In order to move to an improved financial position, you have to create a new financial identity. If, for example, your financial life is characterized by underearning, constant financial worry, or longing for more and you want to experience abundance and security, your concept of your financial self has to change.

In order to replace financial discomfort of any kind with financial peace and prosperity you have to develop the thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors of a person who always has more than enough and never worries about money.

For many people, this means making major alterations in how they deal with themselves and the world around them. I don’t think, for example, that a person who has been underearning for many years, can rapidly evolve into a person who is well-paid or runs a consistently profitable business.

That’s why, for the majority of people, prosperity programs don’t work in the long run. Altering the characteristics of your financial life takes commitment and conscious attention, over an extended period of time.

You need to know two things: where you are now and where you want to be a few years. Not just financially, but also emotionally. Then you can develop a strategy for gradually altering the thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors that contribute to your current position.

Start by honestly defining where you are now. Perhaps you have already started altering how you deal with money. Start with where you are now, not where you were when you first started changing. Write down how you think and feel about your finances, what beliefs you harbor about what you deserve and what being wealthy means, and how you behave with money. (See the chart in Exercise 1 in Build Your Money Muscles.)

Then write down how you want to be thinking, feeling, and behaving two years from now. Also choose a realistic goal in terms of increased earnings or net worth. Doing this opens the door to decided which steps you want to take in order to develop your new financial identity.

There is no magic answer and unless you are expecting a large inheritance, no one is going to swoop down and drop a load of money into your life. You have to move in a new direction and planning how you will move is up to you. Once you make the plans, it’s up to you to take action.

Coming Very Soon:
Build Your Money Muscles for Financial Strength & Security. A six-month program guaranteed to move you to a healthier financial position.

In the last Prosperity Quick Tip, I mentioned the Identity Factor, which I believe is the main reason that most people find it difficult to significantly alter their financial position. And those who do move up the financial ladder often find themselves just as uncomfortable emotionally in their new positions as they were before.

Making significant life changes can be a triple threat:

• A threat to your personal identity (not a "treat" as I mistakenly wrote last issue)
• A threat to your position in your peer group
• A threat to your position in your family of origin.

Making major changes will stimulate new responses from the world around you. You know how to respond the what you usually create. You have to learn how to respond as conditions change.

For example, when I moved to Santa Fe, I had $200, a computer, and a few cartons of belongings. I fit right in with the locals here who struggle financially. As I moved up, people treated me differently. In order to feel like I was part of the group, I had to find new points of commonality so I could feel connected. Not only did my sense of myself change–and that was sometimes confusing–my position in my peer group also changed.

And years before as I worked to eliminate the rescue dramas I often went through with my family, I had to find new ways of interacting with them on a meaningful level. And they weren’t always ready to change along with me.

So in order to effectively institute long-range changes, you have to be willing to work through the resistance to change that is the natural result of the triple threat. It’s so much easier to go back to being who you were than to move forward into who you are becoming.

Continue »

Last week’s Prosperity Quick Tips about disappointment evidently really hit home for a lot of people. I received an unusual amount of email about it. So today, let’s take another step forward.

If you have an emotional pattern that shows up in your life stories such as disappointment, betrayal, abandonment, or any other uncomfortable emotion, then on a deep-down level you harbor an expectation of that experience. Because of the way the Law of Attraction operations, that expectation will lead to a result.

The same thing happens if you have a pattern of having life stories end in satisfaction, success, or getting your needs met. You will have an expectation of a favorable result and that’s what you will manifest.

Continue »

On yesterday’s teleclass, Working Through Your Money Issues, one of the participants admitted to being habitually disappointed in the outcomes of her life stories, expecially those that involve finances. Her habit was certainly not unique.

Many people have a disappointment habit, experiencing series of dramas that end in disappointment. Turning this around so that your like stories end with feelings of success and accomplishment requires that you first release your NEED for disappointment.

A disappointment habit is the result of holding in feelings of disappointment over an extended period of time. Those feelings keep looking for an avenue of expression and if you don’t express the feeling they will find that avenue through new life stories that magnify the feeling.
Continue »