Four days without social media.
Piece of cake right?
I think most of us could agree that choosing to go an hour or two without your phone is a pretty reasonable test for a modern woman.
But what if you went without it for four days, ceased social media, emails, television, radio and even reading?
I might here you say – “Are you crazy woman, 4 days! what’s there left to live for without my tech?”
Girlfriend! THERE IS MORE to live for THAN YOU COULD ever IMAGINE.
Let me show you why this is true…
Creating conscious money habits
Regular actions, that eventually become habitual (and natural) will slowly change our reactive or negative patterns into something that serves our vision. Words spoken become not only powerful but naturally positive in nature.
When choosing our conscious habits, we can should consider these three things:
Energy
This aspect of our conscious money habits relates to the energy we feel not only when we speak about money, but also relates to the thoughts we have and the physical body – where we hold the energy in our bodies when we think or speak about money.
Energy is an underlying thing, we can feel it but we often can’t see it. It is often said that money has a neutral energy, it is neither good nor bad, it just is. However, if we reflect on our money story, it might be apparent that you have held a certain energy around money for a long time. When you observe what was said around money growing up – was the energy in your family open and expansive, full of possibility, or perhaps when you spoke about money in the context of others lives there was an energy of needless consumption, greed, or status.
Consider the energy you feel in your body when you repeat your powerful money statement to yourself. Are you reading it with intent and passion or is it just another thing on your to-do list? This is no different to the energy you feel when you create something – a piece of art, a beautiful meal, or even movement. If you know how you feel when you create these things – power, love, attention and fullness, how would it feel if we applied these feelings to money?
If you find yourself landing on this blog post today, then welcome to part two of our series on money.
In working with many over the past year, I noticed that our relationship with money can be a little sticky. A subject that we don’t feel comfortable talking about or experience a loss of confidence when it comes to money and making powerful choices.
In the first part of this three-part series on money, I asked you to complete this set of questions (download HERE).
Together, we looked at your history and past experiences, to find out whether this may have a bearing on what beliefs you hold today – especially if money makes you nervous.
The reason I asked you to look into your past, is that some of the beliefs you have today, you may have unconsciously carried through your life. Your actions today, may be a reaction to those past experiences – for fear of repeating a cycle – perhaps you don’t want to experience what your parents went through.
Sounds all very simple, easy to follow – right? Abundance is my middle name I hear you say.
Or maybe not. Maybe abundance sounds great in theory but what about in reality?
You open your wallet, you look in your fridge, log in to your online banking and somehow things don’t feel so ‘abundant’ anymore.
So, in my experience, we can’t talk about abundance without first addressing its most common association – money.
When you break it down, money is just one tool that allows us to invest in our growth and our human evolution, through new experiences. If we are feeling less than abundant, then the decision to undertake a period of growth and transformation will be rife with debate.
Because money is not seen as a tool to open our eyes to greater possibility, or eye-opening experiences.
These new ‘eye-opening’ experiences could be further education, courses, working with coaches, a mastermind, therapists, attending workshops, walking over hot coals…which I’d much prefer to do than sit in a cave for 10 years and meditate – despite the cave being a route that requires minimal financial investment.
Would you agree that you freely invest in your growth? or is money the biggest factor in this decision? Designer dress or a session with a kinesiologist? Waaaaaay easier, and more comfortable to go designer – right? You’ve already got the university degree, that counts right?
There will be some women out there nodding their heads, because we LOVE learning.
But for many of the beautiful souls out there, investing in our growth, possibility and potential, is scary and requires stepping into the unknown.
There are no guarantees, nor do we obtain something physical in return that is evidence of our investment. Designer dresses are typically not included. Which is why we take the seemingly easier route.
Opt out.
Instead if we invested, we trusted, we persisted and we allowed passion and desire to fill our veins, the vision eventually becomes a reality.
And suddenly your direct association between abundance and the status of your bank account shifts dramatically.
I believe we need to get comfortable with investing in our growth for one key reason – if you don’t know what you don’t know – why that fear might be holding you back, then it makes sense to find someone that could shine a light on it.
Let’s go back to my original statement about defining abundance.
Perhaps your beautiful vision of abundance involves creating a business to be your own boss and serve others, or relocate out of the city so you can start a veggie patch and live off the land. Down the line, there will likely be some financial investment to get it off the ground. Stepping into this vision requires you to up skill or step into a new version of yourself with the support of a team or an accountability partner to get you over the line.
When we give excuses for not investing and not doing the work, we are in a state of resistance, and we deny ourselves the investment because of…money.
Or rather it’s not money itself but our beliefs, and our story about money that holds us back.
These beliefs create our identity. Which creates our behaviours and verbal excuses – how we spend, what we spend it on, what we say about money, or what we don’t say about money. And so the cycle continues.
To break the cycle, you need to first own your money story.
So what was my money story?
