Money and Spirituality Archives

Financial Self-Sabotage Exposed …

When we start a business, we tend to arm ourselves with information – with modalities, with webinars, training programs and events.  This information-gathering often takes up a lot of our precious time … time that we could spend DOING and implementing, rather than learning.

Our rationalization?  We are preparing ourselves for success.

The truth?  We’re trying to stay safe.

The mind and ego has an overwhelming need for knowledge before venturing into the big, scary unknown that is our own business.  After all, if we can just know the “right” way to make money then we’ll be safe.  If we know the “right” way to market ourselves and sell, then we’ll feel prepared, we’ll know what we’re doing.  We’ll be safe.

Of course, there is no “right” way.

But we sure try to find one … and this is exactly where we shoot ourselves in the foot.

We “try.”  We try a way of marketing ourselves, we try launching a product, we try running Facebook ads, we try selling our products and services.

The problem with trying is that it always carries at least a partial expectation of failure.  Sure, it makes our mind and ego far more comfortable.  If we try and fail, we can tell ourselves that at least we tried.  Failure won’t hurt as badly, won’t rock our world, will not shake our faith in the Universe and ourselves.

If we try and fail, we can try again and pat ourselves on the back for our willingness to try.  We can even congratulate ourselves on our perseverance, our determination, our commitment to our Soul Purpose.

The difference between TRYING and DOING is our willingness to risk.

When we DO, we put our hearts on the line.  We take all of our passion, our hopes, our dreams and risk being very, very wrong.  Doing feels like we’re putting our lives on the line.  That feeling may not be rational – after all, no-one has ever died by launching a website, or having a sales conversation.  But it sure feels like we are putting our naked heart on a silver platter for all the world to see, to criticize, to reject.

If your next business project doesn’t have the potential to break your heart, to devastate your self-esteem, to make you lose faith in all that you thought you knew … you’re not playing big enough.  You’re just trying.

Doing your purposeful work requires giant leaps of faith.

Trying is looking for the staircase that will lead us safely down the cliff and conveniently up the other side.

Take a look at your current business projects.  Look at your calendar.  What’s on your to-do list that has the potential to break your heart?  And what is on that list that is designed to minimize risk?

Leave your comment and share!

To your infinite abundance,
Andrrea Hess

What Rules Do You Live By?

Rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing.  We all have certain rules we live by – whether the rule is eating a healthy breakfast or starting the day with coffee, not doing business with our friends, sending out Christmas cards the day after Thanksgiving, or not bothering with Christmas cards at all … we all have rules we live by.

Some of these rules were created by us consciously, based on our own experience.

Unfortunately, most of the rules we live by are the ones we have unconsciously adopted from our environment – from our family, the school system, a favorite teacher, our industry, and the media.

There’s nothing wrong with any rule, consciously chosen or unconsciously adopted … unless, of course, the rule is in direct opposition to what we want to create!

If you have an unconscious rule that you can only make money when you work hard, for example, you will always limit your income … because there are limits to the amount of “hard” work you can tolerate.

If you have an unconscious rule about how much income is acceptable, possible, or even appropriate … then that’s the income level you’ll get stuck at.  Frequently, it’s the highest income level our parents ever achieved.

If you have an unconscious rule that you can only focus on love OR money, your income will suffer whenever you engage in a romantic relationship, but will go up when you’re single and focused on your business.

Because you unconsciously resonate to these rules, you attract situations that affirm them over and over again, thus strengthening the rule.

Of course, you may also have some fabulously helpful unconscious rules playing out in the background of your subconscious mind.  Maybe you expect help and support from others.  Maybe you expect to be smart enough to figure out anything.

Rules are actually a good thing, when they are not in conflict to what we want.  Rules allow us to manage a great deal of our lives on auto-pilot.  We don’t have to think about every little decision in every situation.  We say “please” and “thank you” automatically.  We brush our teeth every morning.  We drive our car without having to invest much thought into the process.

