Patty is talking to Barbara (Stanny) Huson. She’s an expert on money mindset. She explains the key to financial success; understanding who you have to become in order to be the container for money to show up.
She explains that one of the reasons many women have money problems is because of their fear or ambivalence around power. This creates a field of resistance which keeps the money from arriving.
Power comes when you face what’s not working.
Hear how learning the brain science made a huge shift in Barbara’s work. It’s how the concept of rewiring your brain. She outlines the 3 steps that anyone can do to be on your way to wealth and well-being.
How do you handle money beliefs that you’ve had your whole life?
Barbara explains how this happened in her life (women don’t handle money) and how she was forced to change that belief. This is so powerful and helpful!
Small steps, consistently taken, create remarkable results.
Barbara explains 3 steps that you can take to shift your relationship about money. This is what she did when she found herself in debt, newly single, raising 3 kids. All 3 of these are very doable no matter your circumstances.
Other things discussed:
- What to do when you have lots of credit card debt.
- Why saving (even small amounts) will help.
- How to feel “rich”.
- The emergency fund and the fun fund and why you need both.
- Get support when you need it.
- The path to self-forgiveness and why it matters.
Final thought: how to have a legendary love affair with money!
Resources:
Previous Episode with Barbara Huson
Book: Rewire for Wealth
A Course in Miracles
Debtors Anonymous
The Wealth Connection Community
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Transcript
0:00:04.3: Welcome to the Space for Magic Podcast, where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-Type A corporate banker turned intuitive coach. Using a blend of common sense, brain science, and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome. Hey, welcome to this episode of the space for magic podcast. I have back with us Barbara Huson. I believe when I interviewed you, Barbara, you were going by Barbara Stanny, so we’re gonna have to link to that earlier podcast, but for those of you who don’t know Barbara, she is someone I hold so close to my heart. She’s also a wealth coach and an expert in finance and so many things, but the reason she holds such a special place in my heart is as I’ve talked about debt here before and freeing ourselves from the pain of it and forgiveness around it. Barbara is the person that unlocked that key for me, it was so hard at the time, I remember I took so much courage to sign up to work with Barbara, and she in just a single session.
0:01:27.2: We worked together for six months, but there was one session in particular where she just unlocked something for me that gave me… It went from me being in a closet, feeling like the debt was surrounding me and the pain and the unforgiveness was just closing me into suddenly feeling like I was just in this open field where everything was possible. And I can tell you where I stand today in relationship to money, is a direct result of the work I did with Barbara. So Barbara, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you, that was beautiful. I was very touched by what you said… Thank you. Yeah, you are one of those special people that I truly believe are here for those of us walking that middle ground of having that spiritual path and trying to be good people in the world, lightworkers, whatever you wanna call it, and yet really being in the material world, right. We don’t get to go off into caves and meditate and find enlightenment, we’ve gotta find it right here in a world of family and mess and credit cards and money and all of it, and you are such a voice of reason and understanding and love when it comes to this topic, I’m so happy to share you with my audience.
0:02:48.6: And you have a new book out, which I’m so excited about. Thank you. Me too. Me too. So I started to ask you this before we jumped on and I decided to save it ’cause it was so fun, the way you responded, so you know how is the book tour in the covid happening for you to.
0:03:09.2: Be… This is my eighth book. This is the best book tour I have ever been on. It is the most fun. I never have to get on an airplane, I never have to leave home, I don’t even have to get dressed if I don’t want to, so it’s been a perfect book tour.
0:03:25.8: I love that. And the reason why I was like, Okay, hold on, let’s ring this on to the podcast because the way you start to talk about it is so close to the way you help me start to feel about money way back when, where it can feel so serious and hard and all of these constraints and suddenly it can be fun, it can be an exploration, it is something you can dip your toe into with your pajamas on, and it can be something different than what you expected it to be.
0:03:54.8: It can be… Yes, it absolutely can be. Not that it doesn’t have its challenges, not that even a book tour in covid in my pajamas doesn’t have its challenges, but the challenges provide the growth and so… And it’s really more than about money, it’s really more than about money it’s who you have to become in order to be a container that can attract, that can sustain and it can grow your money into wealth.
