Healing my relationship with Money

Over the first few years of being self-employed, my business revenue doubled each year. That's pretty sweet, and it told me that I was reaching out to the right people in a way that resonates. It also indicated that my programs were successful and people kept showing up to work with me.

Yet despite this growing trend in revenue, I found that I was paying myself about the same amount as the first year - more or less nothing.

All the revenue my business brought in mysteriously disappeared each month before I could pay myself. Not only that, my business didn't feel stable (despite it's growth and success) because I was still operating on a week-to-week cash flow where the money goes out almost faster than it came in.

My business savings towards future growth wasn't growing, and neither was my paycheck. (What savings? What paycheck?)

I had known for a long while that I had a block in relationship to money, which is why I worked on it with my business mentor and my financial advisor. And yet, despite the wonderful systems they gave me to create good habits with my business finances none of it really clicked for me. I'd try a system and by the 3rd week I'd start avoiding money again.

I seriously had a problem here, but I was stumped on how to change it.

Then I had a breakthrough when I heard Mark Silver talking about responsibility. He said that we are responsible for showing up for ourselves, our clients, our family and friends. He talked about a lot of us misplace this responsibility, sometimes believing we are responsible for what happens next after we show up, but we are not. It's our job to show up, do the work, and then surrender it.

I realized at that moment that I had not been showing up for myself. I was not holding myself responsible in my relationship with money.

My usual reaction to money had been "Ugh, I don't want to deal with this," and I would find something else to do. I fell into a habit of being very passive about money, allowing it to flow right out of the business as fast as it was coming in. I was allowing others to influence where my money came from and where it went.

Oh boy. Facing that was pretty sucky.

I decided, finally, that it was time for me to get responsible and proactive with my money and face all the emotional stuff I had been avoiding.

The first step was to take stock of where the money was coming from each month, and where it was going. Ooh this was really an eye opener for me! I discovered that for some of the services I offered, the fee did not cover the expenses. It was actually costing me quite a bit to offer them.

Um. Ugh. Oops. That was a pretty upsetting discovery.

I gave myself time to sit with the yucky emotions, eat ice cream, and meditate until I had processed it all. I was ready to take responsibility for it. Part of taking responsibility was owning that I was the one who created the situation, and that it was ok to forgive myself, learn from it and do something different.

I figured out my emotional reasoning behind the services offered so cheaply. Some of what had motivated me at the time was wanting to please the people working with me by creating a rate they couldn't refuse. I realized, though, that these low rates mostly prevented people from really investing in themselves and working the program. With a price point so low, it was no big deal to sign up and shrug it off if you didn't get around to following through.

I had created a situation for my clients that didn't give them the best possible support and structure for success. Not only that, offering a program at cost to me wasn't helping me be successful either. What a lesson to learn!

Another part of taking responsibility was putting in the time, thought, heart and effort to restructure and get a handle on my business finances. I committed making bookkeeping a priority so I could always pull up a snapshot of my finances instead of guessing what the pile of receipts on my desk represented financially.

I also started fiddling with budgets and spreadsheets and invited this work to bring healing to my relationship with money. I hung in there and sat through all the yucky emotions that came up. Remembrance and tonglen breathing came in very handy during this process.

As I became acquainted with my finances and shifted my business so it had more financially healthy habits, I gave myself plenty of TLC, self-care and breaks. I kept working at it until I emerged on the other side like a butterfly leaving it's cocoon. I was a butterfly who felt empowered and inspired about the flow of money into and out of her business and life. It really was a beautiful transformation.

And if I could do it, you can too.