Of course, when our rules state the opposite of our Soul’s Divine self-expression and our conscious creative desire, we immediately experience conflict.  The conflict actually begins within us.  Vibrationally, our unconscious and conscious mind are in dissonance.  Conflicting vibrational qualities of thought may create a big mess, or cancel each other out completely.  The end result is that we can’t conceive of the thoughts that would become the actions that will create our desires.  We just go blank.  Externally, we manifest not much of anything at all.

Of course, the first step to repatterning the rules of our unconscious mind is to become aware of them.  It’s not hard to do, if we’re willing to look at the results we consistently create in our own lives.

Our rules are actually written, clear as day, in our circumstances.  Our rules are obvious within the areas in which we’re stuck, or unwilling to change, or have surrendered into tolerance.

But we MUST be willing to open our eyes and look!

What do you keep creating, over and over?

What’s not changing?

Blessings,
Andrrea

The WORST Question To Ask When You Are Stuck

There is a truly terrible, completely self-defeating question that we often ask ourselves when we are stuck.

And that question is “Why?”

This question can take a few different forms:

“Why am I stuck?”
“Why am I not taking action?”
“What’s in my way?”
“Why can’t I see my path clearly before me?”
“What’s stopping me from doing this?”

These questions inevitably focus us on THE PROBLEM.  And since, through the very nature of this question, we’ve told ourselves that there IS, indeed, a problem, our mind will now take it upon itself to go and find us the problem.

Even if there was no problem at all.

If you ask yourself “why” you’re stuck, then your mind is hard-wired to come up with a “reason” for the stuck-ness.  And because your mind is also very invested in being right, your reason for being stuck will sound extremely valid and important.

We might come up with issues from our childhood.
We might come up with past-life events that are blocking us today.
We might come up with problems in our relationships, our business, our health.

Whatever we come up with … we will invariably now address the problem, since it is obviously keeping us stuck.

The thing is … now we’re still stuck, but feeling productive because we’ve given ourselves a problem to solve.

In other words, we’ve given ourselves the best, most reasonable excuse in the world to stay exactly where we are.  We’ve given ourselves a problem to solve before we can move forward.  Convenient, right?

All because we asked ourselves “why.”

The real answer is actually always the same.

We’re stuck because we are not congruent to what we really want.  If we’re doing what we really want (vs. what we think we should want, or what we think we can have, or what we think would please others, etc.) we don’t have issues with stuckness or indecision or inaction.

What do you really want?  What do you want so badly that it will get you off the couch, out of your comfort zone, and into the unknown?

To your infinite abundance,
Andrrea Hess

If You Dream It, Can You REALLY Do It?

Our culture has become very attached to the idea that our dreams will come true, if we’re willing to work hard and pursue them.  But obviously not everyone is going to become the next Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Anthony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, or Oprah.

You may have heard that if you dream it, you can do it.

Then why does the pursuit of their dreams leave so many people struggling?  Is it just a matter or perseverance, of working harder, or putting in even more time, more effort?

I’ve frequently said that when our Soul inspires us with a desire, that this desire MUST be achievable.  Our Soul will NOT dangle an unattainable carrot in front of us!

But that doesn’t mean that all of our desires are attainable!  A great many of our desires have a very different origin, and they are not MEANT for us to attain.  They are most definitely of value … but not the way we think.

Many of our desires are not Soul-inspired at all.  Many of our desires are inspired by a deep egoic need, arising from old wounds held at the level of the subconscious.  Our desires may come from a need for recognition, a need for love, a need for acknowledgement, a need for security, a need to be deserving.

There IS value in these desires.  These desires don’t show us our Soul’s purpose or Divine self-expression.  Desires that arise from a wounded ego show us where we need to HEAL.

A desire that arises out of need can only reinforce that need.  A desire that comes from a wounded ego will forever have us chasing after that elusive SOMEthing that we, deep down, feel that we are lacking.  Of course, this process serves us.  Eventually, this need and lack within us becomes so reinforced that we MUST address it, and work on our self-healing.