0:04:28.1: Such a good point. So the $10 million question, one billion dollar question is, how do we do that? How do we become that container… You know what I’ve found? Women’s difficulties with money have very little to do with money, really very little, and it is everything to do with their fear of… Or ambivalence about power.
0:04:51.3: And because we don’t understand power as a woman, the feminine perspective of power and power as I define it, a powerful woman is someone who knows who she is, who knows what she wants, and expresses that in the world unapologetically. So essentially, our fear of power is our fear of becoming fully who we’re meant to be, instead of watering ourselves down, so we don’t make waves… So for me, and the work I do, it’s not just about understanding the difference between a stock and a bond or negotiating a raise or getting out of debt, it’s really looking at who you have to become and what you have to let go of, all those thoughts and beliefs and ideas and decisions you made about yourself and money that have kept you stuck.
0:05:39.5: That I love because one of the things that jumped out of me in the book, which I thought when I read… So the book is Rewire for Wealth, and we’re gonna talk about what that means, rewiring. But I honestly thought having worked with you read all your other books, that this would be a refresher course for me more than something new, right? But there was something that you said really early on, it related to a story of a woman you worked with, I believe, where the essence was that debt is really a way to hide from a deeper pain, that debt distracted this client of yours, from the thing she really… That really hurt. I remember the moment, I remember the moment. It was, she had been through a year-long course of mine called One year to wealth, and she lived in financial chaos and she was a smart woman, and she was living in financial chaos, and after a year, she not only got out of the chaos and the turmoil, but she turned her life around and she had no more debt and she was starting to invest, and she slipped in the bathtub and I… She was in the bathtub, and all of a sudden she had these past memories of abuse, they just came up, because financial turmoil, when people have suffered trauma, one of the ways to keep from feeling the pain of trauma is to create financial turmoil that hit me right between the eyes when I read that, because my debt, I didn’t have debt like most of my life, so I wasn’t a debtor.
0:07:22.6: Right, and I had money and then my mom got sick and my husband lost his job and I started my business, and the debt was created. And when I read that, I thought, Oh, I wonder if part of that was the pain of all of that that was going on around me, somehow subconsciously creating chaos that I actually could control.
0:07:46.9: It creates… You couldn’t control the chaos. You could not control the debt, it was getting out of control, what you could control were your emotions and your feeling about the pain of what was going on around you, and so the financial chaos, the financial turmoil that the debt… It takes up a lot of real estate in our head, so we don’t have to deal with the deeper pain either of what’s going on currently or what lodges in our nervous system because trauma lodges in your nervous system.
0:08:24.1: Yes, yes, and we talk about that so much with the concept of the receiving school, receiving method is that any resistance you have to receive money, love, support, whatever it is in the material world that you’re looking to receive… It’s already on its way to you. So if you’re not receiving it, it’s because there’s a field of resistance up, and that field of resistance was built by some type of trauma, insignificant, someone made fun of you at the wrong time when you were little on the playground, right up to really violent trauma. So that made total sense to me, Barbara. So one of the questions that my community had asked me to ask you was, how do you, and it ties right back to what you just said is, how do you feel powerful when the money isn’t flowing in and you feel like you’ve tried to do the right things.
0:09:19.2: You don’t feel powerful. If something’s not coming to you, you allow yourself to look at what… Why isn’t it coming to you, you dive in deep to what’s not there, what’s missing, what’s not working, and you will discover, you will discover exactly what it is that needs healing, that need to work, that needs developing, or that needs doing, and it… Power comes when you… When you take control of a situation when you face it, let’s put it this way when you face what’s not working, and you go there, that’s when you start, that’s when we start getting in touch with your power.
