Ep #34: How to Change Your Relationship to Money

In this episode of The Art School Podcast, I’m talking to you all about making money. But this isn’t business as usual. Making money can be a beautiful exchange of energy and to introduce, kick off this conversation today, I have this quote for you from Deepak Chopra. It’s taken from his book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

“When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. When you seek money or power for the sake of the ego, you spend energy chasing the illusion of happiness instead of enjoying happiness in the moment. When you seek money for personal gain only, you cut off the flow of energy to yourself and interfere with the expression of nature’s intelligence.

But when our internal reference point is our spirit, our actions are motivated by love and there is no waste of energy. Our energy multiplies and accumulates and the surplus energy we gather can be channeled to create anything we want, including unlimited wealth. When we harness the power of harmony and love, we use our energy creatively for the experience of affluence and evolution.”

So no matter what your current relationship is with money and making money, whether it’s a very healthy and robust one or it’s one that needs some work, whether you don’t think you’re interested in the topic of money at all, listen in because money provides such a rich and profound paradigm for thinking about the creative process for all of life.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hey there all of my beautiful creative genius friends out there listening. Welcome back and how are you today? Because I am feeling amazing and I know I also usually tell you some stories about why I’m feeling what I’m feeling and how I’m feeling amazing, and today I also just want to point out that you can feel amazing, I feel amazing, and that’s the reason.

So try that on. Do you ever allow yourself to feel amazing and then you don’t need any reason for it? But then you tend to look around and when you feel amazing, you can then find additional reasons to feel amazing. I actually do also have lots of great amazing stories from this week. One that I thought of all of you in this podcast as it was unfolding.

So on Monday, my husband and I and two of our children went down to this area in Indiana called Nappanee, Amish country, and that is where this amazing craftsmen, artist that is building the cabinets for our new house lives. And we’ve been to his shop down there a few times now and we love going there. It is, I kid you not, it feels like a spiritual experience.

This man is such an incredible artist and also has just this energy around him where you feel just like you’re in the presence of peaceful, grounded joy. And we’re there for a few hours and it feels like some sort of revival. And why I’m also sharing this on an episode where I’m talking about money is because one of the reasons we’re there is because we are paying him to make these cabinets for us.

And it’s really interesting how my husband and I sometimes come from different angles when it comes to making purchases and things like that, and the thing is when we were both there, we both just are like, want to give Dennis – that’s our cabinet maker – we want to give him more money to make more things for us.

And while this might not be an unusual or surprising thing for me because I love to purchase things from artists, especially amazing artists and who produce beautiful things like Dennis does that gives me so much joy not only receiving what they’ve created but I really love that exchange, and I also don’t call it supporting them either. More on that later, but to me it is this beautiful exchange of energy and I love participating in that process.

Now, I don’t think if you asked my husband he would usually say the same thing about – to him it might usually seem more like a transaction, like handing somebody over some money that was his and now he no longer has in order to receive something else. And but the thing is when we’re there, it inspired my husband even to like – we go back and look at our plans and he says, “Well, what else can we have Dennis make?”

And while we have created a budget for ourselves for the whole house and for the cabinets, even if Dennis were more expensive than he is, I mean, we’ve gone through – we would do things in phases because we would just have maybe if our first phase of our budget could only be then for him to do the kitchen, then we’d have him do the kitchen. And then we would save up and then have him then do our library or family room, and then we’ve save up again for the next tier of projects.

But the reality happens to be, awesomely, that everything we’ve asked him to do is coming within budget for us, and then so much so that we so love working with him and we so love what he creates that we’ve thoughts about additional projects for phases later because we just want to continue to work with him. And there are a couple things going on during this visit where I thought about just that energy of being around someone who is truly such an artist with what they do.

They are so connected to what they do and it flows beautifully from them that it’s like listening to a world-class musician play music. It feels like a spiritual experience. And the energy that somebody occupies when they’re in that space and like, being in his shop where he’s in that space over and over again, it takes that on. And my husband agrees, and he’s not somebody who’s prone to usually talking or thinking like that, but it’s so undeniable.

And the other thing that was going on was that I look at the thriving business Dennis has and he’s not online. I mean, he’s Amish. He’s not online, he has business all around the country because people have just heard about him word of mouth and he has to have drivers take him to different places out east and things like that to do the installation for these projects that he does.

