Transforming Your Relationship With Money

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How can you transform the way people relate to money so it's a healthy relationship, not a destructive one? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Lynne Twist. Lynne is a recognized global visionary who's committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability. In addition, She's written two books, including one of my all-time favorites called The Soul of Money, and her newest book called Living a Committed Life. In today's conversation, we explore the concept of transformation, and in particular, how you can transform your relationship with money and help your clients do the same by aligning your money with your core values and your highest commitments. And when you do so, Your life is no longer focused on how much you have or how you can get more, but on making a difference with what you do have. And when you make a difference with what you do have, as Lynne says, it expands. With that, let's get started with Lynne Twist. I want to go back to 1974, and you went to a seminar. So tell me, what was the seminar and why was that a pivotal moment in you living a committed life?

Well, I, the, the seminar I went to was the EST training, which at that time was 2 or 3 years old, and it was in the Bay Area, and it was kind of a hot new thing, but it was also extremely controversial. People weren't so sure about it, but I was all in. I wanted to, whatever it was, I wanted to do it. And I was a young mom with 3 little kids. I was kind of obsessed with Keeping Up with the Joneses. My husband Bill had graduated from business school and we were, you know, we were trying to be cool and we were trying to understand wine and collect art because he was starting to make money. And I wanted to, you know, wear the right outfits at the business things that we did. And I was all about being somebody that I, I don't know that I wasn't, but thought I was supposed to be. And then I took this Est training, which was 2 weekends. There were 250 people in a hotel room. One leader, just one leader, 250 people, 2 weekends. And it just blew my mind. It was just incredible for me. I mean, everybody has their awakening. Sometimes it's meditation or it's a teacher or something happens in church or they lose a child or they get a divorce. Sometimes it's something kind of dark or difficult or challenging that leads you to a place where you start to transform your life. But for me, it was the S Training. It was so powerful for me. I don't want to condense it, but I want to say some of the things that I received out of it was that I could be myself, that that was actually the job. And that to try to be someone else was foolhardy and false and didn't have true integrity and was inauthentic. And I was freed from the shoulds, the wannabes, the I'm not good enough. I've got to be better, taller, thinner, you know, younger. I don't know what all the things there were. There was an er on the end of everything. And it was, I wasn't quite right until I did something or acquired something. And the S Training just really blew my mind. And I started to realize that I was okay just exactly the way I was. And that freedom, that liberation, I mean, I think that's what everybody wants all the time. But I got it pretty young. I was, I think, in my 20s. It really happened for me. And after that, I became completely devoted to making sure other people had that experience because I thought, you know, I'm not the only person caught in all this noise in my head. It's really part of being human. And it's so easy to get caught in it, especially when you're young, especially when you're, you know, you're recently married and trying to build your life and trying to forge it and formulate it in a way that you think it would be like cool and and everybody would think you're great and all that stuff. And I began to drop that. So it was actually, for me, it was a miracle. It was a transformational miracle. And I started to live a life that was not a life starring me, but a life about what difference could I make? What kind of a contribution could I make? How could this person who's at that time just thought, saw myself as completely ordinary, trying to be almost, you know, superhuman. Just this person. How can I make a difference with this person and not try to be somebody I'm not? And that was a big moment for me. So it's kind of a long answer, but that's, that's what happened. And it's now that program that used to be called EST, founded by Werner Erhard, is now called the Landmark Forum. And it still exists. It's very, very powerful and very useful. And it's not spiritual. It's not psychological, it's not philosophical, although it touches on all those things. It's grounded being is ontological ways of being. So you don't get caught in arguing about your point of view so much. You look at ways of being, ontology. And I'd never even heard of that word before. I didn't know what that was. But it really freed me into my own faith, into my inner life. Into being who I am, not who I thought I ought to be, and to live my life more authentically. So that was big.

So it sounds like that training essentially cracked you open and made you receptive to something that then was going to fill that. And yes, within, I think, a couple of years or so, you found this first thing in your life that you wanted to be committed to. So walk me through how that happened.

