The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom (43 page)

You must trust yourself more than you trust others.

Once you have taken these steps in their entirety, you are blowing the door to financial freedom off its hinges. You will then be in a position to walk through that door. The next step, the seventh step to financial freedom, guarantees that you do not unintentionally limit what is to be found on the other side.

When I was a little girl, my grandfather, at the end of his long, hard life, would often say to me, “Suze, listen. They can take your money, they can take your business, they can take your family, they can even take your mind. The one thing they can never take,” he would say, “is your heart, and you must grow up valuing your own heart. Love life for what you can give it, Suze, and don’t get bitter over what it will take from you.”

Who are the people in this life you truly love and cherish? What are the things you value most? What do you think, deep down inside, is the key to your freedom? Do you really think the answer is something as simple as money?

Most people have the goal in mind that they want to be free from their worries about money. That’s a perfectly good goal, and that’s what the purpose of the first six steps of this book has been: to help you break through the barrier of financial anxieties and put yourself in control of your money.

To me, though, that is just the beginning of financial freedom rather than the end of it. I have come to believe that the pursuit of money for its own sake is a hollow pursuit indeed. So these last three steps to financial freedom are not about money, but about true wealth. About abundance. About my grandfather’s lesson that true financial freedom is when you know you are rich, with or without a penny.

The advice in these three short but all-important chapters is radically different from what you will read in any other financial book and unlike what you will hear from any other financial adviser. These last three steps will take you beyond what money can buy, and they will, if you let them, make you rich or, perhaps, remind you that you already are.

H
AVE YOU EVER
felt depressed or worried about something important in your life—your work, your relationships? When it happened, did you feel that you had no energy to get through the day, even to carry out your ordinary routines, much less to do challenging tasks in your life or your job? When you feel this way, isn’t it true that the phone doesn’t ring, the check or callback about a job you’ve been waiting for doesn’t come, even your closest friends seem to vanish for the time being?

Then your mood turns around. You wake up feeling better and stronger one day—maybe there’s a reason for it, maybe it just happens. Once your mood turns around, everything else
does, too. The phone starts to ring again. The check or callback comes. A friend calls to invite you somewhere nice.

Believe it or not, it works the same way with you and your money. As we’ve seen, money is a living entity and responds to energy, including yours, and to how you feel about yourself. When you are worrying about money, feeling powerless over your finances and sorry for yourself, money won’t want to hang around you, either. On the other hand, when you feel you’re in control of your money and have enough to be generous with it, money will naturally flow your way. Strange, perhaps, but still true. You will become that money magnet you want to be.

We all spend a lot of energy fussing over our money, wishing for more income, balancing our checkbooks, wondering whether we’ll have enough to pay the bills. But there’s a question even more important to ask than “Do I have enough?”: Is it possible that you are doing something to prevent more money from coming in? Might you be not only the prisoner, but also the warden in your financial jailhouse?

I was in Mexico once, and there was a merchant at a market who had many parrots for sale. They were just sitting on perches, none of them in cages, none flying away. I was fascinated by the fact that none of them were even trying to escape. I asked the merchant, “Do these birds just love you so much they have no desire to fly away?”

He laughed. “No,” he said, “I had to train them to think their perches mean safety and security. When they come to think this, they naturally wrap their claws tightly around the perch and don’t want to release it. They keep themselves confined, as if they’ve forgotten they know how to fly.”

Was this hard to do? I asked. “With little birds it’s very hard, sometimes even impossible,” he said. “It’s easy with the large birds.”

Suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head. We are, I thought, just like those poor parrots. We have all been taught to clutch our money as tightly as we can, as if our money is the perch of our safety and security. Just like those parrots, we have all forgotten how free we really are—with or without the perch. The more afraid we are, the tighter we hold on, and the more we have trapped ourselves.

When I realized this I asked the merchant how he would go about “unteaching” this behavior. “Easy,” he said. “You just show them how to release their grip, and then they can fly as free as they want.”

Easy for the parrots, maybe, but how, I wondered, do we go about releasing our own grip on money?

