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Give yourself an energy boost by getting rid of stuff you’ve been keeping "just in case" but never using. Stagnant energy in your home or office can keep you from opening doors to new opportunities.

Imagine that cash needs a clear energy pathway in order to flow through your life. When your desk, drawers, closets, or garage or stuffed with items that never move, the clutter acts as an energy dam, preventing a natural flow. At the same time, items that represent your past keep you mired in the energy of the past. Moving towards a new financial position means letting go of the past and creating openings for new energy to flow through.

The clutter many of my coaching clients have trouble dealing with is paper clutter–paid bills, invoices, bank statements, and other endless bit of paper that need to be sorted, filed, or stored. The problem is, the papers often pile up, never to find a resting place.

If you are surrounded by paper clutter, obtain some banker’s boxes from an office supply store and pile all of the papers you need to deal with into the boxes. If this makes you feel uneasy, label the boxes so you have some idea what is in them. You can sort by a range of dates or type of papers (although this might take too much time and attention). Keeping all receipts from a specific year in the same box can make getting ready for income taxes easier.

After all of the papers are stuffed away in boxes, get them out of your sight. Hopefully, that will also get them out of your mind. If you don’t go back into the boxes for a specified period, like six months or a year, then you can safely assume you don’t need them. They can stay in storage if you need the receipts, and get rid of a lot of the other papers.

A word of warning: when you get rid of the paper clutter, you will have to adapt to the open feeling that you will probably experience. There’s a good chance that papers will begin to pile up again so you can feel more like yourself. Decide that once a week or once  month you’ll clean up and start anew. Eventually you’ll adapt to the open feeling and the fact that there is nothing to criticize yourself about.

Regularly checking in with your money feelings can prevent financial stagnation–that feeling that you just can’t seem to move through your current financial position into a new one.

No matter how much emotional clearing you have done, there’s always another layer of emotions lying in wait, ready to hold you back. That’s because emotions are the bridge between our internal and external worlds. As you move towards a new financial position, the habitual emotions that have defined your current position have to be replaced by new emotional reponses that are in tune with where you want to be.

So, when you check in with yourself today, what are you feeling about your money? Are you feeling frustrated, limited, trapped, deprived, or angry? Or perhaps you feel satisfied with what you have, comfortable with what you are earning, or hopeful about your financial future.
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The short answer is YES. Here’s how:

1. You can connect to like-minded people all over the world, and feeling connected is one of the emotional keys to creating prosperity.
2. You can learn a lot about creative ways of developing streams of income if you network with entrepreneurs and solo practitioners.
3. Your authentic self will have a means to express itself. Even though there are certain etiquettes that are best to follow, there are lots of ways to be creative.
4. If you have a business or practice, you have to opportunity to carefully craft how you want to present your product or service to a large audience. This often brings up feelings that you can examine and work through as you move into a larger arena.

I especially recommend Facebook for small business owners and solo practitioners. It presents many opportunities for increasing your customer or client base.

I’ll be announcing an exciting seminar in the near future to help you learn Facebook techniques for building your business.

If you decide to give it a try, after you sign up, do a search for Joan Sotkin and add me as a Friend. Include a note that you read my blog or subscribe to Prosperity Tips. I’ll be starting a group soon where you can ask questions and get feedback from others.
 

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Because of cultural influences, people rarely reach adulthood with a clear understanding of their authentic selves. More often than not, identities are formed more out of the need to please caregivers than from authentic self-expression.

As a result, people experience a holding back, not just of who they are, but how they express themselves financially. Thus the common thought, "I should be earning more than I am" or a longing to reach a perceived true potential.

The prevalent feeling of being trapped in a particular financial position is the result of feeling trapped in an inauthentic persona. This also often stimulates feelings of abandonment (of self), deprivation, anger, and shame, all of which people tend to blame on external circumstances.

Self-help literature is filled with prescriptions for finding your authentic self. In this limited space, I can only give a few suggestions to move you forward:

• Remember the slogan: If one of us has to be uncomfortable, it doesn’t have to be me. Express your needs and give yourself permission to fill them.
• Learn how to express your feelings. I can’t stress how important this is to being in integrity with yourself.
• Do something today that you have always wanted to do but were afraid that others might judge you harshly for.

These three suggestions will point you in a new direction and help you create a new financial identity.

My book Build Your Money Muscles and the CDs Let Go of the Aloneness Blocking Your Prosperity and Healing Your Financial Shame have specific instructions for learning to express feelings without having to rekindle a lot of old hurts.

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If you are on Facebook, add me as a friend. I’d love to learn more about you. Include a message with your Friend Request that you read my blog.

Any time anything unexpected happens financially, it’s a good idea to be hyperaware of your feelings. This can give you great insight into the dynmaics behind your finances.

