Episode 185: The Psychology of Money
Welcome back to the show. You’re listening to Episode Number 185 of the Live Free Creative Podcast. I’m your host Miranda Anderson. Today we are talking about the Psychology Of Money. Are you intrigued? This episode is going to be sort of like your introduction cliff’s notes to The Psychology of Money by finance columnist, Morgan Housel.
I read this book for the first time last year, and I have not stopped talking about it. It comes up in conversations at least weekly. On a recent trip to Mexico for Spring Break, I brought it along to reread and refresh the ideas in my mind. And while the book itself has a lot of financial lingo, like he talks a lot about investing in different strategies for that.
The overview is that each chapter –there are 20 chapters—is one simple idea about how people think about money and how that changes their behavior around money. I’m going to identify a few of them and to share a sprinkle of thoughts about them today. My hope is that. Well, of course that you’ll learn something that you’ll be inspired.
And that you’ll think about money in a new way, simply from listening to this short episode. And I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of The Psychology of Money and read it. Give it to your partner. It is something that I’m going to talk about with my kids.
We Don’t Learn or Talk About Money
I think we could all agree that money and the way that we think about, talk about, and learn to effectively use money in our current society is like way off. We are wealthier than we’ve ever been. I mean, of course that is there’s huge disparities in that, but the world keeps getting wealthier and yet people are not getting happier.
They’re not getting healthier; they’re not getting more satisfied. There’s like this huge gap between this idea of money makes us happy, you know, which is obviously wrong, just like inherently wrong.
The truth is that we are taught about money in a very simplistic way. We learn how to count coins and how to, you know, calculate taxes, but not necessarily how the way we think about money influences our behavior more than what we know about it. Does that make sense?
I’m excited to share these tips with you today. First, I want to share a couple of peaks of the week.
Segment: Peaks of the Week
For peaks of the week today, I thought it’d be appropriate to share three things that I have spent money on recently that I think are giving me back in value far more than what I spent on.
1. Binoculars
The first is a pair of binoculars. I bought myself a pair of birding binoculars. I bought them on Amazon because I wanted to get them quickly to help with my backyard birding habit. This is my new hobby.
I have a great book given to me by my good friend, Rachel Nielson of 3 in 30 podcast. Shout out to Rachel for the Backyard Bird Watchers Bible. It’s this beautiful coffee table book with full color images. And it talks about the history of birds, the different parts like labels, the different parts of birds, and also goes through all of these really common birds that you might see around.
I have high of a new morning routine of sitting out on my back patio in this beautiful spring sunshine and watching the birds, listening to the birds, getting to know the birds, although they don’t come and like sit right in front of me. I found a pair of binoculars that is helping me spot them when they’re high up in the tree or in the neighbor’s yard or on the very back fence.
I love binoculars. I grew up with a dad who is an outdoors man. And when we’d go on hikes and stuff, he would often have binoculars nearby. I grew up with a grandfather who was a legitimate birder and had binoculars around.
A couple of years ago, we went to Yellowstone with a bunch of my family. We were on a hike and my brother-in-law happened to have a pair of binoculars around his neck. We saw some Bald Eagles nesting. They were so far away. I mean, they were close enough that you could see the outline of them with your eye. But when you look through a pair of binoculars, it was like you were next to them out in the wild in Yellowstone. It was so beautiful.
I thought, gosh, everyone just needs a pair of binoculars. If you want to enjoy the outdoors you get to do, you get to do so at 32 times magnification, if you have a pair of great binoculars, these are fantastic. They are way less expensive than some of the other like hyper hyper professional pairs. I have found them to be marvelous. So, those will be linked in the show notes. If you need a pair of birdwatching or otherwise, just enjoyment of nature, binocular is I invite you to check these ones out.
2. Number two is my new Shark vacuum.
I’ve talked extensively about my Shark vacuum obsession over on the blog starting about six or seven years ago.
In fact, I had the same exact Shark Lift-away vacuum for about that amount of time, six years, probably or seven years. At one point, the handle broke and the only place I could find a new handle was on eBay because the model had changed. So, I ordered the new handle on eBay, wrapped it in tennis grip tape so that it was comfortable.
