How to end guilt and shame associated with money - Women's Agenda

How to end guilt and shame associated with money

Guilt. Shame. Can you feel how powerful these words are? Their heaviness as they roll off your tongue is enough to make you squirm.

Yet they are just words.

It’s amazing how words take on the energy of what we attach to them.

These two simple words are used to describe some of the heaviest emotions we feel as humans. Emotions are simply energy in motion and, like all energy, emotions have a vibrational frequency that can be measured.

Shame and guilt have the lowest vibrational frequencies of all the human emotions. This is why they feel so heavy.

Compare them to emotions like love, bliss and joy which are energising, uplifting and expansionary and you’ll know what I mean.

Each of us possesses a personal energetic frequency that dictates how ‘lucky’ we are or how magnetic we are to the things we desire.

The higher our personal energetic frequency the more magnetic we are to the things we desire. This is the Law of Attraction at work.

But why is it that so often no amount of positive thinking, visualisation, strategising and planning actually sees you achieving the results you desire?

It’s a good question and something I constantly come across with women I coach.

Usually, when we dig a little deeper, we find a past experience that made these women feel deeply ashamed of theirs or their family’s financial situation or wracked with guilt in relation to money.

The result is a low personal energetic frequency when it comes to anything money related. This manifests itself in an inability to take the right actions to make money no matter how hard you try and, worse, an inability to hang onto it when you do make any.

Hands up who’s had that problem? Yep, me too.

In order to clear this problem we first need to identify the specific emotions you personally have in relation to money.

Here is a little exercise to help you do this:

Close your eyes and take a few long deep breaths so you can connect deeply with yourself.

Now let your mind wander back to your earliest memory of money. Play the scene over in your head exactly as you remember it.
• Who is there?
• What is happening?
• What is being said?
• How do you feel?
• Why do you feel this way?

It can help to write this down, particularly why you felt the way you did. Try to identify what it was about the situation that was a problem for you personally.

This exercise will give you a window into the earliest emotional attachment you gave to money.

Now think about scenarios in your current adult life where this emotional experience around money is continually replaying itself. For example, are you constantly discounting your prices in your business even before the client gets a chance to ask? Are you giving stuff away for free with no strategy attached? Are you always paying for coffee for your friends? Or are you very tight and secretive with your money?

Think about how your earliest memories of money and the emotions you felt then may be having an impact on how you are around money today.

If you want a more positive relationship with money, try these five key steps:

  1. Put an old head on young shoulders.

    With all the wisdom of life you now have as an adult, think about what you would say to your younger child self in relation to your earliest memory of money. Straighten out the picture and bring some adult perspective in. Then replay the old memory in your head with this new adult perspective and let the old emotion attached to the memory dissipate.

  2. Practice gratitude.

    So often we forget to be grateful for what we do have. I know when we are struggling, in horrendous debt or dealing with a failing business, it is hard to practice gratitude but being consciously grateful everyday increases our personal vibrational frequency. This makes us more magnetic to the things we want. The expansion creates space for the right people and opportunities to show up.

  3. Recognise that money is nothing.

    Often we allow money to take on this massive, controlling persona in our lives. We let it rule us and blame it as the reason we don’t have the lives we want.

    The truth is that money is in fact nothing. It is nothing but an idea to make the exchange of value easier and more efficient. If we focus our attention on the value piece and less on the money piece our relationship with it will be a lot better and it will be far more attracted to us.

  4. Realise that our relationship with money mirrors our relationship with ourselves.

    The first way we make money is by creating and giving value and accepting money, a store of value, in return. We do this by using our own gifts and talents and offering them out to the world. How much money we ask for in return is directly linked to how much we value ourselves and what we bring to the world. By raising our level of self worth we can also raise our net worth.

  5. Stop working for money

    This statement might make you roll your eyes, but hear me out! Most of us spend our lives working for money when the truth is money is a tool that is actually dying to work for us. No matter how bad your situation is financially YOU are your best asset. Pay yourself first before every single other bill you have and then get advice on getting that money working for you as quickly as possible.

The above might just be the best relationship advice you will ever get.

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