How is your relationship with money?
Take a good deep look in the mirror. How do you deal with money? Are you thinking about it a lot? Too much? Or do you pay not enough attention to it? In any case, money triggers some of our strongest human emotions.
The decisions that we make are influenced by our emotional relationship with money. Whether you have a lot or little less of it. How we deal with money hardly changes during our lifetime. And that is a missed opportunity.
People who are able to see through their own money relationship create for themselves an opportunity to develop a healthier and fruitful relationship.
I’m amazed how much focus there is on the technical side of money, and how little time we spend on the emotional side. We like to think that we are rational beings, a homo economicus, while in reality we are mostly guided by our emotions when it comes to the decisions that we make about money.
For example, we spend money that we don't actually have so that we can show others that we are doing well. (read the book: Status Anxiety by philosopher Alain de Botton in this context. He explains in detail the phenomenon of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’). We burn ourselves out because we are always afraid of not having enough. Or we are ashamed of our too easily obtained money. In short, there are so many emotions that influence our decisions in the background.
Insight
The first step in change is always the same: understand what is going on here! What kind of money type are you? Some groundbreaking work has been done in this area by Olivia Mellan in Washington DC.
Take the free survey on her website and get an impression of what kind of money type you are. Learn about the five different money types. Are you mostly a…
- Amasser. Collect as much money as possible and spend a lot of time thinking about it.
- Avoider. Don't think about it. Money will solve itself.
- Hoarder. Save, save, save and it almost hurts to spend it.
- Money monk. Money is dirty and bad. The root of all evil.
- Spender. Have fun. Spend it! The rest is worry for later.
Check your result with three people that you trust. Which money type do they see most in your daily behavior?
The outcome of this exercise gives you a good point to start from.
Hopefully this inspires.
Paul Donkers
Business coach | entrepreneur | value creation | leadership teams | business leaders
