Ep #69: Your Money Manifesto

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 69.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well hello there, how are you guys doing? I am so amazing. I just got back from a week of visiting with my family. And I know I talk about my family a lot, but I have been spending time with them and it’s so amazing.

So, something special is happening today. As this episode airs and it’s April 23^rd, it is my niece’s daughter’s birthday. So I’m going to shout-out happy fifth birthday, Lilly. I love you so much, sweet girl. I spent a week with Lilly and her younger brother when I was back in Iowa and I just can’t tell you how much I loved and enjoyed their precious little souls. They’re so sweet and amazing and I just love them so much. I can’t imagine how having my own grandchildren will feel someday – someday in the far future. I’m telling that to my son.

And, speaking of my son and grandchildren, actually, today is the 23^rd, it’s Lilly’s birthday, and tomorrow is my son’s 20^th birthday. So a shout-out to Alex, happy 20^th, Alex. I love you, bud, and I’m so, so proud of you. I can’t believe my child is two decades old. It seems so crazy. I feel like it was just a few years ago that we were renting a bounce house and making dinosaur cakes and filling up all the little gift bags for the guests, all the fun things.

So, now that he’s 20, we basically just send money. Can any of you other parents relate to that out there. Yeah, I get you, and I’m going to tell you, if you don’t have kids in college yet, the college years are no joke on the wallet, which is just one more reason for me to study this and my own thoughts about money and to do this work with you hand in hand very personally on a deep level. And I know that one of my clients – her name is Stacey, hi Stacey – Stacey has a daughter who also attends the same university as my son, so I know that she can personally relate to the wallet going empty due to college expenses.

Anyway, we are celebrating the spring birthdays in my household and giving lots of gratitude for all the children and the love and the joy and the abundance we have in our lives, and I know that each of you have amazing friends and family and that you too are grateful for your students and your staffs as well. Starting your day with gratitude and abundance for all the things you already have in your life is the way to create space for even more abundance.

And I’m telling you, guys, abundance is my word for 2019. I wake up every day and I seek out the abundance that’s in my life. I can’t believe what a difference it’s made. And this actually leads us into our topic for today. We’re going to create a money manifesto. And what’s fun about this topic is that you can do this at home and at work. So I especially invite you to do this for your school budget.

And it’s not something that we think to address as a school leader, but it is something that your staff and community will want to know and understand about you as a leader. Now, creating and sharing your money manifesto can help your staff see the vision that you have for your school, and it allows them to understand how you spend the site budget, but why, not only how, but why you chose to spend the way you did.

I think this is so cool as school leaders, if you can be vulnerable and really get deep about who you are, what your money beliefs are and why you believe them and what you feel is important and then you share that with your team, it’s going to align your conversations. And when you have to have budget conversations with your staff, they’ll know where you’re coming from. I wish I had known to do this when I was a school leader. I certainly did not at the time.

But as I’ve researched and learned more about clearing my money mindset and how I want to think about money, I feel like this will be such a powerful tool to use and to share with your staff. If you believe that you get to think whatever you want and that you choose how you want to think about anything, which is the empowerment of this podcast, then you are going to be ready to choose your money manifesto.

A manifesto is simply a declaration of your philosophy or your mindset around money. And today, we’re going to ask ourselves some thought-provoking questions that will clarify how we want to think and feel about money so that you can decide on your money manifesto and practice implementing it from this day forward.

Before I go further, let me interject something that I hope stirs up a fire within you to invest in your own personal development. I just heard my mentor coach talk about this concept and it literally blew my mind. I was so excited and so motivated and it released some old thoughts that I had been holding onto.

Ii couldn’t wait for my husband to get home and share this with him, it blew my mind that much. So I am going to share it with you. I added this into the podcast at the last minute because it was so powerful for me. I want you to think of this, guys. You can choose to say to yourself, I don’t think this topic is important or I don’t want to put this much energy into thinking about money. Money is not what’s most important. I don’t want to talk about money. Money is uncomfortable.

