I feel like an egg that’s been cracked open, and all my gooey insides are running out. It has been quite a day…a week. To feel better, I did two things. First, I spent an hour on my radio show ruminating about how we create value – how we value ourselves, how money or talents are valued – and how we can confuse those two things so easily. And then I went shopping. (Yes, I really did. And I found a really great blouse.)
But I promised listeners of yesterday’s Flowdreaming show that we would continue this conversation about worth-especially self-worth. My own self-worth has been rocked pretty hard lately. And you know how things seem to happen at once?Well, I have news: they don’t just seem to – they do. That’s a perfect instance of Flow in action – whatever you begin to experience “moves forward” energetically, like the wake that precedes a boat in the water – to contaminate (for good or bad) your future experiences. What you feel in response to your present will condition or “mold” what will occur next. So if you feel crummy about yourself, you can bet a gang of things will come in to support continuing that experience. If you’re feeling a streak of low self-worth, you can bet that a slew of stuff will come to you to reinforce this feeling. This is what you call “going from bad to worse.”
Things do shift, of course. Every flow peters out. Winds change. Your mood changes. Your beliefs change. And then you swing back on course again. You get a compliment. Someone tells you they love you. Someone lets you know you helped them, or that something you did was really good. Your self-worth peeks its head up from the dirty clothes pile where it’s been hiding, and you gulp and say, “I can manage one more day.” You have confidence once again.
This is, incidentally, where our economy is at right now. We’ve gone from bad to worse, not because anything about us has changed, but because we’re in a state of collective, paralyzing fear. We think, “What if I don’t have a job tomorrow?” And so we don’t spend money, instead stockpiling for that rainy day, or trying to finally address that mountain of debt we’ve been pulling along.
And businesses are doing the same thing: the men and women who run them are thinking, “People aren’t going to be out buying stuff.” So they lay off people, order less, or let stock dwindle. Less output means that the people who make the stuff they sell, lose their jobs. And on it continues. It’s a crisis of confidence. Business confidence, economic confidence, internal confidence – all the same thing. When we live in fear and feelings of low confidence, our lives reflect this scarcity. When economically, our business leaders and banks feel this way, our economy reflects the scarcity. It’s not about money, actual money. It’s about human feeling.
Money in itself is just an energy condition. Money isn’t just paper currency or coins, or IUOs or mutual fund valuations. That is just the physical “body” of money, like your body is not really the “you” of you. Money is a unit of value that we totally make up! It helps to think of money like this – like a person – with both a body and a deeper spirit or essence. So ask yourself, What is my relationship to this person like?
When you think about money, do you always feel fearful? Do you think it will leave you, like a spouse running out on a 30-year marriage? Do you mistrust it, thinking it is fickle and unreliable? This feeling shows you exactly how you relate to money. And if money was a person, how would it react to these feelings from you? If you’ve been sending it your hurt, doubt, frustration, or fear for a long time, chances are it wants to stay away from you.
You have also probably tied this relationship to your income or work into your own internal sense of self-worth.
So few of us were ever brought up to to think that we, ourselves, were intrinsically of high value. And we should be treated as such. So we value ourselves based on all kinds of outside criteria. Sometimes I get caught up valuing myself on the coolness of my job, or my paycheck. But if both were gone tomorrow, would I be any less? I hope not. Because this could happen. Anything could happen. Where will your Flow lead you next? What new adventure will you be off on? Your sense of internal value shouldn’t be tied to anything so transient in your life as a job or paycheck. These will always come and go. Money as an energy, however, as a friend, will show its constancy to you, if you are a friend to it – if you treat it well, spend it well, tell it you love having it in your life. It will find a way to get more of itself to you, like a friend who wants to spend time in your company.
Our economy, too, will rebound only when we begin showing it our faith. All of us – bank managers, business people, farmers and homemakers. But to make this happen, all of us must have internal self-worth and a feeling of “I’m good enough for this. I can make this happen!”
Remember, as I said on my podcast once: You are a diamond. Let everyone see that value. And watch as life (and your Flow) begin reflecting all the facets of your brilliance back to you.