Please imagine that you’ve gone into your kitchen and turned on the faucet. Make a tight fist with both your hands and try to get a sustaining drink of water from that faucet from your fists. You won’t be able to.

Now open up your hands, cup them. Put them under the faucet and accept the water flowing freely into your hands. You’ll be able to drink to your heart’s content. Your thirst will be quenched and the thought “not enough” won’t even enter your mind.

It works the same way with our money. If we are grasping what we have so tightly, we are not open to receive or even notice all that may be trying to flow our way. We must learn to release our grasp.

From then on, every time poverty consciousness hit me and I sank into another money funk, I’d remember that first day. I would promptly take out my checkbook and send a check to
one charity or another at the time. It was the strangest thing, but I would feel much better right away. Even stranger, as soon as I was feeling spunky again, lots of people would call and want to open a new account with me, or a newspaper article about me would appear and the phone would start ringing off the hook. In every instance, the amount I had given was showered back on me tenfold in no time. More important, with each check I wrote, whether it was for $5 or $500, I felt more powerful. I was able to extinguish the feeling of poverty that had been burning at me. That act, for me, was worth its weight in gold.

It took awhile until it hit me that I had stumbled upon—or perhaps was guided to—the answer to my questions “How does one release one’s anxious grasp on money? How does one make oneself open to receive?”

By giving.

I started to test my theory back then with my clients. I went back through many of my files and divided my clients into two groups, one that gave money to charity on a regular monthly basis and one that did not. What I found was that those who donated regularly had an abundance of money, more than they really needed. Most of the others didn’t.

I was fascinated by this but couldn’t tell if my little study was accurate, because I had no way of knowing whether my more generous clients had more money to begin with; maybe their abundance had nothing to do with what they were giving. Maybe it was a fluke. So I took a different approach. When new clients who weren’t doing so well came to see me, I asked those who I thought would be open to it to start donating money each month to a place they’d feel good about giving to. To new clients who also weren’t doing so well but (in my opinion) wouldn’t be open to it, I said nothing. I couldn’t believe the results. The better people felt about themselves, and the more they kept their hands open to receive by relinquishing money,
the more their financial situation improved. It was thrilling. The key was to start respectfully to give money away by making an offering on a regular basis. They had moved toward financial freedom by giving their money to others.

In a course I once took in Eastern spiritual tradition, I learned about what is called the dharma of money, which means the “right action” of money. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I now know the following principle is true: We experience prosperity, true financial freedom, when our actions with respect to money are dharmic, or righteous, actions—that is, actions of generosity, actions of offering.

Money flows through our lives just like water—at times plentiful, at times a trickle. I believe that each one of us is, in effect, a glass, in that we can hold only so much; after that, the water—or the money—just goes down the drain. Some of us are larger glasses, some of us smaller, but we all have the capacity to receive plenty more than we need if we allow it. When you make an offering, the glass will be filled again and again and again. I knew I always felt better right after I made an offering—stronger, worthier, more powerful. And after a while I began to believe that it was no coincidence that after I made such an offering, more money would always begin to flow my way.

This may seem like a very strange concept at first; many of my clients found it so. One question that’s always asked whenever I talk about this step is, “But Suze, I know plenty of people who are as cheap and ungenerous of spirit as can be, people with plenty of money who never give a penny away. How come they have so much?”

People who are cheap are more trapped than any of those parrots on perches. Being cheap has nothing to do with how much money you have. You can be rich and cheap, or poor and generous. Cheap people guard their water glasses and hoard what they have, to make sure nothing flows out. New water always has to flow in to keep the water in the glass fresh and useful; otherwise it grows stagnant, like standing water in a pond. People who are cheap are letting their money stagnate. What they are missing is the serenity that money handled responsibly, generously, and well can bring, and the pleasure.

Ask yourself this: Who is the most generous person you know? Someone who opens up her home to friends, her heart to those in trouble, her wallet judiciously and without resentment? How do you feel toward this person? Do you think this person can feel your love and appreciation coming back to replenish her?