You don’t have to do this work and you might not want to do this work because you think it’s uncomfortable or you don’t see the value in spending your time on it. And that is totally up to you, but I want to strongly encourage you to consider that you have three resources available to you at all times.

You have your brain. You have time. And you have money.  I want you to think about that. You’ve got your brain, which is the most powerful tool on the planet. It created everything that ever has or will be. Then you have time. Time is that valuable resource that you have to make the most of because what you do with your time creates your results. And third, your money, your money is a powerful tool because it allows you to exchange resources for your kids, exchange value.

It allows you to get paid for you to do the things you want to do in your life. It allows you to make the money you want to make to send your kid to college or to send your grandchildren fun gifts. Those three resources are all in your capacity and in your reach. You have so much time in the day and running your school well depends on your ability to effectively manage your time.

The way you learn how to manage your time is to create, and create more time for yourself so you can do activities like this personal development exercise for example is to invest your time into your brain. Your brain is your most powerful tool on the planet, hands down.

You guys, think about this. It’s the reason that we go to school. It’s the reason we built schools. It’s the reason that you and I went into education, because we have seen the power of our mind. We’ve experienced what learning and developing and growing has done to our personal lives. I hear story after story of teachers or school leaders who are the first person in their family to go to college and earn a degree. And, by the way, I am one of those people.

So, of all the things we could have chosen to do with our time, our money, and our brain, and the way that we chose to make money, which is we chose to go into education, and certainly not because of the paycheck or the holiday breaks, but because we believe in the power of educating our brain.

There is nothing more I want for you than to see the power that comes with investing in your brain. And, using those other two resources, time and money, because they all work together, to become the person you want to be. The reason you’re listening to this is because you want to be more empowered in your professional and your personal life.

You can invest in your life all kinds of learning, think about this. Think about the ways you have invested in your learning, in your brain. You’ve read books. You’ve purchased books. Hopefully you’ve read them. You’ve taken classes. You’ve earned degrees. You have invested in all kinds of learning in your brain. You listen to podcasts, you watch documentaries, whatever it is that you do to learn, you did that because you believe in the power of knowing more information and having that power in your brain.

You can also invest your time into those same things. When you invest your money buying a book, you may or may not read the book. There’s lots of books that I’ve purchased that I’ve never read. But when you take the money to buy the book and then you invest your time into reading the book, you are spending your time, which is basically like money, to read the book, to listen to this, another podcast, to attend workshops and conferences or to go to class and to spend time getting those higher degrees. And then you can give your brain time to come up with ideas for generating more time and money.

So you use your money and your time to create more ideas for your brain. You use your brain to create more ideas for your money and your time. They all work together. And this is how we create our entire lives.

You see, I’m using money as a context for this month to hold these conversations. It’s basically like money is the pitcher that you pour the water into and without the pitcher the water would just go everywhere. So I use money as the context to pour the content into because I know it’s something that all of us have experience with.

And money is very tangible. We’ve interacted with it before. We’ve made it before. We’ve spent it before. We’ve lost it before. We’ve earned it before. Like, we’ve had lots of interactions with money and we’ve all struggled with it. We’ve all had fears and anger and frustrations and thoughts around money.

Money is universal for anyone who lives in a society that has currency in its existence. So you can substitute money philosophy, you can talk about your educational philosophy or your parenting philosophy or your fitness philosophy, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about your brain and the way that it thinks about a topic, the way it thinks about your time and how you choose to spend your time on that topic and the way it thinks about your money and how you choose to invest in that topic. Can you see that?

And I just love the topic of money because it’s such a trigger and it’s so rich for bringing up emotional issues around it. And it triggers most of us and it’s also time to start talking about money in education in all these different ways. And why?  So that we can educate our youth on money and give them the tools now so that they can invest in their brain and invest in their time and their money in the way that works best for them.