Well, Bill was becoming quite successful. He was working for a company called Itel, which at that time had a goal to become the first, I think, billion-dollar company. I don't know. It sounds so— it was a long time ago in the '70s. So people were not— billions wasn't in the lexicon the way it is now. So he was making money and we were, you know, we could buy the hottest BMW. We had a really nice house. You know, we could play that game. And we love all of those fine things, and we still do. But we started to realize we weren't about that, that that wasn't the point of life. Both of us, actually, because he took the training. He has training too. And it was an encounter, a very powerful encounter with Buckminster Fuller, the great engineer architect of the 20th century. Buckminster Fuller was often called Bucky. He invented the geodesic dome.. He invented an electric car in 1949, seeing the fossil fuel industry coming to a close at some point, way before anybody else saw these things. It was often, he was often called the grandfather of the future. And I was curious and admiring Buckminster Fuller, but I didn't really understand mostly what I read that he had written or what I read about him, but I was curious about him. So I went to an event to hear him speak. Not only was I curious about him, I could feel a draw. You know, sometimes you just have a feeling about someone. And when I got to this event, I remember exactly where I was sitting. I remember everything about the auditorium, 2,000 people. I even remember what I was wearing. I mean, it was one of those life-altering moments where I got another deep experience of what's real, what's true, what's actually going on. And Bucky, he was affectionately called Bucky by millions and millions of people at that time. And this was in 1976 now, so it was a couple of years later. He talked about his life, that as a young person, he was in his 80s when he spoke at this event, but he he hearkened back to his own life that there was a point where he thought his life was worthless when he was 27 and he considered suicide. And he talked about how if I'm a throwaway person, I can't feed my family, I can't succeed, I'm a failure. This was his sense of himself. If I'm just a throwaway person, rather than take my life, Maybe I could take the thing called my life that's been given to me and see if one ordinary little human being could live a life that would make a difference for all humanity, a positive difference for all humanity. And he decided rather than ending his life to devote it to that inquiry. And when he shared this, I remember thinking, oh my God, what an incredible— I was about his age, he was in his 80s, but his realization. This thing that happened to him was when he was 27, and I was probably 27, 28. And then ever since that choice that he made, he was in his 80s. So let's say, you know, 50, 60 years later, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great thinkers on the planet. He had made such a huge difference with his life, and he'd made a difference that impacted all of humanity with his inventions, with his humanity, his teachings, with his intellect. And most of all, this is love. And I just was gobsmacked by that, that one individual could make a difference that would impact all humanity. And there he was standing there, this little bald man with thick glasses in his 80s. You're really talking about that. So then there was a point in the presentation, and this is kind of the key thing where he said, I'm now going to say something that I've never said and probably say the most important thing I'm going to say or have ever said or ever will say. Now, I didn't understand a lot of what Bucky said because he talked about the intellectual integrity of the universe. He had models on a utility table in front of him and a tetrahedron, like a big Tinker Toy thing, an icosahedron. He was talking about the intellectual integrity of the cells and the— I don't even know what he was talking, molecules. I don't know, it was way over my head. But I loved him. I loved the way he was. There's a beautiful quote from Emerson that says, who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear the words you're saying. And that was my experience of Bucky. Who he was spoke so deeply to me. His love for the universe, his love for nature, his love for humanity spoke so loudly that I didn't really understand most of what he was talking about until this moment when he walked in front of the utility table looked right out at the audience. You know, I think everybody felt that he was looking right at them, but it seemed like he was looking at me. And he said, it's 1976, he said this, humanity has just passed a critical threshold. And he put his arm out like this and said, we've crossed it. And when Buckminster Fuller talked about recently, he said, we've recently crossed this threshold. He kind of meant the last 50 or 100 years. That's the way he used to talk, big swaths of time. Okay, so he said humanity has crossed this threshold and it's recent and it changes everything. And that threshold is this, he said, we are now doing so much more with so much less. And that is the direction of our genius. It is the direction of our science. It is the direction of our innovation. It is the direction of all of our technology that we now live clearly, he said, in a world where there is enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. And when Buckminster Fuller said there is enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life, I had a Kundalini thing. I didn't know what to call it then, but I'll say this now, go up my spine. I started to cry. I was moved to tears. I didn't understand what he was saying still. My hands started to perspire. I was in some sort of altered state. It was like a truth, a really deep truth. There is enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. Then he says, that