Do you deserve to have money? Are you good enough for wealth and financial success?
If your answer is "no," or "I don't know," that may be the very root of many of your financial and professional struggles.
That's because our deeply-held, inner beliefs about money play a powerful role in shaping our expectations. Our expectations, in turn, shape our behavior, our choices and ultimately, the results we will see.
We all have beliefs that we have come to accept as "˜truths' due to our upbringing and childhood conditioning. With regard to finances, these are often expressed in simple sayings such as "money doesn't grow on trees," or, "you have to work hard for your money." Hearing these expressions over and over, we internalize their messages.
These hand-me-down beliefs probably entered the cultural consciousness because they served to protect people from pain, harm or disappointment at earlier points in history. Times when there was no middle class for example, when career paths and life opportunities were very different, and when societal norms that would seem outrageous to us now (slavery, anyone?) were still in place. Although the world may have moved on since then in many ways, and even though we are living in a time of unprecedented change externally, many of us continue to hold on tightly to those same unchanged and yet outdated beliefs at an internal subconscious level. Often, those beliefs no longer serve us very well.
In essence they are nothing more than myths that can limit us, hold us back and drive us to behave in ways that sabotage our best efforts financially. That's why I call them "limiting beliefs."
Limiting Beliefs About Deserving Money
As I explain in my book The Abundance Code, those of us who believe the myth, "you have to work hard for your money," are probably fundamentally convinced that there's a direct connection between our work and our worth. We're conditioned to see a cause and effect relationship between doing things that other people value and receiving material rewards. Thus prosperity is tied to our sense of being "good enough."
Society also asks us subtly but consistently to prove that we deserve what we receive in life. If we enjoy the blessings of material or financial abundance, others will sometimes question whether we have done something "worthy" to deserve it. We internalize this layer of judgement, too.
But what if your worth is not determined by our work? What if it can't be measured in hours or in dollars but is inherent simply in your unique gifts and beautiful soul? Isn't there immeasurable worth in a smile? Or a kind word?
Why do we have to justify any prosperity that may flow into our lives by limiting it to the kind that comes from "hard work"?
Of course, it's gratifying to work hard and prosper as a result. The real problem arises when our subconscious beliefs cause us to doubt whether we deserve money or financial success.
Why? Because in order to succeed at any given endeavor, our conscious desires have to fully align with what we believe at a subconscious level. Whether we know it or not, we will only truly accept into our lives that which matches our underlying belief structure. When our conscious desires do not fully align with our subconscious beliefs, the outcome is frustration.
Thus, having a deeply held feeling of being undeserving of money, or not being fully convinced that we do deserve it, will be reflected in our outer circumstances. On the flip side, if we truly believe at a deep, internal level in our own deservingness of wealth, money will flow easily into our lives.
The subconscious mind always prevails in the end.
I learned about the power of the subconscious mind the hard way. My incredibly luxurious childhood fell apart when I was 11 and my parents lost all their wealth through a series of bad choices. I coded that experience into a solid internal belief that as easily as money flows into ones life, it will flow back out. So as an adult I experienced an exhausting, repetitive roller-coaster ride of money ups and downs. It took coming to the brink of bankruptcy before I recognized the pattern: my outer experiences were being driven by an unhelpful inner belief.
Shifting Your Mindset
The task, then, is to create a shift from a mindset of doubt to a sturdy sense that we deserve and can achieve financial freedom and success.
To do so, we must first step back and take stock of our subconscious beliefs around our deservingness of money. In thinking about what we want, we often find reasons that justify why we don't or can't have money including, "I don't deserve it." We need to dig deep and examine where this stems from. We also need to open our eyes to the patterns of self-sabotage such beliefs create.
Next, we must give ourselves permission to shed the old belief that "you have to work hard for your money" and instead envision a realistic, attainable future where money can come easily. This includes allowing ourselves to truly believe that it's okay to have money now, that yes, we deserve financial success and peace of mind"”everyone does"”and that we don't have to serve any sort of penance to justify it.
Finally, it's key to over-write the belief that we have to "do something" to deserve financial abundance. This can be accomplished through replacing it with a new belief that says we deserve prosperity and financial freedom unconditionally.
The process will require time, energy and emotional capital and it won't always be easy. I have personally done this work and there were tears and sorrow when I revisited painful memories and saw how I had coded their lessons into my subconscious beliefs about the world. But once I removed the limiting beliefs blocking me and over-wrote them with beliefs that supported and aligned with my conscious goals, I was easily able to reprogram my internal hard drive from "easy come, easy go" to "easy come, easy GROW."
When we truly believe that we deserve what we desire, we will use all our knowledge, energy and passion in its relentless pursuit. Even if we experience setbacks along the way, our belief will spur us on toward attaining our goal and we simply won't accept anything less.
Some Amazing Comments
Comments