And yet he is thriving and including times he shared that during the recession and things like that, that for them, a couple projects he said just miraculously came through where they had two of their biggest homes ever that they worked on during that time and so he just said they were very fortunate, but that actually didn’t impact their business, and now it just continues to grow steadily and steadily.

So again, it just felt like a great gift and an affirmation for me to be there and have this visit with him while I was preparing this particular episode on making money and having just come off teaching a workshop in The Art School summer workshop series on making money because so often when people come to work with me and making money is one of the things that they want to work on, they can be brilliantly creative and connected in other areas of their life, but then when we talk about money, something in them shifts.

They don’t continue to talk to me about making money from their most powerful self. They shift the conversation to talking about making money. And what I want to invite you is most possible and most powerful for you if you know yourself to be a powerfully creative person is that you stay in who you are and that you don’t make money special in some negative way. That in these areas of your life you can figure things out, you can run marathons, you can run ultras, you can raise children, you can paint beautiful paintings, you can make music, you can graduate from college, you can learn how to drive a car, you can succeed as an adult and keep your head above water for years in this world, but you can’t learn a little bit more and become better and better at making money.

So that’s the first point I really want to emphasize is that what’s available to you is that making money doesn’t have to be business as usual and that making money doesn’t have to be special in this negative way. It’s not something that’s just reserved for special people or something that is denied to others of us and you may or may not be surprised how many people I talk to who really just believe money is somehow inherently tied to who they are, that who they came into this world as is either somebody that is good with money and good at creating money, making money, good at having money, or not.

And that’s just not the case. So the other point that I want to make sure to emphasize today is that it can be really powerful to think of money as currency. That’s language that’s pretty familiar to us. But think of that literally, money as currency as in like electricity, as in potential energy, as in creativity to potential energy. And then it’s neither good nor bad but that money is neutral. But it’s something that can be plugged into, channeled into, electric force that can be channeled into powering what it is that you want to power.

But it is not something that is tied up in your worth and I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. And that’s that money has nothing to do with your worth as a human being. The amount of dollars you have in the bank or the amount of dollars you have in debt or credit card debt have nothing to do with your value as a human being. That’s not even on the table. That’s already decided. You are infinitely valuable. Your worth cannot be added to or subtracted from in this lifetime with dollar amount.

So that’s also too why, although it’s kind of vernacular and I still use it too, I more and more avoid the word earn because it’s so tied up in our consciousness. I think to earn our keep and underneath that is this sense that we are just a finer existence here, that we’re somehow putting dollars in the bank and that’s adding up to our value. And I know intellectually you might get that yeah, I know that’s not true, I know money is not tied to my worth, but I still feel like that. I still feel like I have to prove myself, or I can’t get over the emotional attachment to feeling like how I am as a human being is tied up to how much I’m earning.

So just consider this. Babies, when they come into the world, unless they have a huge trust fund, which most do not, have zero dollars to their name. Zero dollars in the bank. But would you ever say that their life is not worthwhile? Conversely, there are human beings on this planet with billions and billions of dollars in the bank and do you hear anyone anywhere arguing that we should just automatically canonize people whose net worth is over a billion dollars because bam, they’ve proved it, they are superior human beings and therefore they are a saint and enlightened?

So you don’t hear people making that argument either. So I just offer some of those as a way to maybe shake up and create some wiggle room in your own mind around worth and value, but I’m also going to say it again and again because that repetition does help. So in thinking about this podcast today and for the rest of this podcast, I wanted to really make sure to include, hit on points because I could create content on this topic that would last for 100 more episodes, and there will be more episodes on money and I do money coaching all the time, and I’ll offer more classes on money too.

But for today, I wanted to make sure to hit on points that would be relevant and helpful to you, whether you have millions of dollars in the bank or whether you have hundreds and thousands of dollars of debt. Student debt, credit card debt, what have you. I wanted to hit on points that no matter where you find yourself in that spectrum or whether you have a really healthy relationship with money, that would be useful for you to developing an even more beautiful and healthy relationship with money.

The first one is just a general statement that money and martyrdom don’t mix. And I find that theme coming up in a variety of ways. One of the most common is that people are often holding themselves back, limiting their capacity for making more money, having, keeping, saving more money, or enjoying the money that they have because of this underlying belief that martyrdom is good, and that somehow also making money requires a martyrdom.