0:10:06.0: Yeah, does that make sense? It does, and I think for those of you listening, the book, I highly recommend you look at the book, and we’re gonna talk about this now because I think that really talks about the rewire process, right Barbara, because people… They might be listening to what you say and they say, I get stuck, I get frozen, I want to do that, but I don’t know how, and that’s really what… Why, I think what you have to say in this book is so powerful, so sacred success was such a beautiful journey of showing how to shift into the successful being, being-ness, this acting in this space of success that comes from this holistic place, but this new book really talks about how to get the inner workings, the inner hardware. To really play nicely, I think…
0:11:04.2: Let me suggest, it was right after sacred success came out, and sacred success was a really terrifying book for me to write because it was when I decided I’m gonna come out of my spiritual closet, I deal with very practical stuff, money, and I always bring into psychology but I had never brought in the spirituality, and it was the spiritual work that helped me get through my financial crisis, that helped me survive with my husband, the compulsive gambler, and I divorced and he had lost all, he had lost almost all my inheritance, and then I got over a million in tax bills that I didn’t… I didn’t have that money and my ex had left the country, my husband, my father wouldn’t lend me the money, and I had three daughters and I was not gonna raise them on the street, it was a very scary time, and it was the spirituality particularly, of course, miracles to grade course in miracles, they got me through it, that got me to where I am here as your guest today, so I never really talked about that before, so I came out of my spiritual closet, it was sacred success, and after that book came out, something really weird happened, I started losing interest in my work, I started feeling like something’s missing, and there was something more…
0:12:23.1: I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but I just felt like I wanted to take a sledgehammer to my business and smash them into smithereens, it was irrational, so I started praying, Okay, God, is something missing, or am I supposed to not be doing this anymore, and I… What I do, what I do, I love what I do. And then I started praying, and one day in my email, there was an article, a neuroscience brain, the random… Just an article about neuroscience and I started reading it and I… Where I feel like my brain lit up like a Christmas tree saying This is it, this is the missing piece, this is what that… Whoever asked that question, how can you feel powerful when you have money problems, it was a neuroscience bit that was missing for me, and so I spent almost six years now really bringing neuroscience into my work with psychology, spirituality, and personal finance, what I would say anyway. So I’m gonna stop there and see if you have any questions.
0:13:31.4: Like that, that’s perfect. ’cause I was gonna say, so what made you write this specific book with this process… And I think we’re going there, so talk more about what’s inside and what this neuroscience brings…
0:13:45.8: So what I learned is that your brain controls your behavior, everything you do, inhaling, exhaling, spending, saving, betting is controlled by your brain. Now, your brain is a physical organ in your body, right, but until you understand how the mind and the brain work together, it is a really, really hard to change your behavior, it’s a real struggle, but what I learned is that the mind, which is not a physical organ, but a non-physical entity, the source of our thoughts and feelings, that what flows to the mind is what shapes the brain. So what are thoughts and feelings? As we have thoughts and we have our feelings, what happens is it goes right to our brain, right to the cells in our brain, and the cells release… The neurotransmitters or chemicals and they start talking to each other and they form these pathways and these pathways become behaviors, so if you’re always thinking there’s never enough, you will start unconsciously start creating things, creating your life, so there’s never enough, because our brain will always confirm our beliefs, a brain will not see, our brain will not here, and our brain will not do anything that confirms anything that doesn’t confirm our beliefs.
0:15:20.2: So what I realized is, if you can train your mind, you can rewire your brain to make wealth-building really well-being, anything you want so much more efficient and easier.
0:15:38.5: So powerful, and what do you think is the first step for someone?
0:15:44.7: So let me suggest, there are three steps to train your mind to wire your brain for what I call health, well-being and whatever else you want, because there’s no purpose to me in having wealth without well-being, and it’s so interesting that wealth… The word wealth comes from the root word weal, W-E-A-L, which means well-being. So what I want to do is help women create wealth and well-being, and to do that, there are three steps, so let me tell you what the steps are, and then I can go for their detail. Okay, the three steps are recognized, reframe and respond differently, recognize reframe and respond differently, very simple steps, very simple steps, but in the beginning, it takes massive effort to follow these three steps because your brain does not wanna change, there is nothing in your brain that wants to change, knowing that your thoughts are what program your brain, which determines your behavior, any behavior you wanna change, like debting, for example, you start recognizing the thoughts you are having, the negative thoughts you are having or the thoughts that you are having about this particular thing.
