Embrace Prosperity

In 2001, after I had spent much of the previous decade trying to make sense of my own relationship to money and abundance, I sent this email to other members of the fledging professional coaching community.

Financial sabotage

I am interested in exploring how to help people be more responsible about money issues in their lives. Often, they know what to do to take better care of themselves financially, but do not act on their information. I am currently collecting stories about how people sabotage their financial lives. If you have a story, or even a one liner, will you share it with me?

Responses poured in. One of the first I read started, “As a recovering scarcity expert, I have some thoughts for you! Is this for your clients, or research, even future project like a book? Just curious....” Looking back, I know the answer was yes on all counts.

Other responses reinforced my own views that this was a life pattern, developed early, that required much time and effort to change.

Fast forward to 2010 when I encountered a process that helped me understand that viewing everything in the world in terms of energy allowed these changes to happen astonishingly quickly: Logosynthesis.

Logosynthesis is a system for self-coaching and guided change. It was developed from energy psychology and other modalities by my co-author, Dr. Willem Lammers and offers a new and different way to help you discover the abundance that exists in your world.

In 2001, when I was exploring money and financial issues, Willem was searching for easier and more direct ways to serve clients when he discovered Logosynthesis in 2005. When we met in one of his workshops in 2011, I was incredibly impressed.

As Willem continued to develop new applications of Logosynthesis, I continued attending his programs and eventually used my skills as a writer to translate his work into an introductory book for the general public.

When Willem first applied Logosynthesis to money, I eagerly learned his framework and combined it with my own work on the subject. When I asked about participating in the new, online version of his work on Logosynthesis and abundance and described why I was interested, he suggested that we collaborate in writing this book.

Willem: I came from a background of scarcity, in which everybody always worked hard to pay the bills, and that’s what I’ve done. After I became self-employed, I founded two training institutes and ran them for more than 30 years.

After I sold my last institute, I kept working hard, as if the scarcity still existed, even though my business had done well enough to guarantee me a good pension. It took me several years to realize how exhausting that was.

I discovered how deep this pattern was rooted when I was developing new Logosynthesis workshops on relationships, health, and money. I realized how the idea of scarcity kept me going when it wasn’t necessary anymore.

Bandwidth and Energy

Others have been exploring the same question in very different ways.

Research shows that our mental resources, known as our bandwidth, are limited, and when these resources are low, so is our self-control. We then respond more emotionally and less logically than we would when we are fresh and ready to go. Each task that takes some of our mental resources or energy makes us less likely to respond logically to our next task.

Spiritually, the energy of the universe is boundless, and it flows through each of us. As human beings, we have the potential to experience this boundless energy, this Essence. However, we exist in biological bodies that must be nourished and nurtured in order to tap into this boundless energy.

That is where bandwidth comes in. We have a limited amount of biological energy which supports our psychological well-being and mental capacity to allow us to experience that boundless spiritual energy.

The new science of behavioral economics works with the concept of mental and psychological bandwidth. The authors of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Edgar Shafir, Ph.D. and Sendhil Mullainathan, Ph.D., explored the question of why poor people continually make poor decisions about their financial lives.

They concluded that when you (referring to people in general) feel you lack something, your mind works less efficiently. You tend to focus intensely on solving your most pressing problems—a process called tunneling. You lack enough energy to imagine the future and to take action to avoid later problems. It is hard to do anything besides taking care of yourself in the moment.

Finding New Options

We, Carolyn, Laurie and Willem, all concluded that we lacked money—for entirely different reasons. But the effect was quite similar. None of us could solve our respective problems without finding some additional energy.