And people are either unwilling to do that because they believe that to make more money you have to sacrifice more of yourself. That is not true. That’s a choice. You can choose to believe that. I don’t advise that. In fact, that’s what I do a lot of the coaching work with my clients with is to get them to a belief system where making money is plus-plus for them. It supports their life on every level. Mind, body, spirit, materially.

And the other way that the martyrdom comes in is with the having and enjoying of money. A lot of people will make money but then not allow themselves to harvest and celebrate that money, which actually completes the loop and helps to make you even more powerfully creative going forward. And I think a belief – not I think. I know one of the thoughts and beliefs underlying this tie between money and martyrdom is where we can conflate, concern, and worry with caring.

So for instance, I will have a lot of people argue with me at the beginning that if they don’t worry about their money, then if they don’t express their concern about money constantly and obsess constantly in this negative way about money, then they’ll lose it or they won’t be as good at making it. So then how I challenge that, how I come back is you can care about something without worrying about it and without the heaviness of concern.

And I would also argue that in the long run, caring is a much more sustainable strategy and is a much more lucrative strategy. So again, I would reference that Deepak Chopra quote from the beginning. And on this point, there’s another great quote from Deepak where he says, “When we seek money, or a good relationship, or a great job, what we are really seeking is happiness. The mistake we make is not going for happiness first. If we did, everything else would follow.”

So this goes to what I’m saying about concern and worry not being the most lucrative strategy. If you think you’re going to worry enough and be concerned enough in order to some day create enough wealth, affluence, to then be happy, then you’re going about it the wrong way because you’re practicing concern and anxiety and when you have money, that currency is just going to get plugged into your habit and your patterns of worry, and it’s going to amplify that. Not alleviate it.

The next thing I wanted to share with you today is so powerful. So here is a mantra to memorize and bring with you any time you are looking at your own money relationship or doing any of this money work, and that is with money, make it math, make it neutral. As I said in the beginning, your worth is not tied to those numbers, but so many of us have such a hard time untying the belief that it is.

Those numbers, whether you are in the black, hundreds of thousands, millions, whether you’re in the red the opposite way, those are data points. I know that seems like such a stretch but if you can just begin to think in that direction, just consider it, even if today you can’t wrap your mind around it, your world is going to be blown open. Those numbers are neutral. They’re neither anything good nor bad. It’s the story that you’re telling about them that makes those numbers good or bad.

What those numbers can be are great feedback. So for instance, if you’re in business for yourself and you have months where you go into negative cash flow, you can use that as a data point. It doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it doesn’t mean that you’ll never succeed. If you can take that emotional charge out of it and look at them as data points, then all of a sudden, it becomes great feedback and you could learn from that, and that’s what wisdom is.

Wisdom is learning from the past but without an emotional charge. So think to I just bought my husband for Father’s Day, one of those Muse meditation headphones. So when those meditation devices that are feedback devices give you feedback that you’ve gone out of a meditative state, we don’t think oh now I’m a terrible person. We just use that as feedback to move into a meditative state.

And the same thing, you can think of your bank account as feedback points. Where are you in alignment with offering value and creating value and delivering value to other people, and where can you grow and improve and course correct? Another really interesting – within this topic of thinking of money as math and just making it neutral – if you are in debt, asking yourself what do I make that mean? And if you are in the flush and when you’re making a lot of money, what do you make that mean?

And seeing if you do have a story that ties it to how well you’re doing as a person or who you are. Just as an awareness exercise. The other thing is you can use this as an awareness exercise for the rest of your life. So if there are areas, let’s say you are in debt, you can ask yourself what’s my story about that and if my story about that is there’s never enough, I’m always behind, I’m always scrambling, then start to look at where else that deficiency, that pattern of deficit is showing up in your life.

And then commit and really make a decision that with courage and grace and compassion and a lot of love, I’m going to give myself a life where there is enough to share and enough to spare, and then make yourself unavailable for any other option. And if you can really commit to this, it will alleviate that anxiety in the moment that this is just the way your whole life is going to be is always just one pattern after another of not enoughness.

So make that commitment to yourself. Make a decision to change. Not just wanting to change, but make a decision to change and to be unavailable for anything else but a life that feels truly rich and affluent to you, and immediately begin to look for all of the ways, small and big, to celebrate the fact that it is.

The next point that I wanted to offer you today is that if you want to make more money, make more offers. Make a variety of offers. Change it up. But if you want to make more money, make more offers and also experiment with increasing the price for those offers. And as I’m saying this too, if you’re somebody who money is not an area that you feel a need to work on, especially you don’t feel you need to make more money, that is awesome.

