Posts Tagged ‘prosperity’

The many changes occurring in our economic foundation require a new focus and discipline for you to thrive and prosper. Here are five keys that I consider essential.

• Pay close attention to your finances. During difficult or transitional times knowing exactly where you stand financially and keeping up-to-date financial records are essential for strategizing and making rational financial decisions.
• Stay tuned to financial news. You will benefit from following stories and commentary about the financial sector and becoming more literate about the financial world. This requires knowing much more than just the movement of the stock market, which is a limited view of financial trends.
• Focus on the present, not the past or future. The future is entirely unknown, and during uncertain times people tend to project into the future from fear. Many people are thriving right now and there’s no reason why you can’t thrive and prosper too if you adjust your financial behavior and goals to fit current conditions.
• Be open to new ideas and opportunities. Holding onto the past often provides apparent safety when in fact it keeps you from moving forward. Have an open mind and carefully examine the potential of opportunities that are presented to you, even if they require moving out of your comfort zone.
• Take care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, connect to others, express yourself authentically, and meditate daily. This is not the time to withdraw and comfort yourself with unhealthy foods and inactivity.

Making changes to your focus and behavior requires ongoing attention and support. The Peace of Mind & Prosperity program can provide this for you. Read more about the program on ProsperityPlace.com.

Resourses: PBS.org and CSPAN have some excellent interviews about events leading up to the financial downturn and suggestions for the future. Highly recommended: (All can be downloaded from ITunes
The Warning: a Frontline program. http://bit.ly/ax6qdP
After Words Interviews on CSPAN’s Book TV
    Joseph Stiglitz: Author of FreeFall
    Naomi Prins: Author of It Takes a Pillage

Last week, I posted a tip to my Facebook fan page suggesting that people take a few minutes each day to do nothing. As I’ve thought about this, I realized that if you’re alive, it’s impossible to do nothing. You are always breathing and usually thinking. And doing nothing is actually doing something.

That led my mind to think about how we really do get to choose our moment to moment activities and point of focus. We can choose to be ultra-busy, highly stressed, in fear, or acting compulsively (eating, drinking, shopping, etc.), or the choice can be to pace ourselves carefully, approach everything in a relaxed manner, trust in a positive outcome, or make deliberate choices.

Some people seem to thrive in high stress situations. When I was younger and working for a nightly network television show, I loved the fast pace and daily pressure, but was taking lots of Valium and eating more than my share of sugar and junk foods. In the long run, it proved to be disastrous physically and emotionally. Read the rest of this entry »

I wish you all the best in 2010. And to help insure that you experience a healthy financial year, here’s what I suggest:

• Without delay, set up a system for keeping careful financial records. Use software such as Quicken, Quickbooks for your business, one of the many apps available for the IPhone or ITouch, or one of the online services such as mint.com. If you deal with multiple currencies, try AceMoney
• If you already keep good records, analyse the data. Determine your best source(s) of income, your highest expenses, and how your monthly income in 2009 compared to your monthly income in 2008. Be aware of changes in your sources of income and expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent article in Fortune magazine http://bit.ly/6AXo0R indicated that there are fewer deaths during a recession because people apparently “adopt smarter lifestyles in recessions, especially those people with the worst health habits.”

One reason is that as work hours are cut back or people are laid off, they have more time to spend going to the gym, preparing meals, and getting more sleep.

There’s something else happening too. People are becoming much more conscious about how they spend their money. Consumer sales are decreasing because many are deciding against excess and for frugality. Instead of thinking, “It’s only $20!” and making an unnecessary purchase, often the decision is to not spend the $20 and save it instead. That’s good for a person’s economic health. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the season when the “I-have-to-have-it-now” syndrome often appears. Symptoms include hyperactivity, overspending, excessive debting, and lots of shopping, often for unneeded items.

Seeing something you like and putting off the purchase is more difficult now when every message from the media is buy, buy, buy. After all, we are told, we help the economy by being consumers.

Yet this is the perfect time to learn how to wait, a skill that eludes most people in this culture that encourages instant gratification. Learning to wait actually increases your chances of manifesting what you want without overspending or debting. In the case of non-consumer goods or events, learning to wait can increase your general comfort level in life. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to thrive in this economic environment and prepare for a prosperous 2010, it’s time to pay attention to your finances and create a strategy for the new year. Even if you already keep good records, you can learn to go even deeper into what you can learn from your own numbers so you can get the most value from your money.

