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 wholly 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.