Why It Might Be Time to Rethink Your Relationship With Money
How is your relationship with money? On the surface, we all love it. If you sat down at the dinner table with just about any entrepreneur, I think they would say that they want to make more of it.
They’d say they want nicer things in life, that they’d like to go on more vacations, that they’d like to be able to pay for more training – that they want to use money to make their lives more comfortable.
But what I’ve noticed, being a business coach and a money expert for the past 12 years, is that when you look under the surface, there are telltale signs that most entrepreneurs have some issues in their relationships with money.
I’m going to list a few of those signs that I see in a lot of entrepreneurs, and I’d like for you to ask yourself if maybe some of them appear in your own business.
You haven’t raised your prices in years, even though you know that you’re undercharging or that your expenses are going up. You send your invoices out late and often worry that your clients aren’t going to pay them.
You give your clients savings or discounts, sometimes without even telling them or putting the discounts on their invoices, because you feel a little bit guilty for charging them the full amount. Or maybe, if you’ve sent the invoices late, you feel like you don’t deserve to charge the full amount.
You don’t really look at your numbers, so you’re often surprised at the end of the year or during tax season. You realize then that your business is making a lot less than you would like. Or maybe you find that you’ve been making a lot more than you thought you were, and you’d spent all this time worrying needlessly.
You worry about money in your business all the time. You’re not really sure if you’re making enough. You feel like you often overspend in your business by putting way too much on credit cards. Sometimes you even hide the amount you spend from your partner and other people in your circle.
Secretly, you wish someone would just come save you from having to deal with money altogether.
Now, if you saw yourself in any of these statements – even just a little bit, even if there was just a spark of recognition – chances are that we need to dig deeper and ask – what are the voices in your head telling you about money?
Maybe you feel like you’re not worth higher prices and rates. Maybe you feel ashamed about asking for money. Maybe looking at the numbers really scares you because the stakes are so high.
And I want you to know that, if any of this is resonating with you, you’re totally normal.
No one ever taught us about money – even if it feels like they did. No one ever explained that it takes a conscious effort to move through all of our scary beliefs about money.
In fact, for most of us, it was the complete and total opposite. We were never supposed to talk about money. Not to anyone. Not ever.
So we go into business, and we continue to avoid money, and it ultimately affects our bottom line. It affects how much money we’re making in our businesses and how we can pay our bills.
But here’s what we must realize: Money loves attention.
Money loves to be looked at. It loves to be accumulated. And money loves when you focus on the specific ways it can help you reach your goals.
In order for us to get to a place where we can pay proper attention to money, we have to change our relationship with it.
My mission on the planet is to have safe and open money conversations with entrepreneurs so that I can put more money into the hands of the women who are going to make this world a better place.
Taking a deeper look at your relationship with money starts with examining how money was talked about when you were growing up and then connecting that to how you deal with money in your business today.
We spend quite a bit of time on that specific exercise on the first day of my Master Your Money event, which is coming up next week on May 18.
If you feel like you could use some help uncovering and rethinking your relationship with money, I encourage you to check out Master Your Money.
It’s a safe space where we’re going to be actually doing the work together – not just talking about it. And because the event is virtual, you can do it in the comfort of your own home.
It doesn’t take much to get beneath the surface of your relationship with money – but once you do, it can have a profound effect on how you run your business.
To learn more and register for the event, go to MasterYourMoneyEvent.com. Tickets are normally $495 – but for you as a newsletter reader, putting in the code save300 will get you a ticket for just $195.
I’ll see you there.
