Chapter One

Do You Believe in Scarcity?

Have you ever been so terrified that you simply couldn’t bring yourself to make an important financial decision? Do you have visions of being destitute? Meet Carolyn.

Carolyn was stuck!

She wanted to retire but was terrified that she would not have enough money to last her the rest of her life. This is a common enough problem, but with one exception. Carolyn, an outstanding and respected pro-fessional woman, was a multimillionaire.

Logically, she knew that income from her investments could easily support her lifestyle without her ever having to spend the money she had been saving and investing for years. But logic didn’t help—she still imagined being too poor to afford food.

As we talked about why she was so scared, she described memories from an impoverished childhood. She had been earning her own spending money before she was 10 years old. Then she said something startling, “When I put money in the bank, I still think it disappears forever.”

Carolyn’s parents insisted that she give them almost all her earnings to put into her bank account. She dutifully followed their rules but when she went to withdraw the money for a school trip, she discovered that the bank account was almost empty. Betrayed and furious that her parents had spent her hard-earned money, she vowed to never forgive them—and 50 years later she was still angry.

She had been overwhelmed by this experience of betrayal when she was 15 years old and could do nothing to change the situation. The situation was so painful that she effectively froze her energy to protect herself from the pain she felt. Instead, she focused her life around accumulating money. Yet the memory of her money in the bank disappearing stayed active enough to resurface 50 years later.

Life energy either enlivens you as it flows, or it blocks you if it doesn’t. It is in the right place or the wrong place. Carolyn’s energy not only wasn’t flowing, but she had left some of it locked in a memory for 50 years. In the midst of material wealth, she had never experienced having enough. She not only believed in scarcity; she was stuck in scarcity.

Are You Stuck Too?

If you believe “I don’t have enough” or “There isn’t enough”—whether that’s enough money, enough time, enough love, enough friends, or enough resources to do what you want to do in any area—then the answer is yes.

Laurie: I have been there. I once needed to make a daily choice between buying the lunch drink I wanted and the one I could afford. The difference in price was only two cents. This happened a long time ago, but the difference was very real to me when my personal spending budget was only five dollars a week.

Willem: I have been there, too. When I was 14 years old, my family was poor. One of my shoes had a hole in the toecap, because I had worn them for a long time. Because they were my only pair, I couldn’t bring them to the shoemaker’s shop to have them repaired. It took my parents weeks to collect the money for new shoes. In that time, I learned that there wasn’t enough.

After many years of struggle, we learned a process that helped us release the last vestiges of those struggles and discover the abundance that truly exists in our worlds.

This book will help you discover and experience abundance in your relationship to money. But it just might overlap into those other areas, too.

You Need to Start Where You Are Now