Wealth is Just a $tory
By Julie Blake

The best and the worst thing that can happen to you is just a thought; a story we make up in our minds. Let’s say a child finds $100 and thinks she is rich! An older and wiser person finds $100 and thinks “that’s not enough.” And someone in another country finds the same $100 and is very grateful to be able to buy food for several months. So, what is a $100 really worth? Nothing. It’s just a piece of paper and not worth anything until someone makes up a story about it! It’s worth whatever you think it’s worth and not a penny more or less.

Wealth is whatever story you make up about it. This is great news! Because you are the author of your own story and you have the power to re-write your story anytime you choose. You can even decide how easy or hard it is to create wealth and how much you deserve. The trouble begins when people believe that having more money will make them happy and feel secure. The truth is that nothing outside of yourself can change how you truly feel on the inside.

What people are really seeking is to create self-wealth. Self-wealth is obtained when your self-worth grows along with your monetary wealth. As far as I know, this can best be achieved by getting to know your true self, the powerful creator that you are – it’s when you discover that you have always possessed the power to create your reality.

Self-wealth is internally based on who you become by what you have learned and how many others you have served; it is not based on a number outside of yourself. Self-wealth is built on valuing yourself and knowing that you deserve happiness and wealth. If deep inside you really don’t believe that you deserve wealth and, and you make lots of money, then you are in living hell because your inner and outer realities do not match. This is why so many lottery winners end up broke, friendless and in massive debt.

Some of the wealthiest people that I know are also the most wildly unsuccessful. They have millions and millions of dollars in the bank, yet they don’t celebrate their success because they think that others have more than them. No matter what they accomplish, they always look at what they did not get done. No matter how much money they have, it will never be enough. This kind of thinking is extreme poverty, it’s the ultimate lie. Because there will never ever be enough money to cover up the lie of being a victim. Once you get that you are the creator of your life and that wealth is internal, you will have hit the jackpot – you are on your way to becoming peacefully wealthy and truly happy.

Money makes you more of what you already are. If deep down, you feel worthless and stupid, then more money will just make you feel more unworthy and pathetic. (And we ALL feel “not good enough” in one way or another – it’s the ultimate victim lie that almost seems like it’s programmed as part of being human).

Would you be happy if you sold your company for 1.5 billion dollars at age 27? The following are quotes from an interview in the New York Times with Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars.

“The year after selling Paypal was the most miserable year of my life. I had this expectation that I would go explore my inner self, sure enough I didn’t do that. Instead I basically spent the entire year moaning about how I feel worthless and stupid, like I’m not doing anything interesting.” Later in the interview he revealed his deepest fear “On a grand scale I worry about being irrelevant. That’s my number one concern in life.”

Money just makes you more of what you already are, and if you do not value yourself, then as your wealth grows, so does your victim story. And the result for Mr. Levchin is that he started a new venture, Slide.com with the intention of building it and selling it for more than 1.5 billion dollars (plus inflation). He is so committed to seeing his new venture succeed that he keeps a blood-pressure monitor on his desk. “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t start companies,” he said. “I’d probably think about slitting my wrists.” He really believes that if he cannot top what he did with PayPal, he will have learned nothing. He said “If I can’t top PayPal, then what the hell am I doing?”

He is on the run from feeling worthless, stupid and irrelevant. However; nothing outside of him, no amount of money, (not even 1.5 billion dollars) can set him free from the hell he is living in. Only the truth can set him free, and the truth is that he is not a worthless, stupid victim; he is a very powerful creator.

Click here to watch the video interview with Max Levchin.

Click here to read the article – “After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again”

We all live with this same kind of poverty in one way or another; we experience poverty every time we focus on what we don’t like about our partners and ignore all the good things. And when we believe that there is not enough time or that you do not have enough money. Every time you worry, you are poverty stricken because you rob yourself of taking action in the present moment to create what you want.

Lyrics from John Mayer’s song No Such Thing
I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the
Top of my lungs
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you gotta rise above

What if the “Lie you gotta rise above” is fear? Creating self-wealth is simple when you rise above the illusion of fear and claim your power in the present moment. Victims allow the past to stop them from taking action in the present moment and dreamers get lost in an imagined future to avoid taking action to change the reality that they have already created.

There are only 3 possible reasons why you are not as happy and wealthy as you would like to be.

1. Your thinking
2. Your thoughts
3. Believing your thoughts

Because wealth is just a story that you make up in your mind, once you change your thinking, creating wealth can be as simple as washing the dishes. You pick up a dirty plate, turn on the water squirt some soap and scrub. It’s your stories about doing the dishes that makes it a drag, such as…

• “It’s not fair, why do I always have to do the dishes – it’s not even my turn!”
• “I don’t have time to do the dishes.”
• “Doing the dishes is hard work!”

Yet, before a child has been taught that it’s hard work doing the dishes, they will volunteer to do them because they enjoy playing in the soothing running water and irresistible bubbles. Which story is true?

The good news about stories is that you can re-write them and change them to whatever you choose. I used to have the story that I did not have time to do the dishes, so I let them pile up until I built a monster sized monument to show me just what a failure I was, it was living proof that there was just not enough time, (that’s what us victims believe). I really believed I was an overwhelmed single mom and life was just not fair.

Then one day I realized that in reality it takes less than 5 seconds to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and that it was much easier to keep the kitchen clean. As I started to unravel the big lies I had been telling myself about doing the dishes I could see that I did not HAVE to do the dishes. I WANTED to do the dishes, because I really enjoyed walking into a clean kitchen. I opened my mind to new possibilities, I turned doing the dishes into a meditation, my creating thinking time, and ideas started flowing to me as effortlessly as the water.

Later, I became completely neutral about doing the dishes and keeping the kitchen clean. If the kitchen was a mess and dishes were piled up, it was most likely because I had spent extra time helping my son with his homework, or I was completely lost in the passion of my projects. I no longer had the story that I was a failure because the dirty dishes were on the outside of the dishwasher.

While doing the dishes, I started singing along to my voice lesson CD’s or just singing songs that I wanted to learn. This had a profound effect on my singing; it reconnected me to the joy and passion of singing because doing the dishes distracted me from trying to sing perfectly. If the kitchen was a big mess, I was excited because it gave me more singing time!

Doing the dishes washed away the lies that I was telling myself about   being a powerless victim. Bryon Katie says that “reality is always kinder that the stories you make up about it.” The reality is that I have always had the power to see the opportunity in everything (even doing the dishes) and creating my reality, just as you do.

Creating wealth is simple once you stop blaming money for your problems or for your success, once you realize that wealth and success are internal events and you learn to master the moment.

Julie Blake is a founding member of Steve Chandler’s Club Fearless and transforms lives as a Courage Coach for people want to live in untamed passion, experience unbridled freedom and take bold action to create a life they love!

Visit www.GotCourage.com for more free resources to turn up the passion and courage in your life.

NOTE: You are welcome to publish this article for your magazine, trade journal, newspapers, business journals, website and/or Ezine as long as you keep it in its original form and include the resource/credits box at the end. Thank you!

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