Okay, end of rant, on to the questions. Question number one, how do you want to think and feel about money?  Because money beliefs are so deeply rooted within us, we don’t stop to ask ourselves why we feel the way we do about money and how we want to feel about it because we didn’t realize before that thought work, before this thought work work, was possible to change how we feel.

So, we used to believe that it was just the way it was, there was no other way around it, there was no thinking differently about it, but now that we know that we can look at our money thoughts and actively strive for thoughts that feel better and that serve us better, all we have to do is create the time to do the work; the thought work. We’ve talked about, in this month’s prior episode, a lot about how you currently think and feel about money.

All of the past episodes for the month of April have been about your money beliefs, your money thoughts, your relationship with money. So this is a very important exercised because how you decide to think and feel about money is going to impact the way you interact with it and how you interact with it will impact your money outcomes, not just in how much you attract in your life, like how much you earn and you make, but how you feel each time you look at your bank statements and each time you decide whether to save or to spend or just to have the money.

Every day, we interact with money in some form and whether we realize it or not, we wake up and we go to work each day, in part because of the money that we receive for our service as a school leader. You do not wake up and go to work because you don’t get paid and it’s free and you want to volunteer.

You go because you get paid. You might love your job and the money is icing on the cake, and that is beautiful, but if not – and most of us have days we love and days we don’t – we do go because we get paid in exchange for the value that we provide. Using the things that you’ve purchased such as your home, your car, and all the stuff that is available to you at home and at work is all because you interacted with money.

The decisions you make at school about who you hire, what materials to buy, or what services to implement are all impacted by the way you think and feel about money. This knowledge opens an opportunity for you to actively choose how you want to feel about this valuable resource.

So, let’s try this out. You know when you go to a party and there are people with trays of appetizers walking around and offering guests little different bites to try, or maybe there’s a long table with all kinds of foods and dessert choices and they’re little teeny samples and you can try as many as you want? So, if I were a waitress and I was walking around a party with endless options on my platter, but instead of food it’s thoughts about money, like you could take any thought you wanted to off the platter and try it on and see if it tastes good or if it feels good, which ones would you try?

Like, you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it and you can try as many as you want until you find the one that you like the best, but think about this; of all the options, if you could pick any thought to think about money, what would you choose? Like, if I could give you an appetizer that contained a thought and when you ate that appetizer you instantly and fully believed the thought to your core, what would you choose to think?

What would you want to think? That there’s never enough money? Would you want to have the scarcity feeling that you don’t have enough and you need more and there’s never enough. Like, how does that thought make you feel? It’s completely fear-based.

The thought that there’s not enough money or that you need more generates emotions of panic, lack, scarcity, disappointment, frustration, like all those negative vibes. How does feeling this way serve you or serve your school? When you choose the appetizer with the not-enough mindset, it tastes bad. It tastes terrible. So why would you choose to continue feeding yourself that thought?

Spit it out. Spit it out and try a new one. So what would you like to try? Let’s try again. Let’s make a list of thoughts that you would just love to try on and see how they taste and how they feel. Now, you don’t actually have to fully believe that the thought is true right now in this moment, you just have to generate some really juicy ideas that sound super fun to believe.

For example, what if you tried on the thought, there’s plenty of money to serve all of my students? How cool would that be? Or the thought, I enjoy reviewing our budget and seeing how our money is being spent. Wouldn’t that be nice to actually want to put that on your calendar and take pride in all that you’re serving and doing for kids? Or maybe you want to try the thought on, we always seem to have more than enough for our school and our students. That would feel so peaceful, to always feel like you had enough or more than enough for your kids and your school.

So, write down thoughts, even thoughts that seem ludicrous or crazy that you would ever believe them, thoughts that feel out of reach at this point. Write them down and write down the thoughts that would feel most delicious to think about and believe that they’re true.

Now, question number two – what do you believe money gives you? This question really is about why you want to think the thoughts about money that you do, why you want to think about money in a particular way. What is it about money that money gives you in your life? What purpose does it serve?

