LESSON #5
HOW TO BE WELLTHY
The Seven Social Sins
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principle
-Frederick Lewis Donaldson
When you think of money, what happens to your body? How do you breathe? Do your emotions shift to positive or negative? When you ponder the statement “money is the root of all evil” do you agree?
Money is such a seductive and tricky beast. We want it, resent those who have it, go in search of it, have it magically given to us, squander it... the list goes on. Our relationship with money lands on the emotional spectrum and ultimately, where you exist on this spectrum defines how much of it you own or will own in the future.
Just like our views on pretty much every aspect of our lives, our relationship with money is defined in our youth. A child growing up in a household of limited finances could perceive money as unobtainable and the pursuit, stressful. Another child living in a home with a lot of money may view it in abundant supply and easy to come by. When we perceive one person’s outlook on money as a mystery but another person’s view on money as obvious, who do you think has more? The beauty of this phenomenon is that once we identify with and accept our history with money, we can set a new path for wealth in the future.
At the end of the day, the more you practice abundance, the higher your odds of having more cash in your life.
Abundance
What does it mean to live in abundance? I ask this of all my clients and a majority of them have a similar answer: to have more money, more stuff, the opportunity to travel, etc. These things that are thought to be ‘abundance’ are actually just proof that you are living in abundance. To focus on the money alone isn’t enough. One must tap into the source of where the money comes from, which for a real estate agent, is the knowledge that there are thousands of homes out there that need to be sold, thousands of homeowners that need you to help them sell and thousands of buyers that need you to help them buy. Focusing on the source allows you to show up to work knowing that there is a ton of business to be had and abundance to be experienced. All you have to do is put yourself out there in order to receive it.
I have studied the law of attraction and, though I find it illuminating, I don’t agree with the idea that one can profit from want alone. Hope isn’t a strategy and to tell the universe that you want fortune and simply expecting it to arrive isn’t going to work. Frankly, why would you want that to be the case? Real estate is a career, not a job. A career is what we do to live out our purpose, to test ourselves, to access our skills, to reach a goal. If you want to spend your days on the couch insisting the universe send you some money, that sounds like a pretty sad existence to me, even if it did work.
Money’s true value presents itself when we consider what it took to obtain it. Think of the majority of lottery winners who end up in serious debt due to overspending and poor money management. Money doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but when we work for it, we don’t need instructions. We respect it enough to take our time with it, invest it, save it, plan ahead with it.