The Rigidity of Money Stories

I am an NLP Life Coach. I am also a Systems thinker. Among the many workshops that I conduct, one that amazes me the most is “Welcome Money”. Weeks before the workshop, I start preparing for it. I fill pads and pads with notes, visualize each and every step, write down the anticipated questions and get into resourceful states.

And yet during the course of the two-day workshop, something new and powerful emerges. All participants return back home, a few in discomfort, few in pain, few hurting, and yet each one ready to heal, grow and transform in ways that defy all norms.

Because you see, when it comes to money narratives, two plus two can be something beyond four, six, and two thousand.

It is that serendipitous. And powerful.

The “I am unable to charge more from my clients” or “I have to control my spending habits” are not simplistic narratives cast in black and white. They are living, thriving, breathing stories with muddled timelines that we carry in our DNAs and bodies. Perhaps they have their roots in our childhood, in the neighborhoods, we grew in, in our ancestral histories.

Like how one participant came wanting to discover ways to earn more and how as the workshop progressed, she discovered the similarity she and her mother shared in their relationship with money. And how that disturbed and discomfited her. And how she felt the calling to heal and re-group her relationship with her mother.

Our relationship with money is often shaped by how we view ourselves and everyone around us. It is also shaped by the money stories we keep hearing around us. And when I say “money stories”, I mean money as an undercurrent — silent in its presence yet exerting its weight everywhere, sometimes heavily like a tsunami and sometimes delicate like a tiny ripple.

I often kept hearing versions of this statement since my childhood, “Men have 10,000 problems to take care of…”

Women, their blouses slick with sweat and their backs hunched with the day’s toil would tiptoe around their men because well… 10,000 problems. And men who have been taught to take care of “their” lands, “their” women, and “their” cattle since times immemorial are still unaware of the gilded cage they have set themselves in.

The thing is, money narratives like patriarchy are not easy on both the man and woman.

A woman who is unable to increase her fees is still tip-toeing like her mother and her mother’s mother because that is what these women have been taught their entire lifetimes — to make safe choices so as not to disturb the system.

A man who is unable to share his financial woes with his partner is still the owner of lands and cattle and properties. And while that is a privilege, it can also become utterly lonely at times.

We talk about retail therapy as though a few hours of shopping can undo the wounds of thousands and thousands of years ago. Homeostasis is a dynamic equilibrium, in which continuous change occurs yet relatively uniform conditions prevail. Shopping in that sense becomes a vain attempt to break open a few of the ancestral chains that have been holding the system for many years.

No amount of apps or Excel sheets can help a shopaholic unless they decide to loosen the soil of their being and begin to dig and excavate deep.

In that sense, re-writing our money scripts are also about bringing flexibility into our being and about healing and transforming our relationship with the world.

Does money make the world go?

I invite you to sit with the question for a while and feel it in your body. And then answer me.

I await your responses.