Embrace Prosperity

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.