So take anything that I’m saying here and generalize it apply it to an area of your life that you do want to work on, whether that’s relationships or your art. So for instance, making offers usually requires an emotional risk. And so that’s kind of at the heart of when I know somebody is really making an offer or not is where the emotional risk is.

So another way of saying make offers is saying where can you take a high-quality emotional risk that’s intentional? Not just meant to make you feel uncomfortable, but if it succeeds, it’s really going to help you grow and it’s really going to help you move forward. And as you’re making offers, this brings me to my next point. Dare to be a genre onto yourself. Dare to be in a league of your own, in your own industry. Don’t look around. Don’t compare. Don’t crowd source for pricing. Think about how you can be a Dennis.

There is an X factor to people like Dennis. There are how many thousands of cabinet makers in the world and definitely ones that are less expensive and yet he has people seeking him out and going to the extra trouble of seeking out somebody who doesn’t have a cellphone and doesn’t have an online presence and lives in the middle of nowhere. And it is particularly – he’s got something that is so uniquely him so what could be your X factor?

And it’s always going to be a little hard to describe what an X factor is, but you know it when you feel it, and if you’re listening to this, I am willing to bet you have a sense that you do have something like that to offer. You do things a little bit differently, it’s hard to explain why it is that way, it’s hard to explain to other people how you do what you do, which may have caused you in the past to undervalue what you do, but I want to give you permission here to tune into that and to ask yourself how can I dial up my connection to my X factor and how can I project that more?

And I think that will likely require of you to make an offer in the sense of engage in some emotional risk. Be more out there as your true self in the world. Be really seen as your true self in the world. I know that has been a big part of my journey as an artist and as a coach. As an artist, I knew I had art, I could feel it in me. And when I finally hit my groove, it was such a knowing and such a coming home and such a recognition, and then two seconds later it was pure mortification and horror.

Because while it felt like a coming home, my brain and my ego felt so vulnerable and so exposed because my brain wanted my art to look like a Dutch master or Van Gogh or something that all the greatest critics and intellectuals would never be able to criticize and that people would look at and be like oh yes, that is how you paint a figure.

And instead, what turned out to be the art that lived in me, that when it flowed through, I recognized it like we were long lost friends from a thousand years ago, it was that intuitive art. It was large and colorful and semi-realist, semi-abstract, playful, full of symbols. Some of which I didn’t even understand at the beginning. I was very uncomfortable with being that free, and then I was very uncomfortable with how I felt like my inner life and my spiritual life and my intuitive self was right there naked in full colorful glory on the canvas now where everybody could see it.

And everybody could judge it, and everybody could misunderstand it, take it, leave it, what have you. And so that thought too, that mortification also kind of let me know that I was on the right path because of that fear, and that I was really onto something and then I remembered like I’ve shared on this podcast long ago, when I had written in a journal when I was still in law school, not painting, that I wanted to someday make art that not only turned heads but turned souls.

And I had a feeling that there was something special energetically about the art that I made, and it was really hard for me to first just acknowledge that to myself, to say I think there’s something special here about the energy and the love and whatever I’m channeling in these pieces, and then it was a whole ‘nother layer to be able to ever say it to anyone else. Not to mention to now just announce it on a podcast when I don’t know who’s listening.

But that for me has also been – it’s like the truth will set you free. In my case, at first it didn’t piss me off, it just scared me to death. Maybe it pissed me off a little bit that I couldn’t just be a normal artist, but really it just scared me. But I’ve continued on and it really has been not only spiritually, personally liberating, but there’s also been a direct correlation I know for sure to the way I’ve been able to make money with my art and from my art.

And part of that has also been just a decision of I long for this collective community of artists and I love that, and I also know too how important it is for me to stay on my own mat and not look around and compare and despair and stay in my own lane and do my own thing. So not outsource to the community for prices because I just decided from the beginning that I’m going to trust myself with all of this and I decide my own prices and I command and demand my own prices.

I command my own audience and I just trust that I’m going to create art that’s meant for the right people and that they’ll love it, and that they’ll feel the way about my art or my coaching too, for that matter, that I feel about Dennis. That it’s just this beautiful exchange in something that they want to soak up. And it’s a flow, even better than a give and take. It’s just this beautiful exchange and participation and beauty and in life.

