Inspiring Your Authentic Week

Posted: 16 Aug 2010 12:45 AM PDT

Money gets a lot of blame, but money is a very basic technology designed to simply facilitates the exchange of energy between people. It is not evil.

A spade is also a basic technology deigned to facilitate digging. It is not evil either.

Like a spade money can be used as weapon to exploit or harm people. Unlike a spade money can also contribute to harm when it is used to gamble.

Money is by far the most common tension that people feel holds them back from living their purpose and their dreams. I have done my Life Purpose exercise with over 3000 people and, one way or another, people feel that money holds them back.

Either they have a job and an income and don't feel they can leave the job, because they need the income or they don't have a job and they don't have enough income.

Money is a tricky one to come to terms with, no question. There is so much conditioning about the importance, the scarcity and the "cost" of money that it is extremely hard for most of us to get any sort of objectivity about it.

Myths about money that we are conditioned with include:

1 - We are not allowed to evaluate our own worth.
2 - Money is scarce
3 - If you want money you have to work hard/ sacrifice your personal values to get it.

None of these are true. I would argue that one of the reasons that people with money have money is because they don't believe these things.

1 - One of the core lessons of our education was that evaluation had to be done by someone else, preferably with a red pen and preferably without consultation or right of appeal.

The result is that most of us don't have any real idea of what our time or energy are worth. This is bad in a job situation where largely we just accept what we are offered, it is worse in an independent scenario where we have to price and sell ourselves.

The truth is we are the most important evaluators of our work and it is a skill we need to learn. We need to do the research and understand the value that we bring to a situation. We need to balance that with the income we need and the time and effort we have put in; and arrive at an amount which we can negotiate towards.

2 - In one of the later books of the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, leaves are used as money. This is obviously ridiculous, there is a virtually unlimited supply of leaves and everyone can help themselves.

Is this really more ridiculous than money?

In fact the supply of leaves is MORE limited than the supply of money. The difference is that under our system only a privileged few can help themselves. Leaf supply is limited by the number of trees and the number of leaves per tree. Money supply is limited by the amount of debt banks can sell and the amount of leverage they can apply (times they can multiply it).

Money is a human invention. These days with most money being digital it is effectively free to create. It's supply is not, as you might imagine, carefully controlled by wise financial geeks in the government or central bank. It is created by all banks every time they make a loan, they then securitse the borrowers asset and turn it into money (and charge the lender to borrow it). This is exactly what went so horribly wrong in the credit crunch. For more on the problems with the way that we create money see The Bank of England Act.

3 - Hard work is a common "Christian" value, and we are told that we will be rewarded for it. The myth is that the reward is proportional to the work, it is not.

The richest people in the world are not necessarily the hardest working, the poorest are not necessarily the laziest. In fact you would probably find a fairly even split of hard workers to lazy throughout the wealth spectrum and hard work does not inevitably lead to wealth.

There is no linear relationship between hours worked/effort put in and wealth. Of course there are many wealthy people who work extremely hard and there are also many who do not. Equally there are many poor people who work extremely hard and many who do not.

So how do we stop money from holding us back from living our purpose?

1 - Change our relationship with money. Shift our perspective towards seeing it simply as a tool we need to help us exchange energy with other people.

2 - Decide how much money you want and work back from there to establish a strategy. If you want to earn 200,000 per year - how much of what and at what price do you need to sell to make it happen? Work it back to even a weekly level and then work out how you are going to make it happen and over what time frame.

You can do the same sum if you have a job, how much of what do you need to do to justify that income, what is your strategy for doing it? How can you sell that strategy to your employer?

Don't leap directly to a big figure, start in a small and manageable way and grow it from there. Christian Owens did it at 16 - why not you?

3 - Embrace the idea that your values and your purpose are what makes you valuable, not just your hours or your muscle. Our purpose gives us huge motivation and our values guide us and give us strength. We can use them to enhance our lives and our value to others.

If you need help with articulating your purpose, your values or your strategy - give me a call.

Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. This week we will be discussing "money - the root of all evil?"

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With love

nx

Neil Crofts
Neil Crofts
authentic business

+34 646391384
neil@neilcrofts.com
www.neilcrofts.com
Skype - neilcrofts