Coaches both love and hate to talk about money.
Everywhere you look online, coaches are repping their 5 or 6 or 7 figure businesses (though they rarely talk about profit). And every coach either seems to be KILLING IT or is totally desperate to make ends meet. And of course, the coaches that are killing it are never you.
But if you’re going to run a business, money is a thing you’ve got to deal with. Ideally, money can be a thing you can learn to empower, enjoy, and even use to have a more significant impact on the world you live in. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start with a few observations about money.
1. It’s scary –
Well, money itself isn’t scary, it’s really just scraps of paper or lines of computer code. (It’s like totally just a concept man ✌????) But we bring ALL of our fears to money.
Our fear of approval and rejection.
Our fear of safety and security.
Our fear of being dominated and controlled
Our fear being trapped and unable to do what we’d like (aka freedom)
We bring all of these fears to money, and so money get’s very heavy and scary for most people.
2. It’s Taboo
We were raised not to talk about money. That we shouldn’t count other people’s money. That you should carefully glance at a price tag and not have any reaction. We were supposed to play it cool around money. All of this, even though money was scary.
It’s this weird thing that money is scary, but we’re supposed to pretend it isn’t. We’re supposed to pretend that we’ve got our money under control even though most people don’t. Most people avoid thinking, talking, and dealing with money unless they absolutely have to.
3. We Avoid It
Which is pretty amazing because it’s EVERYWHERE!!! Yet somehow we manage to use money all day every day while at the same time trying to avoid it as much as possible. And most businesses are happy to oblige us.
Cards that don’t feel like money, deals where we save money on things we don’t need, recurring subscriptions we set and forget, the list is endless.
We don’t want to deal with money, and so we find ways to hide it, even in plain sight.
Dirty Money
These three observations on money should hardly be surprising to you. And yet most of us just accept this is how money is in life and how we relate to it.
We want it, but we don’t want to admit it.
We’re SUPER curious about what other people make but would never ask.
We are worried about running out, but try to avoid paying attention to it.
All of this makes it incredibly hard to have a great relationship around money and to live a life where money exists in a conscious, loving and, even empowering way.
So how do you begin to create this kind of relationship with money?
It starts by setting simple goals and practices. In my next post, we will take a look at some ideas for creating financial goals and habits this year.
