I shouldn’t be writing this. Affirmations are such big business for my friends and colleagues and the people who hire me. And affirmations are stupid.

Why?

When you can’t get (or leave) a job, or pay your mortgage, or find a date… chanting to yourself, “I’m a millionaire,” isn’t going to solve your problems.

Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE affirmations. I think they’re useful. I have a few in my book. I’m the kind of girl who makes things happen by thinking, “I want that.” But I do a lot of inner work to make that possible.

Affirmations are like putting pretty make-up on a canker sore: it doesn’t cover the problem. (more…)

Financial Alchemy Workbook

“I have no trouble believing this, but it’s such a gas!!!!! Remember, a few days ago, 2 days after working with your on-line book, my husband received a $5,500 unexpected bonus? I just received your workbook, and began working with it last night. Well, today he received a $550 increase a month after taxes, income. This allows us to buy the new car, and model car, I really want! (My car, which I still love, is 12 years old– so it’s certainly is time!). WOW! By the way, I am a self employed singer, songwriter, musician, children’s teaching artist. My field is feeling the recession, friends in the field really worried, phones are not ringing, budgets are cut back… BUT MY BUSINESS IS BOOMING. $3800 worth of booking has come in within the past 2 days. And I know it’s just the beginning of money magic this year. I feel joyful and free! THANK YOU MORGANA! THANK YOU MONEY HONEY!!!
Anna

I got another note from Anna today:

“Thank you, Morgana! I’m loving working with your materials, and am buying your workbook as a gift for 3 dear friends, and my brother. My life is charmed, and being more charmed by the day.”
Anna E., New York City

Read an EXCERPT and pick up your own FINANCIAL ALCHEMY WORKBOOK at http://tinyurl.com/FA-excerpt !

Awesome Harry Potter book store geeks

We all face occasions when we want to make a lasting impression.  (I’m not talking a Tiger Woods kind of lasting impression.) Whether you are applying for a job, making new friends, building your client base, or looking for a date, you need to separate yourself from the crowd.

Five Steps to Being Unforgettable:

1) Establish relationship first. Listen, be curious, be genuinely caring. Focus on the other person instead of yourself. Who is this person? This is how you establish relationship.

2) Identify the needs of this other person. How can you serve this
person? Your partner will wake up for station WIFM (What’s In it
For Me).

3) Be authentic. Don’t pretend to be interested. Don’t pretend to
care. You won’t fool a soul. And no one wants to be around a fake. Meanwhile, the more you are authentically interested and authentically care about the people you meet, the more you’ll find yourself meeting wonderful people!

4) Don’t be your job. When someone says “tell me about yourself” what do you say? Cause EVERYBODY will answer the “tell me about yourself” with what they are working on, will be working on, or were working on. Snore. Be able to share at least three concise and memorable things about yourself that have nothing to do with your business. These things may be humorous or dramatic, but they reveal something about who you are as a person.

If you have a zinger like  “I smoked pot with Jimi Hendrix,” or “I taught blackjack to a bunch of orphans in Cambodia,” do you think your questioner will forget that–or you–any time soon? BUT BE APPROPRIATE.

See how authentic you can be.

5) Finally, have a point to what you share. Pick your story with
your audience in mind, and tell your questioner what your share
says about you.

Especially on the radio. If you have only five to fifteen minutes on air, you better be on message!

For instance, sometimes during interviews share that
I was hit by a car, thrown into a coma, had a severe head injury
when I awoke, and spent my last semester of high school
homeless and sleeping on a friend’s floor. And I graduated
with honors and went to a top college.

You think you’re gonna forget that?

In the context of my message–Financial Alchemy–I use my story to illustrate that money isn’t an automatic reward for effort and good work. I could do all that and not make a living. Until I changed my relationship with money.

Here’s a great Money Magnet Burning Question that came in:

“When I speak to money, do I need to be holding some money in my hands or can I just ‘speak to money’ as it were? I’m not sure what I need to visualize when I speak to money.”

Stop thinking of your Money as money. Money is not a number, it’s a relationship.

