I used to have the uncanny ability to remember the exact amounts of money I had spent for days at a stretch. When it was suggested to me by a few different friends to track these amounts on paper and build an overall picture of my spending habits, I remember thinking that it was a silly exercise, given the way that I already obsessively tracked my bank account balance and couldn't shake spending amounts out of my head if I tried. I did it anyway, and I noticed that other financial success seemed to come my way as I did so. Then, after tracking my numbers and building spending plans for awhile, a few friends suggested that I would gain more from reading my plan for spending as well as my actual spending record out loud to a trustworthy friend before and after I spent money.
I didn't see much of a difference between tracking the money alone and reading it out loud to someone. So I declined to do it for a long time. After all, wasn't my obsessive thinking about money difficult enough? Did I have to make it harder on myself by repeating all those numbers in my head not only on paper but to other people as well? Gag me with a spoon!
Then one day, a friend of mine told me how much more money she had been earning since she had started reading her spending out loud to another person before and after she spent it. I remember the exact words that went through my head. "Wow, she's a lunatic, but she's a rich lunatic. I'll be a rich lunatic." (as in: I'm willing to be a rich lunatic.)
The next morning, I called my friend and read her my recorded spending from the previous day and my planned spending for that day. I did the same thing the following day. As I did so, I became aware that every decision I made to spend money was now being witnessed by a person I trusted around both money and feelings. After about 48 hours, I was had the strangest experience. Inside my head, it was suddenly *quiet.* I didn't feel as though I was losing my mind, far from it. There was suddenly SO MUCH ROOM for my brain to stretch out between my ears.
And what was missing? What was the mechanism that had been taking up so much room in my brain? It was a running set of questions that went something like:
"Will there be enough? Do I have enough? Will I have enough?"
Again and again and again and again.
These questions were so incessant and so old that I always just thought of them as "ME". If you had asked me, I would have told you, "This is my personality, I think a lot about making sure I know how much is there so that I never run out." And I would have left it at that.
Suddenly, it was as if someone had surgically removed that set of questions and shown me that the misgivings I so often had about spending too much money or spending it on the wrong thing just couldn't terrorize my brain in the same way now that I was checking in with a supportive person about my spending choices. With those misgivings quiet, I discovered that my money obsession was a kind of insubstantial though relentless smoke rising from a primal fire of fear and scarcity first kindled during childhood.
My earliest memory of this scarcity was shortly after my parents' divorce. I was 5 years old and my mother confided in me that she had earned $6700 that year. The number sounded enormous to me at that age. But the terror in my mother's voice left a deep impression on my brain. That terror was reinforced over the years whenever it was time to ask for anything--food, clothes, money for a field trip--without fail, I always experienced my mother as either angry, terrified or both in response to my requests for things. So I learned not to ask for them. Ever.
Instead, I learned to count my pennies, save whatever money came my way from birthdays or holidays and do whatever I could to help minimize expenses. Both my parents talked loudly, frequently and anxiously about their financial problems. And I was determined to use all the power I naively assumed I had to make everything better. But the only power I really had at age 5, 7, 12, etc. was in my head. The power to obsess and worry--which of course, is no kind of power at all.
But what child understands how powerless they truly are when the adults around them are so terrified?
And so it became part of who I was--this obsession with money, this fear, this worry. It colored how I behaved in relation to friends (what could I get from them? How could they make me more secure?), in relation to jobs (how could I get more money, more perks, more validation?), in relation to dating (could this fellow make enough money to make my money fears go away?), and in relation to the world at large (how could I get the most stuff for the least amount of money?)
To be fair, I had already been working on these issues for awhile when I began my daily spending check-ins. But the shift I felt as I combined my work on my own financial clarity and integrity with the consistent, daily support of other people engaged in the same process was transformational.
It made me realize that clarity and self-awareness about my financial choices and past experiences were useful but not enough to liberate me from the scarcity mindset that had imprisoned me most of my life. In order to move from scarcity to abundance, I needed clarity PLUS love and support from trustworthy people outside myself, my immediate family or my co-workers.
My scarcity was a combination of fear and vagueness. I was never vague about spending amounts but I was plenty vague about bills, obligations, appropriate job behaviors and so much more. Even when I got more clarity, though, with the fear still in place, clarity and fear simply reinforced obsession. Also, at rare times when I got loving support without getting the information that would bring me clarity, I would feel good for a short while and then bump my nose against a wall of ineffectiveness.
To responsibly and maturely left the vagueness and fear of scarcity, I began to see "clarity + support" (or "clarity + love") as a simple formula for achieving abundance in every area of my life. Over the ensuing days, weeks, months and now many years that I've been privileged to use this formula, I've seen it create breakthroughs around every problem I've ever had. It has been even more rewarding, though, to use this simple approach to help create breakthroughs for literally thousands of people from all walks of life--CEOs, senior executives, entry-level employees, independent business owners, artists, people living below the poverty line, people struggling to find jobs, couples, parents and many more.
It doesn't just apply to money or career success either. The experience of abundance that results from bringing clarity and loving support to the lack of information and fear that creates scarcity can be applied to issues of time, life balance, communication, relationships, self-worth, vision and so much more.
How can you apply it in your life?
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