0:17:12.7: So let’s say you are having a thought, there’s never enough, you… First step you do is you recognize, Oh, but you recognize it a certain way, you recognize, Oh, I’m having a thought about there’s never enough, or maybe I’m not enough, or it may be stupid, whatever the negative thought is, you recognize, Oh, I’m having a thought about… Isn’t that interesting? You recognize it with curiosity, not criticism or judgment, Oh, I’m feeling powerless about money because my money is so bad… No, it’s the thought, I’m feeling powerless that you wanna change what you do is you separate yourself from that thought by saying, I am having a thought about… I am having not, I’m scared, but I’m having a thought about being afraid, so this separate you from your thought because your thoughts are not truth, your thoughts are just something that’s going through your mind, and probably you’ve been going through your mind for one… A long time. So you recognize with curiosity, not judgment, and then you reframe. You reframe. You look at, how can I see this differently? That’s a lesson from the Course in Miracles that I use every time I have a thought, oh, there’s never enough.
0:18:31.1: Or, I’m not enough. Oh, isn’t that interesting? I’m having a thought, How can I see this differently? Or in other words, how can I see this through the eyes of love and not fear, and so you can reframe it and you can reframe it many… For example, I was working on… One of my things that I worked on while I was developing this is this belief that I don’t have what it takes, it comes up every book, every project, everything I do. So I’m running this book and I’m thinking, I don’t have what it takes to put neuroscience into a book. And I thought, Isn’t that interesting? I’m having a thought, but I don’t have what it take. It’s not true, it’s just a bad… How can I see this differently? I reframe it and said, I can handle this, did I believe I could handle it, but I believe I could write a book about neuroscience. No, no, no, no, no, not for a second. You repeat something often enough. It starts becoming wired in your big brain and it becomes a belief, just like there’s never enough, just the thought that became a belief that became wired in your brain, so you what? I can handle this, so I…
0:19:36.9: First, I recognize that I reframed, and then I responded differently. This is the key, this is how the rewiring you rewired those neural pathways by acting differently. So what I did is I didn’t wanna write this book, I didn’t wanna do this, I made myself sit down and write. I made myself do things I didn’t wanna do, I made myself do things I felt didn’t feel right to… To feel uncomfortable. And after a while, it becomes a little bit easier. And it becomes a little bit easier. And it becomes a little bit easier. So those are the three steps to recognize the negative thought with curiosity, reframe and then respond differently, so… Good.
0:20:21.4: So you know, one of the other questions I came up in the group when I was asking if they had questions for you was how do you handle… And I’m curious how you relate it to what you just shared, how do you handle money wounds, money struggles, money beliefs that have been handed down generation after generation after generation…
0:20:42.4: Well, I can use a personal example, I always was handed down from generation to generation to generation in my family is women do not handle money, women do not make money, women do not manage money, it was told to me in no uncertain terms, and in fact, my father’s that always say, there’ll always be a man take care of you, and any communication about my inheritance… ’cause I came from a wealthy family. Any communication about my inheritance went to my husband, not me so that when I found out my husband was a compulsive gambler, I let them handle it because I had this belief if I had known how to rewire that it wouldn’t have taken me, what, 10 years to change, I could have done it much quicker… Tell me the question again. How do you… And handle a belief that’s been passed down for generations. Is that what the question? Yeah. Rewire that, So just notice, Oh, I’m having a thought, I will leave that money that I can’t manage money ’cause I’m a woman. Isn’t that interesting? It’s not true. It’s just a belief. It was just something handed down, how can I see this differently, you know, because believe you can believe you can’t…
0:22:00.4: Either way, you’ll be right Henry Ford said. So how can I see this differently? What I would have done at the time, I would have said, I’m going to learn how to manage money. Or, I can handle money, or there’s many ways to re-frame would you reframe it in, you replace that negative statement that you don’t want any more with a positive one, and then you start responding differently, so I never replaced my thought, I never recognize my thought, but it took me 10 years to start responding differently and started learning about money and taking classes and going to workshops and doing all those things. Finally, finally, I broke through.