Most people would say to the effect that it creates a level of certainty or safety for them. Having money for people allows them to feel safe and to achieve some level of certainty in their brains. It gives us a lifestyle we want, but in addition to having the things and all the experiences that we want, we also believe it will create a feeling of sufficiency.

And sufficiency just means that we feel like we have enough, we have exactly what we need, we don’t want more, we don’t worry that we’re not going to have more, we feel sufficient, just enough. Our brains are constantly seeking out that feeling of sufficiency and our brains love certainty and safety.

So, it believes, in order to be physically and emotionally safe, that we need a certain amount of money. What’s interesting about that thought is that if you believe money creates certainty and safety in your life, then you’re always going to be wanting more money and yearning for it. You will never be satisfied because it will never be enough and you’re always going to seek out more.

According to Lynne Twist, who is the author of The Soul of Money – super good book by the way – the feeling of abundance or lack does not come from money. Money in and of itself does not create abundance in your life. This idea that we don’t have enough money is a lie. Scarcity is a lie. It’s a lie in our brain. Scarcity is not true.

We have been so led to believe that we need more, that more is better, and that there’s only so much to go around in the world so we’d better hurry up and get as much of it as we can for ourselves because if we don’t have it, somebody else will, or if we have it, somebody else won’t. This could not be further from the truth.

Money has no inherent value. It only has the power that we give it, and we have forgotten along the path that we, as humans, created money, and that money is simply an exchange of value. In her book, Lynne states that money is like water and that it is designed to flow between us freely and without stagnation.

Viewing money in this way, to me, is such a freeing feeling. When you think about money from a meta-cognitive standpoint, money is always flowing around. Like, in the entire universe, money is constantly moving and being exchanged all over the world.

You receive money for the value that you provide at work, and then that money flows from the district to you and then you have the money, and then it flows from you and onto and into things that you exchange the value for; things such as your home, your car, clothing, food, electricity, your iPhone, college, whatever it is, right?

That money goes from the district to you, then it flows out from you, and then it goes into those budgets, and then that flows out to those people and then to their people, and the cycle flows on and on and on. So, when we have an open and flowing relationship with money, we feel sufficiency in our lives and we have no need to cling or hoard our money.

We can let it flow freely knowing that all we need and all we will ever have will always be available. And when we slip into a scarcity mindset, we block money from flowing to us and through us, much like a dam in a river. So if we let our money stagnate by holding on to all of it and never letting it flow, we’re going to be in a scarcity mindset and the money will stop coming in as well as going out.

So, Lynne recommends focusing on sufficiency versus that need of always wanting more, it never being enough, and in return, your ability to generate the amount of money you need will expand. And there’s a quote in her book that says, “When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up oceans of energy to make a difference with what you do have.  When you make a difference with what you have, it expands.” I love that. So, I want you to think about what does money really give you and why do you want that?

Question number three, if these thoughts were true, if all the appetizers that you tried, that you want to believe, you tried them and you actually did believe them and they all became true, how would things be different? Once you’ve identified the thoughts that you’d love to believe about money, I want you to ask yourself, if all of those became true for me, how would things in my life be different? What would be different about my work on a daily basis? How would I be approaching my job as a school leader?  What would I be thinking and feeling? What actions would I be taking? How would I be showing up? And what exactly would be different about work and home life if all of those juicy exciting thoughts about money were just a fact of life?

Here’s some food for thought that will help you get started answering this question. What if right now I gave you $100,000 in cash, free and clear? You don’t have to pay taxes on it or you don’t ever have to pay it back to me and you get to do whatever you want with it, no questions asked, what would you do with it? What would be different about your life?

So, write down everything you’d do with the money. You can spend it, save it, invest it, whatever you want to do. Identify what you would do with it and then ask yourself, now that you’ve done all of that, what’s different about life now that you have had somebody give you 100k in cash? And if you want to really push yourself and have tons of fun – I love doing this – I want you try doing the same thing, pretend I gave you a million dollars in cash and do those exercises. And then try it again with 10 million dollars in cash.

