57: Emotions & Money

Transcript

Meaghan Smith  00:00

Hello, beautiful people. And welcome to another episode of the money mindful podcast. So great to be here with you today.

Meaghan Smith  00:31

I just like to start by saying welcome to you, if you are a new listener, I've noticed on my podcast data feed that there's a lot of new people tuning in from new countries. So Hello, and welcome, especially those who are tuning in from places like South Korea, and Russia. Wow, thrilled that you have found my podcast and that you're getting something out of it. Welcome. And, of course, to those of you who are regular listeners, really great to be here with you today. I have a little favour to ask, before we get into the show. If you are enjoying the content of this podcast, I would be so delighted if you could go to iTunes and leave a review. That's what helps other people find the show. And it also lets other people know that hey, this shows All right. Let's check it out. So if you're enjoying it, and you think that other people would, too, I would appreciate it so much if you would leave a review. Alright, let's get into it. So today I want to talk to you about emotions and money. A couple of episodes back I did an interview with Cait Flanders, the author of The Year of Less, that's actually the book we've been reading this month in Book Club. We have a book club meeting tonight. So I hope you'll join me and I will certainly elaborate on this conversation in Book Club tonight. We talked a lot in the interview about feelings and money, like our emotions and money. And I think when it comes to making money and having money, feelings don't really get much of a look in. And I think this is actually a problem, because feelings have a huge impact on what we do and don't do. So today, I really want to flesh this topic out with you about how much money we have. And the results we have with money have a lot to do with our feelings. So I actually teach my clients how to generate the emotions that drive money making action and how to process emotions that are blocking them from creating what they want in their life. But that's beyond the scope of this podcast today. But I want to just give you an overview of how feelings and money are connected. So there's four main points that I want to cover with you today. So that's how emotions affect what we do and don't do. The second point is I want to talk to you about paying attention to how you feeling and why it's so important. The next point is question to ask yourself, How do I identify what you're feeling about money. And then number four that I want to cover with you is common emotions that block you or affect how much money you make. So let's start talking about the first point, emotions or feelings I'm just going to interchange those words.

Meaghan Smith  03:49

Because they're the same thing. They affect pretty much everything we do or don't do. So when we take action, often we think as humans because we're not really taught a lot about our emotions. We do or don't do things based on how we think we're going to feel. But often we're not actually conscious of that. And I'll give you some examples. The first one that comes to mind is I don't particularly enjoy feeling restless or feeling bored. They're not emotions that I enjoy experiencing in my body. So in the past, when I was completely unaware of these, whenever I felt those emotions coming on, when I started to feel restless, or when I'm working, I didn't want to feel that and so what I would do is I would get up and go to the pantry and have a snack to avoid feeling restless, right? Can you relate so many of us live our lives like that we live in response to our emotions, but we don't even realise we're doing it.

Meaghan Smith  05:00

And this is why it's so important to be connected with our feelings and understand our feelings, what causes our feelings and to be aware of why we're doing things. Because as soon as I realised that and I learnt that that's what I was doing that I was avoiding feeling restless and going to eat.

Meaghan Smith  05:21

I could stop doing that right. Now, listen, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with you if you do that. But the point for me was, is that I was eating when I wasn't hungry. So that was having a negative effect on my life. Because in order to avoid feeling restless, I was eating food when I wasn't hungry. And then of course, that's not good for my body, because I'm over eating. Right. So how this relates to money is we.

Meaghan Smith  05:53

Because we're motivated, basically, by our feelings, our feelings drive our actions. For example, if you're having a bad day at work, and you want to feel better, what we do is we try to make ourselves feel better. And one of the common things that people do you spend money to feel better, right? We want to feel better. So we go and buy a bottle of wine on the way home to drink, or we don't feel those feelings or whatever it is.

Meaghan Smith  06:27

That is that we're dealing with in the day, we don't want to feel that we don't want to feel that stress. So we go and buy alcohol and drink alcohol. Because we want to feel good about ourselves, right? That's just one example. Or we go and buy something to make ourselves feel better. So whatever that that is, for you, it might be that you go out and buy makeup, or you go and buy clothes, and there's nothing wrong with going and buying things. But what I'm pointing out to you is that so often we respond to our emotions, and we do it unintentionally. And that's why you find yourself doing things that afterwards you regret, because it's a short term gain, right? Like you don't feel that great. So you go out and do something, such as spending money on something to make yourself feel better. But actually, the real issue is, is that you don't want to deal with how you're feeling right now. And if we take the example back about me feeling restless, if I had just allowed myself to feel restless for a few minutes, it would have passed, and then I wouldn't have needed to be foraging, erecting the boundary. But as humans, because we're not very connected to our emotions these days, as adults, we just respond and react to how we think we're going to feel. And so my aim for you on this podcast is to draw your attention to starting to reconnect with your feelings, and noticing what you do.

