PNTV: It's Not About the Money by Brent Kessel (#98)

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have a book called It's not about the Money. I would hold it up and show it to you if I had it, but I don't know where I put. I have an advanced copy of the book actually in manuscript form when I created this note before it was published. Awesome book. It's not about the Money. The subtitle to the book is unlock your money type to achieve spiritual and financial abundance. It's written by a friend of mine named Brent Kessel who's both one of the leading financial planners in the country. In the U.S. one of the top 250 financial planners in the U.S. as determined by Worth magazine. He manages over $800 million of capital and, and he's a total yogi. So he's the contributing financial guy to Yoga Journal. So he's a really amazing combination of spiritual practitioner and uber successful financial planner. And in this book he essentially integrates those two. He went around the world studying and interviewing everyone from the Dalai Lama to Thich Nhat Hanh to the founder of Vanguard Mutual Funds and a bunch of other people. Collected a various, a variety of different opinions and has distilled his wisdom into this awesome book. So really enjoyed it. Highly recommended if you, like me, have kind of struggled with some of your issues around integrating your spirituality with your finances. A couple other books that were really helpful for me on that front. Spiritual Economics by Eric Butterworth. Just a good, Good Human Being, Unity Minister, Bringing Spirituality to Our Economics and then the Science of Getting Rich. Funny title, great book. And those two books were huge. We've got another dozen or maybe 10 in the abundance classics that we have in the hundred that you can check out both the PNTVS on and the notes. So here, let's jump in. The first big idea is the idea of addressing our wanting mind. So if you haven't noticed, we've got this part of our consciousness that craves things. That's what they call the wanting mind. You want this, you want that, and there's this story that you won't be happy until you have this, this or that, or this, this and that, or whatever the combination is. And money tends to be a very, very popular subject for the wanting mind to crave after. So we want to pay attention to our wanting mind. And remember that. I should mention the theme of the book is captured in this really awesome quote. Before I turn the first page, let's get this one done. He says, though outer wealth, outer wealth rarely leads to inner wealth, inner wealth often leads to outer wealth as we invest in ourselves, which is what all these teachers talk about and what these notes are all about. As we invest in our own consciousness, we have the consciousness that naturally attracts and circulates all of the abundance we want in our lives, from financial to spiritual to love, to kindness, generosity, appreciation, etc. So that's kind of the gestalt here, the wanting mind. It's kind of like what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. Hedonic treadmill. It's when you're on a treadmill, right, of wanting, you're not getting anywhere. You get, you know, you take the next step, the next step, the next step, and you get this and you get that and you get this and that. But you didn't go anywhere. You didn't get any happier. And he says these desires would be fine if they actually gave you what you thought. They give you happiness, lasting happiness, but they don't. So we want to separate wanting mind desires from heartfelt desires. We don't want to get rid of our desires. That in itself is a desire. And that's a silly thing to think about. We just want to translate and transfer from the wanting minds desires for all the pleasure, all the financial rewards and all the fast cars and big houses and stuff like that, which is you almost always wanting mind stuff to really heartfelt desires. Who do you really want to be? What do you really want to create in your life? What, what does financial abundance mean for you? Beyond impressing people, beyond having the latest gadget or fastest car or biggest house or fastest yacht or whatever it is that you get all excited about and transfer to the heartfelt desires, the truly dharmic impulses we have within us, like a Buddha's desire to reach freedom and enlightenment so that he can reach, figure out what the cause of suffering is, experience his own level of happiness so he can inspire and empower the world to experience that. That's an authentic heartfelt desire. The Buddha was not without desires. He just learned how to turn his wanting mind off. He realized this was silly. Wanting mind desires are just really kind of silly. Rumi says the intelligent want self control, children want candy. The intelligent heartfelt desires, we want self control, children want candy. And unfortunately, the self development genre doesn't have the strongest reputation in helping us discover and go after our heartfelt desires stuff is sold. Whether it's self development books or lose belly fat books or get rich quick schemes. By selling to the wanting mind, right, and setting up all these ridiculous goals, we Want to have, have, have, have, have, have again, the faster cars, bigger houses, etc. We want to shift our goals. And a big part of my evolving philosophy is shifting from those having goals to being goals. Who do you want to be? What are your highest goals? How can you connect to and express the divine within you more consistently? Live with joy, appreciation, love, kindness, generosity, courage, creativity. All the virtues you aspire to, you want to be remembered for, right? What do you want to create? Being goals and creating goals. What do you want to create? A family, a thriving business that serves your community, A piece of art? What do you want to create? Being creating. Then what do you want to do? Kind of the bucket list stuff, right? Things, fun things you want to do in your life and then what do you want to have? And I think that the have goals, really want to get them in aligns that those things are in integrity with our doing, our creating and our being goals. I want to have beautiful things in my life, mostly almost entirely because they support my actualization. I love getting massages, I love living in a beautiful home, I love eating wonderful food. But it's very different than the old pursuits I used to have of the fast car. I had the Porsche, sold the Porsche for a Prius. We all got to go through that. But let's really find those heartfelt desires that we know are connected to our higher selves. And that's a huge idea. He's got some great quotes on it here. And then he also talks about a core story. We have a core story driving our financial show. He says a four year old runs your financial story, really runs your life. It's kind of like our conscious mind is the tip of an iceberg. It's a four year old consciousness that we've been programmed how to see the world. Then we've got this iceberg below, right? That's our subconscious mind. All the things we've been conditioned to believe. We may want to go here, but if our subconscious mind is programmed for scarcity and fear and anxiety, we're going to go and float in this direction. No matter how much we want to go here, no matter how many vision boards we have, we've got to deal with the subconscious stuff. His book is awesome for that. I'm not going to go into it right now, but check out the note for both core story issues and archetype issues. He talks about eight, I believe, archetypes that we tend to fall into and we can look at. You can look into that in the note and in the book. Of course. Which would be here if I had it. So another really big idea I want to cover. He has this amazing story about a study that was done with people who are at risk for heart attacks. Right. And they wanted to see how many times individuals use the words I, I, me and my, I, me and my. And they wondered if the number of times someone uses those words would be related to whether or not they actually had a heart attack. What do you think? Well, perhaps not surprisingly, those who are so self centered that their words choices are dominated by I's, mys and me's tend to. What was it that was the strongest predictor, the strongest predictor of mortality among heart attack victims? Not only was it correlated, those who didn't use those words as often weren't as likely to have heart attacks. Not only was it more correlated, it was the strongest predictor of mortality among heart attack victims. Amazing. So expand your sense of self, use money as a vehicle for expansion and go out and rock it. I covered more on the heartfelt goals than anything else, but hope you dug it. Check out the note, check out the book, get your core stories and archetypes rocking. And remember, it's not all about the money. Alright? Have an awesome day. More soon. See you.