At the beginning of this year, or the original Shark Lift-away died, it was like an old model, of course, seven years old. They changed the models fairly frequently. I replaced it with one from Costco. Had a couple of different features that I wasn’t as familiar with. And so that has now become the basement vacuum that most recent Shark vacuum.
I have two. Now, this is going to sound dramatic, but my house has three levels and there’s something kind of nice about having a vacuum on each of those levels. So I don’t have to haul it up and down the stairs.
I wouldn’t have done that except for the fact that the basement, essentially, just kind of like a glorified storage room, but it does have carpet down there because I didn’t love some of the features of the last Shark Costco vacuum that one’s now relegated to the basement.
I got a new Shark lift away vacuum. I will link these by the way. Well, at least the two that. In the show notes, the new Shark lift away also has like all the pet attachments and everything. But I remember my first Shark seven years ago, thinking this is the first vacuum I’ve ever used. That feels like it was designed by an actual vacuuming human.
It was so intuitive, the way that the pieces came apart and went back together. I can hold the canister in my hand and use the wand, but then I can also click it all back together. So, it’s like a normal, upright vacuum. I just am fascinated by how simple and easy and wonderful they are. And the new one operates just like the seven-year-old one that I loved.
I’ll link that one, the new Shark lift away. If you happen to be in your mid-thirties and get excited about vacuums, you might like this one also.
For the upstairs I got a cordless one. There isn’t as much to vacuum upstairs. It’s small. But I loved again, not having to haul it up and down. And so, I got the cordless shark vacuum.
And while I don’t think it has like the canister capacity, you’d be emptying the canister a lot, a lot if you were vacuuming like an entire house with it, but just for a quick vacuum upstairs in my room and in Plums room, which is all that we have going on upstairs. Really nice. And there’s something just great about just picking it up and going. It stays plugged into the wall and whenever I need it, I can just pick it up and go.
Vacuum up the little bit of kitty litter that’s fallen out of the litter box. Or a little spill of Graham cracker crumbs or whatever it may be. So however silly it might be—a Shark vacuum. I’m going to say there where it’s at my experience with them has been fantastic.
And the two that I love right now, the lift away and the cordless stick, I will link in the show notes so you can check them out. If you’re in the market for a vacuum that far the value of it, and the experience of it far outweighs the car.
This last one is mostly for you, local Richmonders. Although the idea of it could be widely applied wherever you happen to live.
My third peak of the week is my weekly bakery order from the most delicious micro bakery here in Richmond. It’s a Scandinavian bakery called Axeldotter Bakery.
It is about $25 for an assorted box that I order on Tuesday. I pick it up after I go to the gym on Saturday. These are so delicious. And the experience itself is so fun that Axle’s daughter, Ingrid, who runs it is baking out of a cottage bakery out of her own home in Bon Aire.
So we go to the gym, then we drive down and I ring the doorbell and get this box of warm buns and cookies and tarts every week. It’s a little bit different.
She runs the whole operation through Instagram. So, if you follow her on Instagram, if you’re local, it’s @axelsdotterbakery on Instagram, I’ll make sure that it’s linked in the show notes and you order on Tuesday where she posts the menu.
There is a Fika Box every week. Then we also sometimes add on, there’s usually a couple of different kinds of cakes or something else special that she, that you can order. It’s been so fun to just build it into our routine.
The piece that I would share for people globally is that there’s probably something, if not exactly like this, a little local bakery that just sells delightful, delicious baked goods that you could build into your routine.
It gives you the expectation and the anticipation, as well as the absolute delight of eating something that has been made with love and care by an individual baker right there in your community. I don’t know how I found Axelsdotter. I think I just stumbled across it, you know, maybe on Instagram from a different local food blogger.
We’ve been doing almost a weekly fika box for the last couple of months. I found out about it and then I tried it out and then I became subtly obsessed with like, I crave a cardamom button in the morning on Saturday.
There’s something so sweet and special about it and about the routine. And of course the actual pastries themselves are remarkable. They’re absolutely fantastic.