0:22:38.3: And what would you say for someone who is… ’cause a lot of the people that listen here are mid-life sandwich generation, probably your managing kids and aging parents having work that they do in some way, shape or form, either in their communities or for money, the one that’s super busy. What are the things they can do? How can they start… You talked about workshops and all of this, but what… Besides those three strategies, what can they do, what can they do to what… To shift their relationship to money, to start to… Get smart about money.
0:23:17.5: I’m gonna give you three steps. This is what I did, this is how I started. Because what I realized, it’s small steps consistently taken that create remarkable result, because I also was working… I also had small kids whom I was raising alone, and I had these tax bills, and I had to learn about money, quick. So what I did, I’m gonna give you these three steps, now, this does not count the psychological, because I was doing the psychological healing at the same time, but what can you do is every day read something about money, even if it’s just for a minute or two, seriously, even if it is for a minute, even if you just open the newspaper to the business section and peruse the headlines… Even if you’re standing in line at the supermarket. You pick up Money Magazine and put through it instead of people magazine, even before you go to bed at night, you take out of a finance book and read one paragraph because so much of getting smart or smarter is just familiarizing yourself with the jargon and the current trend I mean, what I did is all these women told me the women as the women I interviewed for my first book, centering is coming, I interviewed women who are smart with money, and that was really helpful to me, and when they all told me they subscribed to The Wall Street Journal, so I subscribed to The Wall Street Journal.
0:24:45.5: I couldn’t understand that at all. Not a thing. So we put it on the kitchen counter and I figured by osmosis and pick something up, well, I did, you do this for three or four months you’d be amazed, every day you read something about money, even if it’s just for a minute or two. Second, every week. Talk about money, have a conversation preferably with someone that knows more than you, it is our secrecy and silence that keeps us stuck. That’s what I found. So when I was interviewing these women for my first book, I was like, Oh my gosh, I was learning so much, and so I started, anybody who knew anything about money, I say, I take him out to lunch or take him to tea and he said, Can I pick your brain. Or can I ask you questions? You know, and I’d ask him questions, how did you learn about money? What was the biggest mistake you ever made? What was the smartest thing you ever did, what’s the best advice you ever got. What advice would you have for me? I did this over and over again, and people were amazingly willing to share to every…
0:25:47.8: Day read, every week, talk and every month, save, automatically automatically have a small amount… Start all really small. Automatically, you have money transferred from your paycheck or your checking an account to a savings account, and because small amounts with compound interest where your interest is earning interest on your interest, it starts adding up the monthly full… Call it the Snowball, a small amount with compound interest starts adding up, so everyday read, every week talk, and every month save.
0:26:24.2: Those are so good ’cause they’re so doable, and I can attest to the, you know, reading something, just a small amount, because when I was a super young and I had just left college and started my job at the bank, everyone around me just was so much more financially aware and I had an English Major, I hadn’t done anything with business, so I felt so non-intelligent in that world, and so I subscribed to The Wall Street Journal just so I could carry it in with me, so I could look like the rest of the people I was working around. And so I started reading the headlines really just to look like I was reading the paper honestly, and I would say probably within six months of just reading the headlines, I started to really understand the market. So yeah, it works. So that’s a great story. Patty, that’s a great story. Yeah. Okay, I have so many questions. Oh, I know. So that last step about saving, and because this is something I know I lived through that was super confusing for me when I had a lot of debt was… So if you have a lot of debt that’s got compound interest on it, mainly credit cards, I don’t know what else would…
0:27:39.2: Does it… Do you still save or do you just take that money and put it against the credit cards?
0:27:44.6: Well, that’s such a good question. That’s such a good question. It’s so important to save at the same time you’re paying down your debt, because what happens with the cycle of debt is once you get out of debt and you have no savings, one unexpected emergency, one unexpected large expense and you’re back in debt again. So it’s really important as you pay down your debt, it may take a little longer, but as you pay down your debt, you are also saving small amounts.
