Coach Barbara Harrington
“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.”
― Alan W. Watt
The Way We are With Money is the Way We are With Everything ...
I have lived through all of this myself and solved it because I had no other choice but to look at what was going on and make changes that resulted in surviving and then thriving. And, you will be amazed at how simple this is once you get the hang of it.
And once you learn the basics, it’s kind of like learning to ride a bike. You couldn’t do it, you tried, maybe you fell off, and then all of a sudden you got it. You felt the balance and could maintain it almost to the point of stopping at a street sign without having to hop off. Remember that? I do. It was fun to ride and then fun to challenge myself in how to go slower, faster, further.
AND, even when I hadn’t ridden for years, when I got back on, I could do it. I was balanced even though my thighs were a little tired the next day.
There had been so many times that I over spent and lived a life of anxiety producing debt with collection agents calling . . . Ugh. Other times I was forced to live hand to mouth, paycheck to pay check. Both led to sleepless nights that just aggravated the problem.
And yet, there were other times when I was on a roll. A money roll so to speak. I was accumulating cash in my bank account. To be honest, it was mostly in my checking account without having thought through how to make the money work for me. I was the grasshopper enjoying the spring and summer, not the squirrel who created a comfortable reserve. Why should I.
Money was flowing. I was a money magnet.
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When I have a reserve, I’m a great person with my self confidence soaring.
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But when I’m in debt or losing money for whatever reason, my head is bowed in embarrassment.
At those times, I was so hard on myself, feeling shame and guilt and self recrimination. Even though when money flowed, it reflected so positively on me.
I was on a money image roller coaster with my sense of worth soaring and plummeting radically as a function of how much I was making or accumulating or losing moment to moment.
It was kind of like being bi-polar. Manic and excited as money flowed in, then dropping into despair as I watched it slip through the cracks of my leaky financial fingers.
But, hey. That’s ridicuous. It’s wrong. No matter what, I am still the same person. I have my values, my interests, my strengths, my sense of humor, my appreciation of people in the world, of beauty, of science, of problem solving. Those are constants. I’m sure you have those too, that people might use to describe you no matter what.
Yet, when I get seduced into looking at myself through an external lens, I find myself losing my equilibrium that forces me to ride the waves of external changes that shift and vacillate, monthly, weekly, daily and if you’re in the stock market minute by minute. So how can I help but feel crazed or desperate as life swings. What on earth does that have to do with me as a person and my self worth?! Or you and yours?
NOTHING!! Or does it . . . ?
Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that when the numbers go down we’re losers who are at fault. When they go up, we’re winners who get all the credit.
It’s SCARY!!! And, yet so important to summon the strength to look at ourselves.
I finally recognized how much I needed to. God knows how I got the courage, but I did.
I bit the bullet and learned some very valuable things about myself and my business. I knew I was a spender (ha…how else could you be $30K in debt). I loved spending on things that made the other people in my life happy. It made me feel good. It said I was a good and generous human. But, I was tanking my credit. Deep inside, I knew I was resourceful and disciplined and could solve this.
I mean I AM a chemist / scientist by training and it is the part of me that ultimately helped me figure out how to get through my financial ‘funk’ and stress to building a substantial six figure business that benefited myself and my family, with moneys that grow on themselves so I can once again sleep at night – no more night sweats, panics and hyperventilating. Worried about who’s going to call next asking for money I didn’t have.
This was so me!
I needed to go back to the “drawing” board – drawing money to me and keeping it, growing it, rather than repelling it – tapping my solid chemistry training to synthesize a practical, productive effective system that would actually be fun. And I say FUN because of how hideous the teaching is about money in our society.
Just think about the awful sayings we’ve been subjected to around money:
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“Money is the root of all evil”
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“Money doesn’t grow on trees”
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“too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.”
No wonder I was so judgmental about my money patterns. It was similar to my feelings about love and sex. Don’t talk about it. Don’t get help. Just live with it.
There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway – at least without humiliation.
But what if you could have an incredibly satisfying love sex life?
It is possible even with the same person after years in a relationship that has become routine and boring.
And what if you CAN make lots of money doing the things you love, because in fact one of the secrets of making a great living and cultivating new patterns to grow and thrive necessitates loving what you do and charging what you’re really worth – which I’m willing to bet a lot, is much more than you think.
And wouldn’t it be amazing, astonishing and so life affirming if you could let yourself know that it’s just a chemical reaction. How you combine money with new elements, in this case new attitudes, leads to new and positive outcomes. It’s all chemistry – Emotional Bio Chemistry.
Science is showing us that we can not only make ourselves feel sick with the wrong choice of elements, but we can also make ourselves feel WELL at the cellular and systemic levels.
Event plus Your Chemical Reaction = Outcome. Change your reaction and get a better result! It’s chemistry. As simple as that.
And, how you react to money is You and money changing your chemistry formula, just a little so that you now.
It is Your time now, to experience a new, vibrant relationship with money, to change your life, and to change your business. In fact, money is one of our best friends because it helps us learn how to be our best self.
"Money becomes the unwanted beast or elephant that’s always in the room. For me and I’ll bet you too – it’s something I didn’t want to deal with, didn’t want to talk about But was causing great stress and discomfort. Like being in a painful love relationship, but no one willing to talk about it for fear of losing everything."
"So many of us fall prey to a very cruel and vicious cycle of confusion and fear regarding money. This problem prevents us from effectively earning, or negotiating what we are worth, investing in ourselves to grow and develop, and to manage what we accumulate, even day to day."
Coach Barbara Harrington