means we move from a mindset, perhaps unconscious, perhaps unexamined mindset, but a mindset of scarcity that there's not enough to go around and someone's always gonna be left out. A you or me, you or me paradigm where you make it at my expense, Steve, or I make it at your expense because there's not enough for both of us. Two, that's one side of the line. To the other side of this threshold where there's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. That's a different world. That's a world where the paradigm is not scarcity. The paradigm is sufficiency. And you and I can both make it at no one's expense. So we go from a you or me paradigm to a you and me paradigm. And then he said, and I'm not talking about an amount of anything when I say sufficient resources, enough. I'm talking about a way of being. So then again, he's kind of speaking over my head. But then he said something super important. And he said, we will not realize this for 50 years, somewhere around 45, 50, 55 years. And this is 1976, remember, because he said humanity is rooted in institutions that are sourced or rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. And our institutions are powerful and strong and they come from a you or me scarcity mindset. So clearly he said the economy is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. But even education, he said, is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. He said governance is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. Politics is rooted in a you or me understanding of the world. He named all the big institutions of humankind. And then he had the courage to say even religion is rooted in a you or me understanding the world. He said then it'll take 50 years, 1976, 50 years for all of these institutions to become so dysfunctional that they will no longer be repairable. We won't be able to fix them. We won't be able to rejigger them. We will have to let them completely and totally dissolve. They will start falling apart in 50 years. And we will need to recreate all the great institutions of humankind from a new paradigm, a you and me paradigm, a paradigm of sufficient resources, a paradigm of enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. And he said, that's a completely different paradigm for life. So this is a long answer to your question, but that's when I really got what he was saying. And it got into my core, my cells, my heart, my being. And after that, The Hunger Project was born. And that's really when I found my, you could say, dharma, my gift, my contribution to take this incredible life that everybody has been given and give it to something larger than my own desires and my own wants and needs, but something bigger than that. And Bucky was very, very important to the Hunger Project. But Mr. Fuller and Werner Erhard met, and out of that meeting and a lot of other things, but out of that meeting, I would say the Hunger Project was born. And the Hunger Project is a worldwide commitment, still exists, and now a movement to end world hunger, given we have enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. Bucky said, and Werner said too, that the hunger issue is an integrity issue. Integrity. That we would allow a billion children to be hungry all the time in a world that's— there's enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life is an integrity issue. It's an indictment on our relationship with each other and our relationship with the human family. So The Hunger Project was born in 1977, and I— it swept me off my feet. I knew this is why I'm born. This is what I came to do. This This is why I'm alive. You know, I just became totally devoted to the work of The Hunger Project, as did my children, as did my husband, as did all my friends. I made them do it. And we became very, very deeply involved in the work of ending world hunger from a lens of transformation, from a lens of responsibility and sufficiency for the resources on this planet and the love and care and relatedness to one another that would create a fulfilling life for those of us who were committed to it and those of us who were suffering from hunger and poverty. And we really approached it from the front and the backside of the hand of hunger. The front side of the hand of hunger being physical hunger, starvation, malnutrition, malabsorptive hunger. The backside of the hand of hunger being the hunger for meaning in the affluent world, the hunger to make a difference with our life. The hunger to matter. And Werner and Bucky said, this is all one hunger. This is the same hunger, front and back of the same hand. You won't end this hunger without addressing this hunger. To live on a planet where at that time 44,000 people were dying every day of a world full of food was unconscionable. And to live in that world with affluence and all the bells and whistles that those of us who live in the affluent world has, an integrity issue and one that we needed to address at the heart of who we know ourselves to be. So that was a huge turning point in my life. And working on ending world hunger took me to Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, you know, Zambia, Zimbabwe. And I became deeply devoted to that work from the lens of transformation. So That's when I found a purpose larger than my own life. And what it did was give me direction and purpose and meaning, but also a purpose larger than your own life reaches back into your life and shapes you into the person you need to be to fulfill that commitment. It is the most powerful way of transforming yourself. I think, or at least certainly was for me, knowing that you could make a difference that will influence the long-term future of life is a privilege. It ennobles your life and it frees you. It frees you into full self-expression. So I could talk about that for hours, as you could tell. But anyway, that was my next big turning point.