Meaghan Smith  07:59

So that brings me to the second point, which is paying attention to how you feel a feeling, what a feeling actually ease, it's just a vibration in our body. For example, when you tune into your feelings, often people describe how they're feeling like a lot of people feel stress in their shoulders, or in their throat. You know, some people, when they feel insecure, they feel it in their stomach, or they might feel a little bit nauseous.We all we it's just a vibration in our body, right, and we feel it in different places in our body.

Meaghan Smith  08:40

But so often, we spend so much time trying to avoid feeling these vibrations in our body. Because for many people were really afraid to feel certain emotions. But the funny thing is, when you look at it logically, it's literally just a vibration in our body. And it's so interesting for me to look back on old past behaviours that I did, and sometimes still do. Because when I do something out of reaction to either not wanting to feel a particular way or wanting to feel a particular way, and and so this is why it's important to pay attention to how you're feeling. Because if you want to get on top of your spending habits, if you find you're always overspending and every time it gets to the end of the pay month or the the pay week, and you don't have any money left tuning to how you're feeling when you spend money. Like just take a moment and ask yourself, How am I feeling before you spend the money?

Meaghan Smith  09:48

This is my third point to like common questions that you can ask yourself is am I avoiding feeling a certain way or am I doing this because I want To feel a certain way. And again, I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with spending money. But for example, right now, the pillows on our couch are looking a bit haggard. And he's haggard a word. I'm not sure if I just made that up. But anyway, they look, they look rundown, they need replacing, okay. And there's different ways that you can look at these for instance, in, in all honesty, if you came to my house, I don't really want you to see my old pillows, right. And so I don't want to feel the discomfort of somebody coming over and seeing my old pillows on my couch. This is what you really want to be aware of. Because in actual fact, I mean, it's, there's nothing wrong with me replacing my pillows, okay, there's nothing wrong with me wanting to have nice pillows in my house. But let's say that I was in debt, or I didn't have enough money to buy the pillows, that's when you really want to be on to yourself, because I'm actually I would actually just be buying the pillows, because I want to avoid feeling the discomfort of judging myself or feeling judged by other people, right. So I would go out and spend money to replace the pillows on my couch. And that's why understanding why we do things because of how we want to feel is so powerful. Because when you know that you can be on to yourself and be like, Yes, I don't want to feel uncomfortable when people come over and see my old pillows. But in actual fact, I'm just going to allow myself to feel that discomfort because what I really want is to save money. And that's more important to me. And in order to do that, yeah, I need to feel that discomfort of not buying something, but that's okay.Right?

Meaghan Smith  11:57

See, see the difference there? Like, it's totally fine to go out and spend money. But why are you doing it? I just doing it because you don't want to feel a particular way? Or are you doing it intentionally? Because you're intentionally deciding to go and spend that money and you like your reasons? Okay, I hope you're following me here. Because feelings are it's a big topic. So finally, number four, I want to draw your attention to common emotions that block you or affect how much money you make. So for me, the biggest one is the feeling of being insecure, like feeling insecure, I really don't like feeling insecure. And to be honest, most of the reason why I'm so good at managing my money is because I didn't want to feel insecure. And I thought that if I manage my money well and saved, I wouldn't feel insecure. Right? I was completely motivated by not wanting to feel insecure. But the really interesting thing was that even when I got myself to the stage where I had more money than I'd ever had before and investments, you know what, I still felt insecure. And this is because I didn't understand how to generate emotions on purpose. And I'm not going to go into that in this episode. But there's another layer to this, we can take this to a deeper level by knowing

Meaghan Smith  13:31

how to generate the emotions that you actually want to feel on purpose. Because once I realised I was trying to avoid feeling insecure, that was so powerful for me, because then I could start working on creating the feelings of feeling secure, and actively working towards that, because what I've realised is that when you don't know how to process emotions, and manage your emotions, and create the emotions that you want to feel on demand, you will keep generating the same feelings. I'm pretty sure that even if I was a millionaire, if I like a multimillionaire, if I hadn't worked this stuff out, I would still feel insecure. Because it's not how much money you have. It's like how much is enough to not feel insecure. We think it's an external thing that's going to change how we feel. But actually, it's it's the way that we think that affects our feelings. So I think you can still create money from feeling insecure.