0:28:15.6: Awesome, alright, so good, ’cause I know that that’s gonna be a big question and it’s… I, in the year of covid with so many more statistics about when the covid test came out before they were funded, the fact that most families would not have been able to shoulder that cost, and just the sheer numbers of families that a $400 unexpected expense could potentially push them into really dire circumstances, what do you attribute the number of people in that situation… In the situation, because they don’t have savings and that we are there with all this understanding out there, granted we don’t use it, but just with the Wall Street out that money magazines out there, you’re out there, podcasts are out there, and yet the majority of Americans at least, and I don’t know what it is in other countries, are really in these dire circumstances financially.
0:29:17.1: It’s so much more fun to spend than it is to save, it’s instant gratification in it, isn’t it more fun to go out to dinner or go buy a designer dress, or go buy your latte than it is to set aside money and put it in savings and to start investing, I mean, please. And so what happened when people have a scarcity thought system, a scarcity mentality, they feel like if they save, it doesn’t feel rich, people have them really misguided belief about money, and so I also… Also, most of us, because you look at the statistics, most of us had grew up in families where there was no savings, so we never learned the importance of savings, that’s the one thing I’m grateful for is my father was a prodigious favor, he really, really pounded that in our heads, but most people didn’t… They didn’t understand. They live paycheck to paycheck. So the good news is, because of covid, the savings rate has gone up, I don’t know the number now, but it’s huge, people are saving more because there’s less to spend on…
0:30:29.1: I didn’t know that that’s interesting. Well, another blessing from covid.
0:30:34.6: Many gifts from Covid, many curses. Many awful things. But many blessings.
0:30:38.6: Yeah, do you have… This is possibly an unfair question, Barbara, but do you have any tricks to make saving… Feel wealthy.
0:30:50.4: Oh, well, I don’t know, saving feels wealthy to me ’cause every time I do automatic savings, so every time I automatically put it in every month or maybe every couple of months, I’ll look at how much I’ve saved and I see it grow… I feel wealthy. I feel really wealthy… It depends on what you’re telling yourself if your mind is telling yourself, why should I give money to the bank when I could buy it this wonderful dress and I feel so beautiful and I feel so good, or, Hey, I’m going through a divorce, I deserve this, or I work so hard. We justify our unhealthy habits, what happens is we dig those unhealthy habits deeper into our brains, and it’s harder and harder to change, so I think what has to happen is our thinking has to happen, anything like… I’m going to save $20, I’m going to put it in the bank, I’m so proud of you Barbara, I’m so proud of you, and give yourself a gold star, have a champagne toast, celebration, anytime you can celebrate any small step, your brain response because it feels positive and the brain loves things that feel positive, which why spending feels positive, but when you can reward yourself for saving and it feels positive, your brain will start building your own…
0:32:12.5: Pathways, they will encourage you to save.
0:32:16.5: Good, I love that the rewards system ’cause that I think does work for so many people, it definitely worked for me, and.
0:32:25.4: Just try it for a couple of months and just look at how your money is growing, that’s a reward in itself, and speaking of savings. So let me suggest something about savings, I have a very strong feeling about this and it’s hard to do at the beginning, but it’s something to shoot for it, and that is have two kinds of savings, you want it untouchable, the other is a touchable… So I have one savings for emergencies, and that’s untouchable that it is only for an emergency, like a few years ago, I had to have a whole new roof put on the house, it was 70,000 that comes from my untouchable account, and I had it ’cause I’d let it grow for a long time, but a shoe sale is not an emergency, so I have a touchable account for those kind of fun things, enjoyable things for vacations or clothes for whatever I want. So it’s really good because they give more, you want the emergency and you don’t wanna have to deplete it.
0:33:23.5: Yes, absolutely. And just as you were talking, or I asked you the question as you were talking through, and I’m remembering back when I resisted savings, I think also there was a feeling of… And I think this goes back to managing your thoughts, when we had gotten into that tough place with so much debt, saving felt hopeless, there really wasn’t a possibility of something better.
