Money is one of the most common things that people worry about. How do you stop worrying about money? I've got 3 easy steps for you today, and the last one is the most powerful.
Step one is understanding worry. We are going to stop worrying about money. Let's understand worry first. What is it? I'm a psychologist, I deal with this all the time. Worry is the negative prediction of what is to be. Think about that for a minute. We all constantly imagining what is coming. It doesn’t exist because we haven't created it yet. Think about that.
How you doing next week? You don't know. You have something to do with it. Please remember that, but you don't know. So, the only place that exists right now is in your imagination. Can you imagine things getting worse for you? Just play along with me for a moment. You do it all the time anyway. When you imagine that things are going to get worse for you, how do you feel? Worried? Nervous, anxious, apprehensive. Yeah, we got a lot of words for what boils down to what we are talking about here today. That is worry. That is the definition of anxiety. When we imagine (because we don't know) that what's coming is even worse than what we've already got, that is worry.
Look at the flipside for a minute. Can you imagine things getting better for you? I know, it would feel a little foreign sometimes if you are used to imagining things getting worse. If you imagine things getting better for you, how do you feel? Yeah. Feel that! It feels different. Now, you don't know what is coming. My point here is you are taking a position. If your position is that things are going to get worse, which you don't really know, you are imagining it. You are going to feel anxiety, worry. I think that's all you really need to know –to understand worry.
Let's move to the next part, understanding money. Let’s say you can see some money here in front of me. I have one US dollar, I have 5 euros, and I have 100,000 Vietnamese dong. I'm kind of proud of the dong, because this was my first 6-figure speaking engagement. I was paid 6-figures to speak at this particular event. Kind of cool, right? Now, you might not know exactly how much each of these are worth. Which hopefully triggers some kind of thinking in your own mind. Money is simply a symbol of something else. What is that something else? What do we use money for? We use it to trade for something of value. Right? So, the money is not the value. The thing that we are trading it for is what we value. Oh. That should get us thinking a little bit differently about money.
Here is another way that I've found helpful to think about money. It's a receipt for a value that is being created or promised. So, if someone creates value for me, if you provide a service or a product to me, I might reach out in some denomination. It depends on where you live or what your interests are. I will reach out to you and give you a receipt for the value that you provided for me. Now, what are you going to do with this? Well, you are going to take the currency and trade it. You are going to give it to somebody else for a value that they created for you. Nobody wants to keep this. They want to trade it for what they really want. That's important.
If you look at money as a receipt for a value, that's going to help us with a solution to how we are going to stop worrying about money. It's a receipt for a value that's been created or promised. The receipts flow from you when you are receiving value. So, when value flows to you, receipts go out. When value flows from you to others, the receipts come in. Got it? That's important. Now, it's time to pull all this together to understand worry. Worry is the negative prediction of what is to come. Understand money is simply receipts for value promised or created. We can put those two things together. To stop worrying about money, all we have to do is shift our focus of our own mind from the money, from the receipts to the value.
Worrying about money is like worrying about a pile of receipts. The receipts really have no meaning separate from the value that they are connected to. A receipt for what? When we shift our focus from the receipts to the actual value, we don't have to worry about money coming up. What we do is focus on is what kind of value we can create for other people. The receipts will come. The receipts are simply a strategic side effect of the value that is created. Shifting our focus, shifting our paradigm over to the value allows us to stop worrying, making negative predictions about the future. We can get really clear about creating more value for more people.
And the worrying doesn't bring about value, does it? What if you use that same mind that you are imagining all these negative outcomes to start asking yourself, “What value can I create for other people in my world?” That, I believe, is the economic answer to any money problem. We are not hoarding receipts. We are providing value in bigger, more powerful ways to more people, and then you don't have to worry about money.
If you haven’t yet ordered your copy of Pathological Positivity, do so today. I've got stories in there about how I stopped worrying about money, and you will see how that relates to your own experience. I will cover the cost of the book if you pay for the shipping. Go to drpauljenkins.com.
Continue the conversation with: