, turn out all the lights, and sit and listen.

Make sure you’re listening to the music, by the way, not to your Inner Critic or the To Do List you keep on mental tape or a conversation you’re planning to have later on. If you bring your mind back to the music, you’ll hear a thousand nuances that you never noticed before. You’ve probably been tossing that CD on as a background soundtrack while you do other things, but it deserves better and so do you.

The truth is, most of us already own so many things that can make us happy, we can go a while without buying more. Mr. Secretary, take your recession and stick it in your ear!

Money Is Not Evil.

There is a huge dichotomy within the American culture around the idea of wealth. On one hand there is the notion that money is bad and to want wealth is evil. On the flip side, money is useful. We need money to eat, to heat our houses, to send our children to college. Those who don’t make the money to support themselves are considered lazy, manipulative, and a drain on society. So which is it? Is money good or bad? It’s actually neither. Money is simply a tool. But how you feel about that tool is important to know because it will influence your decisions around how you make, spend, save, and give away your cash.

So what do you think? If you think that wanting money is a bad thing, then make a list of all the wealthy people you know who have done good things with their wealth. We’ll help you get started:

Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono, Dolly Parton, Warren Buffett. Check out Charlie Rose’s interview with Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates when Buffett gave their foundation $30 billion of his own money.