Meaghan Smith  14:43

But I believe that if it affects how much money you make, so, for me, I was always trying to create money from a place of scarcity because I was always creating from a place of being afraid of not having enough money and I've got to tell you that learning that stuff about yourself, like, for me learning this stuff about myself, and learning how to manage my emotions is, is so freeing, because it allows me to still create money, I can still look after my money, but I don't have to do it from that energy of being scared and feeling insecure, like I never have enough money, I can do it from a place of, yes, I have enough. And I'm going to make more. And when you do it from that place of abundance, it's so much easier to make more money, right. So some other really common emotions that come up around money or shame,

Meaghan Smith  15:44

either feeling ashamed that you don't have enough money, or equally as bad feeling shame for having money. And I've got to tell you that there's a few clients that I have that quite wealthy. And it doesn't matter how much money you have, if you don't process this stuff, you will carry it with you. It's not the amount of money that affects how you feel it's your thoughts around it. So you can have a lot of money and still feel shame around it. And I just find that so fascinating. It's Yeah, it's so interesting to me, because so many of us think that when we earn more money, we're going to get to this magical place where we don't feel negative emotion anymore. And it's simply not the case, you'll just carry that with you, no matter how much money you have. So you want to learn how to manage those emotions. Now, like right now, where you are in your life, in whatever financial place that you are in. And shame is a huge one shame will stop you taking action and moving forward to create more money. If you have thoughts around being wealthy, and having money that's associated, like has a negative association with shame, like you have shame around that. Like you don't talk about how much money you have, because you feel ashamed of having more money than other people, that's going to have a negative impact on your life. So this is why being aware of our feelings is so important. Another one, and this was a big one for me. And I'm still learning about this emotion and it comes up for me. Like I'm much better at managing it now. But it's inadequate. So it's that feeling of never quite being good enough, right? So that will affect you attracting more money, because what you because of what you do and how you show up if you think that you're inadequate, and this this is the people shopping different versions of you know, not feeling good enough or, or what have you, you're not going to ask for a promotion, I you. Because when you live in that space of inadequacy, or not feeling good enough, or insufficient, lack scarcity, whatever word you use for it, that will stop you from going for bigger things when you're in those emotions. So we can still create money when we feel those emotions, but it's so much harder. And it's always coming from this place of lack. Like you need the money because you don't have enough as opposed to coming from a space of I already have enough money and I can create more I can create more abundance, shame, scarcity, inadequate insecure, they're all really common emotions that people associate with money. They're common emotions. Yeah, around around that topic of money. And scarcity shows up in particular, when you really pay attention is that when you feel lack in your life, and that scarcity, feeling notice your desire to buy things, because we want to make up for that feeling of scarcity. And this is why when we get paid, we spend all our money because we think we don't have enough. Like we're living in this energy of not having enough. And so we go out and we buy things to try and make us feel better. So we we buy things. And what happens is we just end up with a hassle of stuff and we still feel that feeling of scarcity because no amount of things will ever get you out of a feeling. It's learning how to actually process your emotions and create your emotions intentionally. And as a coach, I can help you do that. If you're interested in learning about that more. You can reach out

Meaghan Smith  20:00

To me, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap up wrap up now. And I really hope this episode is motivation for you. I'm trying to encourage you to Yes, just be more in tune with how you're feeling. And if you have no idea how to do that, and you want help to do that, please reach out, I can help you with that. You can book a consultation on my website. Before I say good bye. I'll let you know that the final book club meeting of the year is tonight and yes, I know it's December and it's the November book club meeting. But it's the last one for the year. We're going to be discussing the year of list by Kate Flanders and I'll be talking a lot more about feelings and asking questions around this topic as well. So I hope to see you there. It's at 8:30pm Australian eastern standard time it's on the money mindful Facebook page. You just need to go to the page and I pop up live. Okay, until I see you again. Have a beautiful week. Bye Bye.