Money. How does it make you feel?
Stressed, anxious? Angry, exhausted? Guilty about your privilege, or ashamed about your income, your spending, how you handle your finances? Is it something you avoid thinking about, whenever possible? If so, rest assured. You’re not alone.
We load money with all kinds of fears, beliefs, stories, emotions. If you make a living by selling your creative work or services, it’s even more anxiety-inducing, because there are no salaries to compare, no corporate scales, no sense of a set, ‘right’ price for our services or our art.
We all load money with emotion, with stories
But on its own, money doesn’t mean anything. It’s just another form of energy, bits of paper and metal – or increasingly, just bits of data on a computer – that we exchange for goods, or for people’s time and skill.
Obviously, life is easier when we have enough to be comfortable and feel secure. And times are tough at the moment, so I do want to stress that if you’re struggling, it’s NOT your fault. But it can help to work on your money mindset.
We all have hidden beliefs about money
These are often stories we tell ourselves, not objective truth. We might not express them out loud. We might not even know we have them: some of them have been part of our lives for so long that we just see them as fact.
But they affect the way we behave around money. How we spend, save, earn, invest. What we charge for our work. Whether we deal with our financial admin – or do anything to avoid it.
A few common beliefs about money
Do any of these feel familiar to you?
- Money is the root of all evil.
- To get rich, you need to be ruthless. (Or unethical. Or just plain nasty.)
- You can’t buy happiness.
- I’m not worth what I’m charging.
- Raising my fees would make me selfish, greedy.
- People can’t afford to pay more right now.
- If I ask for more money, I’ll lose all my clients.
- People like me never do well financially.
- Real artists starve. No one gets to earn a good living from a creative career. Unless you’re Taylor Swift.
- I’m not good with money.
- I’ve never been able to save.
- Investments are difficult.
- I need this pizza/coffee/handbag/car/house. And I won’t be happy till I get it.
- If I accumulate too much money, I’ll betray my roots. I’ll outshine my parents/siblings/friends. And that’s wrong.
- If I turn down one freelance job, I might never work again.
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And there’s always a price to pay for success.
- I’m already in debt, so what’s another £200 on top?
So how do you change your money story?
If you recognise any of the above – or if you’ve noticed other beliefs surfacing as you read this – grab a journal and examine each one, deciding how well it is serving you.
- Is it really true? Is there concrete proof, evidence you’d feel happy presenting in a court of law?
- Can you think of examples that show it isn’t always true?
- Is there something you might choose to believe instead?
- And how might your behaviour, your bank balance, your life change if you did choose that new belief?
If you want to ge deeper on this, I’ve made a workbook to help.
Uncover your money story
A FREE work book to help you uncover your beliefs around money – then change them.
We all have limiting beliefs holding us back.
I’ve worked on my own money story, and I thought I’d dealt with most of my issues around this. But I recently uncovered a powerful belief that was so deeply buried I’d never questioned it. It just felt like objective fact. It was this: to earn good money, you have to work really, really hard.
It has often led me to make life far more harder than necessary. When I had staff jobs on magazines, I took on extra work and put in more hours than anyone else, because I felt that justified my job title, my income, my place in the media world.
This might sound noble. It probably felt that way to me, at the time. But I now see that it also made me tired, grumpy, and sometimes difficult to work with. It also made it harder to access the creative thinking that got me the job in the first place!
I’m letting go of that story now.
Writing about it in my journal, I realised that my parents – and indeed most of the people I knew, growing up – worked hard, in jobs they often disliked or found stressful.
I saw my dad come home from his work as a joiner, exhausted and dirty. My mum juggling two children and a demanding admin job in a special-needs school. And money was often scarce, something my parents whispered and worried about.
I think a secret part of me always felt it unfair that I got paid more than they did, simply for writing. Certainly, my parents never considered it real work, and often urged me to get a secure, ‘proper’ job. As a secretary, perhaps. Or a nurse.
It’s taken me a long time to see this: I felt guilty, so I made my work harder than it needed to be.
The truth is, I love writing.
Even the difficult and frustrating bits, when I can’t see the shape it is taking, or wrangle words into an order that feels true.
As a journalist, I met interesting people doing interesting things, and got to ask them lots of questions. Then I had the extraordinary privilege of sharing what I’d learned with readers.
Writing is a big part of who I am, the thing that makes me more… me. Even when I’m not being paid for it, it’s something I choose to do.
When I think about it, I have lots of creative friends who feel the same about their work. Our jobs aren’t always easy. The struggles, the frustrations, the difficulties are real. But when it goes right, creative work can be very satisfying.
I love coaching even more.
I get paid to chat with interesting, creative people, hear their stories, and to sometimes help them create new stories that serve them better.
I’ve put many hours into training, reading, researching and coaching to get good at it. But if I’m honest, very little of that ever felt hard. It’s fun!
And it always feels like an honour to bear witness while clients grow, change, and shape their work and their lives into something that is right for them, that makes them happy.
There was plenty of evidence to contradict my story
Yet this deep-seated belief that you need to work hard and be unhappy to earn money explains why I often over-complicate jobs that should be simple. Why I over-research features, writing enough to fill a book then labouring for days to cut it back to the required length.
I now see that I have often expanded jobs so that they fit the time available, working weekends and evenings because some part of me really believed it had to be that way, or I was cheating.
In the past, I’ve also struggled to charge a fair price for my work: a common problem for freelancers and the self-employed that for me was tangled up in all sorts of stories about value, greed, ethics and self-worth.
So what if I choose to believe something different now?
What if I decide that earning money could be effortless, and fun? Perhaps I might write more easily, with less drama. I’d stop moaning about how busy I am, and admit that I enjoy my work. Even as I write that here, I feel lighter and happier.
I’m sharing this because you can too change your money stories. And create new ones that serve you better. I’ve even made a short workbook to help.
Change your money story, and your income often shifts too.
Certainly financial admin gets easier, and you handle money more gracefully. You face up to uncomfortable truths about debts, spending more than you earn – and then you make a plan. Perhaps you also start charging more for what you do, and market your skills with more confidence.
The workbook is free for now; just click below to download it.
Money doesn’t have to be fraught. And we all deserve to make a living from our creative work.
Changing your money mindset isn’t a magic pill. It won’t solve the cost of living crisis, or end the uncertainty in many creative fields. Nor will it give you Taylor Swift’s bank balance overnight.
But if it makes you more calm and rational with your finances, it’s a fine first step.
What do you think?