Money is a word that has many meanings depending on the context, values, lifestyle, culture, motivations, etc. Each person has a relationship with money influenced by these and other factors.
When people hire me as a coach, they are motivated by different objectives such as increasing their potential and performance as professional, finding a good balance between work and personal life, development of skills, problem solving, etc. However, until now, none of them has come up with the demand to clarify or improve their relationship with money.
Nevertheless, I have had some cases where money appears and suddenly becomes an important matter for the client. The first hints that the money is an underlying issue are statements like: “My Company pays me little,” or “I should earn more” and “I’m short on money”. Suddenly negative emotional attractors appear in clients.
But, what if in fact the problem is not that they do not earn enough… but, that they spend too much and do not have good money management?
When I am confronted with this situation, I ask permission to my clients to perform the following exercise.
I ask them to sit down comfortably. I put an empty chair opposite to them. Then I ask them to imagine sitting in that empty chair at the age of 70 years old. Now, the client will have a conversation with his/her 70 years old version. The conversation starts with the client asking this question to his/her old self.
What is your economic situation now that you are 70 years old?
Then, I ask my client to stand up and sit down in the empty chair where his or her 70-year-old version is, reflect and answer the question.
After that, the client comes back to the first chair and asks a second question to his/her old self.
The second question is:
What happened to get to this situation?
I ask them to change the position again, reflect and answer the second question.
Finally, the exercise finishes with the old version expressing gratitude to the young version if he or she did the correct thing with money to have a life that he or she expects for the future.
After doing this exercise, many people are scared or shocked! They realized that their future is not going to happen the way that they desire if they don’t do something! Their relationship with money is not a good one. This awareness pushes some of them to take actions to change it, and frequently it becomes a new issue to work on.