Make your Money Honey a HUMAN you would love and adore for his own sake, having nothing to do with his being money. You can’t love a piece of paper like you can love a lover.

A client today was telling me how much easier it was to care for and respect money when it became a HUMAN being.

You wanna learn UNCONDITIONAL LOVE? This is it, baby. That’s your relationship with your Money Honey. He loves you no matter what. You love him no matter what. And he’s so real you get butterflies in your stomach. (The Money Honey can be female too.)

But your Money Honey will never really exist for you unless you exorcise the monster before him. That’s the price of admission.

This is Alchemy. The first step is “negridio”– the blackening. You must create polarity, separate the bad from the good. Your Money Honey is only as real and wonderful as the monster before him is real and terrible.

Financial Alchemy has six steps. You can’t leave a single step incomplete.

1) uncover every negative experience
2) create the monster
3) get rid of the monster
4) create the Money Honey
5) ask your Money Honey what he needs (rarely what you expect)
6) take the action he wants (rarely what you expect)

If you aren’t sure you have your Money Honey, I can tell you right now you don’t. When you’re Honey arrives, you will KNOW it with every fiber of your being. And you will SWOON!

The economy’s crashing, so you better slash your rates, right?

Sure, if you want to project fear and a lack of confidence. I don’t care what you’ve heard about the economy, etc. If you treat your contribution as worth less, so will others. You do NOT want to be the person people hire because you’re cheap!

There’s an underlying contempt for money when you encourage people to hire you because you’re cheap. You’re telling your customers that being paid well isn’t important to you. Even worse, you’re telling your customer and yourself that you don’t deserve to be paid well. How attractive is that?

It’s a downward spiral: your clients will invest less, get less back, see you as less valuable, and you’ll find yourself struggling for less and less. You lose all credibility. A better strategy is to charge more and make sure the value you give is even better.

Financial Alchemy Coach Sarah Hoskin Clymer

Sarah: Money has been the biggest bane of my life. It was always the thing that I was working on as an adult. I tried to figure it out and affirm my way through it. You name it; I’ve done different things to get to what was at the cause of having so much struggle and pain around money.

Financial Alchemy came to me. It was one of those impulse things. I got on the website, ordered the products, then said, “What am I doing? I’m spending money. I can’t be spending money. This is crazy.” I knew it was right somehow, so I stuck with it.

That was just under a year ago. It was really out of doing a coaching session with you that I got to change my relationship with money. That allowed me to show up differently in the relationship. I finally understood that I could work myself for the next bazillion years, but as long as my relationship with money was the same, I couldn’t show up any differently.

No matter what I did, no matter how many affirmations I said, and no matter how many beliefs I got in touch with and “tried” to change, it was still the same basic relationship.

It was an abusive relationship with money. Money was horrible to me. It was demeaning and so arrogant. All I knew how to do in the face of that kind of energy was cower. It was no wonder I avoided money. I didn’t want to get anywhere close to it. It was terrible energy to be around.

You went through the different kinds of money. I was also a spender. As soon as it came in, I’d spend it. That was a way of getting rid of it and avoiding it, too. To actually have money meant I had to be responsible and manage it. I thought, “No.” I would send it right back out.

When I finally got to change the relationship I had been living in and literally get rid of the old relationship to bring in a new one, all of a sudden, not just money changed, but my life began to change. It was maybe because money was at the core of so many of my struggles.

I think it’s available for anybody. Money is such a huge part of our lives, no matter what. We all have to deal with money. To actually get to change that relationship, and have it become a loving, empowering, welcoming, safe relationship, changed the platform that I’d been standing on all those years.

Morgana: How did money connect with the other areas of your life?

Sarah: I really believe that because it was so core and central for me that it was like it had a thread or hook in every area. I could be doing something that would seem unrelated, but as soon as money came into the conversation, I would shrink back down. I’d grow small and go unconscious. I’d forget what I was doing or just back out of the game altogether.

It happened in so many places. Money was the biggest, most menacing and critical voice inside of me. It was my biggest gremlin.

Morgana: I’m so glad you brought that up. It isn’t just about the money. People who hear us talk about Financial Alchemy think that all we coach about is the money. That’s just the entryway.

