Chapter 5
“Desire is the starting point of all achievement…”
– Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
You are about to embark on an incredible journey. The course that is coming up in the following chapters, Taking Control of Your Money, was designed to take away
the fear from the whole concept of financial planning by helping you dive right into it with my help. I won’t deny that embarking on this journey will bring up some
discomfort, challenge, and at times – maybe even the urge to close the book and run away. However, I promise you that if you stay with the short-lived discomfort, you will bring about life-changing results. Isn’t that why you picked up this book in the first place? We are here to make great changes in your life.
First though, I want to explain to you the difference between becoming financially independent and becoming financially free
Financial Independence: You have the ability to manage your money in such a way that you have sufficient funds for your expenses and your lifestyle, without carrying any debt or relying on borrowing money from others.
Financial Freedom: You have enough passive income to cover your expenses and your lifestyle without having to work or rely on others for money.
In order to become financially free, you must first become financially independent. Unfortunately no one has ever managed to start her journey on the second step. We all have to take the first step in order to get to the second step.
In the 6-week course, you will be taking the first step. What this means is that you will be taking control over your financial life. Instead of living day-by-day in a victim role (reacting to whatever takes place), you will be reclaiming your power and taking 100 percent responsibility for your finances and creating the life that you want. You will be taking real, concrete steps toward financial independence.
In this course, we are not working on the tools for financial freedom. This is an area that Nisandeh and I cover in a three-day course called the Financial Freedom Intensive. I will be telling you more about this after the 6-week course.
There are a lot of women who think that they have to make a choice between being either rich or happy. Or they think that if they want to be rich, they will have to give up on other things in their life – such as family or a social life. Some even think that in order to be rich they will have to give up being nice to people!
Transforming this kind of mindset is a crucial issue women face when they want to become financially independent because this mindset will create a poor outcome. Those who think that in life it is either this or that will have a tough time creating an abundant life.
Rich people know that you can have both. Rich people know that being rich isn’t just about the amount of money that you have accumulated; it’s also about having great relationships, a wonderful social life, and giving back to society. In other words, it includes being generous and “nice.”
The other issue that we have to face as women is the centuries of conditioning that taught us to focus on happiness and friendships. The idea is that if we are happy and friendly, then we don’t need money. In the fairy tales we grew up with, they told us that the people “lived HAPPILY ever after.” But nowhere was there any mention of money and how the happy couple financed a small kingdom and a family.
We were not raised with the concept of taking care of money, but rather with the concept of taking care of happiness. Therefore when we are faced with the issue of money, we tend to think that we’ll need to choose between money or happiness – instead of looking at how one supports the other. This goes back to the mindset of thinking you can either have this or that. This mindset can be a major factor in sabotaging women from creating financial independence.
Another concept getting in the way of women is the idea that money will corrupt them. You’ve heard this one before, right? The list looks something like this:
- “Money corrupts.”
- “Money makes you greedy. ”
- “Rich people are greedy.”
The fact is that money will actually just make you more of who you are. What I mean by this is that if you are a corrupt, evil and manipulative woman, money will make you more of that. BUT if you are a generous, loving and caring woman, money would just allow you to become even more of that – and will allow you to do even more good things with your money!
The point I want to make here is that having a lot of money does not come in place of having a full life. Actually when you have a lot of money you can contribute much more to society than when you are worrying about where your next paycheck is going to come from.
Becoming financially independent allows you to let go of the worry and fear and live a life of abundance in the sense that you can give more to people around you. But in order to get there the first step is to … TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MONEY.
How the Course Works.
In the first week of the course, you will be given exercises designed to help you identify your money blueprint to get more clarity on how you deal with money and why you do things in the way you do. We will be working on the first two steps to create change:
- Awareness
- Understanding
In the following weeks you will move on to exercises designed to help you get clear about your financial situation and create the habit of tracking your money. I will take you through these exercises step by step. During these weeks, we will be working on the third and final step to create change:
- Re-conditioning
I created the 6-week course to help you develop financial independence by Taking Control of Your Money. My intention when I created the course was to simplify some of the terms that people use in the financial industry that usually make women feel that they are stupid.
Sometimes we think it should be obvious to us what these terms mean – net worth, net profit and loss, income vs. expenses – but did anyone ever sit you down and teach you how to calculate these? They didn’t in my school.
I still haven’t seen Money 101 listed in any of the school curriculums – so why do we assume we should know about all of this?
There may be times when the work feels challenging and uncomfortable, or times when you feel some resistance. This is all okay. Remember, being uncomfortable is a necessary part of the process of growth. If it were easy to change, then we all would have done this by now!
If you just take things step by step, you will be amazed at how you can draw a full financial roadmap of where you are, where you want to go, and how you are going to get there.
Please don’t give up on yourself. I know you can do this. You would not be reading this book if you didn’t have the desire and commitment to create financial independence. Have you ever heard it said: The moment you move out of your own way, you make room for miracles to occur?
That’s what we are doing here. Let’s get started!