Money and Your Value as a Human Being...

What inanimate object can determine your life decisions, your attitude to yourself and how you relate to others? What object can evoke, fear, worry and a sense of feeling controlled?

 

 

 

Answer: Money.

If you think about it most of our life's decisions are based on the Money concept. Can we do this or that because we have the money? Do we have a enough money to buy the house, the clothes, pay the bills or the buy the car? The unfortunate truth is the money concept carries a value and that value merges with your 'self.' Money correlates to freedom and experience. Consider this - what if money were shells. Would you care how many shells were sitting in a pile? Would you work yourself to the extreme to accumulate a shell? Would you desperately need to show off your shells to others? When you shift the object of value then you realise how ridiculous the illusion is that we have been persuaded with. Yes money makes the world go round but that is because we believe that is so.

 

With the above in mind: If money is how you value yourself then how can you value yourself more without money as the gauge? How can you demonstrate your true value to yourself? What makes you feel rich inside? Well these are some questions that have crossed my mind since writing Money Farm and having it turned into an audio book by the brilliant Helen Lloyd. The thing that I have realised is that so many people often feel that their  intrinsic value is directly proportionate to how much money is sitting in their bank account. Those that are in debt often experience a sense of financial shame. They feel worthless because they are stuck in financial ruts that they can see no way out of. When I was researching the debt figures related to Money Farm I heard the expression 'Nillionaire' - someone who has little or no money. That expression, albeit amusing, made me think of how many Nillionaires there are in the world. Can you imagine someone saying that person over there is a Nillionaire? How many would be proud of that title instead the tar of shame would be coated upon them.

Whilst writing Money Farm I looked at other systems of exchange and it dawned on me, in times gone past, when we had to eat we went out to hunt. We caught food and ate it - we cut out the 'money' as a middle man. When we needed other forms of food we traded. Values were applied to grain, cloth and other goods. I wondered how the world would exist without actual money and looked at alternative spheres of exchange and how values were applied. It was all so fascinating yet the truth is culture and civilisation need an exchange mechanism. We can't all take to the forests and hunt or forage. The truth is we need that exchange concept, although that exchange mechanism does not need to be intrinsic to the person. Money is not the extension of self, instead, it is simply a tool that can be invested, accumulated or spent. Once emotion and attachment is removed from the financial equation then there is a sense of liberation. Once you stop being your money and your money stops being you then that is where the fun begins. I am not saying stop earning money, what I am saying is that you are more than your money. You are a phenomenal person existing in time and space. I am sure that if you asked your soul what you were worth then it would not determine it in terms of money.


With that in mind, I will ask the question: how you can you value yourself without having money as a device for your self value? How can you demonstrate your own vast value to yourself without applying the concept of money? Finally how can you feel rich inside so that is shines into the world?
Enjoy:)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B010BJOYFQ 

Money and its Power

Money really is a curious entity in itself. We spend our lives earning money to enable us to do things and have things. To do this we exchange the hours of our life, quite often doing things that we don’t love, to do what we do love. My other favourite is that we exchange our time to have things to make us feel good yet often feel guilty for spending money on a luxury. Consider this – we earn money to buy a house so we can go to work to earn money to pay for the house. We work to pay for a holiday to rest from the work we do to enable us to pay for that holiday. I know… In the next few weeks I intend to write a series of blogs that explore the money concepts and hopefully shift some perspectives.

 

You may wonder where this has come from – well since Money Farm was released on audio last week, I have received a few ‘testing’ questions on money, belief systems and persuasion. With this in mind, maybe it is time I ‘blogaciously’ explored money as a symbol in hope to inspire and provide thought-provoking questions. In the meantime – is there anything you would like me to consider in the next Money-centric blogs? A couple of the themes I have been asked to look at is money and emotion, attachment to money and money beliefs.

 

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Fiction/Money-Farm-Audiobook/B010BJULIK/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1436517357&sr=1-1#publisher-summary

The Secret Literary life and its Challenges.

The Secret Literary life and its Challenges.

 

Have you ever had a burning secret that you are desperate to share? For me it feels like resisting that open bar of chocolate when you are on a diet. So where has this come from? Well when one begins writing there is a choice to be made: do you write under your own name or do you write under an alias? One of my students advised me that he had been writing under a secret name and was living two lives. It was a struggle because his girlfriend had no clue what he was up to and he could not share it with her. His fan base had escalated into thousands because he wrote about contentious subjects. He felt that by being ‘someone else’ he had the freedom to express true opinion. This alter-ego was very different to the shy man in the class. What’s more, he felt that it was too late to let his girlfriend know and felt torn. It made me wonder how spies manage.

 

Something about living a double life struck a chord with me. I had always written under my own name. It was an easy name to find but at the same time it made life a little bit of a challenge. My work colleagues ordered my books off the net and one morning I walked into a sex scene being read aloud. There was nothing malicious in it, it was a bit of fun. The thing is there was a shift in attitude towards me because the colleagues who surrounded me sensed I was working towards something bigger. The benefit of people knowing who I was that when I released books I could sell them from my desk. I could promote through the work place and hype. Unfortunately policies were introduced which put a stop to this.

 

People knowing I wrote was lovely because my colleagues would ask me what I was working on and the work place asked me to do presentations based on teaching creative writing evening classes. Over time my colleagues began dreaming on my behalf and would say things like ‘when you’re famous…’ ‘Here is an idea for your book – I want a cut if you use it.’ ‘I have this great idea for a book for you to write…’ That was when I realised that maybe people knowing I was an author wasn’t so great. Also people would come to me and tell me why I should write about them and what made them so fascinating. What made ‘authorism’ more of a challenge is that people had this idea an author was propelled to stardom and earned millions. The question, ‘so why are you here? Can’t you just be an author?’ would be asked when people found out I had published. I would explain that most authors would earn around 7K a year on a book if they were lucky. What I did not tell them was that being in a work environment provided numerous excellent conversations and material. Watching how real people react to difficult situations is better than sitting in a room imagining it. I had a source of inspiration at my type-worthy finger-tips.

It was when a series of events happened to a friend whose book was optioned to be made into a film that things shifted for me. Over a couple of years she shared her excitement and talked about her film and what would happen when she earned loads of money. People became excited for her and it was a major topic of conversation for all who crossed her path. By watching her I could see how I might have been perceived. As time went on the project slowed and money certainly was not flooding in. In the meantime, she still needed to support herself and she said to me ‘I wish people didn’t know. I just want to go away and be anonymous.’ That little insight also struck a chord with me. Did I really want people to know that I was an author? Who really cared? Was my ego trying to prove how special I was? After a lot of thought seven years ago, I decided to rebrand and write under a different name. I maintained my work as a business analyst but moved to a new department where people did not know my history. It was funny because I felt a real sense of liberation. The whole secret literary life was quite wonderful. I felt that I could maintain a sense of mystery and write about my passions: love, relationships, spirituality, healing and money. It was over the last seven years I slowly wrote Money Farm. Working as a financial analyst provided a depth of insight into the financial system. What I had considered a role to support me while I wrote was in fact the perfect job because it provided all the material necessary to evidence the workings of the financial system.  What makes it all the more beautiful is that Money Farm has now been produced in audio by the extremely talented producer Helen Lloyd and reached the audio market. Oh and guess what? I still sit amongst my colleagues discussing the ridiculous, the absurd and the trivial while a book about one financial institution deciding to completely change the global economy (the Brave New World of Finance) is listened to and read all over the world. There is something deeply satisfying about that.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B010BJOYFQ

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B010BJOYFQ