It seems that life goes by so fast when we are working hard and trying to get ahead while still checking off our to do lists.
Maybe your list looks something like this:
- Pay off debt,
- Start saving
- Lose 5 pounds
- Spend time with family and friends
- Meditate
The list goes on and on for some of us. So where on your checklist for your money, is self-love?
Your Relationship with Money Starts with Self-Love
Self-love equals self-care, and self-care gives us the motivation to nurture our financial health.
There is a sense of deserving that needs to happen for self-value and self-worth to kick in. You do deserve an elevated sense of your own worth, on every aspect of your life. Our judgment and attitude toward what we believe we deserve are linked to our money story and our first memories.
If we feel undeserving, we can be our own worst enemy and create roadblocks to improving our financial situation.
By not relating our money story to our sense of worth today, we are sabotaging our relationship with money.
For example, I met with a client who had come from a divorced family. Her father left when she was ten and her mother raised her and her brother. My client grew up struggling financially but also emotionally. She shared with me that she felt abandoned and didn’t and still doesn’t understand why her father has not continued a relationship with her and her brother. She went on to graduate from university with full scholarships, to find stable employment, and then to complete her master’s degree while working, all debt free.
She now earns more than $150,000 a year. When I met her, she had credit card debt, no savings, and was living from paycheque to paycheque. If she accumulated any amount of cash, she felt she had to get rid of it; she experienced an unsettling feeling—an almost urgent feeling—that it shouldn’t be there. She would shop and spend it immediately. Her scarcity mindset, paired with her self-worth and self-love were causing her to release money she had, because deep down she felt like she didn’t deserve it.
Once we went through her history, her money story, and her memory, we connected her self-value and how she perceived her self-worth and money. Nowadays, she can still spend and not feel restricted, but not until after she has taken care of all her savings buckets and retirement savings she needs in order to protect and love her future self. She can then spend what is left guilt-free from a place of abundance with self-love in mind.
I started my relationship with money because of a marriage breakdown, but all it takes is a mini wakeup call or maybe you just have a long nagging feeling of unease and doubt that stop you from taking back control.
Do not ignore your money story because by doing so, it could be the number one thing sabotaging your relationship with money.
Our money attitudes are financial but mostly emotional. How our parents handled money has a large impact on how we deal with our own money today. Whether we overspend and are in debt or we agonize over our money decisions, save everything, and penny pinch, we can trace back to having either accepted our parents’ money beliefs or having rejected their attitudes. Either way we reflect our history into our current money behaviours. The key is to know and recognize our financial story, talk about it, honour it, then separate from it and choose to create our own.
The #1 thing sabotaging your relationship with money is not relating your money story to your sense of worth today.
JOIN THE FREE 5-DAY HEART OF YOUR MONEY CHALLENGE HERE
If you’d like some extra support in starting your intentional journey with money, you can sign up for my FREE 5-day Heart of Your Money Challenge here.
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