If you’re here in Richmond, you’ll want to spend a little bit of your money sometime in the next couple of weeks on a fika box from Axelsdotter Bakery, I absolutely can’t recommend it enough.
If you are not local, find somewhere special where that investment of your money yields, just a huge return of warm fuzzies of support of someone local in your community and of deliciousness, because we all need a little bit of deliciousness in our lives. Those, my friends are my peaks of the week.
The Psychology of Money Notes
Now, as I mentioned in the intro, this episode is loosely based I’m giving you sort of a high-level cliff’s notes on a couple of the chapters of the book, The Psychology of Money.
I first read this book last year in 2021. It was one of my favorite books of the year. It has worked its way into multiple conversations, with different people about different topics over the last several months.
I also want to plug a couple other podcast episodes that I’ve done specifically on the topic of money over the last four seasons. This is a topic that I think is so important. It’s very relatable. We all deal with money, whether we like it or not in our everyday lives. And I think we don’t talk about it enough.
Other Episodes I’ve Done About Money
I wanted to just highlight some of those episodes that I’ve done before jumping in today:
Episode number 9 of the podcast is titled: “Two Ways to Have Enough Money.” I still fully stand behind the two ways to have enough money that I discussed in that episode.
Episode number 42 is titled “More, is Better and Other Lies We Believe.” One of the main tenants of this episode is the idea that we think that if we have more money, that our lives will be better. There are so many studies that clearly show that that is not the case. So, listen to episode 42 if you want to hear a little bit more about why more is not necessarily better.
And then most recently in episode 146, I talk about the “Basics of Budgeting”. I really break down the way that my family budgets right now. That’s a good episode if you want some tactical sort of strategies around basic budgeting.
I mean, it’s basic and can be applied to a lot of different circumstances.
So those episodes number 9, number 42, and number 148 will all be great additions to the discussion. I’ll make sure those are linked in the show notes.
And just as a reminder, every single week, the entire transcript from the show is available on my website: livefreecreative.co/podcast.
You just look up the episode number. You can even type in like the little search magnifying glass. You can type in a word from the episode and the episode will pop up. That’s where I put all the notes from the episodes. If you want to go back and pull a quote, or you want to remember something specifically without listening to it again, the entire transcript every week is available on the website.
Introduction to The Psychology of Money
Let’s talk about The Psychology of Money. The premise of this book is so interesting and so spot on. Morgan explains how he’s a financial columnist and he’s been writing about money for years and years.
He recognized that the way that we “should” use our money based on hard science, like math and economics is not actually the way that we do spend our money.
He says, “Financial success is a soft skill. What you do matters more than what you know. “
Isn’t that an interesting idea? What you do matters more than what,you know. How often do you know something about money that you don’t do? For example, saving a certain percentage is something that you may have learned from your parents or in school or a financial class at some point. Do you follow through with that?
For example, not spending money you don’t have on things that you don’t necessarily need as essential. How many of you have consumer debt that would have been avoided if you had done with your behavior, something that you knew with your knowledge? That’s such an interesting idea.
The bridging of application between what we know and we do, doesn’t always translate. So, the approach of this book is to talk about not the science of money of how to achieve financial success, but the psychology of money and getting to the root of why we do some of the things that we do. How we can use our understanding of human behavior and of mindset to build financial success now, and in the future.
20 Ideas Over 20 Chapters
The book itself has twenty chapters. Each chapter is short and it’s a really quick read. There’s some that get a lot into the weeds of specific financial tactics and investment strategies and things like that.
The broad appeal for me is in some of the purely psychological chapters. And those are the ones that I want to highlight here.
Peeks Into Some Chapters
I’m going to go through maybe five of the chapters very briefly and give you an overview because these concepts, these five concepts about the psychology of money can completely transform the way you think about and then use your money.
Chapter Three: Never Enough
The first one is actually chapter three, chapter three is called Never Enough. Can you think about why I might be instantly drawn to this chapter?
Morgan really echoes some of the ideas that I have thought about, talked about, and shared over the years. And I also wrote about in my book, More Than Enough.
