Last week I had pains and stiffness in my neck and shoulders. What could it mean?
I checked out my copy of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, which has an appendix listing every part of the body and every disease, along with the psychological significance of each and an affirmation you can recite to support recovery. The information didn’t help me understand the pain, so as a psychology hypochondriac I worried that I was blocking out some flaw in my mental makeup. As someone who sobbed my way through boxes of tissues during psychotherapy in my twenties, I assume there’s lots of gunk under the surface.
However, after a few days of ibuprofen and taking it easy, my condition began to fade away. This is amazing since I didn’t seem to experience any breakthroughs on where my head is at.
What this has to do with money mindset. In other words, is it all in your mind?
If you’re looking for a way to beat yourself up for not being rich, there are experts who will tell you that your problem is your poor money mindset. You haven’t decided you want to be rich. Or you think you’ve decided but you actually haven’t. Or you have “issues,” such as you subconsciously feel that your spouse would be jealous if you outearned him or her.
Then they sell solutions to your problem as part of their coaching programs. Here are some of the solutions I have seen offered:
Make a list of everything you want to buy so as to feed your materialist desires.
Decide the big financial “why” in your life. Maybe it’s to pay the mortgage or pay for a root canal. The bigger the better.
Choose a charitable cause and decide to make a huge donation that will truly make the world a better place and stretch your financial vision.
Come to a conference to explore your “issues” and let the experts fix them right up. For instance, spouse problems? Just show up and they’ll be solved in no time flat.
I don’t get it.
To me, teaching someone who lives in the U.S. (or a similar capitalist society) to want stuff is like teaching a stream to run downhill.
I’m satisfied with my present level of purchasing dreams. I’m not a big spender but I’m not austere either. I’d just as soon downsize my lifetime shopping list as boost it into the stratosphere to keep myself “motivated,” or as I prefer to call it, “stressed.”
I feel the same way about my why’s.
As for charity, I donate what works for me relative to my income. Sorry, world. Giving to charity is a very fine thing to do, but it’s the cart, not the horse.
And as for fixing my issues, I don’t see how it’s easy. It may be easy to identify an issue, but that’s not the same as clearing it out of one’s brain for all time.
Changing client mindsets is a terrific coaching specialty. The cause and effect relationship between a positive mindset and financial success is said to be an immutable law of the universe. If you don’t succeed, it’s because you failed to construct the right mindset. The principle never fails.
Your New Year’s resolutions to make more money?
At this time I’ve decided I am not in the market for paid coaching to fix my money mindset. Still, as we enter the period of New Year’s resolution setting, plans for mindset remediation fit the season.
Originally posted 12-15-13