Your Money, Your Rules | Money Mindset, Money Management, Abundance Mindset, Budgeting, Spirituality

152 | Money Can’t Buy Your Feelings: Here’s How to Be Wealthy From Within

• Erin Gray | Wealth Coach, Former CFP and CFO

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Too often, we chase numbers (our income, investments, net worth, our business revenue) thinking they will finally make us feel secure, capable, or “enough.” 

In this episode, I discuss how to redefine success beyond income and status, integrating health, relationships, play, and a calm nervous system. We explore how money can act as a security blanket, keeping us from the inner work that creates real safety.

In this episode, we cover:

  • Redefining success beyond income, status, and bank balances
  • How money acts as a security blanket and mirror for self-worth
  • Separating self-worth from net worth
  • Identifying “proving energy” and people-pleasing tendencies
  • Building self-concept through daily, intentional practices
  • Slowing down to notice intuition and body cues
  • Making neutral, values-aligned money decisions
  • Choosing temporary discomfort to gain lasting calm and freedom
  • Taking action from the identity you want, not old doubts


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From my soul to yours,

Erin

Erin:

In today's episode, I'm sharing with you why I believe money will never be able to buy your feelings. It can't buy your self-worth, it cannot buy your confidence, it can't buy your sense of value or lovability. Those are things you actually have to build from the inside. So let's dive in. And before we dive in, I just want to offer that if you are ready to stop letting money define who you are, your self-worth, and really start cultivating confidence within you, changing the way that you feel about yourself, feeling certain, not from something outside of you. I would love to support you and see if we are a good fit. You can just schedule a call with me by clicking the link in the show notes and scheduling a time that works well for you. So let's talk about why I think people wait on money to validate them. This is definitely has been my story. Our entire culture is built around that success. Well, first of all, it's built around you have to be successful, whatever successful means. Like, I don't even know if we've actually defined what is successful. Like successful to me used to mean uh you make a lot of money. Successful now means you make money and you have an amazing family life, and you're super healthy, and you're able to have friends and enjoy, you know, and you're able to play and have fun and you have a calm nervous system. And right. So I think a lot of us have been brought up with the idea that success equals money. And then then we take that a little bit farther, and then that means what you're you are worthy of or not worthy of, or that is your worth, right? Like, how many times have you heard like net worth equals self-worth? It's like, yeah, no, it doesn't actually, because I'm living proof that you can have a low self-worth and you can still have a high net worth. And I think that there are there are people out there, I know because I've myself and clients of mine, that you know, we are actually trying to like money is just our little lovey. My daughter, she has this little elephant that we had from when she was born, and we call it a lovey, and it's just like your security blanket, right? Like whatever you want to call it. But like we think money is our security blanket. We think that if we have a certain amount of money, then we'll feel good about ourselves, then we'll actually feel worthy, or we'll feel lovable, or we'll finally feel worthy. And those are all things first and foremost that are inherent within us. You know, we bought into this lie that money, and I'm air quoting, fixes, right? Fixes the self-doubt, fixes our low self-esteem. But what I actually believe is that we're just using money to cover up all of these wounds that we actually have. And if we actually strip the money away, which many of us are not willing to do, many of us are not willing to go to the edge of letting go of the money to actually see. And I don't, I'm not advocating you have to like spend or circulate all your money, but so many of us are hoarding on to it, holding on to it for dear life because we have now associated money with safety, money with security, money with our value, money with our self-esteem, and all of those things are not equal. They are not representative of um who we are. And so think about if you are someone who has money, has received more money, and your feelings haven't changed. And if they do change, maybe it changes temporarily, but your baseline is it goes back to feeling like you're not good enough, feeling like that you um maybe might need to be doing more than, you know, where is the self-trust, where is the the self-love, where's the self-compassion? Like money doesn't do any of that for us. And I don't even know sometimes when you know people say money is a mirror. I think there is some, there is some truth in that because if, like for me, if you believe that, you know, you don't have enough money, that's definitely a belief I had about myself. But I also think that we can use money to mask what we're actually thinking and feeling about ourselves. And so what I want you to think about is, you know, this download came to me the other day of like what money can never buy. And it can never buy our self-concept. Yes, you can pay for coaching or you can pay for courses and things like that. But what I mean, like at its core, right? Like your self-concept, knowing who you are beyond income or your assets or your business. Like you are God's. I don't remember where I read this. I'm sure it's probably in a Neville Goddard book or something else, but you are God's one of, or you are God's greatest and grandest creation, each of