Hello beautiful people!
Let’s get real about money, honey. Whatever level of artistry we bring to our storytelling, we’ve chosen a career in which money is a huge factor. So, let’s fix up whatever might be keeping us from our earning potential.
Important stuff, because if we live in a world where we hold any resentment toward those who get paid ridiculously well for sharing their talents, we repel that eventuality for ourselves. See, we can’t become what we hold strong negative feelings about. Our dislike for a status — say, “Rich people are so selfish and greedy,” for example — will prevent us from aligning with it as fully and as richly (no pun intended) as we could.
Because I want to see you not only at your next tier but at the highest tier you aspire to reach, I want you to clean up the stories you may be telling yourself about money and its role in your life.
Begin seeing economy, artistry, and all of the transactions that surround us in our creative journeys as exchanging value for value. Applause, laughter, tears, standing ovations, autograph requests, gold-and-shiny statues, and MONEY are all just value-ascribed things we are given in exchange for what we have provided in sharing our gifts.
That we place judgment on the exchange of value for value at any particular level is precisely what will prevent us from experiencing that level. (Tweet that.)
Start thinking about your ability to say NO to a project as a gift to someone who is hoping to get to the tier you’re lovingly leaving behind. Lay the groundwork now for clearing away any of the baggage your family may have assigned you to carry about being the “struggling artist” or any worries you may have about how jealous your friends will be once you’ve broken through to the next tier (but you cannot bring them along). Watch your self-talk about your “crappy agent” or how “it’s dead” in your market. About how HARD it all is. And really call yourself out for playing the comparison game. Keeping score is for wannabes. Stop doing it.
Surround yourself with a vocabulary of abundance — it’s everywhere if you’ll open your (spiritual) eyes to it.
If you need more resources regarding your relationship with money, I have a ton stored here for you. Be incredibly patient with yourself as you work through it all. A lifetime of faulty wiring about money will take more than one day to repair. Expect a few *jolts* along the way, notice your overdeveloped muscle trying to take over as you edit your self-talk, and give yourself loads of love and appreciation for even attempting to clear old ways of thinking and feeling about your potential abundance!
This is big stuff.
Today’s work: What are your some of your most deeply-held money blocks? For me, the BLOCK story is that I grew up in a single-parent household, the youngest child of a Depression-era mother who had never worked a “real job” while she raised my brothers in an iconic 1950s family where my father brought home the paycheck. Suddenly, it’s just the two of us against the world and I’m ripped from my amazingly enriching Montessori environment and plopped grade levels behind my intelligence in a public school that provides government-supported meals for me while my mother figures out how to make a living without that ever having been hers to do. She begins practicing astrology (a hobby she immersed herself in as she tried to understand how her life got SO turned all upside-down) and her old friends show up at our door with bibles, there to drive Satan out.
It was very easy for me to spend many years telling the story about how “it can all be taken away, so don’t ever get used to it” about anything I earned. Both my financial reality and my lovelife suffered from this strongly-held belief. My programming included such whoppers as “you will be punished socially for your advanced intellect — and especially for your woo-woo — so learn how to hide it,” “don’t need anyone because they’re all gonna leave anyway,” and “you’ll only have hand-me-downs so be grateful for them” plus “when you do get something nice, you’ll have to keep it ’til it disintegrates.” These scripts kept me from feeling safe reaching a certain earnings benchmark, from using my smarts and my woo-woo to build businesses that could support not just me but a team of people on staff, from trusting anyone, and from enjoying buying new things I finally *could* afford!
Phew! Important stuff to clean up, y’all.
And it takes time.
It took me time and it will take you time. And it will be something that we all continue to work on.
But it’s soooooooo much better on the other side of these CORE limiting beliefs! After those are dissolved, it’s all about dealing with the upper-limit problems we continue to discover as we move up that true north path.
So, let’s get started on the journey toward this better version of you! What needs cleaning up around money in your life? Journal, share below, even work this out in your accountability group! Be sure you include this work in your checkpoint check-in, so you can track its shifts. Don’t be frustrated when any of this shifts back to its factory setting! Just note that it means you have more muscle-building to do!
Hooray! Awareness is liberating!
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