So there's two books that rank right up at the top in terms of my two favorite books. The first one, is the first book that you wrote, which is The Soul of Money. And the second one is one that I think you're familiar with and you have a connection to. It's called Living Deeply, which was based on some research from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which I think you spent some time with. And so this book is Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life. So as I hear you talking, I keep hearing the word transformation come up here. And I'd love for you to describe how you view the difference between change and transformation. Because as we think about living a committed life, if we think about getting a right relationship with money, it might take not just change, but transformation. So how do you think about change versus transformation?

Well, thank you so much for asking that question. Uh, I love that question cuz I like to, distinguish between those two things. My understanding, or this is my assertion, that change requires you to make something wrong so that you make something new right. In other words, insulting something so that you can make that transition or that change. And we see it in the political divide in our country right now, and we see it all over the place in our lives where I'm too fat, so I have to go on a diet, or I'm too lazy, so I have to get more efficient. It requires, in many ways, change requires insulting something, insulting the past or insulting the present to motivate you to do something different. Now, I think change is really important. I'm into change. I know there's a lot of things that want to change, that need to change, that are changing. So change is not wrong or bad. It just is the dynamic where you have to insult or make something wrong and something right. That's kind of how the dynamics of change work in my view. Transformation is very, very different than that. Transformation never insults the past or the present. It completes it. It has it suddenly make sense. It transforms it to have you see, oh, this led me to be the platform, the gift, the blessed space out of which I can take this next step. And it's very, very powerful. So change is very powerful too, but transformation is distinct. So, for example, I work with a lot of women and their relationship with money and life because that's part of the book, Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life. And often Women come to me or getting or just had a divorce from maybe a wealthy man. So their life changes dramatically. Yes, it does change dramatically. And sometimes the divorce, and most often it's harsh, it's ugly. People get turned into kind of monsters. There's lawyers involved. They make each other wrong and point fingers and shame each other. And, you know, it's usually not pretty. Sometimes it is, but mostly it's not pretty. But often there'll be this moment or this transformational event where the woman who was so angry and so hurt and so almost felt damaged would look back and be grateful for the life that she was given, the life she led, the raising of the kids, the opportunity, and the thrill of being freed of a life that really wasn't right for her any longer and a relationship that wasn't healthy for her any longer and can stand on the platform of all of that and know that it brought her to a place where she could find her own voice, create her own business, live her own life in a way that she never did before. So, you know, those moments of transformation, that's a transformation. We have people in history who've really been excellent examples of transformation. Also, change is very important. I don't want to make change wrong. It just requires this wrong-right thing, whereas transformation is about completion and freedom. When you have a transformation, it's often a revelation. It's often a realization. It's often a step into another level of consciousness that never goes back. Change goes, you know, first we're conservative and then we're liberal, or this is wrong and this is right. It's pro-choice, it's pro-life, you know, all of those things. But even in our own life, Should I go to this movie or should I go to that movie? I wanted to go to this restaurant. Why are we going to that restaurant? All of those kinds of things create a lot of noise in our lives, actually. But when we have a transformation, it's a revelation. Everything falls into place. The whole thing makes sense. The past is not something we're trying to get away from. We're grateful for it. It has led us to this moment of revelation. And transformation, and we stand on the shoulders of what came before rather than there's something wrong with it. It's also got an evolutionary quality to it. You realize that out of that, the death of your mother, perhaps in my case, the death of my father when I was quite young, a lot that I committed to in my life comes out of the deep grief that I went through when my father died that transformed my life from being all about the outer life and being a popular kid because I was in high school 8th grade when he died, to realizing that I had a very deep inner life and that that was really where I was rooted. So I had a complete transformation on my father's death. It was still sad. I still grieved. I would love to have my father back, but I had a transformation and it was a change. That's really the way to look at those two words, at least in my view.

So one of the reasons why I bought this book, Living Deeply, because it is all about transformation, because, and I tend to get in my head a lot. And so I'm thinking like, I want to transform, so I'm going to read a book about transformation. Well, obviously that's not how it happens. So you talk about the death of your father. I believe like on your 14th birthday he had passed away, which was in hindsight transformational. You talk about the S Training, which is transformational. You talk about meeting Bucky Fuller, which is transformational. There's 4 more transformations I think that happen in your life that lead to 4 more big commitments that you make in your life. So Do we have to have some big life moment that happens before we experience transformation? How should we think about that? And maybe let's get this to money. And I think this is a good way to segue into the Soul of Money. And in terms of, can you make a transformation happen? Do we let it happen? How does that work?

