The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom (7 page)

Now take your fear and write it down. As you read it back to yourself, go back to the piece of paper on which you wrote your childhood memory, the one you recovered in the last chapter. Do you see an obvious connection? You might not at first. Give it time. You’ve opened your memories of money, long forgotten, and you’ve faced the fears long held inside you. The connections will come, too.

The mind gives us thousands of ways to say no, but there’s only one way to say yes, and that’s from the heart. It’s great when you start to make the connections between your memories and your fears. Now you have to make sure those fears stay far away; they will try, if you let them, to keep coming back. We have to retrain our minds away from thinking that we can’t control money, that we don’t deserve to do well, that not enough money is going to come in, that we don’t have enough now, that we won’t have enough tomorrow.

Believing, really
believing
, other realities makes other realities true: that we can control money, that we do deserve to do well, that there will be enough. How do we replace the old fears, the old reality? With new thoughts. With new truths.

I grew up with the belief that pervaded our household: “We don’t have any money” was the message. “You’ll always have to do without, so you had better learn how.” I did learn how to do without—so you can imagine the shock I felt when I applied
for a job as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in 1980 and was actually accepted. All I could think was, Wow! My dad is going to be so proud of me.

It didn’t start well.

I wore my best outfit to the interview, my blue silk shirt over red-and-white-striped Sassoon pants tucked into my white cowboy boots—and you should have seen the looks on all the interviewers’ faces. When they saw me, they actually asked if I had dressed that way to insult them. If there had been a rock in that conference room, I would have crawled under it.

Taking that job was breaking away from everything I had ever known. I was so out of my league. The most I had ever made before was $400 a month as a waitress, and even that was more than most of my friends were making back then. Every morning I would get up and feel sick to my stomach, but off I’d go to work with all these men in their pin-striped three-piece suits. When everyone else would go to lunch at their fancy restaurants, I’d get in my car and go to Taco Bell. It was the only part of the day when I felt comfortable in my surroundings.

The job itself was quite scary, telling people what to do with their money—and me having to make money just to keep my job. I had to go through a training program, but it didn’t train me for the pressure, and it didn’t give me the confidence. I was a commissioned salesperson, and either I generated commissions or I would soon be looking for another job. It was a never-ending battle: Would I meet my quota each month, or would I be out on the street? I needed something to override the fear that was eating me alive. I decided to change my perception of my situation and create a new truth for myself.

I created what I wanted for myself first on paper. Every morning before I went to work, I would write over and over
again: “I am young, powerful, and successful, producing at least $10,000 a month.” Why did I say “at least”? Because why limit it? What if the world wanted to give me more? Why did I use the present tense? Because this was the life I wanted to live in the present tense, not tomorrow, not someday.
Now
.

I wrote down that truth twenty-five times a day, said it to myself in the mirror, thought it each time I went up and down in the elevator. That’s what I would say, and that’s the truth I created. I still carry that truth around with me like a lucky charm in words, and it still works. I replaced the message of fear, and my belief I was inadequate, with a message of endless possibility.

You can, too, once you pull the fear out from wherever you’ve pushed it away to, face it, and use the power of your mind to put it behind you.

For twenty, thirty, forty years, or more, we’ve all been creating paradigms about ourselves, telling ourselves who we are, financially and in every other way. Part of this comes from what we were told about ourselves as children (“You’ll be a secretary just like your mom”; “You’ll be a gambler, just like your father”; “You’ll never amount to much unless you do X, Y, or Z”). The rest is what we tell ourselves, fears and all, over and over until we believe it absolutely.

Your new future begins with your new truth.

The power of positive thinking is not a new idea, but when it comes to money it is, because we’re still so afraid. We’re a culture of slogans—in ads, on bumper stickers, on T-shirts, needle-pointed onto pillows. Call it what you like—a financial mantra, a new truth, a new belief in yourself—but you must create a
positive, empowering message for yourself and instill it into your powerful mind to replace the fear you’re leaving behind, beginning now.

