Sound Advice

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice -E.W. Howe

         Do you remember that time in your life when you were deciding what you wanted to be when you grew up? Not when you were still a kid and believed it was possible to be an astronaut princess or an actor who is a ninja at night. I’m talking about in your teen years when it was time to make decisions about your future. Do you remember how you made the decision to do whatever you are doing now in exchange for money?

         To me, greed is making any decision based solely in money. Meaning that you may have wanted to be an artist and or study something new that has never been done before. Maybe you dreamed of doing something others didn’t understand. Did you have that moment when someone you loved said something like, “Well how are you going to make money at that?” Or “Art is a great hobby but not a great career. There just isn’t much money in it.” Or maybe even, “Sweetheart we love you but you have to be more realistic. Without much money, you are not going to have a great life.”

         This talk happens to nearly everyone at some point. A parent, teacher, school counselor, or even a peer tells you that what you dream of doing will not make you very much money. Then the wind is taken out of your sails, your heart sinks, and your shoulders slump defeated. All because you believe them. How would they know what the future holds when the future is always a fantasy? But still, they all mean well. They have an intention of helping you be happy in the future but what they have just done is teach you greed.

         Many people believe that greed is going after more than your ‘fair share.’ Or maybe charging over and above what others are charging for a similar product or service. Maybe even lying to people to make money or scamming them is what many consider greedy behavior. But each one of those examples of greedy behavior has at its foundation a person making decisions based solely in money. But if you are not following your heart when it comes to money, greed is logical. In something as important a decision as a career, if you are not following your inner guidance greed is what comes to fill the void. It will sit in the throne of decision-making all under the guise of not having to worry about money in the future.

         There is a question I ask many of my students just to see their reaction. The question is, “How do you know that following your heart won’t make you the most money in life? How do you know that following your heart won’t lead you to a vast fortune?” Then I sit and watch their facial features as they process the question. They typically walk through their thought process around their choices back to the conversation when someone taught them to abandon their dream and chase ‘good money’ instead. Then they either defend their decisions in order to protect the approval they received from their loved ones for following greed instead of their hearts, or they feel the letdown of being duped.

How Would They Know?

         How would anyone know what is best for you? They don’t. No one does. Only your heart knows that. The faster you understand that the only way to wealth is by listening to the wisdom found in your heart and not the logic of the financial world, the faster you will escape the matrix of greed.

         My mother was a saint to me. The kindest person I had ever known. However, I grew up poor. When it came time for me to decide what to do as a career path, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. My peers had all been making decisions or at least visiting college campuses where they could further their education while still deciding what to do in the future. For me, we were so poor that college was out of the question. I couldn’t afford to spend time in class because I had a mouth to feed and every minute I wasn’t supporting myself I was a drain on my mother.

         My mother did what I believe all parents do when their children are faced with these kinds of decisions and told me what had worked for her. She told me, “Son, you can do anything. However, if you learn a trade you will never go hungry.” Looking back I find her word choice fascinating but even more interesting than that was she was giving me financial advice while we were in serious poverty. Meaning she had no clue how to get to wealth because if she did she would have done that for herself.

         What fascinates me is that this experience was not unique to my life. All parents teach their children what they know, they can’t teach them what they don’t know. Even if a parent is unhappy with their life or their financial situation, they will still teach what ‘worked’ for them. An unhappy person cannot teach you to be happy and yet they still pretend that they can. So if you want something more than your parents had you cannot listen to their advice. Except no one tells you this when you are a teenager or young adult. You have to learn it by listening to their advice and watching it fail.

         I loved my mother, she was my best friend and favorite human. But that love blinded me from what I was being taught. It wasn’t until after she died that I began seriously investigating my subconscious mind and what it believed about money. It wasn’t until then that I saw I had inherited her struggle with money. She taught me what she was taught by my grandfather who lived through the great depression and I suspect missed a few meals because of it.