In the beginning of this chapter, there’s a story about two different examples of multi-multi-millionaires committing fraud. Going totally, you know, losing their lives, their reputations, their families, because of the insatiable desire for more.
It’s so interesting. The idea that someone who already has more money than they could reasonably ever spend in their lifetime would make the ethical and risky decisions to acquire even more. Why? Why? I mean, there’s no, it doesn’t make sense on paper or in psychology to do that. And yet when we don’t have a sense of enough, the decisions that we make become very muddy.
I’m guessing most of you listening. Aren’t multi-multi-millionaires. Maybe you are. That’s fantastic. Whatever your financial status, the important point in the idea of Never Enough is that the hardest financial skill is stopping the goalpost from moving.
This is a quote directly from The Psychology of Money. “The hardest financial skill is stopping the goalpost from moving back.” We acquire a certain amount of money, and then we desire more. And then we make the sacrifices necessary to acquire more because we desire more and that continues and continues and continues.
If not, then someone who has multi-millions of dollars would probably decide to do something enjoyable rather than continue to work hard to or totally defraud people to make more money.
How do we stop the goalpost from moving?
When do we decide that we have enough?
Those are personal questions that we need to answer.
When we’re thinking about our own idea of money, he talks about how social comparison is one of the biggest drivers of the idea of not having enough, that we look around and see the way other people are doing things and make decisions for ourselves. Other people’s lives rather than our own lives. Isn’t that interesting?
Our goalpost for our own financial success is something that we can determine based on our own desires. The lifestyle that we hope for, regardless of what anyone else is doing or achieving in their lives.
Another important point from this chapter is that enough doesn’t mean too little. Enough doesn’t mean that you stop before you are content and fulfilled enough. It simply means deciding, and then being okay with that decision.
What enough looks like for you is going to be different than what enough looks like for me or for anyone else. Because it’s a feeling. It’s a decision rather than a specific number. It doesn’t mean you have to put up with or somehow scavenge beneath what you hope for. It just means against stopping the goalpost from moving and allowing yourself to understand that the idea that more is always better is a delusion.
If we can’t be satisfied where we are right now, even as we’re working to improve our circumstances overall, that it’s likely that once we get to whatever our imaginary goalpost is, we also won’t be satisfied. An exercise in developing contentment and gratitude and fulfillment in the moment is what will enable us regardless of our financial circumstance to be content and satisfied and fulfilled.
I want you to just consider this and think about it for yourself and for your own financial goals. Do you have a goal, like a goal post? Is there some number, or is it more of like a feeling or like a lifestyle hope? Or is it something you could even define where you will be content and satisfied and fulfilled in your financial life?
Or is that something that will just change and be pushed back and be pushed back as you continue to succeed financially?
It’s an important question. And one that we really should discuss and, and answer for ourselves, with our partners, with our families. I want to share kind of a personal example of this.
Our Goalpost: Time Together
When we decided to move to Richmond, it was for a job that my husband was had been offered. My husband is an attorney and the traditional path for an attorney is working for a law firm. And then, maybe a bigger law firm and then becoming a partner in a law firm. And with each one of those steps, you know, there’s a very like predetermined ladder within law firms.
It’s kind of an old boy’s club and you climb the ladder and each run gives you significantly more financial income. It could be just a climb to the top of the financial spectrum. I mean, this, you can just work harder and make more money and stay longer and work harder and make more money. There is very clear correlation between the hours that you work, the amount of time that you invest, and the income that you make.
When Dave received his job offer here in Richmond, the job that brought us to Richmond was a step off of the ladder. It was a step out of a law firm and into an in-house position it’s called where you’re working as an attorney within a company rather than being hired by outside companies, working for a firm.
The decision was really, almost absolutely between time and money. Between having Dave work essentially a nine to five, where he worked more like a, like a businessman doing business hours. Still as an attorney. I mean, the, the, what of his job was essentially the same, but the how often, and for whom changed and the latter changed.
Rther than continuing to climb a ladder and working harder and working more and making more, we stepped off and the correlation between exactly, you know, how much you work in, how much money you make changed as well. We have so much more time than we would have had continuing to work inside a law firm.