For those of you in the US, when your tax rebate arrives, take a moment to tune into the kinesthetic experience in your body. A number of possibilities come to mind. You may:

1. Feel eelated. Like a kid who just  got a birthday gift and your immediate reaction will be to want to spend it.
2. Feel initially elated, then sad because it isn’t enough to get all of the things you want or because you know you have to use it to pay for bare necessities.
3. Have a feeling that someone cares about you.
4. Be aware of a sense of resolve that you will use the rebate, or part of it at the very least, to pay off some of your obligations. You decide that this is the moment that you are going to change your habitual financial behaviors.

Whatever you are feeling is most likely to be something you have felt in the past and your habitual behaviors will follow suit. This is the perfect time to be aware of the feelings, sit with them for a while, do some deep breathing, then do something that you wouldn’t normally do. Like doing nothing with the money for a week, then making a decision as to what to do with it.

One of the keys to moving to a new financial position is to change your behaviorss. This is a great time to do this.

If you are outside of the US, imagine that you are getting a check for the equivalent of $600. How would you respond?

If you’ve been working and playing hard, keeping track of your money is probably not something you look forward to doing. But the simple act of writing down what you spend and earn can help you move to a better financial position.

Money, like people, goes to those who love and take care of it. And what money likes best is to be counted. Financial Vagueness Syndrome, which many people suffer from, does not encourage cash flow.

Taking care of your money stimulates feelings of empowerment as well as increased self-esteem and self-trust. Avoiding the task does the opposite and often enhances feelings of shame.

If you’d like to improve your cash flow and can see the benefit of paying attention to your numbers, it can take a while to build up a habit. The decision you have to make is to start and to do something with your money as many days during the week as possible. Five minutes a day is often enough to keep things up to date.

On ProsperityPlace.com, you can download a PDF file with instructions for Basic Money Management.

My book Build Your Money Muscles also has instructions and can help you work through the shame that may be coming up when you think about your financial situation. That shame can be what is holding you back.

There was a story in our local newspaper yesterday with the headline, "Prices rising faster than income," and I thought about how many stories about difficult times I’ve been reading about.

Here’s a different way to deal with these stories so you don’t get caught up in fear:
We live in a dualistic reality where for every plus there’s a minus, and for every up there’s a down. It’s a world of opposites.

Imagine that you are holding in your hand a coin–heads on one side, tails on the other. When you look at the coin, you only see one side. Turn it over and it looks entrely different.

It’s the same with whatever it is you are looking at. Turn it over, and you’ll see the opposite:

• On the other side of debt is solvency
• On the other side of evil is good
• On the other side of miserable is happpy

And on the other side of financial discomfort is financial comfort. All you have to do is turn over the coin and see it from a different point of view.

Because of the downturn, people are becoming more aware of their financial values, and many are getting past financial vaguenss and learning new cash managment skills. Consumerism is down, group activities are up. There is always a plus on the other side of a minus.

Look for the plus in what seems like a minus and you can turn your life around.

If you are sitting still, you can’t move forward. That’s obvious. But many people go through their day in a rather sedentary way, keeping their mind busy and their body quiet. No momentum.

I bet if you look at your daily schedule you can find 20 minutes that you may consider "wasted." Well, if you used those 20 minutes to move your body, you will move yourself into a new energy level, and that will include increased cash flow. (Your money is an expression of your personal energy.)

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In my book, Build Your Money Muscles, I talk a lot about connecting to others in order to create prosperity. After all, money comes from people, and if you want more money, you need more people in your life.

I’ve been taking the time to learn Facebook and other networking sites, usually referred to as social media. I’ll admit  that I avoided this for a long time because it seemed too time intensive. But I can see that it has great possibilities.

The whole social media universe can seem quite daunting. Start with one and let your network grow. I think Facebook is a good place to start, There are a lot of business people congregating there now and it’s a good place to promote yourself and/or your business.

I’m reading Facebook for Dummies, which is simplifying the learning process and giving me a lot of good ideas. 

If you aren’t  on Facebook yet, follow these steps:

1. Set up an account (it’s free) and be sure to upload a picture and fill in your bio information. What’s great  about Facebook is that only your "friends" can see your profile, if that’s what you choose, so you don’t have to fee vulnerable.  
2. Read Facebook for Dummiesor go through the Help file on Facebook
3. Add to your Friends list. You can look for people you know by searching for their name. Or go to my page (search for Joan Sotkin) and add me as a friend, then you can see who I’m friends with and ask them to be friends. Once you check their profiles, you can decide if you want  to keep them on your friends list.

This is a good way to start. I’ll have more to say as I move along on this path. Take it slowly, so you’re not overwhelmed.

Economic gloom and doom is front and center now, and for good reason. The economy is taking a nose dive. But that doesn’t mean that you have to buy into the group feelings and have the gloom and doom affect your personal finances.

I’m just starting a new business in the midst of the downturn and I assume that the economy is going to work to my advantage. You have the same option.

Because we tend to manifest what we project, when lots of people hold the energy of fear it moves everything downwards. It’s sometimes hard to rise above the group think and get to a place of positive expectation.

The fact is that there are always people who do well and always people who don’t do well. Some people consider a downturn a tragedy, others see it as an opportunity. How do you want to see it? It’s your choice.

Here are some steps I suggest you take:
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