How often do you find yourself talking about your next holiday, your next adventure, your next purchase and yet when it comes to talking about money you find yourself or someone you know shutting down, changing the subject or becoming very quiet. This is a well-played out scenario for many people.
We interact with money on a daily basis and yet talking about money, for many is often a NO GO ZONE!
The challenge with not talking about money, especially where it’s not part of the school curriculum, is that you struggle to learn positive spending and money management habits. You end up being tied to working hard for your money, opportunities seem to pass you by, and this can often lead to a constant state of stress and anxiety around meeting your living expenses, resulting in your future needs being left to chance.
This uncomfortableness around money doesn’t discriminate, with individuals on six and seven figure incomes, living paycheck to paycheck, more often than not because they don’t feel comfortable talking about their finances and they either don’t know how to manage their money or don’t have time to manage their money.
SO WHY THE STRUGGLE WITH TALKING ABOUT MONEY?
Money is considered taboo
For many growing up, the general rule was, you didn’t talk about money, politics or religion. Why? Because people’s views on these topics were so diverse, it could easily lead to heated augments and so the safe and respectable thing to do was not broach these subjects.
The impact of your environment
The money environment you grew up in plays a key role in the relationship you have with money. It’s not uncommon to hear from clients that parents didn’t talk about money growing up. This might have been as a result of trying to protect their children, cultural, societal, relational, systemic reasons and in a number of cases, there being no formal process on teaching good money habits to the younger generation.
Money trauma
Personal finances can attract a lot of emotional baggage, whether it be from childhood or struggling with long-term debt or setbacks in adulthood. These events inform how you interact with money on a daily basis. Where financial trauma has been experienced (from money being taken and not repaid, to bankruptcy, living in poverty, eviction, divorce or loss of a loved one), it can lead to challenging behaviours like denial, avoidance, overspending, lack of spending and lack of boundaries.
Unfortunately, these behaviours are not a great mix when dealing with money.
HOW TO RESOLVE THIS
Communicate
Start taking small steps to talk about your finances. By normalising the money conversation, as you would talking about other topics, you remove the ‘taboo’ nature that may have been associated. You could also leverage off that individual to become accountability partners to support each other to move towards your financial goals. This could be someone you know, a financial coach or financial specialist such as an Accountant, Financial Adviser or bookkeeper. It’s not uncommon to seek trusted external support to talk about money.
Awareness
Build awareness around the money environment you grew up in. Was money discussed? Was the environment one of lack or more than enough? Bring curiosity to the emotions that are coming up for you when dealing with money. Overspending? Acknowledge the emotion you’re feeling prior to spending, is it because you’re trying to soothe pain or because you’ve had a bad day? Consider self-soothing using tools such as journaling or breath work to help calm your nervous system down so can view the situation more consciously.
Express forgiveness
It’s often easy to blame yourself or others for the financial position you’re in. By exploring forgiveness for yourself and those around you, you can acknowledge both yourself and others were operating with tools available at that time. The focus now becomes what you can do to change your current position rather than focussing on the past.
Separate yourself from the money narrative
Instead of focussing on language such as ‘I’m bad with money’, ‘I have so much debt’ separate yourself by acknowledging that ‘I’m learning to be better with money’, that ‘I’m moving towards reducing my debt’. You are not money and money is not you. You are worthy of wealth just as you are.
Having a challenging relationship with money is not a life sentence. As a financial coach, I use a multi-faceted approach to support clients up-level their relationship with money which encompasses the emotional, practical, physical and spiritual aspects.
We explore deeper the relationship you have with money as part of the Money Mindset Reprogram.
Suzanne X
Working with a financial coach can help you to gain clarity around creating more money and managing money. If you would like to explore this further, please book in for a free 15 minute chat.