And by now, you know, five years later, we probably have significantly less money than we would have if Dave would have gone on a partner track at a law firm. That decision for us came from a place of not moving the goalpost. It came from a place of recognizing what we really wanted for our life. And again, when we made this decision, we were right in the middle of our minimalism experiment. This year of not shopping.
We were really challenging a lot of our widely held beliefs around finances, around accumulation, around what we needed to be happy. We recognized clearly that we value the time that we can spend together and the time that Dave himself has on hobbies. He can spend time exercising and doing date nights and having a real weekend where he doesn’t have to call in, or he doesn’t have to be available by email. Leaving his computer home for an entire vacation.
Those were things that weren’t reality working for a law firm that are now our life. Our day-to-day life looks entirely different in positive ways, even though the amount of money that we could have made was reduced by this change. We recognized that money was not the single most important factor in the decisions that we make about our lifestyle.
Our lifestyle encompasses much more than how much money we can make. The amount of fulfillment and contentment that we have in just our regular life, because of the time we’re able to spend together, far outweighs what we could buy with the money that we could have earned on that endless ladder toward the eternally moving goalpost.
Chapter Seven: Freedom
That story and some personal insight into our family workings leads into the next chapter that I want to comment on, which is chapter seven, about freedom.
Again. I mean, Morgan is just speaking my language. In chapter seven, he talks about how “The highest form of wealth is to be able to wake up and say, I can do whatever I want.”
Money equals the ability to control our time, but that doesn’t mean that more money gives you more control over your time. In fact, relating to the story that I just told sometimes opting out of more money is what gives you more control over your time. Mind blown.
We have been so fully indoctrinated to the idea that working harder and working more yields more financial results. Sometimes we forget that maybe the goal is the time. If we work a little bit less, automatically we gain more time.
He talks about this incredible cultural shift that has happened over the last 50 years, 70 years, we have dramatically more income than we did in the 1950s.
Again, there’s a disparity there and I recognize that the shift between low income and high income has also widened. That gap is getting larger. The average family in America has dramatically more money than they would have related to the 1950s.
The reason that we don’t feel it, the reason that the average American might not feel as dramatically wealthy as they look on paper comparatively is because the more and better stuff that we think we should have has canceled out the added income.
Our houses have gotten bigger. Our cars have gotten nicer. The amount of clothes and shoes and vacations and hobbies and activities. And the way we spend our money has just dramatically increased further and faster than the actual average financial growth. And so even though we have, you know, if you’re comparing apples to apples dramatically more than we would have living in the fifties, that desires for the way we spend it has have gotten away from us.
They’ve far outrun the actual numbers. The average family is living in more debt with more stress and more overwhelm and depression than before, even though their paycheck has gotten bigger. The key to claiming the freedom that we can unlock with our financial success is to recognize what really brings wellbeing, relationships, interest, free time, feeling in control over our time.
Those things don’t necessarily always correlate to having more monet. That might mean opting out of some of the hustle required for more money to enjoy our time more.
Also, for sure recognizing that all of the things we think we want to spend money on will not necessarily bring the fulfillment that we expect. Finding a freedom from the excess, from the continual drive for accumulation of stuff, will bring a peace and a freedom and a joy beyond what we have now.
Chapters is eight, nine, and ten are also kind of related to this.
The basic overview summary here is that wealth is what you don’t see. And Morgan goes on to talk about how, when people spend their money lavishly, or even, you know, however you spend it. When you’re spending your money on things for people to think that you have money. What the people are seeing is what you spent rather than what you have.
One of the ways to build wealth is to not spend all your money. While you may not have a designer handbag, you’ve got that $1,200 in your bank account. That is what financial success and wealth can look like, you know, on, on paper, money in the bank is more valuable than money spent on stuff.
Yet, we are sort of conditioned to believe that we show our wealth and success in outward ways by spending the money that we have earned. Rather than having the money, saving the money, hanging onto the money.
