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A TALE OF TWO (MONEY) PATHS
Many children have big dreams of one day making the world a better place. I wasn’t one of them. Not that I didn’t want to help people. I did. But more important to me were all the ways I was going to be rich. I would think about it incessantly—the clothes I’d buy, the homes I’d own, the places I’d travel, the shoes I’d wear.
My dreams were filled with the life my parents could not provide but I badly wanted. The more struggles my family had with money and the more they fought about it, the bigger the void inside me grew and the more determined I became to earn money—lots of it. Putting money as my North Star made life simple: if I couldn’t have what I wanted when I was young, all I had to do was figure out how to get it later in life. It would fill me up and give me the satisfaction I didn’t think I could get any other way.
By the age of thirty-five, I had achieved many of the dreams I’d set out for myself, and by many people’s standards I was wealthy. But the process of getting there—all the rationalizations for doing what I did to get the money—meant I had become really good at convincing myself that the end justifies the means, that as long as I got what I wanted, nothing else mattered.
THE PURSUIT OF MONEY
Chasing money, success, and fame is the epitome of the American dream. Reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; The Richest Man in Babylon; and Think and Grow Rich filled my mind with the idea that anyone could do it. You just had to learn the game. The deeper I went, the more I could feel myself compromising.
Like a drug addict who needed another and yet another fix, I believed that money was the thing that satiated me better than anything else. Getting rich was my siren song pulling me toward the rocks of Homer’s Odyssey. God help anything or anyone that got in the way of what I wanted. I was a woman on a mission. Rather than being pulled toward my death, I was being drawn toward my own emotional bankruptcy.
Earning money became all-consuming, requiring a lot of work, planning, and strategizing. I learned quickly that there were no shortcuts. The more I wanted, the harder I had to work to get it. Working for someone else left me putting in longer hours, taking on bigger projects, and assuming greater responsibility. My evenings became shorter and my weekends revolved around chores.
Perhaps you can relate?
If you’re like I was, you find that chasing money leaves you overlooking the true meaning of life. Depending on what you do for a living, this could mean feeling forced to compete and connive to get ahead, or fear of being passed over for a promotion or pay raise. If you’re self-employed, you may find yourself tempted to deceive to get the sale, out of fear of not earning enough to stay afloat. Other than those proverbial few who make success look easy, many find themselves feeling like they need to do whatever it takes to make money, no matter its toll.
At some point, you may ask yourself, “Is any of it worth it?” For some, the answer will be no, and they’ll make changes. But what if you can’t say no? What if you can’t back away? Perhaps your finances don’t allow it, others depend on you for their livelihoods, or you’re already so addicted to the money game, you can’t break free.
MONEY AND FEELINGS
Money is so powerful that it can blind you to the realization that you have a choice about how you live your life. On one hand, it makes sense you want to have more money, because it can be incredibly satisfying and brings feelings of euphoria and enjoyment. On the other hand, life can become so complicated and expensive that no matter how hard you work, you never feel like you’re getting ahead, nor do you ever feel like you’ve “arrived.”
Before the age of thirty-three, my main interest was climbing to the top of the corporate ladder. With this goal in mind, I became a business development executive at a large bank, where I managed relationships with a handful of the largest companies in the world. I was driven, logical, strategic, and not the least bit interested in my own emotional health.
My goals for success overshadowed everything, including my relationships, even with my three-year-old daughter and my husband. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of my ambition, and every decision revolved around getting ahead. I felt pride in my ability to stay focused and achieve my goals. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was anything but ideal.
Until one day turned everything upside down.
I was in the middle of negotiating one of the biggest deals of my career. Arriving home after a particularly long day, I found my mother and grandmother waiting for me. They asked me to sit down on the couch and proceeded to tell me that my estranged father had been brutally murdered. The shock of hearing how he’d been killed sent me into an emotional tailspin. Although my father had tried to be a good one, his many years of drug abuse combined with an inability to control his anger had caused my family to push him away. Now I was hearing how he’d been killed in a horrific manner, and all of a sudden my life no longer seemed to make sense.
After my father’s death, all I could think about was how sorry I felt for him. His entire family, including his mother, had disowned him, and then he was killed in a terrifying way. Strangely enough, I couldn’t stop thinking I was in some way responsible. The guilt and sadness consumed me.
As I fell deeper into my sorrow and grief, I began to untangle my life and question everything. Who was I? Why I was here? Why was I so tormented by negative self-talk? And what could I do to help myself feel better?
The more questions I asked, the more I realized I had absolutely nothing to offer myself, nor did I know anyone who could help me. I felt so alone I even weighed the point of my life and wondered if it was worth continuing. Feeling helpless was something I had resisted my entire life, and yet now it was staring down at me and I had no choice but to surrender into the abyss of unknowing. It was absolutely dreadful.
