We each have a story about money. It could be a happy story, one in which you are creative, generative, and capable. Or it could be a story in which money has you at a disadvantage.
Your money story defines your relationship with money. It determines the success of your quest for authentic wealth. It also defines much in your relationships with other people and with the world in general. And because it is so pervasive and powerful, your money story is part of your identity.
Which means changing your money story involves changing your identity.
And that’s like changing from being a character in the story to being the author.
Changing your identity is scary
Changing your identity is scary. It means letting go of familiar ways of thinking about yourself and how you are in the world. That can be profoundly disorienting. If you become the author, who’s going to tell you what happens next?
Change at the level of identity brings up fear of loss and rejection. How will friends, loved ones, and colleagues relate to you if you write a different story around money? Will they still like you? Trust you?
Change at the level of identity can also feel like a challenge to your authenticity. If you write a different money story, what does that mean about the story you told before the change? Does changing that make you inauthentic?
Changing your identity is complex
Some changes are simple. You can cut your hair. You can learn to cook Thai food.
But changing your identity means changing how you see and relate to yourself. It means being able to see yourself from the inside and the outside at the same time.
Think about people who undergo multiple plastic surgeries, drastically changing their appearance, but continue to see themselves as somehow physically flawed.
Becoming the author of your money story is an inside and an outside job.
Enough about how difficult it is to shift your money story. Let’s look at how you can do it anyway so you can achieve Authentic Wealth.
You become an author when you choose the plot
Your new money story begins when you choose a different plot.
When you acknowledge, even welcome, a new possibility. When you declare to yourself that a different way of being, a different outcome, is possible, and that you are committed to creating it.
When you commit to a new plot, you step outside the role you played in your old money story. You shift your point of view from being stuck inside the story to standing outside it.
Outside your old story everything is different. Your sense of what is possible expands. You are more inspired. You begin to see ways to create Authentic Wealth that had been invisible before.
And then, step by step, you live into your new story.
Authentic wealth means living into a new story
Ask any author, and they’ll tell you they don’t know exactly how the plot will unfold before it is written. They start with the big picture and fill in the details as they appear.
A real story, especially one you live as you write it, evolves in real time. The change in your identity is both incremental and instantaneous.
Rewriting your money story is the same thing. Once you’ve chosen a new plot, you make lots of little changes in your attitudes and behaviors. Your new story unfolds gradually.
Then comes the phase change, when the whole way you are around money shifts and you take on a new identity.
Will you begin now?
Interlude: Introducing Authentic Wealth: Write Your New Money Story, a 14-week Virtual Retreat
Money problems are outward symptoms of inner conflict. When you are at war with some part of yourself, you can’t ask for, receive, or create wealth. And even when you have what you need, you feel chronically insecure.
In the 2014 Authentic Wealth Virtual Retreat you’ll clarify what you want from money and what money needs from you. You’ll re-write the story of you and wealth. And you’ll restore that relationship to integrity and wholeness.
The waiting list for the 2014 Authentic Wealth Virtual Retreat is now open. As soon as you join the waiting list, you will begin receiving free goodies about how to create wealth and wellbeing in all dimensions of your life. There is absolutely no obligation, and your info will never be sold, rented, or loaned for any other purpose. Period. Amen.
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/srsphoto/6907273779/