And while I’m not a giant proponent of like never spending money and a lot of people confuse our no-shopping year challenge with a no-spend your challenge, which I address in my book and have gotten a little bit of criticism about how the focus of our shopping challenge was not about saving money.
Although you will inherently save money by not shopping. I recognized that I wanted to spend differently. And so instead of spending money on more clothes and shoes and handbags, we were spending our money during that time and still do, to a great degree, more on experiences on going out to eat on going to the movies and going on vacations.
It wasn’t a total lack of spending. It was a shift in the way we spent to align better with our values.
I love this idea that to save your money, you reduce your spending and these chapters do a really good job of explaining. Why that is so simple to think about and yet hard to do that?
We want to justify our success through outward ways, rather than build our financial success through not using all the money that we’ve earned to show off how much money we have earned–that we now no longer have because of the things.
I love from chapter ten says “You raise your savings by raising your humility.” That’s an arrow to the heart of the spender, right?
Raise your humility, allow what you earn to be enough. Even if it’s not as much as you want it to be, the less you spend of it, especially on things that will not build value fulfillment, joy and happiness in your life.
I mean, so much of the things we spend money on, we think will make us happy that don’t so taking an audit of that and recognizing where we can curb some of our spending for things that don’t actually satisfy the way that we want them to.
Instead, we can feel satisfied with things that don’t cost money. And with the understanding that the money that we haven’t spent is building our freedom, building our opportunity, and building our cushion, a soft place to land when the unexpected happens.
Chapter 13: Room for Error
This leads into chapter 13, which is having room for error.
The idea that we often far underestimate the expenses of our lifestyle. We don’t build in room for error. He talks about how so many families are living paycheck to paycheck. They’ve budgeted out exact numbers. Like this is how much I earn. And so down to the, the dollars, this is what we’re spending each month, rather than creating some sort of a cushion.
Moran talks about how most of the time things don’t go according to plan. I mean, if we look at just the state of the world, even just these last couple of years, we are all a lot more able to easily acknowledge that the unexpected happens, right? A quote that I love says, “plan on the plan, not going according to plan”. This is such a good reminder as we’re thinking about our budget.
It is not a good idea to spend until the number is zero, but allow some space for the unexpected. I often talk about remodeling with friends by saying, expect to spend twice what you budget and have it take three times as long. And people always kind of laugh or feel uncomfortable.
I mean, it’s like kind of frank the truth is that in my experience, and I have a lot of experience with remodeling over the years. Twice what you budget. And this is like being conservative with your budget. If you don’t want to go over, then spend plan on spending half of what you have.
Let’s say that you have a $30,000 budget for a kitchen remodel, make a plan that includes a $15,000 budget because inevitably it will go over. If you have a hard stop at $30,000, plan on your budget being $15,000 to account for the room for error.
The same thing on timeline. If you have a month to get something done, ask what can happen in a week, or make accommodations for two to three months. Because the only thing you can plan on is the plan not going according to plan.
Chapter 16: Run Your Own Race
The last bit I want to share is in chapter 16, he talks about how we have to run our own race.
In episode 12 of the podcast, it’s titled Goals and Self-imposed Deadlines, I talked about a metaphor for our lives as rivers. That we are each in our own river. We’re not even in the same river, you know, floating our own race. We’re each in our own entire river. The way that we do things and the pace at which they happen is going to be entirely different than anyone else.
This is so true and so important when it comes to financial decisions. In chapter 16, Morgan says, “While we can see how much money other people spend on cars, homes, clothes, and vacations, we don’t get to see their goals, worries and aspirations.”
Every single one of us is living a different life. We’re each running our own race. The idea that we should make decisions based on other people’s decisions is false. The way people invest, the decisions that they make, based on timeline, the way that people spend money, and the debt that people choose to accumulate are all different.
All those cues that we can take from other people might be cues and points in a game that’s entirely different than the one that we are playing.
We need to evaluate our own goals, our own hopes and dreams, our own lifestyle, the way that we want to live, the pace of life that we want to have the aspirations and worries and basic personality profiles. Then we can make our own financial decisions based on those things, rather than on anyone’s outside analysis or the decisions that they’re making in their own lives.