THE HEALING PATH
Up to this point, I was what you would call a “do-it-yourselfer” with just about everything. I’d never seen a therapist. Instead, I relied on talk therapy with friends. I’d mostly avoided religion and questioned anything that had to do with the idea of a father figure in the sky that deemed you a sinner. I figured that I already did a great job at talking down to myself and had plenty of naysayers who challenged me on a regular basis, so there was no need to invite someone else in, including the idea of a God who might judge me and see how messed up I was. This left me in a pickle when it came to figuring out how I was going to answer all these questions that were bubbling up inside.
Shortly after my father died I was on lunch break in downtown San Francisco when I walked into Stacey’s Bookstore on Market Street hell-bent on finding something to help me understand my father’s death. I left the store that day with not one, but eleven books on death, dying, and meditation, thus ushering in a new phase of my life that continues to this day. Here, I began a healing process that brought me into the depths of my soul, eventually leading me back to the connection between my life and my money story.
IS MONEY YOUR TOOL OR YOUR MASTER?
After my father’s death, I became more and more disenchanted with my corporate career and kept changing jobs in search of a place that fed my soul and my wallet. I transitioned from business development to marketing and then to mortgage banking and underwriting, eventually settling into the role of financial advisor.
As I moved through the different jobs, I noticed a stark divide among people and the various ways they reacted to money. Some of my clients and friends treated money as a tool; they didn’t seem to have strong feelings about it one way or the other, and no matter what happened with money, they seemed to take everything in stride. Often, they were multimillionaires who not only understood how money works but had mastered their relationship with it.
The majority of people, however, were those who either grasped at their money tightly or avoided it altogether. They handled it as if it were their master and used it as a barometer to decide if life was working out or not. If their financial affairs didn’t go as planned, they were angry, frustrated, and focused on finding who was at fault. If things were going well, they took it for granted. Although I hated to admit it, this group of people behaved just like me.
After watching how people’s attitudes affected their experiences with money, a few questions began to stick out in my mind: “Why do so many of us feel like money is in greater control of our lives than we are?” and “Why do we feel the need to sacrifice, badger, and compromise ourselves in order to get money?”
Conversations with my clients confirmed that people who treated money like it was a tool often felt a sense of peace, regardless of how much they had. Working with these people as their mortgage banker and, later, as their financial advisor, I saw how common it was for things to go their way. And even if problems arose, their calm attitudes led them to quickly find resolutions. They had restraint when it came to facing challenges and didn’t let their lives get turned upside down when things didn’t work out as planned.
In stark contrast were those who felt controlled by their money. In this case their attitudes about and experiences with money were entirely different. Whatever could go wrong would go wrong. Many times these were the hardest clients to work with because, when challenges arose, I’d find myself on the receiving end of their anger. It was like their feelings created a ripple of energy that magnetically attracted further chaos and pandemonium, and I couldn’t help but get caught in the fray.
It was only when I asked my clients how they felt about money that I began to unearth the vast world that was playing out under the surface. Within minutes of sharing, my clients would reveal intense stories of the past that elicited fear, sorrow, resentment, regret, shame, and guilt. The more they revealed, the more clear it became how repressed their memories were and how much emotion was hidden inside. Never before had someone asked them such personal questions about their relationship with money. The emotional floodgates opened beyond our wildest imaginations.
My clients, almost in unison, would share comments like, “I’ve never thought about this before,” “I’ve never told anyone about this,” or “I can’t believe that I wasn’t more aware of myself and my money.” Many times, my clients got so emotional that they’d become too self-conscious to want to talk again. I would later learn that just by talking with me about money, they each experienced a personal awakening. From there, nearly everyone started making changes: one left her husband, another quit his job, another bought a house, and yet another started a side business. The awareness of how they felt about money caused them to take stock of their lives and make life altering changes accordingly.
Listening to my clients’ stories brought me full circle to my own money story and the many ways I continually made choices from a place of scarcity. I noticed how deeply I believed that only by achieving wealth would I ever feel safe, and that gave me license to repeatedly sacrifice myself in pursuit of it.
Research conducted by Sendhil Mullainathan and behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir, authors of the book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives, found that, “Scarcity captures the mind.… Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think.”1 They also found that scarcity causes people to become myopic and single-mindedly focused on the problems at hand rather than seeking to find helpful solutions. Once your focus becomes “tunneled,” you become less likely to consider all of your options, including those that would provide you with a solid resolution. This causes us to become blind to our own potential as human beings. Research into such ideas, combined with my own experiences, proves that whenever scarcity is present, whatever we believe to be true for ourselves cannot help but become our reality.
This is what happened for me. Watching my parents fight about money constantly served as a reminder that surely there was never enough to go around. Looking back, I can see how my childhood was defined by a scarcity mindset, even though I was great at earning, saving, and even investing it from a young age.
I’ll never know if it was this mindset that caused me to beg my mom to take me to the bank and get a checking account by the time I was ten, or the fact that I lied about my age on a credit card application at JCPenney when I was twelve. What I do know is that my parents watched me with curiosity as I gradually began to have bigger savings accounts than they did.
Strangely enough, no matter how much money I saved, I thought about it all the time. This sense of perpetual fear and worry was my mainstay. It didn’t help that I was also struggling with undiagnosed depression and suicidal thoughts starting at about the time of puberty. All of this combined together caused me to decide early on that if only I could become a millionaire, everything in my life would be better.
