Embrace Prosperity

You Need to Start Where You Are Now

If you don’t feel like you have enough money, you’ve probably learned to believe some ideas like these:

• Money burns a hole in your pocket
• The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
• You can’t win for losing
• Money is the root of all evil
• One way to lose a friend is to lend him money
• Save it for a rainy day
• Marry a rich man—or woman
• Money doesn’t grow on trees
• You spend money like it’s going out of style
• We can’t afford this
• It’s only money

Did you hear your parents, grandparents or religious institutions insist that this is the truth, even the absolute truth? How did hearing them help you learn to believe in scarcity?

Laurie: Whenever I teach a class about relieving money anxiety, the first thing I ask participants to do is create posters of statements they heard about money when they were children. We put them on the wall and refer to the statements throughout the workshop. Later, we try to answer the following questions about each statement:

• How did you learn this?
• Why did people in your environment repeat this when you were a child?
• How has this idea been useful to you in your life so far?
• Is the statement useful now?

Laurie lives and works in the US. Willem lives in Switzerland and works internationally. When we asked an international group of folks what they heard about money when they were children, these are some of the things they posted on the virtual wall of the Internet.

• Money doesn’t make happiness
• Learn to live within what money you earn or receive
• Don’t throw away your old shoes before you get new ones
• Easy come, easy go
• Money doesn’t grow on my back
• Money is not everything
• Money is all you need
• I’m not your ATM, I’m your parent
• Spend half, save half
• You will become a pauper
• It’s too expensive
• You can only become rich by being a criminal
• You have to work hard for your money

These messages are rarely shared with evil intent. Children don’t experience limits and often share freely. Many people who grew up in poverty had no idea that they were poor when they were small. Others who grew up in wealthy families learned to fear not having enough.

Scarcity Is A Belief System

Most parents do their best to prepare their children for the world as they know it. Some parents do this from their own belief that there isn’t enough, hoping to protect their children from what they believe to be the harsh realities of the world.

Almost everyone who is attracted to information about abundance has a childhood history of hearing statements like those we have listed. But not everyone believes that money is scarce.

Laurie: I once listened to one of my wealthy clients in wonder as he explained to me how his parents had routinely taught him about how to acquire and manage money in the world. He was a philanthropist and concerned with using his money to make the world a better place. For him, money was abundant, but love was scarce—which is why he was a client in the first place.

Fortunate people who believe in abundance and have enough money to be comfortable with it are rarely attracted to this kind of book. They either heard different, more useful, messages about money as children, or they have already examined and changed their old limiting beliefs.

What This Book is For

If you are reading this, you were probably exposed to limiting beliefs that taught you that there isn’t enough money. In many cases, there were not enough other things as well, and you learned that many resources were scarce. The information about what to do about those scarce resources is extremely varied.

We do live in a world of limited resources, and the amount of money you earn or receive in other ways may be beyond your control. However, the fact that you’re reading this book probably means more about how you think about having enough than how much you actually have in your bank account.

Reading this book will not immediately change the amount of money in your day to day life. It is designed to help you resolve your limiting beliefs about scarcity and discover how to experience abundance instead.

Money is the measure you probably use when you think about abundance or scarcity. It’s not the only measure. It’s often a stand-in for love, time, food, energy or other important commodities. Some people measure abundance by the number of toys they collect. Others do it by the number of people they can help.

You are unique, and your experience of the world is unique. That experience depends a lot on what you learned to pay attention to when you were a child. It also depends on how you were taught to manage the ongoing challenges of deciding how you use your resources.