We can do a lot to improve our relationship with money and our businesses/careers. There are a lot of tools and strategies but as I’ve already hit on. But if there are issues related to your experiences growing up, they don’t work so well.
That all comes down to our ability to trust ourselves.
Normally, it’s hard to trust ourselves in a society that withholds knowledge, discourages us, and confuses us with messages like “this is the only strategy you need” and “my method is the right method”.
Kinda hard to trust your instincts when everyone else is telling you the right way to do things and the truth is, all those methods and strategies are equally right and wrong. I’ve run businesses for over 2 decades and seen one method help a business thrive and another crumble. Outside of the systemic setbacks and issues, it’s more about what works for you and what feels right for you.
But that’s hard to trust and even harder if you happened to be like me and you grew up with narcissistic, emotionally immature, or abusive parents/caregivers.
Maybe when you confronted a parent or parents about saying or doing something mean they came back with:
“That never happened”
“I never said that”
“You make things up all the time”
“You’re such a liar”
“You’re so emotional, that was just a joke”
As a child, you then began questioning yourself. You ask yourself things like:
“Did that really happen?”
“Am I too sensitive/emotional?”
“Maybe I’m the problem”
“Maybe somethings wrong with me?”
When this became consistent then issues developed of not trusting your perception of experiences and people.
About 80% of what we believe comes from our formative years. So, if nothing is done to validate what we experienced in those formative years, we continue to doubt our perceptions.
How do we deal with this then?
First, we need to understand the difference between our intuition and trauma responses as a result of these experiences. I have found for myself and my clients who’ve grown up in similar situations that our intuition is much quieter and more subtle. It’s not big feelings of anxiety, paranoia, or fear and it’s also not big feelings of excitement. That’s right, those big feelings of excitement and turn on are usually not your intuition, it’s a fawn response.
That need to people please and ignore red flags comes from learning to anticipate the behaviors of our parents and now others. It shows up in many areas such as:
· Ignoring that gut feeling that something is off with a person because maybe you’re just being judgmental.
· Putting out an offer/product because omg people will love it so much even though it feels anxious when you put it out there.
· Doubting a really good opportunity or offer because it’s probably too good to be true and you probably aren’t capable of handling it anyway.
We get all in our heads and that causes us to sabotage ourselves because we don’t understand our intuition and trust it.
Again, our intuition is usually a lot more subtle, it’s that gentle nudge over and over, that gut instinct. It’s calm and constant.
How do we begin trusting that more?
Well, you know I love IFS/parts work so first we need to identify what moment taught us to doubt ourselves, either the first or most impactful moment.
How old were you, what happened, what did you learn to believe about yourself, and what did you learn to believe would happen if you trusted yourself and spoke up or did what you wanted to?
Most importantly, what did we need at that moment that would’ve made us feel safe, loved, and accepted? Once you know those answers start giving yourself what you needed at that moment so the subconscious part of you is reparented and will begin feeling safe to trust.
In conjunction with that, start finding very small ways to trust yourself and trust that others will accept you if you trust yourself. Maybe that’s as simple as saying you don’t want to drink when going out to dinner and noticing those, you’re with say ok, no biggie.
It may not be fully related to your business, money, or dating yet but it’s all about building evidence and if you can do that in small ways you can increase those.
You can start intentionally showing this subconscious part of you the evidence to increase trusting yourself in the bigger ways or ways that scare you the most.
Now, of course, you’ll have people that won’t receive you when you make decisions and do things from a place of self-trust. That’s ok because you’ll be giving yourself the reassurance and noting the evidence to discern who aligned and who’s not, what’s aligned and what’s not.
Ask yourself in those moments when your instincts are challenged “does this person benefit from me not trusting myself and how do they benefit? Is there some power they maintain or status quo that gets maintained?”
The last thing I suggest is once you have some evidence to support trusting yourself create an NLP anchor. I do this with clients all the time and it’s a super effective somatic tool. An NLP or Neuro-linguistic Programming is essentially connecting an external trigger to an internal response.
Take the feeling of trusting yourself and it is working out using a specific moment and while you think about that press a hand/finger to a specific part of your body to “lock that in”. Then every time you want to tap into that memory and feeling you can press on the spot and bring it up to reinforce the feeling.
It’s quick and easy but can be really effective so I definitely recommend trying it and seeing how it works for you!