0:33:49.7: What I found, when you get in that hopeless place, the thing is like what you’re doing for people, Patty, if that’s when you need support, and especially for us women, it’s so important, we are so relationship-oriented, it’s so important that we surround ourselves with people that say, Go for it. You can do this with role models, with people who… Who are doing it? Who have done it. So I think one of the things that helped me with my hopelessness because I spent my whole adult life feeling until I was 46 years old, feeling really hopeless, but it was interviewing these women for my book Prince Charming and for secrets of six-figure women that I started, wow, I had a role model. And then I went to debtors anonymous, which is amazing group, anybody who is in debt, that’s the best thing I can recommend, is go to debtors anonymous is a 12-step program. It’s free, and right now it’s on the phone, you can go to phone meetings, and that the support there will really help you get out of your hopelessness and into possibility.
0:34:56.9: Yeah, I love that. ’cause it really is that shift to possibility, I think that you gave me… That shifted a lot, and.
0:35:05.6: I don’t think we can do it alone. I honestly couldn’t. I couldn’t… You can get in such a downward spiral of hopelessness and despair like I did, that it wasn’t till I started surrounding myself with people who were doing what I wanted to do, with people who were supporting me and telling me I could do it, and that’s why I created an online community just for women to talk about their hopelessness, their despair. Their possibility and their recovery.
0:35:35.4: Awesome, so I know we’re gonna have the link to the book where to get the book in the show notes, but why don’t you just quickly give information a little bit of information about that community, ’cause we’ll put a link to that as well in the one.
0:35:48.6: They’ve been, that’d be… I started it two years ago, is my dream, it was my dream to have a safe place for women to talk about money as women, we talk about it very differently than men, and so I created what I call the wealth connection, it’s an online community. And we have group coaching twice a month, we have expert calls. Every other month, we have a book club, we have a master class right now, it’s the rewire master class next, it’s gonna be an overcoming under earning master class, and we have this wonderful Facebook group, and all we do is talk about money.
0:36:26.5: So if you wanted to follow Barbara’s three-step. This would be a great place to do it. Then you get to check two boxes, we need to have that money. Learning about money, I love it, that’s awesome. And I can tell you, for those of you listening, Barbara is a woman of incredible value and what she puts out in the world is rich on so many levels and worth the investment of your time and your energy and your money. Thank you, Patty, thank you. Yes, I say that so easily from the depths of my heart, and so I work… I have two questions, these will be ones that you may not be prepared for, I have an answer for it, and we can move on, but early on in the book, you mentioned Alfred Adler, which is Who is my guiding psychological theory when I was doing my Master’s in Psych, I loved the mention and Adler has his concept… Well, I’m gonna read the way you wrote it, but then I’ll give you my question, so you wrote… Alfred Adler said, Our earliest recollections become a guiding fiction by which the psyche orients itself, and I love that it was one of the reasons I became obsessed with him because it was before I really understood the Law of Attraction deeply or any of the other stuff, but one of my professors had said that was a deep Adler expert and had spent his whole life studying Adler…
0:37:55.4: That Adler… The way Adler had run his experiments and his research, he found that people’s memories actually changed once their belief systems change, and you referenced two memories, one is the first memory of money and your mom kind of giving you a look when you asked about money and the second was your sibling being brought home from the hospital and just feeling left behind, I’m curious if over the time of you doing all of this work, if those memories have ever shifted for you…
0:38:28.4: No, the memory has not shifted, my reaction to it is shifted, so when I was three years old and I was standing outside my parents house looking up at their bedroom, knowing they had my sister, they just come home from the hospital, they had my sister… I made a decision very early. In that moment, I remember, I remember it like yesterday. I’m not important anymore. I don’t matter, that memory is still very solid, however, I’ve done enough work on it that the belief has changed, that did not mean I’m not important, that just meant they were excited about their my little sister. The other memory is I asked my mother How much money she had when I was about five years old, and she gave me this withering look, and what happened is an early memory, the reason it’s so important to look at your earliest memory because, in that memory, you made a decision, you made a decision about yourself about life, and that decision became embedded in your brain and it became a belief that probably is no longer conscious, well, it is probably running your show, and so when my mother said looked at me like that, I thought Oh my God.