Even after becoming a millionaire many years later, I was still consumed by wanting to feel financially safe. My fears were so strong that I did not believe it was possible for me to leave my lucrative financial advising practice to follow my passion of helping people deal with their money fears. It didn’t matter that my husband and I had saved up enough money to retire early; I couldn’t get up the nerve to quit my job. But then something happened that changed everything.
THE PATH FINDS ME
In December of 2013 I was sitting in my doctor’s office among several other patients. Not accustomed to waiting, a flash of irritation crossed my mind as I checked the time on my phone once more. How much longer would I have to wait?
I glanced up to see a dark-haired man in his midfifties walking briskly into the waiting room. Addressing everyone in the room in a soft and compassionate tone, he said, “You might want to leave now.” His warning sounded definite and firm, yet mild-mannered enough that hardly anyone paid attention to him.
Before I could register what he was doing, he pulled a large gun out from under his vest and started to move quickly toward the offices beyond the waiting room.
The receptionist shouted at him: “Sir! Sir, where are you going? Sir, you can’t go back there. Sir!” She stood up to get his attention, but he ignored her. Then she saw his gun. “Everyone out!” she shouted, with no thought for her own safety, only ours. “He has a gun! He has a gun! Get out of here!”
At that, everyone in the waiting room jumped to their feet and rushed to the elevators. My heart was racing and a burst of wild energy coursed through me; a jumble of thoughts swirled through my head. One part of me was thinking, “He’s serious! He’s going to kill someone!” while another part thought, “He isn’t going to do anything bad.”
When I reached the elevator, I stopped to take a breath. The alarm had spread, and people were running in all directions. Time slowed down, the way it so often does during calamities, and I took a second to consider where to go.
Just then, the elevator door opened in front of me. I hastened inside with a few other people. Someone punched the button for the ground floor, and we all took a deep breath. Just as the elevator doors were closing, a hand stopped them from shutting. Everyone froze. If the hand belonged to someone like us, we could be saving that person’s life. If it belonged to the shooter, we were not coming out of the elevator alive. A woman next to me started praying out loud, and then another person joined her. I was surrounded by a melody of prayers as a few more nurses scurried in and the doors finally shut.
I’ve read that upon facing extreme terror or imminent death, human beings can go through an out-of-body experience.2 I think this is what happened, because one moment, my eyes were glued to the elevator doors, and in the next, my life flashed before me. I thought about my family, realizing that I might not see them again.
Yet I also realized that if I were to make it through this alive, things were going to change. In that moment, I felt just how much I wasn’t living; I felt how much my fears had been holding me back.
Experiencing such intense emotions in that elevator stripped me of all feeling for just long enough to notice that I was not my fear. I was much more than my fear, and all my internal stories of not being good enough, not being safe enough, not being enough were glaring back at me in that moment. I could sense the ridiculousness of how I’d been living. I closed my eyes and thought, “It can’t be over yet! I’m not done yet! I’m here to live fully; I get it! God, please give me another chance. Please…”
AFTERMATH
My incredible, loving, and supportive doctor lost his life that day. His kids lost their father, and his wife lost her amazing husband. Two other people were shot, and the gunman took his own life at the scene. I grieved for everyone who was affected by this and other violent deaths that have become far too common in our world.
The shooting made me see more than anything just how precious life is and how fortunate we are to be alive. Interestingly enough, research shows that when people experience high levels of trauma, the reticular activation system, which is responsible for wakefulness and sleep-wake transitions in the brain, releases noradrenaline.3 This stress hormone is part of the so-called fight-or-flight response that promotes alertness and vigilance. It also enhances the formation and retrieval of memory, which could explain the feelings I had of watching my life flash before me in the elevator. That reaction alone brought hyperawareness to the fact that I could no longer allow money to dictate my life. It also made it clear that I could no longer afford to hide behind my fears.
Within a few months of the shooting I left my financial advisor job to start my company, WealthClinic. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Matrix, you’ll understand that it was as if I’d taken the red pill. The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are metaphors for the choices between the path toward knowledge, freedom, and the brutal truths of reality (red pill); or the path to security, happiness, and blissful ignorance of illusion (blue pill). In choosing the red pill, we’ve awakened to see the world as it really is and are no longer willing to believe in our own lack as human beings. Becoming our fullest expression of ourselves while acknowledging and learning to love our fears and failures means we get to enjoy life on our terms.
From this vantage point, nothing compares to the joy you feel when you spring out of bed every morning excited to see what is going to unfold. The joy is limitless. From this place of understanding, it becomes easier to see just how terrible money can be when you’ve made it your “why,” and how awesome it is when money becomes one of your many “hows.”
True, lasting prosperity is an unknown frontier in our compulsive society, as much as it’s a wide-open doorway into personal liberation. The Mindful Millionaire methodology can become a trusted guide for entry and continual exploration into these uncharted territories. Thank you for giving yourself this gift.
Copyright © 2020 by Leisa Peterson