         I took her advice and almost straight out of high school I went into the trades. I became an electrician through the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. By the time I became a journeyman and mastered my trade I was making decent money. Enough money to be considered middle income. Except my heart was seeking wealth, not middle class. However, my mother was very proud of me. Because of this, I hold the opinion to this day that to many parents getting their children one step up the social class ladder from where they started is success.

         I am in no way saying my mother or your parents did anything wrong if my story sounds familiar to you. They did what they were taught, they did what they thought would help us the most. However, when you are taught to choose a career based solely or somewhat on the money you will make, you have been taught greed. If you were taught to follow your heart and the money thing will work itself out, then consider yourself lucky. If you were like me and never taught anything about following your inner guidance to wealth then like me you are going to have to teach it to yourself.

         Learning something so foundational to your decision-making means that replacing greed with inner guidance is not going to be like learning the latest dance craze. It is not something new you can simply install. What has come before must be deleted, removed, or unbrainwashed otherwise the way you have always done things will be fighting to be right. The most difficult thing for me when updating my programming to align with wealth was investigating how the love for my mother and the beliefs she taught me were intertwined.    

I’m still craving approval from my parents. It took a lot of success for me to realize it is never coming. It’s just not in their nature  -Andrew Stanton

Never Go Hungry

         “If you learn a trade, you’ll never go hungry,” I remember her teaching me that at 16 years old as if it was yesterday. You see the problem with giving young people advice is that they have no frame of reference. They have no experience to draw from and therefore, cannot tell what sound advice is and what is fear-based poverty mindset advice. All the child knows for sure is that their parents want what is best for the child. Since most of us were not taught to listen to and follow our inner guidance, we had no way to counter-argue what seemed like good advice as youngsters. We had no way to test its validity other than taking it into the world and practicing it.

         After many years of trying to escape poverty through hard work using the trade I had learned, I realized that wealthy people don’t seem to work hard, they work smart. So I set out to educate myself on the financial industry while leaving the electrical trade behind and swapping it for a career I could get paid for using my brains, not my body. I had seen what happened to construction worker’s bodies by the time they reached retirement and needless to say, it was not a good sales pitch on putting 30-40 years of life into the trades.

         Before I made the leap to the financial industry my mother, who always wanted to be supportive, gave me a book to read. She brought me Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. This is where I was first introduced to the connection between the subconscious mind and wealth. That book was the Genesis of the Financial Shaman. If I hadn’t read that book you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

         Many years later after undoing much of the poverty mindset I was gifted with as a youngster I came back to my mother’s ‘sound advice.’ It dawned on me that what she had taught me unconsciously was scarcity. It is right there in the term “never go hungry.” Meaning learning a trade was a way to combat the consequences of running out of money. It was an outer fix to an inner fear of starvation.

         The only way scarcity can thrive in a mind is to believe you currently reside in a hostile universe. If not hostile, then a universe running with no sentient intelligence behind it, which is commonly known as chaos theory. So to translate the sound advice my mother gave me through the filter of a financial shaman like I am today, what the advice translates to is, “Because we reside in an environment that is hostile and doesn’t care about you, you have to look out for yourself. To be able to take care of yourself and protect yourself from death through starvation you need to have a skill that is vital to society so you always have a job and a way to make income.”

         This advice comes all the way from people who lived through the Great Depression. Essentially, society started to break down and the only people who could provide for themselves and their families easily were people who had skills vital to the rest of us. The closest parallel in modern times comes from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is where only ‘essential workers’ could work to ensure all people still had access to basic needs. However, the essential workers were the only ones not freaking out over finances when everything shut down. When you live paycheck to paycheck, or close to it, economic recessions and global pandemics become a horror movie you are stuck living in.

         Before we go further. Do you remember the sound advice that was given to you when you set out to make money for yourself and stand on your own two feet independently of your parents? Take some time to reflect on what the advice was, how you practiced it in real life, and how the results of that advice turned out so far.

