Sometimes when I point out that people have more power than they think they have (post) I get a comment on the lines of “I have no money and am in dept. How does your comment on power help me?”
There are many new age references that will tell you that if you change your mental attitude to money then your income will increase; you will attract money towards you. Although there is truth in this (and I’ll explore this in a later post) that is not the point I want to make here. Even if you can’t change your attitude to attract money towards you, you can change your attitude to the money (or lack of it) that you have. For instance you can choose to worry, or not worry, about dept. Here’s a true story that illustrates this:
I had a client in her mid twenties who came from an immigrant family, second generation. I asked her if she went home to visit her parents and she said she didn’t like going home. This is unusual for people with her background who usually have close family ties so I asked her why. She said her parents were in dept and when she went home there were always arguments about money. I asked her how long this had been going on and she told me twenty years.
So for twenty years her parents have worried and argued about money to the point were it had split the family apart. They were still alive and living in their own house. They could have spent that twenty years enjoying life instead of worrying about something that they had no control over. They could have adopted the attitude that they would spend what they have on essentials, pay depts when thy could and enjoy the occasional luxury.
It’s a waste of a life but how many people waste their lives in worrying about things they can’t change?