us. And it's our responsibility, I believe, to know that and return back to that. Like I really believe that our souls came here. We each have beautiful souls, and they came here to really um return back to, you know, who we are. And some of it it shows for some of us, it shows with money. Some for some of us, it might show like through our weight, some of us it might show up, you know, through having been abused as children. Like all of these things, our soul chose. This is my belief, that our soul chose this to come here to to reveal. I want to use the word heal, but like to reveal who we truly are. And it is through these experiences that we have been able to do this or will be able to do this. So money can't buy your value or your worth. Like that's inherent within us. It's not transactional. You know, when you think about it, like we are all one if you believe that, if we believe that we all came from the same source, so we're all valuable. So if you think that that person over there is valuable, but you don't think you are, then you are feeling disconnected from source. And then that's the question that I would ask you is like, okay, so how much time are you actually spending with yourself and with God of like reconnecting to that? You know, the reason why we don't believe that we are all one, that we are connected, is because we have picked up stories along the way, right? Why we don't believe that we're valuable or that we're worthy is because we've believed the lies that we've been told. And to no faults of our, when I say to no faults of our parents, like our parents were just operating from the consciousness that they were in, right? So if they think that they aren't valuable or they think that they're not worthy, well, how are they supposed to teach that to us? So we've picked up these belief systems along the way, and then we've never questioned them. Think about your lovability, you know, how you feel about yourself and your ability to receive love, not just give love, but receive love and to be there for yourself in your deepest, most darkest times. Like that's what matters. No one's gonna do this for you. And this is this deep inner work that is worth doing because who you are on the other side is someone who is actually free, who is someone that knows themselves to their core, someone who trusts themselves above everybody else, someone who trusts their intuition and actually listens and acts upon their intuition, no matter what everybody else is telling them, who loves themselves regardless of what everyone else might be saying. So, how do you actually start to cultivate this inner worth, which is independent of money? Like everything, it's a practice. It is a practice. You start with where you are. Like if I were to ask you, tell me 10 things you believe about yourself, rattle them off for me right now. Do you have that? Do you know that in your core? You know, an easy way to find out what you believe about yourself is let something that doesn't like if you have something that's not working out for you right now, what's your first thought? That is going to show you where your belief is about yourself. Is your first thought like, huh? That's interesting. Totally thought that it that it was gonna work. Okay, well, we'll just have to try something else. Or are you like, ugh, I'm a failure. See, I told you it'd never work out. I knew it. I knew it wouldn't work out. Like what the what you think about where you are when you are in those valleys is your true self-concept, what you believe about yourself. And the good news is that that can be changed, right? We can our we know that our brains are able to be changed, you know, the neuroplasticity, we get to believe new things. And so really start to question like, what am I believing about myself? What do I want to believe about myself? You know, if I had XYZ, what would I be thinking and believing about myself? Like those are the things you need to be thinking and believing right now. I also want to say, because I think that this is common, is actually, are you giving yourself time to slow down enough to even question these questions I'm asking you? And if you are in your brain and you're like, Erin, yeah, you don't understand. No, I do, because I came from there. I came from not eating lunch, I came from constantly on, constantly connected. I came from answering every single phone call. I came from ignoring my body and being disconnected and not listening and thinking, oh, it's nice that so-and-so gets to do that, but I don't have the time to do that. No, we all have the same amount of time. How are we using it? Are we valuing ourselves enough to think, you know what? 15 minutes a day, I have 15 minutes a day to sit down with myself. I would start there. As always, like I say, mindset work, right? Noticing where are you tying your self-worth to your earnings or your investments, your assets, anything that is outside of you? If you notice that you feel differently when the stock market goes up and you log into your investment accounts, or when your business had a better month than it did before, are you emotionally like it's one thing to be like, yes, celebrating? It's another to be like almost like that relief of like, oh, it's finally increasing, right? Versus just celebrating or being neutral about it and just being like, yeah, right. So look at how you are possibly attached or what you are making your net worth mean about you, your income, all of that. And then what I always say is start taking action. Like you've got to change the self-concept first. You have to change how you see yourself, what you believe about yourself. Because what I tried to do is I did not feel great about myself. And then I tried to push and force and take action from that place, right? Versus now of like believing myself, believing that I have something important to say, believing what I say matters, um, showing up as the person