Desire inspired by the Soul, on the other hand, is simply about our Soul wanting to experience itself.  Our Soul doesn’t want to be more than it is, or be different, or be special.  Our Soul already knows that it is complete and perfect.  Our Soul isn’t needy.  It is simply showing us what it would mean to be our Selves, what it would mean for our Divinity to be expressed into our humanity.

Serious problems arise when we take desire based on egoic need and wounding, and confuse them with our Soul Purpose.  If we’re lucky, we eventually figure out the difference … but often not until we’ve spent years of effort and money chasing our healing, and thinking we were trying to express our Divine Gifts.

BOTH paths are intertwined – doing our Soul Purpose is not possible without also engaging in our self-healing.  But the two paths can also become hopelessly muddy in their enmeshment.  We can end up so confused between these two types of desires that we stall our progress.  We don’t heal, and we don’t do our Purpose, and we experience nothing but lack.

Knowing the difference between which desire is inspired by the ego’s need for healing, and which desire is inspired by the Soul’s authentic self-expression is KEY to creating BOTH wholeness and abundance.

So join me for my new training on Wednesday, January 30th at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern called “Self-Healing On Your Path Into Purpose.”  You can register here.

To your infinite, Soul-inspired abundance,
Andrrea Hess

2013: Karmic Polarity

Well, we’re all still here.  There was no apocalypse, no fiery meteors showered the Earth, no cataclysmic events eradicated humanity.  My personal theory remains that the Mayans got tired of chiseling, and went about inventing the Margarita instead.

Can you imagine what would have happened if we had been absolutely certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that the world was going to end on a lovely Friday in December?

I doubt most of us would have shown up to work for the last six months.  We would have flocked to beaches and mountains and beautiful places on our planet, spent whatever money was in our savings accounts, and indulged in a lot of unhealthy food.  We would have surrounded ourselves with the people we truly want to be with, and we would have done only what we really wanted to do.

If the end of the world were guaranteed, our choices would have no consequences.  Free of the fear of what other people think, free of the responsibilities of paying our mortgage and our credit card bills, many of us would finally allow ourselves to do what is truly our Soul’s authentic self-expression.

Except, of course, our society would also have come to a screeching halt.  No-one would show up to work, which means our grocery stores would empty, restaurants would close, garbage would collect in the streets, and the rules of our society would disintegrate into chaos.

Karma keeps us from self-destruction.  But karma can also keep us in limitation.  It all depends on how you handle the system of karma.

We can make choices to avoid unwanted consequences.

We can make choices to create desired consequences.

Both sets of choices can look exactly the same from the outside – but the intent behind these choices is vastly different, and so the consequences are also vastly different.

We can choose to go to work every day because we don’t want to lose our home, because we don’t want our parents to think we’re a slacker, because we don’t want to disappoint our children or our spouse.

In our own business, we can make choices that keep us from losing clients, we can write so we don’t lose people from our list, we can water down our marketing message so that we don’t piss people off.

On the other hand, we can choose to go to work every day because we want to create the home of our dreams, because we feel fulfilled as we express our brilliance, because we want our children to live abundantly, because we want to support our spouse.

We can choose to market ourselves authentically in order to attract our ideal clients, we can choose to make offers and structure our business so that we have the most fun while we do our Soul’s purpose.

One set of choices creates a prison of our own making.

The other set of choices creates heaven on earth.

From the outside, they look exactly the same.

Imagine, for a moment, that you only have a few days left on this planet.  What would you immediately stop doing?  And why?

What choices in life are you currently making only because you fear negative consequences?  What about choices in your business?  What are you creating from fear?

What choices would you immediately start making if you only had a few days left in this human form?  What choices would you make in your business if you knew that you would not fail?

What would you create from love – love for your Soul’s self-expression within this human form?

Choices made from fear create more fear.  Choices made from love create more love.  The polarity between the two is becoming more and more apparent as we move into 2013.  And whether we create from fear or love – that is completely up to us!

Blessings,
Andrrea

 Page 1 of 11  1  2  3  4  5 » ...  Last »