So when you’re making offers, don’t compare. Check in with your heart first, check in with your intuition, and my dare for you today – so this is that coach with me, lean in, do more than just listen, really take this information and make it transformational so that it changes your life. In this case, changes your bank account is I want to dare you, I want to offer you, challenge you to make a beautiful offer somewhere in your life and to make a big one.

Let it feel like a dare. Let it feel like an emotional risk. Let it feel exhilarating. So whether that means you decide to add a zero to all of your prices if you’re an artist, so let’s say currently you’re selling things for $50 a crack, now you add a zero and it’s $500 and you just put it out there. Let’s say you reach out to somebody who’s been interested in your art and ask them if they want this particular piece. Let’s say you’re a coach and you decide hey, I’m building my business.

Say you’re a new coach and you’re building your business and you’re not quite ready to say I believe I can make $20,000 a month, what you can believe right now is that you could make $40,000 worth of offers in a month if you use my advice about making it math, breaking it down, figure out how many offers you would have to make, what amount per offer, and at times how many people to get you to $40,000. That’s going to increase your chances of getting to 20.

This is a strategy that I use and it also feels so abundant and there is also – I will share with you, I feel some magic behind it because oftentimes I’ll make an offer and I’ll really think, I believe this painting is for this person or this – yeah, for sure I see this person being my next client and I’ll make the offer, and they may or may not say yes or they might say no.

Either way I celebrate a definite yes or no because that’s so much better than a maybe. It’s so much better than me not making an offer, but almost every single time if I do that, if I make a dare, then somebody else slides in and says hey, do you have any openings left right now for private coaching? Hey, are you still accepting people for The Art School? Hey, that painting you posted a few weeks back, do you still have that one?

So try it and let me know, but there is magic in making offers and magic in making offers that have that element of emotional risk to them. So the second part of your coaching assignment today goes back to what I was saying about making money, not having to be business as usual. So if you’ve tried and worked all the conventional ways and it’s things just aren’t painting out for you, ask yourself, is there something that has been whispering to you to try or a way of going about it but you just haven’t given yourself permission?

Because giving yourself permission, that would either feel like it can’t be that easy, or that’s certainly not hard enough, that means I must be lazy or who do I think I am, or maybe it’s something you feel you have some sort of X factor with but that also feels maybe grandiose. Whatever it is for you, so often I find that people are blocked and they’ve been working for a long time at making money, that there has been something they’ve considered for a while but either they’re sort of gotten a little worn down by failures and are anticipating disappointment, or they’re just not willing to trust that voice and give themselves permission to really believe that they can be amazing at making money.

So what if you gave yourself permission that you have everything it takes to be amazing at making money? What if you gave yourself permission to believe that making money is a mindset and a way of being and that you have everything it takes to improve on that little bit little and that if you just gave a little bit of focus to that every day, every week within a year, your finances would be transformed.

Thank you so much everyone for joining me for another episode of The Art School Podcast. I love that you’re here and love that you’re listening and I would also love to hear from you. So whether that means you could leave a review for me, which I would greatly appreciate on iTunes, or you want to email me and grab one of the few remaining spots I have for discovery consults in July, you can do that by emailing me at leah@leahcb.com because I am still accepting applications for the fall The Art School.

The early bird registration fee, the discounted fee ends July 15th. I can talk to you all about The Art School and then I also do have just a few more openings for private clients through the end of August, and then I’m kind of dialing back on the amount of new clients I’m taking so that I can really focus on my existing private client base and on my Art School clients.

So I’d love to have a conversation with you about being a more powerful creative force in your life, in whatever area that is, in money, in your art, in health, in relationships. So sign up again by emailing me at leah@leahcb.com and I hope to talk to some of you in the near future.

And my closing thought for you today comes from Jen Sincero who is the author of a few books, including You are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth. She writes, “Do something right now that will take you a giant step closer to your goal of getting rich. Make sure it’s something scary. Something that you’d really rather not do because it’s super, super uncomfy. Something that makes you feel like you might puke. For example, renting the massive space for your new handbag company, flying across the country and figuring out how to get yourself in front of the guy who’s hiring for that engineering job that you’re perfect for, cold calling 10 prospective clients, hiring a new full-time employee, et cetera.”

So ties right into my coach with my invitation for today. Do something right now. Commit to it today that takes you a step closer to your goals of affluence and supporting the creative force that you are meant to be. Have a wonderful, beautiful week everyone, and I look forward to talking to you next time. Bye-bye.