0:39:48.5: Talking about money is bad. I’m a bad girl. You don’t talk about money. So all the 15 years, my husband was gambling my money away, my inheritance, I never told anybody I ever… I was in psycho-analysis three times and we never told my therapist now, what happened is from that the memory is definitely there, but the belief has changed, I realized it’s healthy to talk about money, it is only by talking about money that I could heal that I could change that. I could become who I wanted to be.
0:40:24.4: And when you look back on that memory, do you see something in your mom that you didn’t see maybe 20 years ago when you have that memory…
0:40:33.4: Well, I had that memory, I was four years old and I looked at my mom and she was God. Now, I look back at my mom and I thought she was scared. She didn’t understand money herself.
0:40:43.5: And so now you’ve got your next generations, when you look at your girls, your three daughters, what do you see that you’re so proud of, that you know you play a role in shifting or changing or creating because you did this courageous work, they.
0:41:01.1: Are each So responsible with money. They had their periods. Were each made mistakes, but I didn’t… I found those mistakes could be really healing educational experiences, so I took them through their mistakes and we worked through them together, like one of my daughters got into a whole lot of debt, so what it would… I did is I shared my story with them, they knew everything that was going through, I shared how important it is to save, how important it is to pay off your debts on time, to never spend more money than you have, and they are so good with money now, they really are, I’m so proud of it, but even more, than they’re good with money, they respect money, they don’t worship, but they don’t charge it, they don’t have a whole lot. But they respect it. And that makes me really happy.
0:41:55.5: That’s beautiful. So there’s one word that keeps floating around my mind, and we’ve talked about it a bit, but I’m curious if you have any last thoughts on it, the only… ’cause it was such a big part of my journey, and that is self-forgiveness in relation to all of this, and… Do you have any thoughts, words of wisdom, insights.
0:42:17.1: Well, I know it’s a big part of a lot of our journeys, it was a big part of my journey, how could I have stayed married to a compulsive gambler, a compulsive liar for 15 years, putting myself and my children at risk. How could I have done that? How could I have given up responsibility? I went through a massive, massive period of self-hatred and self-loathing, and then I think it was the course America is a spirituality, and that I really saw that, Wait a minute, I was doing this to myself. Because I didn’t know better, I didn’t know better. And I shifted, there’s only two emotions, there’s only fear, and there’s only love, and I worked very hard, and I didn’t have an overnight, but I worked very hard to shift from a place of fear and self-loathing and self-graduation to a place of loving myself for being ignorant and loving myself for facing my fear and doing it anyway and taking the steps I had to take to do what I needed to do to get Smart… Yes, that’s perfect. So forgiveness is not saying, Okay, you did, that’s fine. Forgiveness is saying, I understand.
0:43:36.1: You did the best you could. I love you. And let’s do better now.
0:43:42.6: Yeah, so good. Alright, if you’re listening, I highly recommend you go grab rewire for wealth, this is Barber’s new book, and Barbara, what… Any last thoughts you wanna leave with our listeners that we haven’t touched on.
0:43:57.0: I don’t know why this came to me swear to God, I don’t know why, but I compare money. A relationship with money is like having a legendary love affair with the ideal partner that all money wants to do, it is to serve you and support you for the rest of your life, and all the ones in return is for you to appreciate and respect it by taking good care of it. And if you could do that, you could have a legendary love up here with money and live happily.
0:44:28.5: Ever after. Juicy Barbara. Juicy. I love it.
0:44:34.6: Know what? That came to.
0:44:35.9: Me. That’s good, that is good. Oh my goodness. Well, that’s definitely gonna be the audiogram snippet for this… This episode, thank you so much for being here, Barbara. I just adore you, and I so appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us, and I adore you too and thank you for having me, and keep up the good work Patty… Thank you. Alright, everyone, have a great week, and definitely grab this book. It is awesome. Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day, and don’t forget. Always create space for magic.
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