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If you’re a woman who wants a money breakthrough, I think the best place to begin is to stop beating yourself up, which so many women do.
Instead, do the contrary and ease up on yourself. Give yourself a pat on the back. The goal is to get to a place where you feel compassion towards yourself. Even if you’ve made some bad money mistakes in the past, find something for which you can acknowledge yourself. Remember, you were, and are, doing the best you can with what you know.
Women sometimes need permission to be kinder to themselves. Many times women don’t even realize how harsh they are with themselves, especially around money. When women realize they don’t need to be so hard on themselves and that they can be more compassionate instead, it can be enough to take them out of their financial story. I have found that women have a tendency to create a lot of drama around money, perhaps because they get addicted to the adrenaline rush. They become self-critical and tell themselves stories about being a bad person because they have debt or because they over-spend or because they feel clueless about money. This is what keeps them feeling stuck.
Instead, women can get to a place of forgiveness for the past money mistakes they have made.
This forgiveness leads to feeling more empowered with money. When women feel empowered, they become aware of choices that they were not aware of before. They actually begin to create these choices for themselves out of the new, empowered space because they become more creative and resourceful.
From that point, they become more aware of their money behaviors so that the next time they feel compelled to spend money mindlessly, they can be at choice, which in turn breaks the negative cycle of their money story. The story usually goes something like this: They spend unconsciously, then feel guilty and berate themselves, so they feel badly about themselves, which then leads to feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. It becomes a habitual pattern of self-abuse.
The good news is that, amazingly, the simple process of becoming aware of unconscious patterns with money, and forgiving oneself for unwanted financial behavior, is enough to begin to break and transform the negative cycle.
This blog post is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released book, Super Charge Your Success, co-authored by Patti Fagan.