Achieving financial serenity II
Moving From Survival to Purpose
Financial Serenity is that point at which money becomes a source of energy rather than an obstacle to our best life, but it is also a daily, living practice. In freeing ourselves, we are able to move from the business of survival to the business of fulfilling our purpose, and if you’ve been watching the news lately, then you know that the world is in dire need of our help.
It’s time. This isn’t just about living our dreams — it’s about what the Lord’s Prayer refers to as “God’s will be done — on earth as it is in heaven.” Imagine a planet full of people living their purpose, living the reality of abundance and prosperity: living the reality of joy. And the only way to get from here to there is one person at a time — it begins with us. Here. Now.
Dr. Abraham Maslow described the process of self-actualization this way:
- “a person’s need to be and do that which the person was “born to do.” “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.
Maslow is describing here the condition that I refer to in Financial Serenity as “divine discontent.”
Unfortunately, our most common tendency is to try to cure divine discontent, which often feels like garden-variety anxiety, by trying to create more security in our lives. Staying in the jobs we hate, avoiding risk — the opposite of those actions that will allow us to self-actualize and ease the divine discontent.
But let’s talk first about garden-variety anxiety — the social miasma of fear that’s created by the noise of the world, by traffic, by the media, for whom, if it bleeds, it leads, and in which a story is only a “REAL” story if it’s truly bad news. The anxiety that’s caused by urban living and which simply floats about, waiting to attach itself to whatever our favourite subject of worry is. That ‘favourite form of suffering’ might be concern for our health or our children — but it’s often wholely or partly about our money.
Environmental anxiety is a fact of life in an urban environment. We can control the volume — by limiting our exposure to media, noise, traffic and bustle, and by increasing our exposure to the natural world, to healthy, nutritious food and exercise, and inspirational people and activities — but we can never entirely turn it off. The greater the population, the greater the environmental stresses. The greater the environment stresses, the greater the level of anxiety.
In order to transform anxiety into creative energy, we have to first understand that anxiety is not personal, and it will not disappear when we have solved the problems we think make us anxious. Anxiety IS. It is free-floating and attaches itself to the weakest link in our lives. For many of us, that link is money.
Most of suffer from anxiety at some time, particularly when it comes to issues of money and security, and most of us begin by believing that if we do things right, we will become financially secure and therefore, we will no longer feel any anxiety about money.
That’s a myth. Money does not cure anxiety.
I’ve spoken previously about the very surreal experience of living from paycheque to paycheque as a struggling single mother while managing investments accounts in the millions of dollars — only to find that the investors who were blessed with these riches were even more afraid than I, living lives that were made smaller by fear of losing what they had, or that it might not be enough.
Most of us know someone that fits that description — someone that has more money than we could ever imagine having, and yet whose life is small — constrained by fear, or by greed. People who work too hard, long after they’ve achieved financial success, until their health and relationships are ruined, or who can’t enjoy the money they have because they are impoverished by fear.
Conversely, many of us have had the experience of working hard, increasing our income, increasing our savings and our investment portfolio, only to find that our expenses go up even faster, we pay more in tax, and we can’t get ahead.
If money is not the solution to anxiety — what is the solution?
We must be able to separate anxiety from divine discontent, and the way we do that is simply by treating the anxiety. If our ‘treatment’ relieves the anxiety, it is not divine discontent, which can only be cured by growing into our divine potential.
Therefore, when we feel anxiety, the primary step is to treat it.
To do so, we must begin by creating order. If you don’t know where your money goes every month, or if you really have no idea how much you make (net of taxes and work-related expenses) then you have created an anxiety magnet.
To rid yourself of that magnet, you need only create order in your finances — recording your expenses, creating and maintaining a spending plan, and moving toward that state of grace in which you spend all of the money you earn on things that you truly care about, things that add to the quality of your life.
If you have no idea how to go about doing that, click here. I also highly recommend “Your Money or Your Life,” the best-selling book by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robins.
Once we create order in our financial lives, our anxiety will diminish a great deal, but it won’t disappear entirely — not unless we retreat to Walden’s Pond. The more we expose ourselves to environmental stresses, the more time we need to invest in treating our anxiety. Accepting the fact that modern living requires us to counteract the stresses of modern life through active self-care allows us both to treat the anxiety that we are currently experiencing and to shore up our strength against future challenges.
Just as importantly, we must come to understand that anxiety does not indicate that there is a terrible problem lurking somewhere.
I have spent a great deal of time over the last five years listening to the “still, small voice” of my higher self, and one thing that has become crystal clear is that it never speaks from a place of fear. As Reverend Marvin Anderson used to say, the voice of God is always a Yes! Your divine self is a point of awareness in the ultimate, infinite positive. If you are hearing a voice that says, “If you do that you’ll fail spectacularly and have to declare bankruptcy and even your mother will think you’re a fool” that is your highest self. That is the voice of anxiety. It is a signal — but the only truth it signals is that it is time to treat your anxiety through self-care.
So, let go of that particular myth. Your anxiety is not trying to warn you that you’re about to move in the wrong direction. It is warning you not to move at all, not to grow, not to reach toward your potential. It is warning you to ’stay safe’ by resisting change — the most dangerous
Never attempt to treat anxiety by attempting to solve the problems that anxiety attaches itself to. I find that it’s very helpful to treat anxious thoughts like upset toddlers. Reasoning with anxiety is a waste of time — distraction is the only real solution. Do whatever it is that best distracts you (unless that activity is also anxiety-provoking). Go for a long walk, see a funny movie, meditate, make yourself a nice cup of tea and re-read a favourite book. Get a baby sitter if you have young children, and take a hot bath or a nap. Stop everything — and treat the anxiety.
Why is this important? First, because acting from a place of anxiety is the least effective way to overcome any real challenges we face. Any decision made from a place of fear is very likely to be a bad decision.
Let’s recap. First, we rid ourselves of our anxiety magnets by creating order in our financial life — then, we treat any environmental anxiety on a regular basis.
And if that doesn’t work, if we are still uncomfortable, it is safe to conclude that we are suffering from divine discontent. That means that we must change our lives. For the primary difference between and anxiety is that divine discontent spurs us to action — while anxiety spurs us to inaction.
Self-actualisation, living our best life, determining our purpose and reaching our divine potential requires that we take risks. So, first we treat our environmental anxiety. Then we embrace our divine discontent, and harness it — we use it to lift us off the couch, to create a defense against those in our lives who are afraid of losing us if we become our best selves.
Frank X. Barron was a scholar who spent his life exploring the creative mind. And just to be clear about what we are talking about here, know that everyone who ever succeeded at anything, from art to business to motherhood, did so because they engaged their creative mind. Sometimes the only art we engage in is the creation of our own lives, and it might be argued that the creation of our lives is the greatest masterpiece of all.
Dr. Barron wrote that “Creativity requires taking what Einstein called “a leap into the unknown”. This can mean putting your beliefs, reputation and resources on he line as you suffer the slings and arrows of ridicule.”
In the world of finance in which I’ve worked for the last 15 years, I have identified a number of traits that separate those that succeed from those who only dream of succeeding. Successful people don’t wait until they feel safe before they take action. They don’t let their fear paralyze them — instead, they harness that fear to motivate them to do their best.