For a long time, my version of abundance was wrapped up in status. I probably lived the first 20-odd years of my life via a lens of comparison and material attainment. Some of this was conscious, some of this by default because of the way money is portrayed in Western society. This lens created some pretty interesting thoughts and behaviours around money, which were typically skewed towards lack and not enough therefore always striving for a bigger, flashier version of myself.
I can recall a number of times as a child that fed into this story – breaking down on the ski field in our old car, mum cleaning her friends houses when my parents separated or mum making our clothes as children.
But my lens distorted the really good stuff – what I didn’t see was that my parents chose worldly experience over shiny objects – we camped through Europe for 3 months as a teenager because they chose education and culture. They were rebellious and creative with money. Once I owned my story around money, the distorted lens was lost and instead I could really see what was possible with money when you exercised a little creativity.
I then set about defining abundance for myself based on my values and my vision for my life.
What allowed me to see clearly this new beautiful version of abundance – first choosing my personal growth over that designer dress. Choosing to be worthy of that bigger vision for my life instead of continuing the same old patterns.
On to today’s mini challenge…
I want you to feel empowered when it comes to your finances, your future and therefore all that potential that’s available to you.
To feel empowered, we first acknowledge where we are at right now and where we have come from with respect to money. This allows us to see where we might have been holding on to some funky thoughts and beliefs. We do this through a simple journalling exercise.
I would love to hear what came up for you in doing this exercise? what surprised you? what felt good? what things do you want to let go of?
As I write this I’m sitting on a train to Sydney with my Mama having spent several days together with my beautiful sister in Newcastle.
We come together rarely these days, but we always jam-pack it with our favourite things – movies, several coffees, lunch, shopping, beach swims, cooking delicious meals, sharing stories and our wisdom with one another.
It has often struck me the significant long-term value created by these intense periods of connection. You can have a couple of hours with a girlfriend you haven’t seen in months and it fills you both up for weeks to come. We’ve gone so far as to drop people back at the airport while they’re transiting in Melbourne just to be able to connect.
Back to the daily grind and we quickly lament the ‘busyness’ of our lives. Our physical and emotional energy is spread thin (which is not the way I like my peanut butter!). This busyness leads to a pattern of forever trying to find that perfect balance in all areas of life. This is true for the food we eat, exercise we do, our careers and our relationships.
Since we’re on the topic of connection and relationships, lets go there.
I’ve come to feel strongly that the strength of our relationships isn’t defined by quantity – although social media would have us believing so.
To go deep can be scary, because we are suddenly unmasked, we have nowhere to hide.
Obviously there will be wide-ranging perceptions of what depth looks like from one being to another, but there are a few key things anyone can do to enhance the depth.
Look your beloved in the eyes – our body language, especially the eyes speak volumes for our level of attention.
For a long time, I really had to practice looking people in the eyes when they spoke. I was totally uncomfortable, but this practice alone did wonders for my confidence one on one with people. As this began to grow to an audience, I took the same idea with me.
Even if you’re only have 10 minutes for an exchange at the end of the day with your beloved, in that 10 minutes you are 100% present with them.
As with looking someone in the eyes my awareness also increase around my lack of listening, so I practiced listening. As my man knows, I’m an effervescent woman who was great at finishing sentences in the past. Now 90% of my work as a mentor is listening.
Do you remember what it felt like the last time someone really listened to you? Did you feel loved? did it feel like time stood still?
This is what I believe abundance truly feels like. Again, depth not time.
We too often judge ourselves on the lack of time with loved ones, the lack of connection in our relationships. But rather than focus on the lack – think about what you can do to create depth?
A recent podcast from a personal development coach, highlighted three more ideas for creating deeper connections.
The first relating to the subject of time.
If ‘lack of time’ has become a reoccurring theme for you, then I suggest planning in major chunks of time with your family, friends or partner in advance – perhaps in 3 or 6 month blocks. This could be a holiday, a day date – far enough in advanced that you build the rest of your schedule to meet that date.
The second point in the podcast related to the content of our conversations.
This is a beautiful practice to tie in with our sacred dates. When was the last time you talked about your vision for the future, or expressed a wild idea you had while you’re in the shower? When you create space together away from the distractions of daily life, these ideas flow easily and naturally.
The third related to how we get present before we enter a situation or conversation with our closest humans. This was also a lovely piece of advice that my mother-in-law has given me in the past before going into a deep conversation with her son.
Before you get out of the car, on your walk home from the train take a handful of deep breaths to ground you. Or you could even plan your conversation around a yoga class or a run to get you a little more present in your body.
If any of these ideas connect with you please let me know in the comments below.
If you’re craving to feel more connected to your loved ones, then focussing on depth by using these few little things will go a long way. Soon you will be able to feel a level of depth with not just your loved ones but even a stranger. And that’s when the real magic happens!
Beautiful, are you ready to create a deeper connection to yourself, your career and your relationships?
Good news is that connection already exists within you, sometimes it takes a little help to discover it.
You are invited to begin this journey today by joining me for a 30min coaching call to learn how we do this.
email me: hello@rubymarsh.com to BOOK
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