         When you live through something financially traumatic or horrific like a recession or pandemic, it may make you create beliefs to protect yourself from something painful and scary happening like that again. You may even teach your children the ‘lessons’ you learned from trauma in order to protect them as well. How do you know all the advice you ever received about money didn’t come from those kinds of fearful and painful experiences? Because, technically the advice isn’t wrong, it just sets you up for failure, or at best, mediocrity.

There is one grand lie – that we are limited. The only limits we have are the limits we believe  -Wayne Dyer

Poverty Protection

         What if it told you that believing in scarcity and taking actions to prevent experiencing extreme hunger would protect you from starving but also protect you from wealth? Wealthy people don’t believe in scarcity, so they don’t protect themselves from it and thus wealth is allowed to flow into their lives. Truly wealthy people have unbrainwashed the scarcity from their minds and thus been shown the lie underneath it.

         Do you believe everything you were taught about money was built on abundance and wealth? Wouldn’t your life reflect wealth if you had been taught abundance? There is an old Chinese proverb that states, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now.” It would have been nice to have been taught abundance growing up but the second-best time to learn it is now. Hopefully, if you have children of your own nearing the age where ‘sound advice’ needs to be given, you may think twice about playing copycat and handing them the advice that was given to you. The best way to teach anyone anything is to lead by example.

         I’m grateful I grew up poor for one reason even though I could list several. The main reason I appreciate growing up in extreme poverty is that I’m not afraid of it at all. I’m not afraid of ending up back there or worse. I’ve been homeless more than once, I’m not afraid of that either. It is difficult to fear things you have already survived. This lack of fear of starvation helps me see financial risk very differently than most people. I know that all scarcity is a lie because there is always enough. This is not a hostile universe even though it is doing a good job of pretending.

         If poverty could kill you, don’t you find it interesting that there are so many people experiencing it? Many people live their whole lives in scarcity, dying of old age. But how is that possible if starvation is always just around the corner? What I am proposing is a simple idea that is not simple to let take root in the mind. The idea is your basic needs are always taken care of by the one who created you and set you on the life path you are now following. You will always have enough, however, it doesn’t seem that way. There is a magician in your imagination showing you images of things you don’t want to experience like eating out of garbage cans, begging with a sign on the street, or living in a homeless shelter. These images distort perception through fear.

         When you believe the horror movie in the imagination, it becomes ‘too risky’ to follow your heart to wealth. Even if the career you currently have makes you feel safe, if it is unfulfilling, you will never be happy. Don’t you love knowing that there is a part of your mind that prioritizes safety over happiness? You may even hear that part now say something like, “Why can’t I have both safety and happiness?” Because you only seek safety in a hostile universe, and you can never be happy if your perception sees things to fear in the world you live in.

         People protect themselves from happiness by taking jobs that are beneath them. They covet safety more than kindness from their employers. How many people do you think there are that take poor treatment from their employer because they don’t think very highly of themselves? The value you have of yourself, commonly known as your self-worth, is completely under your control through your perception. No one else’s opinion of your worth matters unless you give that control away to others.

         I have studied scarcity mindset in some way or another for three decades. What I can tell you is that telling someone they have a poverty mindset when they grew up in poverty is like telling a fish it is in water. Meaning it will be so familiar they can’t perceive it. I find it best to ask questions to draw forth from within what they believe about themselves and the universe they live in. Do believe stockpiling money is to protect you from danger or so you can finally do what your heart has always wanted to do? Do believe listening to your heart with money decisions is logical or illogical? Why so or why not? Do you believe everything your parents taught you about money? Why so or why not?

         If you disbelieve even one thing your parents taught you growing up doesn’t that mean that everything they taught you needs to be investigated? If you disbelieve even one thing the traditional financial world has taught you, doesn’t that also mean you need to investigate everything they say to see if is valid or outdated? What if traditional financial intelligence can only tell you how to play it safe, be average or mediocre? What if you want to be free and use money to follow your heart wherever it takes you? Well then obviously what you are up against is in your mind. Your opponent is everything you were taught to prioritize logic over following your heart.

Happiness has to do with your mindset, not with outside circumstance      -Steve Maraboli