who is changing lives and acting from that place. So think about how are you taking action? Like, are you taking action that is aligning with your values of your self-concept, what you believe about yourself, or are you trying to push and prove yourself? And proving yourself is very sneaky. It shows up in lots of different ways. It shows up in ways like overworking, not resting, not taking a nap, always feeling like you have to be productive, having resistance to the word lazy. Proving yourself is like you think you constantly have to be increasing your income and your net worth all the time. Um, proving yourself can look like always having to be what I call productive. And it doesn't necessarily have to be with work, it could be like cleaning the house or always saying yes to taking the kids somewhere or always saying yes to your spouse. Like just think about where are you saying yes to things where you don't want to? And there typically is a proving energy there. Or you're, and when I say proving, what I also mean is like you want someone to like you, which is a proving energy to me in my body. Like that's what that feels like. So really start to ask yourself, where am I saying yes when I really want to say no? Or where am I saying no when I actually want to say yes? And just notice where am I trying to please? Where am I trying to get people to like me or to prove that I'm a good mom or a good dad or you know, a great business person or, you know, great investor. What am I trying to do so that I can get some external validation for what I am not giving to myself? And the more that you do this work, the more you set time aside, the more that you really get to know yourself, the reward is the more grounded you are, the more calm and peaceful you are. Like that's what we really want. We want to feel calm, we want to feel at peace, we want to feel grounded in our knowing. And so when you think about making decisions with your money, trusting your intuition, you know, feeling less stressed, less in that scarcity mindset, more in that wealth consciousness, more in the calmness and the peace. And like I said, it's not going to be perfect. I don't do this perfectly. I go back and forth sometimes, right? But I notice when I do it, I'm highly aware of what my body is telling me. I see the stories that are coming up. I see where I have been, where I've for a blip in time, you know, disconnected. So really start to give yourself some time and space. And this takes slowing down. This takes you valuing yourself enough to slow down. Because here is what I will say. If you don't do this work now, then when? When will you? And here is what I have seen. You don't do it now and you want to grow your business, you're gonna take yourself wherever you go. You're just gonna have more money, more employees, more chaos because you haven't developed yet the skill set to be with yourself, to slow down, to notice in your body before you make a decision. Am I moving from abundance or am I moving from lack? You know, am I in survival or am I in creativity? And what I want for each of you is to feel ultimate freedom. And that just isn't with money. We we know that money does not equal freedom, but feeling free in your body and having your money, that's amazing. But like you've got to be able to slow down. What is that saying? Slow down to speed up. You gotta be able to slow down. And that is that can be sometimes an addictive pattern. Our bodies are used to that. Our bodies are used to rushing, our bodies are used to chemically bathing in stress. And so when we aren't, our body's like, hey, what's up? This feels weird. So it's it's acknowledging that, it's seeing, it's like what Dr. Joe talks about. It's like going beyond yourself, like recognizing this is my old pattern, but I'm not doing this anymore. And it's going to feel very uncomfortable until I move through it. And so it's like, are you willing to move? Are you willing to feel that discomfort in order to have true peace, true freedom, true calmness, and like an exhale in your body. So obviously, I'm saying that your financial life is important. I'm not saying because I think there are people in the spiritual world that are like, oh, I don't care about money, you know, all I care about is like feeling calm and peaceful. No, I care about both. I care about having money and I care about feeling calm and peaceful in my body. And I've had money with not feeling calm and peaceful in my body, and I've had money with being calm and peaceful in my body. And I could tell you the other way, this way, right here, how I feel calm and peaceful feels a lot better in my body. It's a lot more fun to move through life that way. So your feelings, your self-concept, your sense of value, who you are is priceless. Like there, there is no number that will ever be able to match those things. And there is no amount of money that will ever bring you the feeling or the pride that you actually feel of knowing that you have and you love the experience with yourself and being with yourself and returning home to yourself. So if this episode resonated with you, first and foremost, just start by naming one area of your life where you've been waiting for money to make you feel enough. And then decide. This is a decision. And what do they say? Like the decision is actually means to cut off. You have to decide to cut off powerfully, that you're going to move from love for yourself instead of waiting for money to make you feel a certain way. And I want to ask you that if you truly believed in your core, if you believe that in your core, what action would you take? How would you be thinking and feeling differently? And then go do that this week. Like take the action from that other person, right? And if you want support to see how I could serve you, schedule a call with me. Just click the link in the show notes. I'd be happy to help. Okay. I'll see you in the next episode.