The love of money is crippling. Protect your happiness, honesty, and relationships.
Thinking that you don’t have enough money can lead to feeling bad, shameful, or even stressed. And these emotions are not limited to the amount of money you have—it’s your perception. The pursuit of money, of wealth, must be handled with care. Money is a temptress and can easily lead to poor financial decisions depending on your relationship with it.
Building a Loving Relationship With Money
We have all heard of and read about scandals involving money that have affected every region of the world. Usually, such scandals are caused by greed. They fuel distrust and undermine the integrity of legitimate businesses. For individuals, they cause untold damage, impacting health, success, and happiness. They break relationships and destabilize partnerships and families.
When you forge a healthy relationship with money, it’s likely that your feelings are aligned with your personal identity. Think of it as a culmination of your natural behavior, learned behavior, and the quality life you envision. By the way, that’s also called having a healthy money relationship integration.
I believe we all have an inherent prompt that alerts us to safe decision-making. Yes, behavioral risks sometimes interfere with our decision-making, but we all have instincts that help guide us in terms of right from wrong. These same instincts influence your Money Energy potential.
Understanding your money energy begins with understanding your behavior, how you are wired, your pressure buttons, and your stress level. Once you are armed with this personal insight, you reveal your identity. And just like any relationship, you need to know yourself first before you can build a relationship with others (and money).
Seven Toxic Thoughts
According to Psychology Today,1 there are seven toxic thoughts that can ruin an intimate relationship. Coincidentally, these feelings can have the same lethal effect on your relationship with building wealth.
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Label Slinging: Unfairly labeling money with negative connotations means you tend to lose sight of its positive and supportive qualities.
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The Blame Game: You unfairly, and irrationally, blame money for your personal life disappointments, or even bigger issues.
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Emotional Shortcuts: This is when you become convinced that it’s others who are controlling your ability to improve your Money Energy potential.
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Overactive Imagination: In this case, you reach negative conclusions about money that are not founded on facts or logic.
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The All-or-nothing Trap: You look at money in extremes—either you are going achieve all your financial goals or none of them.
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Catastrophic Conclusions: This is when you exaggerate negative outcomes of poor financial decisions as though you can never overcome your fate and there’s nothing you can do to change course.
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The “Should” Bomb: You think money should solve all your problems for you, when your happiness, success, and health are more dependent on you—not money alone.
One thing I can tell you, money will become your master and destroyer if you do not understand its power!
Pursuing Financial Stability and a Loving Relationship With Money
Let me introduce you to Cassie Lindon. She is 31, single, and has just been left a significant inheritance from her grandmother's estate. Cassie is a department head for a policy branch of the government. She enjoys her work and has invested time into understanding her behavior and motivations. Her DNA Natural Behavior Discovery revealed that she is a Reflective Thinker. She is analytical, thorough, and philosophical in her search for meaning, truth, and purpose in all she does.
Cassie believes that the value she adds to her role is being particularly adept at drawing incisive conclusions from data and research. Her accuracy and precision are considered valuable in any group setting. Further, she brings objectivity to any decision-making process. Typically, she prefers to follow guidelines when completing tasks and expects cooperation to be given.
After years of commitment, this reflective no-nonsense woman is now in a position of never needing to work again. However, she fears that she won’t be able to use her newfound wealth appropriately. Cassie finds herself retreating into her reflective state and resisting making any decisions in case she makes the wrong one. She doesn’t trust her relationship with money.
Her financial advisors are not pushing her, but merely offering advice and suggestions. At a meeting with her advisors, she was asked, “What is your biggest fear about retiring?”
As it turns out, the inability to retire was in response to negative associations Carrie had toward her money relationship. She couldn’t believe that her money would be there tomorrow if she stopped working. She thought she would outlive her wealth, that her investments would not live up to her expectations, that if there was a significant dip in the market, her money would let her down, that she would never have enough to cover future expenses of living through retirement.
Her advisors took the time to review her financial plan, her retirement goals, and the lifestyle-sustaining income she would need. Now, there are no guarantees in life, but the advisors helped her address her concerns. Utilizing her Reflective Thinker behavioral style as an opportunity to redirect her contemplative judgments to optimistic confidence, they helped Cassie to love what her money has done for her so far and to trust that relationship to carry her through the remainder of her life.
The relationship you have with the loved ones in our life is priceless, but don’t neglect to build a loving relationship with your money. Think about how Money Energy helps feed all your life energies.