You will hit a point where your brain doesn’t even know what it would do with so much money, it just can’t even imagine how much it would spend. It’s a really fun way to see what would actually be different about life if you had all of the money in the world available to you versus what would stay the same.

And that leads us to question four, so if these thoughts were true and you had all the money in the world available to you, how would things stay the same? Interesting, right? We often think that if we had more money or if we lost the baby weight or met the man of our dreams or lived in our dream house or we had our dream car or we had a better boss or we didn’t have to work – we often daydream if only this, if only that, whatever it is you think that would be better only, whatever it is, that everything is going to be different – you think that when you have what you think you want that life is going to be completely different and that it was going to be so much better.

But in reality, there are things that will stay the same. For example, now that you’re a principal, there are things about your life that are the same as they were when you were a teacher. Or maybe, if you’re aspiring to become a principal, there are things about your life now that are the same as they were when you first started teaching.

Not everything changes just because you achieved a financial goal or a weight loss goal, relationship goal, career goal, or whatever, right? What things do you anticipate will be the same if you were living a life that included your ideal money manifesto and philosophy? And you can use the 100K, the one million, the 10 million exercise to see what things might still feel the same and be the same.

I did this recently and I realized eventually that you come to see that you might drive a nicer car or have a newer home, or you might donate more to your favorite charity, but in the end, you are still you. You’re driving, whether you’re in a 2006 Honda or you’re in a 2019 Tesla. You’re still driving and it’s still you in the car, right? It’s just you’re driving a different vehicle and you’re still waking up and doing your thing each day.

If you could buy anything in the world, having all that stuff is nice – for example, I used to think like, I want all these vacation homes all over the world so I can go whenever I want and be there. And then I realized, wait a minute, having multiple homes is nice and it might be in my future one day, but to be honest, I personally can only be in one space at a time. And even if I bought one big mansion and I had this big beautiful house, I’m only ever enjoying one room in it at a time. Either I’m in the living room or I’m in the kitchen or I’m in the bedroom, or I’m in the office, or the workout room.

Like, even if you had this big home, your body is only enjoying one particular space at a time. So no matter how much money you have or don’t have, there are aspects of life that will just be the same.

So, question number four, based on what you want to think about money, what if your money manifesto going to be? Your manifesto is a statement that summarizes your beliefs. Once you’ve decided what you want to think and why you want to think it and what will be different and the same when you do believe the new thoughts, then you can create a summary of your money philosophy.

Here is my manifesto on money. I love money for all that it is and all that it provides. There is enough money for everyone and everything. I trust money will always be here for me. I have exactly what I need in this moment. I invest money in my brain because my brain is my most valuable asset. I love making money, having money, spending money, saving money, investing money, and sharing money with others. I do not hold money responsible for my certainty. I am my certainty. I am wealth. I generate wealth through the value and services I contribute.  Money and I are very good friends and I never need to worry about money ever.

Now, it’s time for you to go and create and share your money manifestos. Are you ready? It’s so much fun. As part of this process, it’s important to not just create the manifesto, but to share it out loud. You want to bring it to life. You want to get so comfortable with your manifesto that it actually becomes a part of who you are.

Here is an accountability challenge and a way to get comfortable saying it out loud in your own life. I encourage you, I challenge you, post your manifesto on my Facebook page, and number one, I will personally respond to you if you have any questions, or I’ll just cheerlead you on, and two, if you post on my Facebook page, I’m going to send you a copy of this month’s workbook. And this month’s workbook accompanies all of this month’s podcast theme and includes every exercise on money. And the best part is if you do this work on money, you will be able to change the context to whatever else you’d like to clarify in your life, things like your health, your career, your relationships, anything.

So, write those manifestos, share them with me on my Facebook business page. I will respond to you and I will send you a copy of the month’s podcast workbook so that you can dive even deeper into this work. I love you guys so much. Go out there and have an empowered week. I look forward to hearing from you and I’ll talk to you next week. Thanks, bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit www.angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.