You + Money + Business. Bringing It All Together {EFC Series – Part 6}
The point of the Exploring Your Financial Capacity series is all about understanding money is more than just earning and spending.
We’ve covered a lot so far.
Not only have we sussed out…
>> the major shortfalls of modern-day monetary advice, what our financial capacity is and why it is important
>> we’ve explored generational differences and familial influences
>> how social systems and structures can expand or collapse your financial capacity
>> we’ve acknowledged our (pretty screwed up, let’s say unbalanced) monetary environment we all exist within
>> and finally we couldn’t go further without examining our relationship to confidence and doubt when it comes to making and managing money.
So now to bring it all together so we can see how to step forward with expanding our Financial Capacity further.
There are two final pieces of the puzzle here, that the frameworks, guru’s or more experienced folk tend to miss.
And they are…
1. YOU and your values, priorities, preferences and personality.
2. Evaluating how we balance between DOING and BEING (I’ll explain more about this below).
Let’s start with talking about YOU.
Expanding our financial capacity is dependant on us understanding our underlying motivations (underlying values), preferences/personality (in how we function, act and think) and priorities.
No piece of advice can unlock the true-to-self path to expanding your financial capacity without taking these into consideration. And it is the one thing that is (usually) forgotten when it comes to courses, books or programs I’ve observed.
Self-reflection, self-awareness and self-leadership is the key here.
I once completed a Values Session with a personality profiler. Combine those two aspects and your have supercharged understanding of yourself! I highly recommend it if you haven’t already doing some digging.
My values which encompass my business values include:
1. Being an authentic friend, mate, member or loyal supporter. People matter to me.
2. Life and interactions must hold substance- this means solid, straightforward, no bs, down to earth work, people and ways of living.
3. Being lively and feeling alive. This includes fun, adventure, ‘outrageous-ness’ and passion.
4. Simplicity, not for the sake of it but because efficiency, no smoke and mirrors, less is best is just my way of being.
At first didn’t really correlate how this impacted my financial capacity. But as I reflect on my offers, pricing and general business structure I can safely say this holds a lot of influence when it comes to congruency in my decision-making.
— Want to know why someone else can do quick, short, high-priced offers but you can’t? You’re a more ‘keeping it affordable’ or having different price points kind of person?
— What about someone setting up e-courses but you’re completely drawn to 1:1 appointments?
— How about people who are great at holding the space for groups but you’d rather manage less and focus on a few people?
— Or one of the biggest push/pulls I see, is someone trying to set up or run an ’empire’ of a business and go big, but really the in their heart want to narrow in and be a freelancer.
This push/pull of being someone you’re not, offering something that’s not quite you or trying to set up your income earning opportunities to someone else’s rule book significantly contracts our financial capacity. So it’s time to start unearthing your true way, your inner compass or true-to-self way of doing this thing called money.
Now let’s look at our perspective on how we do and be around money.
This means looking through the lens of BEING vs DOING in this world, life and business.
The state of being or how we be around money is not spoken about in the traditional world often. This can be described as being receptive (Amanda Owens has written about this at length.) Other authors call it being present, or it may be a state of surrender, acceptance or simply ‘taking in’. It is a key factor to expanding your financial capacity, to having more wealth, more time and more energy. It is the place where we can evaluate how we feel about money, life and ourselves. When we look at how we BE with money we start to unravel that conditions and influences we’ve covered over the last few weeks.
So how does your internal world of money feel? And when do you allow time or space to explore this? It’s when we stop DOING.
When do you give yourself time to see what your internal relationship with money is like?
When we don’t address it, it can feel like anxiety, confusion, overwhelm.
It is the place where we can decide to consciously act in accordance with our values rather than reacting. It is also one of the hardest places to go if we’ve experienced directly or indirectly money trauma. It is where monetary stories live or are heard and beliefs are made and upheld. It is like an internal ecosystem made up of many different parts and it is the least spoken about piece of this financial capacity puzzle. To often people speak of ‘money mindset’, but instead how can we cultivate more time to BE and to sit in being RECEPTIVE.
We don’t deal with with ‘unseen’ or invisible necessities in this left brained, over-active, hustling business environment.
We’re told action = productivity = success.
But for many business owners, they are stuck in inaction not because they’re lazy but because the external world it not right of them. Or they’ve been taught to doubt themselves. So going into the space of how we want to BE with money is the starting point.
We are very familiar with DOING or being told to take action around money. Make a plan, create a strategy, be accountable and seek guidance from an expert. But this is directed in an unhealthy way in society. An unbalanced way, even if it’s sold as being good for the economy.
Can we all just sit for a moment?
So this work we’ve been doing is about bring back that balance. To find the equilibrium between doing and being, left brained action and right brain creativity, and ultimately creating a space for receiving more wealth, money and abundance, as well as being in a place to give.
So to round up this work on exploring our financial capacity. I’m asking you to look at your relationship with ‘being’ and ‘doing’ money.
Here’s an easy exercise:
If you’ve kept a notebook during this email series than you’re in a good position to reflect on this right now. So my recommendation is to create a ‘whole’ picture of your financial capacity.
Either by writing a list (hello your left brained people) or drawing a picture/visual (and hello to the right brained people).
It can be a page with two columns, one labelled all positive influences and the other all negative.
Or my favourite… draw a picture of a little person (you) with a bubble around them in the centre of a page, that bubble is your financial capacity. Now draw arrows pointing down on the bubble (contraction of your capacity), write with the words, statements and influences you explored over the last few weeks. These are all the negative influences such as social conditioning to not ask for money, to be polite or to always be ‘doing’ and never sitting in receiving.
And then draw arrows pushing out from the bubble (expansion) of the things we’ve identified that expand your financial capacity.
Let’s go through the themes one last time:
1. generational differences
2. parental influences
3. social structures and conditioning
4. your relationship to self-confidence and doubt
5a. your priorities, preferences and personality
5b. how you do and be with money.
Can you see some really specific expanding or contracting influences?
Is there anything you’d like to work on or change?
Can you highlight the parts that are calling your attention first? (Highlight those).
But ultimately I hope you can see that your ability, capability, situation or experiences of money are the culmination of many factors. And this makes us the complex and nuanced people we are.
This ultimately means we can not be comparing ourselves to others, we need to ‘stay in our lane’ and do our own thing. Because our financial capacity is our own, and trying to build, fit or mould into anyone else’s just isn’t going work.
If you’d like to delve into this work even further, I hope you take some time to check out Illuminate: A Money Program for Women in Business as a starting point to step into the financial person you want to be in your business.
Have you seen the Financial Foundations video series?
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
I write emails about making and managing money in business when you're a kind, considerate and empathetic business owner. I speak about our monetary behaviour and practical finance business advice. We look at money from all angles.
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