I don't think there's a formula for it, so I'm not going to be able to say A, B, C, but I do think it has a lot to do with paying attention and having an open heart and open mind and knowing that transformation can happen at any moment. It happens out of time. It's, you know, when you have a revelation, it's not something you can pin down and say, oh, first I did this, then I did this, then I did this. Now, looking back, sometimes we can do that, but it actually really is kind of a false description of what happened. I think transformation is a new insight. It's a new way of seeing. It often comes from creating a new context. The pandemic, I'm going to use that as an example. So the pandemic has been very, very, very challenging. Obviously, people have died, you know, a million people died in the United States, I think some horrible number. I mean, way, way, way more than anybody would want. And worldwide, you know, people suffered and it touched everybody everywhere in ways that was just tragic, especially people who were marginalized. And when you think about the businesses that went under, it was just a very, very difficult challenge. I know a lot of us now that the pandemic is not so in our face, it's still around, but we're now starting to make sense of it. We're now starting to resee it. We're now starting to see what it taught us. We're now starting to recontextualize it. Let me put it that way. So that we can understand the gift, the teachings, the learnings, the opportunity that it gave us. And there's a wonderful friend of mine named Paul Hawken. He's an author and he's an ecologist. He's just brilliant. He does a lot of work with the climate crisis, of course. And he says, perhaps the climate crisis is not happening to us. We're not the victims of it. Perhaps it's happening for us. Perhaps it's happening for us. Perhaps what we needed and what we really need now is feedback from the Earth, from the Mother. Strong, uncompromising feedback to shift the trajectory of the way we're living. Perhaps the pandemic was part of major feedback from the Mother. The pandemic itself, everything, virus, everything comes from the Earth. You, me, your microphone, the computer we're looking at now, You and I, everything ultimately comes from the Earth, as did the virus. So that thought that perhaps it's not happening to us, perhaps it's happening for us, because we all know, the people listening to this program all know that we're on a trajectory that is unsustainable. It can't last. We can't have infinite growth forever on a finite planet. We all know that. We know that in our heart of hearts, but we don't know how to stop. We needed a disruption. We need feedback. We need something more powerful than us. The indigenous people that I work with say we've been yearning, waiting in a primordial way in the human species. We've been waiting for something sacred and powerful enough to disrupt the way we're living, which we couldn't do on our own at a level that we need to. In order to have a sustainable future for all forms of life. So the indigenous people call the pandemic not a punishment, but an ally in helping us rethink who we are. And I call the pandemic pregnancy, morning sickness actually, for pregnant species, human beings that are finding ways to evolve and actually be reborn. In a new way that's consistent with a you and me world, a world of enough resources for everybody to make it rather than a you or me world. So all of that I just said is a conversation. The transformation comes in the conversation, changing the context from being a victim of the pandemic or a victim of climate crisis to seeing it as a teaching, an ally, a message, a learning, a powerful disruption that in many ways we kind of were praying for without knowing it. That's a transformational way to look at all that. So you can have a transformation in the shift of a conversation from happening to us to happening for us. And that's a one-word change. But if you can think about it, it shifts the way you relate to something, and that's transformational. It doesn't insult or make wrong. It completes the picture and something that was partial becomes whole. So transformation can come from anything, a conversation, a moment, a realization. It can come from standing next to a tree and having an insight, probably coming from the tree and realizing, I think that came from the tree. And then suddenly you have a new relationship with trees for the rest of your life. So transformation is available at every moment of every time. You don't have to have your father die. You don't have to listen to Buckminster Fuller. You don't have to go to a course. You can have it out of this conversation right now.

Yeah. So pay attention and reframe from instead of, or this is happening to me, to is this happening for me? So again, we're not going to put this into a formula, but just a couple of things to think about. I think two very insightful things that you just shared there. So I appreciate that. I think that's a great way to really segue into The Soul of Money. And I want to touch on these three toxic money myths that you talk about in the book. And I'm going to just briefly say what they are, and then I want to go through each one of them individually. So the first toxic myth is there's not enough. The second is more is better. And the third is, that's just the way it is and there's nothing we can do about it. So let's start with that first one. There's not enough. What do you mean by that? And how should we think about that?