Episode Recap
I feel like the way I think about money has changed after reading this book now a couple times. And I want to give you a quick recap of just of the things that I shared in this episode, because I know we kind of meandered.
- Stop the goalposts.
So the first is the idea and the hardest financial skill is stopping the goalposts from moving. Deciding what is enough. What that looks like, what it feels like. Celebrating that, and really digging into that and getting comfortable there in enough. That will be the hardest and most important thing that you’re able to do financially.
- Freedom.
Next freedom. “The highest form of wealth is to be able to wake up and say, I can do whatever I want.” What are the things that you feel tied down by or tied to, and how can either working to make a little more money free up your time or releasing some of the money you think you need can free up your time?
Being able to have freedom and control in your life is one of the highest forms of wealth. And one of the highest satisfactions that you’ll be able to feel the way that you can do that is by not spending as much. Just simply accumulating wealth by not buying as much unnecessary stuff.
Wealth is what you don’t see. It’s the money in the bank, not the handbag, not the fancy car, not the bigger house, not the expensive vacation. Wealth is being able to enjoy your everyday life and having the freedom to make transitions and shifts when you want to, not because you must.
- Room for error.
We also talked about room for error or accommodating the plan not going according to plan.
I have a couple incredible people that I’m working with in my one-on-one coaching service. I do creative mentorship and two of my handful of people that I’m coaching right now have recently quit corporate jobs because of burnout. Because of a toxic work environment. Because they no longer were happy in those positions.
Both had created the space in their finances as the primary breadwinners for their households to quit without knowing what came next. They created space to be able to say, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m going to stop. And in that space between what I’m not doing anymore and what comes next I get to explore a little bit.
In both cases I’m helping them go on to build consulting businesses and work for themselves with a lot more freedom in their everyday lives than working in a more corporate environment. That ability to decide because the cushion is already there for you. Because you have a soft place to land. Because you have planned on things not always going, according to plan.
- Run your own race.
I just love finishing up with this last idea to run your own race. And this goes for everything. One of the main things that I try to emphasize weekly in this podcast is your ability to make decisions that are right for you.
Having the freedom to live aligned with your own values, to live on purpose, to choose with intention, what lights you up, what helps you feel like your highest and most developed and most intuitive self and relying on that.
We’re so often taught to look outside for the answers and my goal, as I share each week, some tips and tricks and ideas for living a more intentional and creative life is that you’ll also begin to learn how to look inside and answer the questions for yourself about how best to make decisions that will bring happiness and fulfillment for you.
We are each running our own race, and while we can be inspired and uplifted by others, really encourage you to define what it is for you, what you want, and then use that as your map to get there.
Thank you so much for tuning in today to the psychology of money. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed this book and highly encourage you to pick up a copy to share it, you know, read it and also share it with your partner and develop your own story and idea about what enough looks like, what race it is that you’re running.
Use it as a jumping off point for important conversations about the life that you want to live and how your financial decisions can support that. I really, really appreciate when you take a few minutes of your day to leave a written review for the show, I wanted to share one today.
This is from BMarie:
“Great podcast. This is my go-to podcast. When I need a deep breath, a push towards motivation or reminding that I’m in charge of my life, Miranda is inspiring and always seems to look right into my anxiety and guides me toward action or rest or whatever I need love.”
Thank you so much, Marie, for sharing this review.
Email me at miranda@ivefreecreative.co and I will send you a thank you in the mail.
I have been trying to get back into sharing reviews a little more frequently and inviting you to leave them. They make a huge impact on the ability of the show to reach new people. If you have two or three extra minutes to leave a written review, I encourage you to do that.
I will be sharing some over the next few months and sending thank you to reviewers. If you’re a new listener, make sure you don’t miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast listening app. Also, I have a couple spots available right now for my one-on-one creative mentorships.
These are three-month minimum mentorships where I work one-on-one with you to help you accomplish your own goals. The information is all at patreon.com/livefreecreative.co If that seems like something, you’d be interested in. Hit me up with an email and we’ll chat more about it. Have a great one.
Talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.