Install it, instill it, retrain your mind to believe it. Write it down twenty-five times a day, have it stamped on a T-shirt and sleep in it every night, say it to yourself on your way to work, when you pay your bills, when you begin to worry about money, when you feel afraid. Say it when you’re shaving, when you’re in the shower, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. A positive message to yourself, a message of possibilities. Do it when you resist it, do it when you don’t believe in it, do it when you feel as if it’s a useless drill, keep doing it until you believe it. Then it will be true. Three rules for your new truth:

Sheila is starting to put the lobster platter incident to rest with her new truth: “I hold and benefit from everything that comes my way.”

Mark is saying over and over again his new truth: “I have the power to put my money in good hands, and I trust the people I’ve chosen to keep it safe.”

Liz is on the path to forgive herself the UNICEF mishap with her new truth: “I am not afraid.”

Fears hate more than anything else to be defeated. They will try to invade your new truth like a virus, telling you what you can’t do, not what you can do, telling you what you can’t be,
not what you are becoming, telling you what you aren’t—not what you are and have every right to be. Don’t listen. Just keep repeating your new truth the way I did in the elevator.

What is “income”? Something that
comes in
. Have your new truth with you as you now open the door to new wealth. Your new truth is bigger than your fears, bigger than your debt, bigger than your worries about the future, bigger than all the things you’ve meant to do with your money but haven’t done. Now we will do them.

R
EALITY CHECK:
T
HROW
away a four-dollar magazine you never got around to reading—easy. Toss in the garbage five dollars’ worth of food that’s gone bad; you may reprimand yourself, but you probably do it all the time. Buy a sweater on sale for thirty dollars, then notice six months later that you wore it only once; it just didn’t fit right; you give it away. Now try to rip up and throw away a dollar bill. I have found almost no one who could do this without great discomfort. Yet everything about the way the money establishment functions is calculated to distance us from our money, to anesthetize us to its power. The plastic card that slides through the machine so smoothly
when we make our purchases; the automated voice of the bank’s telephone answering system that robotically answers our money questions; the digital electronic readouts of the stock exchange language that flash on our TV screens for the privileged few who understand it; the instant up-to-the-minute online updates for all our financial transactions. All of these “conveniences” leave us many steps removed from the actual thing. Most of the money we use today is in the form of the plastic cards we use as currency or online purchases that seem to disconnect us from money even more. Isn’t that one reason it’s so easy to spend—“it’s only plastic”?

One way to get in touch with your money is to actually start
touching
it again, to handle cash, to feel and respect it, to delight in spending it the way you did as a child, to enjoy choosing not to spend it, to take pleasure in putting it away now for later. The use of a debit card, while still plastic, is a step in the right direction, as it is more directly tied to the actual money we have available at the bank.

This third step toward financial freedom, then, is about getting back in touch with your money and understanding that you have the power to decide how to use it. And it’s about being honest with yourself. You have looked back to your childhood memories of money and connected them to your fears today and created new truths to keep the voice of those fears from paralyzing you against taking action. Now we are about to face your present reality. We will compare the money you have coming in with the money you have going out—real income, real expenses. With this step, by being willing to face up to what you are really doing with your money, your thoughts, actions, and words about money will begin to merge and become truthful. With this step, you begin to take control of your financial life in a concrete way.

Have you ever taken a big wad of bills from an ATM machine, then found yourself, a day or two later, nearly out of cash and unable to reconstruct exactly where you spent it? And even when you retrace all your steps, you still come up $20, $40, or $60 short? It’s upsetting, but most of us feel that way most of the time: a little short, a little panicky, wondering exactly where our money is going.

You could tell right away that Karen was an extremely efficient woman. She produced a radio show, ran her household, organized her children’s lives, seemed to have everything under control—your basic superwoman. Except when it came to money.