Well, first of all, I wanted to say this is an unconscious, unexamined mindset that I'm talking about here. And it's unconscious and unexamined. So it's a way of seeing. It's almost before deliberation. It's a place we come from rather than what we see. So there are places where there's not enough food. That's real. There's places where there aren't enough jobs. There's people who don't have enough water. All of that is real. I'm very intimately familiar with that, having worked on hunger and poverty. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a mindset. So I want to distinguish it, a mindset that's primarily in the affluent world, actually. When we have a belief that there's not enough and an unconscious, unexamined belief that we look out in the world and like we wake up in the morning, I didn't get enough sleep. We look at the clock, I don't have enough time. We go to our first meeting, we didn't get enough done. There's a, there's not enough, it's not enough, there's not enough, we don't have enough, this is not enough, there's not enough market share, there's not enough this, there's not enough that, there's none of this, there's none of that is probably the song we sing more than any song, you know, and then we fill in the blank. There's not enough blank. There's not enough square feet in our house blank. There's not enough storage blank. There's not enough this, there's not enough. The blank is storage, not feet in our house, or market share, or money, or whatever it is. The there's not enough mentality is a way of seeing the world where you're constantly seeing lack because you come from that frame. It's a very embedded belief system in the consumer culture. It's the water we swim in. I mean, we live in a consumer culture all the time. So there's this misunderstanding, I think, a lie that we think there's not enough to go around and someone, someone's always going to be left out. And if you unconsciously believe that, then that gives you almost unholy permission to accumulate way, way, way, way, way, way more than you need to make sure you and yours are not left out. Because if there's not enough to go around and someone somewhere is always going to be left out, and if you unconsciously believe that, then you'll even accumulate at their expense, knowing that someday when you have way, way, way more than you need, you'll help them. And that's in your mind. But first you have to make sure that you and yours, whoever you consider that to be, are completely and totally safe from ever being left out. And that mentality immediately creates an us and a them. It immediately creates huge overconsumption, huge fear that we have to just have more and more and more all the time. And it comes from a space and a place in the heart that doesn't include everybody, that actually leaves people out. It's our political view. It's, you know, we would go to a country like Iraq or Afghanistan and bomb the heck out of people because we need more oil, when in fact It's a mindset. There's not enough to go around. Someone's going to be left out and make sure it's not us, the Americans. So we'll do anything anywhere in the world to make sure we get more than we need, even at the expense of people living in Nigeria or at the expense of people living in Ecuador, places where I've worked, where I've seen. We go in and we extract to get way more than we need and leave the people with nothing. That's unconscionable, but it comes from a mindset. It's unconscious, it's unexamined, and it creates behaviors that are inconsistent with our humanity. Humanity. And I even say the little children's game of musical chairs teaches you that right away. There's not enough chairs. You gotta get one. And as there are fewer and fewer and fewer chairs, the little kids start knocking each other and being almost violent to be the one that wins and everybody else is left out, which is kind of a training program for the world we live in. Winner takes all. That's a mindset I'm talking about. And I say it's a lie, a false mindset, and it's inconsistent with our humanity and inconsistent with the world we want.

So you talk a little bit about the idea of scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset, but then you talk about sufficiency and you're making a distinction there. And I Think that ties into this myth that there's not enough. What do you mean when you write about sufficiency?

Well, first of all, let me just say that there's not enough mentality creates a more is better, more, more, more, more, more, more set of behaviors that has us, you know, I like to point out the more is better culture that we swim in, more of anything is better. We buy stuff we already have over and over and over and over again. We have way more stuff than we need. Even people living in poverty are often, you know, they have an old refrigerator in the back and an old washing machine on the lawn and, you know, 3 old cars. All kinds of stuff. The more is better mentality. When you think about, we have all these homeless people here in San Francisco where I live. We're not building houses for them. We're building houses for the stuff we cannot fit in the houses we already have. And it's called storage. Storage is a huge industry in the United States. Huge, growing like mad because we have so much stuff. We don't know what to do with it. So more is better is like a mania. It's like a frantic thing to fill the emptiness of there's not enough, it's not enough, there's not enough, which starts to become I am not enough, a deficit relationship with ourselves. So I just wanted to say that before I go on to sufficiency, that there's not enough mindset, it's a mindset, starts to get into the very fabric of who we are. And we're then I'm not enough. And we live in a deficit relationship with ourselves and with the world. So there's not enough, more is better. And that's just the way that it is, which holds that whole mindset in place. So we don't do anything about it is the kind of architecture of what I call the lie of scarcity. So you're asking me now to talk about sufficiency, which I call the radical surprising truth, the radical surprising truth, sufficiency. And sufficiency is not halfway between more than you need and not enough, although it sounds like it is. It's actually a way of being. You and I are sufficient exactly the way we are. Sufficiency is not an amount. It's a way of being in the world. It's related to abundance, but it's different. It's knowing that we are being met by the universe with exactly what we need. It might be a bankruptcy. It might be a divorce. It might be a climate crisis. It's not always good. But that there is a trust, there's a kind of deep calm in knowing that we have and we receive exactly, exactly precisely what we need. There's a principle that I'd like to say. So this is kind of the pinnacle of this thinking, or let's say the point is if we let go, if you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, which is what we're scrambling to get more of. It frees up all the energy tied up in that chase, that wild chase, to turn and pay attention to what you already have. And when you pay attention to what you already have, when you nourish what you already have, when you love what you already have, and when you share what you already have and make a difference with it, it expands before your very eyes. Let me say that one more time. If you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, which is what we're brainwashed to want more of, it frees up oceans of energy tied up in that chase to turn and pay attention to what you have. When you pay attention to what you have, when you nourish what you have, when you make a difference with what you have, when you share what you have, it expands. So a shorter way to say all that is what you appreciate appreciates. And this thing about sufficiency and abundance, I say that true abundance or true prosperity comes from making a difference with what you already have rather than filling the hole that comes from a mindset of lack. If you're coming from lack and scarcity, when you get more, it, you know, eases the pain a little bit, but then you arrive at lack again very shortly after that, and you want more again, and then you get more, and then you arrive shortly after that again with, well, I need a little more. It's an endless cycle. But if you are living in the context of sufficiency, you're not trying to fill an empty hole. You are appreciating what you already have and expanding it by sharing it, making a difference with it, nourishing it, loving it, honoring it, relating to it with nobility and dignity. And that's what has it expand naturally. And that's the source, I think, of true abundance, true prosperity. And it includes sharing it. It includes sharing it. You know, it's coming up to the holidays. Think about Ebenezer Scrooge, you know, having all that gold but being miserable until he shared it. Then he experienced his prosperity. But until he did, no prosperity. So we prosper out of sharing, out of collaborating, out of making a difference with what we have and knowing that it is not only enough, but it's meant if we're blessed We're meant to bless. If we have exactly what we need, then we know we're sufficient. And from there we can contribute, we can make a difference, we can serve, we can walk in the world in a way that everybody— we're connected to everybody instead of separated from them, trying to get as much as we can to keep ourselves safe.

