Imagine you have a successful mission-led business. Your values are important to you, but you are not experiencing the financial wealth you think should be possible. Often, owners of mission led businesses priorities helping other people but fail to ensure that they benefit financially from their business. Essentially, they don’t pay themselves enough. Your business may be succeeding in many ways: you have a good reputation, you create positive change in the world, your clients love your work, but somehow the money is not adding up. To succeed in business, owners will often spend a lot of time and money on external factors: systems, processes, marketing, sales, and team dynamics. These are important and are worthy of attention. However the missing piece of the puzzle very often to having a business which is effective and also lucrative is in the inner game. Reasons why people who run successful businesses fail to experience wealth as a benefit of their work includes:
- Putting other people’s needs ahead of their own – not feeling worthy or deserving
- Believing that making money has to involve strain, that you must “prove your worth” through hard work.
- Spending time dealing with operational problems in the business which drains time and energy. Always fire-fighting issues means there’s no time to be more strategic about what will actually make money.
4.Wanting to be liked and approved of by others, and having judgments about money or people who have it, such as if you work for a cause you believe in you shouldn’t make money out of it The truth is that our ability to earn and retain money is based on subconscious factors.
The relationship business owners have with wealth is usually based on beliefs about money which have been formed through their experience with family, society and culture. Sometimes this goes back to ancestors who we may not have even met. The first step to solving these problems is to identify that we all have an inner relationship with money. You can do this by asking the question “If money was a person, what kind of relationship would i have? How would I describe this relationship? Is it supportive or neglectful? Do i think about them? How do I feel about them? How do I treat them? How do I behave around them?” Most people when they ask these questions are shocked to discover they have an unhealthy relationship with money. The process of discovering and then reframing this relationship we each hold with wealth, requires safety and support. It’s very difficult to do this work on your own. We can get a glimpse of it but to transform and learn to play the inner game requires facilitation and accountability. With support and focused attention it is then possible to move on and ask What kind of relationship I would like to have with money? How much money would I like to pay myself? Ultimately your relationship with money is based on your relationship with yourself. With this knowledge you can then move into action and create new habits.
Lara Waldman is on a mission to create a more ethical, integrated, and healthy financial system that contributes to a just and sustainable world. She believes that by transforming individual wealth mindsets, society can collectively reshape financial systems and beliefs about money. She is dedicated to helping leaders and business owners to transform their financial realities in alignment with their values and life purpose. For more information about her work, you can visit her website: www.larawaldman.com or listen to her podcast: Money Manifestation Mastery.