Sarah: It’s the door in.

Morgana: It is that punishing, abusive voice that hurts how you feel about yourself.

Sarah: It then affects every area of your life. When you don’t have money to come back to and rely on, and you don’t feel in control or on top of it, everything crumbles. It was at least like that for me.

When I created this new relationship, it literally just started to ripple out, and one thing lead to another. I became involved with the work of Financial Alchemy then thought, “I could be a coach in this? Sign me up!” That was another one of those impulsive moves.

Then that was like I thought, “If I’m going to be a Financial Alchemy coach, I’d better make sure all my coaching skills are really solid.” That led me to seek out training as a co-active coach. One thing has lead to another.

I’m certified as a co-active coach. I’m certified as a Financial Alchemy coach. I have clients. I’m advancing in my coaching right now. I’m having so much fun. I’m working with people. I’m getting to do what I’ve always wanted to do. It was with Financial Alchemy that I actually took the steps to do it.

Morgana: People come to me and have an idea of their money. They listen to the teleclass and say, “My new money is this,” but it’s still intellectual.

Sarah: It can’t be intellectual. It has to be from that deep place within.

Morgana: You’ve both been a client and gone through my coach training. What did you learn?

Sarah: I did it all myself before having coaching because that’s what I do. I try it on. What I’ve experienced in both being coached and becoming a coach is the richness and depth a client can go to with a coach.

I want to share a story about one of my clients. When we were going into her financial background, what showed up in the session is that her father committed suicide because of his relationship to money.

That was heavy stuff. I can even feel it in my voice as I speak. The pain was so present in her family of origin. She intellectually understood it. Together as coach and client, a truth got to be revealed like it had never been revealed.

Morgana: Her money was a murderer. If you think about it, her money killed her father.

Sarah: Yet we forget that we don’t have to be in that relationship. We stay in this relationship even though it’s so detrimental for us. When we opened that up and created something new for her, her voice and her whole being lightened up. A whole sparkly clear, fun and dancing energy came in for her.

Morgana: Did you see the movie “The Secret”?

Sarah: Yes.

Morgana: How is that different from just having a positive attitude and a good feeling about money from time to time?

Sarah: In my experience, until you get to the core of it, you’re just putting Band-Aids on the situation.

There’s the analogy that when you have a glass of water and put dark ink in it, it becomes really dark. If you keep putting water in to flush out the ink, it becomes clear again.

This is a much more direct way into what’s really going on for someone. You can release that so much more quickly. Why spend years pouring water in to clear it out when you can go in and get to the heart and soul of it?

Morgana: It’s like digging out the poison instead of putting a Band-Aid on the poison, which only keeps it in.

Sarah: For me it did. I could say all the affirmations in the world, but when my relationship was still such a scary, abusive and horrible relationship, I couldn’t show up any differently within that. I had to get out of that relationship and create a new one. Now all the affirmations are flourishing.

Morgana: That’s because they’re true. We went back. We created your first new relationship with money. About six months later, it wasn’t working for you anymore. What happened?

Sarah: It lost its juice, but I didn’t lose my faith in the process. I knew I had to go back in, just like you were saying about Mercury retrograde. If it’s not working, we have a choice. We get to go back in and recreate.

I did it again, and I got this really nice, little-old-man kind of energy. He was really sweet. He was just a nice old man, but no juice.

Then I went back in and created something that had juice, zest, fun and energy behind it. I felt myself sitting up and saying, “Oh, yes! I like this money! Not only do I like him, but I know he really loves me. He wants to see the best in me come forth.” If I could go back to a moment, it was that moment.

FYI: The full transcript and mp3 for this teleclass, as well as the other teleclasses in the Financial Alchemy series, and my other best selling Financial Alchemy products, is now available in my new “Starter Pack”  for those who aren’t ready to invest in coaching but want to get started, and those who have already coached and want to take it deeper still.  Look at what you get at www.secretsofamoneymagnet.com.

Copyright Morgana Rae 2009, obviously. If you wish to reprint an article from this blog, you must credit it to Morgana Rae and include this blog’s url. Thanks!