So John Templeton, one of the greatest investors of all time, he was asked one time, what was the greatest investment he ever made? And his answer, I think, surprised a lot of people because he said tithing. And he said, the more I gave away, the more that came back to me. And I think to some extent, that's what you're talking about here. He didn't have that scarcity mindset or perhaps even an abundant mindset. He had a level of consciousness. And I think this is what makes what you're talking about difficult for a lot of people, because it takes a certain level of consciousness to have the way of being that you're talking about where I don't feel like, you know, more is better necessarily, or I don't feel like, you know, there's not enough, you know, it's just right. So how do we, I wanna say, put this in practice from the standpoint of, again, a lot of people listening to this, they have clients that are worth many millions of dollars. All of us have some level of quirkiness in terms of our relationship with money, how do we get off of this treadmill, this rat race where we want the bigger home, we want the bigger jet, we want the fancier vacation, and put it in this way of being that you're talking about here? Again, I know it's not a step-by-step kind of thing, but is there any sort of exclamation point to wrap all this together from a practical standpoint Transformation, we've talked about. We've talked about change. We've talked about living a committed life. We've talked about these 3 toxic myths. We've talked about mindset. Is there a way to wrap all these together?

Well, the kind of key practice or tool that I think is probably the best answer to your question is gratitude and living in gratefulness. And the word gratefulness I want to distinguish it from Thanksgiving and thanks. I have a teacher now. He's in his 90s, Brother David Stendahl-Rost. He's a Benedictine monk and he teaches gratefulness. He has a website called Gratefulness. And I'm going to give you this metaphor because I think this might be helpful for people. So it's not that you shouldn't make more money for your company. It's not that you shouldn't have, you know, if you really need a jet, to be effective in your company, great. Where we get caught is more, more, more, more, more. It's like endless. But when we're grateful for what we have, we can really enjoy it. We can really revel in it. We can share it with people. It can be of use to us and to others. It can be a way that we walk in the world so that everybody benefits from our presence.. And that is what satisfies and fulfills a human life. So the metaphor I'm going to use here is, uh, once Brother David and I were in a conversation and I asked him, what's the difference between gratitude and gratefulness? And he said this beautiful thing. He said, gratitude has two great branches. One is gratefulness. The other is Thanksgiving. Gratefulness is the experience of life when the bowl of life is so full that it's almost overflowing, but not quite. It's so full that it's bowed at the top, but not yet dribbling over the edges. If you can imagine the bowl of life being full, but not dribbling over the edges quite yet. And that's, he said, the experience of the great fullness of life, the great fullness of life. You're one with God if you have a belief in God, you're one with the universe if that's what you believe in, you're one with all things and all people. You're— it's all one. And that's so fulfilling that the bowl of life starts to overflow and become like a fountain. And so that puts you in the other branch of gratitude called Thanksgiving. When you're in the branch of gratitude called Thanksgiving, the bowl of life is overflowing. And that's when you are so thrilled to discover that there's an other, because all you wanna do is give. Serve, contribute, share this amazing bounty that you have. And that's so fulfilling. It puts you back in the other branch of gratitude called gratefulness. And the bowl of life is so full, it's almost overflowing, et cetera. So one can live their life in the two branches of gratitude. Gratefulness, the recognition, the appreciation of what is so beautiful about life. And when you do that, the bowl of life begins to overflow. What you appreciate appreciates, and that creates this overflowing fountain of what I'll call abundance. So gratefulness is the experience of sufficiency and the deep appreciation of being met by the universe with what you need. And then it turns into Thanksgiving, which is the experience of true abundance. From the great fullness of life. And when you're in true abundance, all you, when it's really authentic abundance, not abundance coming from lack or scarcity or accumulation, it's overflowing and you want to share it with everybody everywhere. That's just the instinct. So I'm saying, so the shorter answer to your question is that gratitude is absolutely transformational to Have a gratitude practice to wake up in the morning, no matter when you went to bed, and realize, I'm so grateful for the sweet territory of sleep, for my 3 hours, for that rest. I'm grateful waking up in the morning and knowing I'm grateful that I have this time. Maybe it's