I think money is like sex. There is a lot of confusion around what it is, what it should be, and why we want it. And all of our confusions around it actually have nothing to do with money itself; it has to do with, yet again, our childhood upbringing.
I recently realized that a lot of my own money patterns are twisted. For example, I am not a typical Asian in that I really did not care about making money until I turned 29. Then all I could think about was turning 30 and I thought well, it would be nice to afford “small” luxuries. Still, no high expectations. Then, it’s only been in my 30s and trying different entrepreneurial ventures that I thought, hey I’d like to have my own business and make “real” money. Still, I didn’t really believe I could do it (the topic of my next post). And then, it was only recently, that I came upon Barbara Stanny books again (because you can only absorb key information when you are ready for it) and started peeking underneath my behavior and thinking around money and discovering the WHYS of how I think around money.
And whether we grew up with scarcity or abundance, we all have patterns around money. By patterns, I mean irrational, rigid behavior.
There’s a lot more I could say about it, but for now, a key way it comes up in running your own business is your prices. How much do you charge? How did you come up with that? Are you charging enough? Do you feel bad for charging more? Are you valuing your products and services enough?
Many women feel bad about accumulating wealth or intentionally going for making money. Because of our societal conditioning to be caretakers, we feel guilty for taking care of ourselves (and that includes financially). Do you think men feel bad for it?
The same goes for power. Again, a lot more can be said on this, but suffice it to say, that we attribute going after both money and power to be “bad.” This is because most of the models of people –men– who have a lot of money and power are not what we want. But what if we stopped and considered that we could do something different? As someone famous said, “You can’t light up the world, if you can’t pay your light bill.”
#StartMyBusinessToday
