The Viable Alternative

It is often taught by success coaches and successful people that if you’re unhappy about a particular area in your life, you have to change the story you tell yourself.

For instance, if you have complaints about your dating life, your career, the relationships you have or like in my case, your financial situation, instead of telling yourself and others how sucky these things are in your life, the empowering thing to do is to change your conversation, i.e. “story” about these things to reflect how your really want them to look in your life.

I’ve heard people say this for a number of years, but I tended to think of this line of thinking as complete balderdash. If you asked me, the fact that my financial situation was the way it was was because of me not being able to get a break and things always seeming to fall apart on me at the cusp of what I thought was going to be a breakthrough that would’ve started to lay a foundation on me. This was the reason for my lack, which in turn justified me saying on a regular basis I couldn’t afford to do or have a, b, c or d.

How could this be called a “story” when all this stuff really happened and actually described what I was currently going through? Also, if things around me started to change and work out for me then by logic the way I spoke about them would change.

I thought this way until very recently, when I began to have shifts of perception due to therapy about how I’ve been perceiving myself.

It all goes back to childhood (as it almost always does). As a child, as I may have explained in other blogs, I learned to make myself “small” in presence, in way of being, in attitude and in expectations in order to get love and approval from my father who was threatened by anybody else being bigger than him.

As an adult, this translated into me sabotaging my success, stifling myself, being overly hard on myself for the slightest mistake I made, constantly feeling “held back” and of course, dealing with lack in the area of my finances.

As I started to go further down the rabbit hole and connect with that scared kid within me, I started to catch myself in real time habitually “playing small” in various areas of my life including finances. It began to dawn on me that various things did happen to me in my life financially, but the way I responded to them was a direct result of the fact that I saw myself as “small” and trying to stay “small.”

You can tell the size of a man (or woman) in terms of how they deal with the things that happen to them. Those that see themselves as big, or strong or powerful will undoubtedly respond to something that happened to them in a different way from someone who saw himself as small.

The way that I perceived myself as a person who always struggled with and never had enough money, and who was afraid to have an abundance of money because he felt he didn’t deserve it was due more to me learning to be small for the love of my father than the “mishaps” that happened to me over the years.

Had I seen myself as someone big and powerful and worthy of success, I would’ve perceived and responded to what had happened to me in a totally different way that would’ve helped contribute to me having abundance in the financial realm rather than lack.

Thus, the things I did say about my financial situation was indeed just a story. Other people have been through similar situation but perceive themselves differently than I do, so they subsequently tell themselves a different, more empowering story and get different results than I do.

The key for me to change my financial situation is more than just simply changing my story about money, it is about getting more comfortable with seeing myself as big so I can provide the proper context to change my story to something more empowering. Changing my story on its own while still perceiving myself as small won’t work, and this perception was the reason why a) I had failed to “change my story” in the past and b) I came to misunderstand when people would say I needed to “change my story” about money in order to turn my finances around.

As I’ve noticed how I try to stay small, and I learn to apply the tools and insight I learned to be as big as I want to be without any fear from my scared child of reprisal from my father, I’ve begun to see specific places where I perpetuate my own lack, keep myself stuck and TALK MYSELF OUT OF success with my story, it’s utterly bananas.

Where we find ourselves in life truly is a result of the story we tell ourselves over and over again which in turn is ROOTED in how we see ourselves.

So how am I turning this around? Stay tuned for part 2.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love