The Solution to "Money Anxiety"

When it comes to money, how confident are you? That's a strange question, right? Often we think about money. We think about, well, you know, do you have enough money? Do you want more money? How do we get more money? That's what we often focus on. But we don't pause to think about how confident am I about money. But strangely enough, that's what matters most, doesn't it? Because, I mean, no matter how much we have, we can still feel very insecure about money. And there's plenty of examples of this. And so we think, well, I just gotta get more, I gotta get more, I gotta get more, I need more. I don't have enough. But we don't realize is the fundamental problem there is not the actual amount of money. In most cases, the actual problem is what I would call money anxiety. You know, that's what I focused a lot of my life on, is different kinds of anxiety, one of them being social anxiety and low confidence. What I realized, though, is social anxiety and low confidence doesn't just apply to how we feel about ourselves socially, but. But confidence applies to all areas of life. And money is an area where people can have a lot of struggles with confidence and experience a lot of anxiety. And you probably experience this too. We all have, right? It's the moments where someone's like, hey, do you wanna go to this restaurant? And you're like, oh, maybe. Yeah, totally, maybe. What do they have there? How much does it cost? Right? And then you feel this anxiety. But maybe you don't wanna share that. Maybe you don't wanna reveal that. Maybe you feel bad about that. Or maybe, you know, your kids want to buy something, and inside you're like, oh, that's a lot. I don't know. I feel tight. I feel constricted. I feel anxious about that. But maybe you don't want to reveal that. So maybe you snap or you shame them. Oh, you shouldn't want so much and you feel guilty afterwards. Or it could show up at work. You know, you could feel stressed about. Even if you're earning money through your employment, you could feel like, well, I got to make sure that they don't let me go. I can't get fired. I got to work harder. And you start to feel more and more anxious. You have a hard time setting boundaries. You have a hard time setting. No, because you're so stressed about the money underneath, that's the foundation upon which we often sit. And so we feel like if I'm not secure with money, if I'm not safe with money, I'm not safe in the world. And that anxiety can be all pervasive. It can keep you up at night, it can make it hard to sleep. It can make you feel uncomfortable in almost any situation. And on top of that, especially in our culture, money is valued so highly. We can also feel inferior. Inferior for having the anxiety, inferior for not having enough money or whatever we think enough is. We think, oh, they're better than me because they have enough. They have it more together than me. And the whole thing creates a swirling pot of anxiety and inferiority and low confidence. When I see that, I think, yuck. Let's resolve this. Let's address this. So in this video, we're going to talk about the solution to money anxiety. When I ask people this, what do you think the solution to money anxiety is? What's the first answer that comes to most people's mind? Maybe it popped into your mind if I were to ask you, what's the solution to money anxiety? More money, right? I mean, that's what everyone thinks. Like, duh, it's more money. And yet, is that really true? I mean, isn't our world just complete with examples of people who have a lot of money who are still very stressed and anxious about it? I was talking to someone who told me a story about a billionaire who would get into conflict over with his wife over what kind of toilet paper she bought because of the price of it. That's an extreme example. You might say, well, that person's crazy. I'm not that crazy. My money anxiety is legitimate. Is that really true? I mean, so here's how money anxiety often works, right? It's like, I feel anxious about money, and I don't even necessarily have an actual prediction or spreadsheets about what's going to happen. It's just, I don't have enough, right? And then someone's like, hey, you want to get a coffee? And you're like, no, $3 and a coffee. It's crazy. And we just get all stressed out. We decide not to buy something that day, and the next day we buy, like, $30 more worth of random groceries on impulse buys. Like, we're not that clear. We're not that rational. It's just a fear. It's an anxiety. And the more money you get, you might think that might solve it, but that's not often the case. In fact, there's some interesting research they did where they interviewed families where the household income was $50,000. And they said, how much money would you need to feel totally free with Money, not anxious, Total money confidence, even though they didn't use that term. And on average, those families said, guess how much? 100,000. Double the amount of money. But in the same study, when they interviewed families that had on average $100,000 in income, and they said, how much would you need? Guess what they said? No, it wasn't 200,000. It was 250,000. So their perception was, we need even more. And you might think that's strange. Are they greedy? What's going on with them? No, here's the thing. This is why we're all so trapped in money anxiety. Because the dominant kind of perception in our culture is that money is security, money is freedom, money is pleasure. The more you earn, the better you are, the safer you are, the better your life is, the more things you can buy. And that's the purpose of life, right? At least according to a lot of what we see in the media. And so we say, well, geez, I guess I need to earn more. And then those families that are earning more and more and more, they realize, you know, it's not quite working. What do we need more? Is it more? We need more, right? So 250,000. And if you interviewed 250,000 households, maybe they'd say a million. There's no end to it. So the solution is not more money. Now, a component of money confidence, which I'll talk about in just a moment, is about money. So I'm not saying money isn't real or money doesn't exist, although it is pretty ephemeral and digital and nothing we can really put our hands on. But at the same time, it is an important part of life that we want to master. So looking at money and wanting to earn more, there's nothing wrong with that. All I'm saying is that the solution is not just in getting more money and not addressing anything else. What we really have to look at is our psychology and the components of money confidence. We must increase our money confidence just like this. Let me give you one more example. Then we're going to talk about the components of money confidence. Let's say you're feeling insecure in dating and relationships, in your love life, your romantic life, and you're like, ah, I'm not attractive, you know, both physically, but also like my personality is not that great, you know, what do I need? I need a girlfriend. That's how I thought when I really struggled with dating confidence, right? It's like, that's not the solution because then you're with a girlfriend or A partner or a boyfriend or husband, and you're just like, you're still insecure, right? You don't feel radically different necessarily. It doesn't automatically solve the problem. And money is the exact same way because you have a relationship with money just like you have a relationship with other people in your life. So we got to upgrade our relationship with money, we got to upgrade our