Your Relationship to Money
It’s just like people!
All relationships, including the one between you and money, can change for the better if you apply the proper tools and techniques.
The first technique is simple — get some self awareness of how you got here and how your relationship to money was formed — for better or worse. Then take action.
The reflection exercise below will take you through the three main crossroads where our relationship to money is built, and then I’ll show you four practices that take what you discovered about your relationship to money, and make it more beautiful, joyful and healthy.
At the end of this you’ll have a much clearer sense of why you either feel the way you do about money, and what to do about it.
My Inherited Money Story
These are my beloved grandparents. They adored each other (see doting smile), but their relationships to money were polar opposites.
My grandfather was a self-made man who loved studying the financial markets.
My grandmother came off a boat from Austria, was the oldest of 9, and got her college degree in her 80s (P.S. my hero).
My grandfather lived in abundance.
My grandmother lived in scarcity.
Guess which mentality got passed down to my family? :)
Here are the three money crossroads — where you’ll encounter people, places and things that will have shaped your relationship to money:
1) Generational — what’s inherited:
What you inherited through your most influential caregiver’s growing up.
Journaling prompt: What was your parent's, grandparent's, or caregiver's relationship to money?
2) Experiential — what’s happened:
How your actual lived experiences impact you.
Journaling Prompt: What were your early memories around money? Were they positive or negative?
3) Societal — what’s learned:
How the world reflects your place in it. What you saw, heard, and listened to in the movies, music, media, and in public stages, etc.
Journaling Prompt: What were the money messages you received through culture?
We can change any relationship (including our relationship with wealth, money, etc) by knowing the science of relationships.
Great relationships and toxic relationships — even relationships between you and a concept like money — share a great deal of similarity within each other.
The science of long term trust in people-to-people relationships tells us this.
I get into this more here, but in short — because of our massive negativity bias as humans, great relationships require an HUGELY outsized number of positive interactions with someone in order for that relationship to actually feel good.
The same is true of money! We need a great a HUGELY outsized number of positive interactions (20:1 in normal experiences; 5:1 in hard experiences) — intentional experiences with money and abundance — in order for money to not affect us, and thus our relationships.
Follow the science of the Magic Ratios (above) and you’ll transform your relationship with wealth and money.
Increase your positive interactions with money. Be kind to yourself when it’s hard, and your relationship with money and wealth will be an upward spiral!
Money is just one of many relationships in your life that you can heal or ignore, just like anything else. So don’t ignore it.
Lean towards it.