I hope that if you suffer from any level of Financial Vagueness Syndrome, you will decide that this is the time to hunker down and get real about your finances. One thing is for certain: Money doesn’t take care of itself. Without care, it’s like a wild child that needs to be tamed.

I’ll have to admit that I avoid talking about this because I know that people would rather have a magic bullet that fixes something and makes their money fine. But without money management, you limit your own prosperity.

Here’s what I suggest: Read the rest of this entry »

Many years ago, a teacher of mine kept repeating, “Love is the healer.” That phrase was always in the back of my mind as I moved forward with my own healing.

It’s clear to me that love is the glue that holds everything together, and that peace is not possible until we reach a tipping point where love is the predominent emotion.

In order for love to prevail, our hearts need to be open to:

• Ourselves
• Other people
• Other beings
• New ideas
• Opportunities
• Receiving

Unfortunately, because of family-of-origin issues, many hearts close to love, making it difficult to receive that which is needed to thrive and prosper. When love is withheld from ourselves or others, we block the free flow of energy through our lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always wondered why so many people have such a hard time permanently altering their financial position. Time and time again. I see improvements followed by declines. Or, no matter how much work people do on themselves, their struggles continue.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that any major life change can be a threat to a person’s identity. If deep down inside, you do not perceive yourselves to be a prosperous person, then if you achieve a level of financial success, this would be a threat to your self concept.

This kind of threat causes behavior that is often called “self-sabotage.” I call it self-protection. Seemingly sabotaging behavior serves to protect your old, familiar identity. No matter how dysfunctional that identity might be, it’s the one you know.

This is the Identity Factor, a mechanism that kicks in any time you make a significant change. If you alter how you think, how your feel, and/or how you behave, your life is going to become unfamiliar and you will most likely become a bit disoriented.

If you’re moving in a positive direction, there’s a good chance that you’re going to find yourself making more money. Although this is a desired result, the increased inflow will feel unfamiliar and you are going to have to make unfamiliar decisions about how to handle the funds. The uncertainty of the outcomes can make you uncomfortable.

Although you might feel good about your increased income, within a few months you may find yourself moving back towards your old income level because of the Identity Factor.

I haven’t written about this much in these Tips because the Identity Factor is fairly complex. The idea is simple, but how it operates in your very complex subconscious is not. Yet understanding this concept can be the difference between your staying stuck forever or permanently creating a new financial position.

The Identity Factor is discussed at length in Build Your Money Muscles. If you already have the book, I suggest a re-read so you can gain a deeper understanding of the Identity Factor.

I did a teleclass a while back on this topic called Understanding the Identity Factor, and it’s now available on Prosperity Place.com at http://ProsperityPlace.com/catalog/cd_understandIF.html.  

Also, on October 1, the teleclass for the Peace of Mind & Prosperity Program (POMP) was all about the Identity Factor. This recording, plus Understanding the Identity Factor are available immediately when you join the POMP program. For more information visit http://ProsperityPlace.com/catalog/pomp.html

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In my book Build Your Money Muscles, I identify the five main feelings that are expressed most often through money. They include abandonment/aloneness, shame, deprivation, a sense of being trapped, and anger, which we will look at today.

Anger is a very valid emotion. Yet in many cultures people are discouraged from expressing anger in a healthy way. As a result, anger is often repressed and turned inward. Your negative self-talk can be anger directed inwards.

Anger expressed through finances shows up in a number of ways. Borrowing money without paying it back, nonpayment of taxes, late bill paying, and compulsive spending can all be expressions of anger. (Think, “I’ll show you!”) Underearning and debting are two of the most common ways that anger finds itself in finances. Read the rest of this entry »

 Let’s assume, as I suggested last week, you’ve set an income goal that includes an amount you’d like to earn and you have set a date by which you’d like to reach your income goal. Now it’s important to make sure that you have a realistic container into which the money can flow.

If you are a business owner or practitioner, what is the designated income stream into which the money can come? A coach, for example, needs to have a website to draw people in or some sort of marketing that makes it clear what that coach has to offer. There also has to be a clear way for potential clients to contact the coach as well as an established payment system.

With products to sell, an entrepreneur needs distribution channels for the products and a manufacturing system that ensures prompt delivery. Without these, maintaining an increasing cash flow is difficult.

For those who have a job, have you upgraded your skills or done what is necessary in order to earn more? If you are on commission, do you have a system in place for increasing your client base or selling more to existing clients? Read the rest of this entry »