mindsets around money. And here are three core components of money confidence. If you get these dialed in, if you get this adjusted to where you're seeing more accurately, you have better belief in yourself, then you're going to have a lot more confidence when it comes to money. Alright, Want to learn what they are? Okay, the first one, money confidence. First component is what I would call capability. In order to feel confident with money in the world, you have to believe I am capable of earning money in the world to support myself and my family or those that I love. If you don't believe this, if there's a lot of doubt about this, a lot of insecurity about this, then you're going to feel anxiety no matter how much you earn. There's a man I worked with who had a lot of money built up from a previous business venture, millions of dollars, but he was very insecure when it came to money. And the reason for that was not because here's another example of why having more in the bank account doesn't necessarily eliminate money. Anx because for him, his capability was low. His perception of capability. So he thought, yeah, I earned all that money. But that was like the forces of the market and the industry I was in and lucky, in the right place at the right time. And I probably couldn't do that again, which is totally false, by the way. But you know, our perceptions of capability are not actually true about what we're really capable of. It's just our own perception. So we might think we're not capable. You might think that you're less capable than you are. In fact, you probably do. But most of us do. We have a distorted perception of ourselves where we don't see ourselves as fully capable to the true capacity that we are. So in order to increase your money confidence, you want to increase your perception of capability. Yes, I can earn more money in the world. Yes, I can. I am capable of that. And if I need more skills or I need to learn something else, I'm capable of learning that as well. And the more you can install that, the more you can believe that, the more confidence you're going to have. So that's the first component. The second component is actually being able to manage the money. I would call this management, because oftentimes we can get the money, but then we don't have belief in ourselves to keep the money. Maybe you've spent it all in the past or lived beyond your means and gone into debt even after having more money. Or maybe something happened, you know, financial turn, a business turn, getting laid off, changing the industry, something happened, or you made some investments, they weren't, they didn't go the way that you wanted, you lost money. You're like, I'm investing money. That's the smart thing to do. And it's supposed to increase. And not only did it decrease, but actually lost the money that I invested. And so then you feel frustrated, you feel afraid, you don't trust in yourself anymore. And this can make a major damper in our money confidence. Because even if your capability is high and you believe you can earn it, if you don't believe you can keep it or manage it well or invest it well, you don't trust in yourself, then you're going to feel a lot of anxiety when it comes to money even as you're earning it. So that's the second component to increase is your belief, I can manage money well. I'm a good steward of money. I make intelligent decisions. I trust in myself with money. The third component of money confidence, which is absolutely essential, goes beyond these two. And you might wonder what that is because you think, wait a minute, if I believe I can earn money in the world and I believe I can manage the money well, what more do I need? That's all I got. I mean, and that's what most people are operating at. And yet they feel this gnawing insecurity inside that often shows up as, yeah, but what if, but what if? How do I know there's nothing secure to stand on? Well, welcome to being a human. You know, there's nothing, there's no solid ground. Impermanence is the name of the game. That's the name of this life in existence, right? And yet we need something to plant our flag in. We need something, we need some bedrock to stand on. And that is where trust comes in. Safety is the third component of money confidence. And that's a sense of, I'm safe no matter what. I trust that I'll be okay and I'll have enough no matter what. That's the thing that we must have in place. Because if we don't have that, we're going to feel insecure no matter how much we accumulate because we know on some level that the money is impermanent. We know that numbers in an account can disappear like that through your own spending, through theft, through inflation, through hyperinflation, through a change, through government change, through whatever. We know that there's nothing totally secure. Even your legal tender can just evaporate in terms of if there's hyperinflation. We've seen that happen in other countries around the world, different times, different places, so we know there's nothing to stand on with that. And so we need something more deep, more foundational that goes even deeper than money and deeper than any particular changing current like your job or industry. Something that goes right to the core of your sense of connection with life, your sense of faith, your sense of spirituality or whatever connects you to something bigger that says, you know what? I'm gonna be okay no matter what. For some people, they say, you know what? God is my source or infinite intelligence. The universe is my source. That's their bedrock. Each person's gotta find their own way with this. I'm not gonna tell you what it is for you, but it's gotta be something that I would call the realm of spiritual confidence, Spiritual trust. Trust in life. I'll be okay no matter what. One thing I do that helps me with this a lot is to say, you know what? It might be very uncomfortable if things were to fall apart, if I were to lose money here or there. I'm not saying it would be easy. It may be very uncomfortable, very painful to have to make painful decisions or give things up or sell things or whatever. But I'll be okay. I know that I'll always have enough in my life. And if you can find the trust in that, then your money confidence becomes really strong. Because then when there's the, you know, the ups and downs, the vicissitudes of life and fate, gain and loss, you're not so much on that roller coaster of like, oh, no, is this. We're going down. Because there's almost like there's a. There's a floor there that's going to catch you. That's what you want to build in yourself for money confidence. So those are the three components of money confidence. Capability. I am capable of earning money in the world. Management. I can manage money well and safety. I'll be okay no matter what. I'll always have enough. I always have and I always will. So what else would you add to this? What is money confidence for you? This is by no means a comprehensive end all be all this is just a start of a conversation between you and me and all of us of how we can all increase our money confidence together. So share in the comments below. What are you learning? What are you finding most valuable about this video? And what else would you add to money Confidence? What's important for you to feel 100% confident about money? Thanks for being with me today in this video. In the next video, we're going to talk about the Confidence Money connection. Does more confidence equal more money? Hmm. We'll find out. So stay tuned for that video and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.