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Unselfconscious Affluence
We didn't all grow up affluent. I know for a fact that several of my students, in fact, are literally rags to riches stories. Through single-minded perseverance, intention, education, hard work, and maybe a little luck, they have created financial universes for themselves that are quite enviable and outstanding.
We didn’t all grow up affluent. I know for a fact that several of my students, in fact, are literally rags to riches stories. Through single-minded perseverance, intention, education, hard work, and maybe a little luck, they have created financial universes for themselves that are quite enviable and outstanding.
Internal obstacles sometimes need to be overcome in order to attain an unselfconscious relationship with affluence and a super affluent clientle. The journey from self conscious to confidence in dealing with all things relating to affluence can be highly individualized. People who grow up poor or struggling, can carry with them that feeling of scarcity no matter how wealthy they become. The father of a student of mine grew up during the depression and became an orphan at the age of thirteen.
His father’s feelings of guilt at the loss of his mother, his being accustomed to having very little, and then feeling the shame of ‘charity’ in the form of foster parents stayed with him despite his success in later life as a business owner, general contractor and property owner in the very advantageous market of the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s.
My student had everything he could ever need as a child—nice house, excellent education, plenty of food and never a fear that the electricity would be turned off. His father’s experiences really framed how he viewed money, however. He, despite all his comfort in life, developed a real scarcity fear as well which in turn creates a social and class self-consciousness.
Unfortunately, social self-consciousness has a tendency to thwart a fluid relationship with affluence and the affluent and it needs to be overcome.
Step one in overcoming this is the realization that there’s no shame in abundance. There is no scarcity. There is absolutely enough for everybody. Think about it. If we are, as I believe, here on this planet to learn and thrive, we need to redirect any shame we have into a new pathway.
And once we are right with ourselves, our social confidence, no matter what income level, will skyrocket and we will be able to very naturally enter into any social or business interaction with ease.