short, but I can do it to get myself together and get to that first meeting. Grateful for the technology you and I are using. Grateful for the people that work with us. Constant gratefulness, appreciation, looking for the beauty in each person, looking for the beauty in each moment and speaking about it, acknowledging it, celebrating it, living a life of gratitude, or it's called with Brother David's work, he calls it grateful living, great full living. And grateful living has practices like going to bed at night and not looking at all the stuff that went wrong or all the stuff you didn't get done. It's like dribbling over to tomorrow. But before you go to sleep, all that you accomplished, all the gifts that came with the day, looking all the way back to morning. What I'm talking about is a conversation. I'll just say the simplest way to talk about what I'm talking about is to say that I think we don't live in our lives as much as we think. I think we don't live in our companies as much as we think. I think we don't live in the world, our communities, our relationships as much as we think. I think we live in the conversation we have about our lives. I think we live in the conversation we have about our business. I think we live in the conversation we have about the economy. We live in the conversation we have about the world. We live in the conversation we have about our relationships. And we may not be able to change the economy. We may not be able to change our company all overnight. But we have absolute omnipotence over the conversation we have about our company, about the economy, about our lives. And that conversation really governs how we act, what we feel, what we experience, and the way we walk in the world. So I'm suggesting that the levers and dials of life are in the conversation you choose to have. And I'm not talking about Pollyanna thinking. I'm talking about having conversations that empower. They aren't always positive. Sometimes you have to dig in and see, oh my God, we made a real mistake on our balance sheet. We now need to own that. We now need to let people know. We now need to correct that mistake, apologize, and know that there's something that slipped through the cracks. There's a lot to learn from that. And that was a big mistake. The conversation is one of ownership, of responsibility, of learning, of developing, of evolving, of growing from the recognition and consciousness that comes with living a life of meaning and being true to yourself and authenticity. So gratitude, that's the big message. Gratitude and appreciation and living in that conversation as much as you can.

Authentically, authentically. Lynne, thank you. This has been remarkable, and I'm so appreciative of the conversation today. And your life is remarkable. And we didn't really get through all 5 of the big commitments that you're engaged in, but it's just truly a blessing to have you in the world and the impact that you're making. So thank you for that. And, and as we wrap up here, what's the best way for folks to connect with you? I know you've got some programs through the The Soul of Money Institute. You've got the new book coming out here as well. So what's the best way for folks to connect?

Well, I have a website called soulofmoney.org. Soul of Money is the name of the book that I wrote that really addresses how to have a healthy relationship with money. And I end up, you know, that book is, as you said, was impactful for you. I'm working now with a lot of our, with several of our global billionaire families. So, you know, I don't want people to be afraid of, working with me because then they won't have any money. No, it's the opposite. And then I'm also, I've just written a book called Living a Committed Life with a foreword by Van Jones and, um, Living a Committed Life really talks about all the distinctions that come from living in a committed way, a committed to having your business flourish, a commitment to having your business make a difference, a commitment to your employees, a commitment to being of service in whatever it is that you've chosen to do. And having a commitment larger than your own life that guides your life and frees you into being the kind of human being you want to be. So Soul of Money, Living a Committed Life are the two books. Everything's available, including our coaching programs and our workshops about money, our fundraising trainings, all the stuff we do on soulofmoney.org.

Excellent. Well, and I can't recommend it enough, all the great work that you've done and the two books that you have here. So just tremendous. So again, Lynne, thank you very much for being on our show today.

Thank you so much for having me.

I've been inspired by Lynne's work for many years, and as I talked to her today, it was so clear how each of us has the ability to transform our lives. And while there's no formula for life transformation, two things we can all do are pay more attention to what's going on around us and then making the shift from looking at things happening to you to reframing it as things happening for you. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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