This article first appeared in The House of Wellness magazine.
In Money, Money, Money, Rachel Davies and Angela Meyer speak directly to women navigating money in all its messy, meaningful and deeply personal forms. The founders of Hi Money – a money-psychology course grounded in feminist financial principles – are clear this isn’t a rule book or personalised financial advice. Instead, it’s a thoughtful invitation to get curious about how you feel about money, and how to develop this with simple exercises.
Do you feel ashamed about money? Or guilty about it? Embarrassed about what you don’t know? Or reluctant to admit how much you do? Obsessed with trying to control it? Confused about how to ‘make it work for you’? Scared to talk about it?
You’re not alone.
Right now, in parks and playgrounds, boardrooms and bars, women are thinking about money. We’re making it, investing it, spending it, saving it, giving it away, fretting over it, chasing it, avoiding it and losing sleep over it.
And yet, women have 25 per cent less in retirement savings than men and, as a result, are much more likely to retire into poverty.
‘What’s your relationship with money?’ might seem like a simple question. But the response can quickly become deep, interesting and revealing. Like any relationship, your relationship with money can be a complex, constantly evolving, three-dimensional dynamic. It’s more like a chord than a single note.
Consider these questions:
• What’s your relationship with money right now?
• If money was a person, what is the nature of the dynamic between you?
Write your answers down, say them out loud or discuss them with someone. Are there any surprises?
Once you’ve considered your relationship with money, here’s a second simple question:
• What do you want your relationship with money to be like?
Write your answer down, say it out loud or discuss it with someone.
When we get clearer about the kind of relationship we want with money, it can help us get there because we know where ‘there’ is.
You can fast-track achieving your ideal relationship with money by using the technique of reinforcing. There are two main ways to do this: reminding and visualising.
Reminding
How do people change their thought patterns and behaviour?
A powerful method is to remind ourselves of what we want using repetition and vividness. When we experience or think about something over and over, we form a pathway in our mind, making the pathway deeper with every repetition. It’s like if we clear a track through the forest, then walk back and forth on it to make a solid path. In our brain, this pathway might be a new thought pattern or behaviour.
When a pathway is particularly interesting, vivid or exciting, the process of making the pathway happens faster and more easily and can go deeper. The advertising industry uses vividness and repetition to sell us products – it shows them to us over and over, in the most exciting ways possible. We can use this technique for our own purposes.
Reinforce
Find a way to make your ideal relationship with money very interesting, exciting and vivid to yourself. For example, you could:
• Write about your ideal money relationship, finding just the right words.
• Find an incredible image that reminds you of it.
• Locate a piece of clothing or an outfit that has just the right feeling.
• Choose a great song that feels like your ideal money relationship.
• Sniff out a perfume or scent that reminds you of it.
• Find a beautiful object that feels like it.
• Talk to yourself about your ideal money relationship throughout the day.
• Chat about it with friends.
Engage with the item that symbolises your ideal money relationship as often as possible. Put it somewhere you look often. Wear it all the time. Listen to it lots, dance around. Smell it, spray it. Carry it with you, put it on your desk, by your bed, on the handlebars of your bike or the dashboard of your car.
Continue for three or four weeks. This is usually long enough to form a habit. By this time, your ideal money relationship will have become more deeply embedded in your subconscious mind.
If, after reminding yourself for a few weeks, your ideal money relationship doesn’t feel strongly embedded in your awareness, please explore it as a belief or objection instead. Or, enlist the help of a friend or therapist to help you untangle your money psychology around this.
Visualising
Another way to reinforce your ideal relationship with money is to visualise having what you want. Visualising is the process of imagining something in a sensory, vivid, highly detailed way. Even though it’s called visualising, it’s most effective when done with all the senses: smelling the scents, hearing the sounds, feeling the movements, noticing the temperatures, textures and contact with the ground, seeing the details of the world and feeling the emotions.
Athletes use visualisation to improve their performance. As part of their training, they repeatedly imagine themselves succeeding in a sensory way. They rehearse the win in their mind. They might just visualise the successful outcome or they might also visualise the training, overcoming of obstacles, the details of playing the actual game as well as the win. There are lots of ways to approach it.
Neuroscience has shown that there’s not much difference for the brain between actually doing something, remembering doing it and imagining doing it. So, for your brain, when you visualise something, it’s as if you are actually there. Visualising can help strengthen the neural pathways for success, and increase the chances of success happening.
How to visualise
Get comfortable. This can be sitting or lying down, or, if you’re an active relaxer and feel more comfortable moving, that’s great too.
Relax. Begin to imagine yourself in a specific moment, scene or place somewhere in your ideal money relationship. Maybe you’re feeling really happy, hanging out with friends, laughing, completely present, totally free? Maybe you’re opening the door, setting your foot inside your new home for the first time? Maybe you’re hiking with your family up a mountain on a holiday?
A powerful time to visualise is when you’re waking up or falling asleep. When going between waking and sleeping, our brains pass through a relaxed trance state. This is an enhanced-learning state where the doors to our conscious and subconscious minds are open at the same time and we’re more capable of creative thinking and complex problem-solving.
As you visualise this scene, go through each of your senses one by one, slowly noticing the sensory details in an embodied way. Reach out and touch something, feel it, smell it, hear it and see it. Make it as rich, detailed and alive as you can. Notice the good feelings too.
For example, you might notice: ‘As my friend laughs, I’m filled with such love for them. I feel deeply happy and content in a way that feels like it will last forever.’
Repeat this exercise daily for a few weeks.