Feb 16, 2023 |
There are good reasons to use sliding scale, discounts, or scholarships.
And not-so-good-reasons.
Some of us use them as a cop-out.
Is that you?
See if one of the following applies to you.
(1) You firmly believe that There Aren’t Enough People Ever Who Can Pay Your Full Price
Or… even if there are, They’re Too Far Away or Mysteriously Hidden and You’ll Never Find Them.
Then you might be using the “I’m building equity!” thing to avoid building a sales mindset that actually works.
Selling at full price is a skill that, at some point, you have no choice to build if you want a profitable business. If you don’t want to do the mindset work around this, that’s fine… but tell yourself the truth.
You’re giving away scholarships because you’re scared to believe in yourself and the value of your offer.
And it has nothing to do with equity.
(2) When you imagine yourself abundantly, even luxuriously provided for, you feel… guilt, shame, anxiety. Abbunance feels like a zero sum game where, if you’re thriving, you must be taking from someone else.
I’m not talking about the clean pain that comes with acknowledging the fact that some people are grossly economically oppressed.
That is a real thing, and if you are paying attention, that should enrage you and break your heart. It should make you slow down and think twice about creating a flow of wealth that is community-enriching and socially responsible.
But here’s something that will be telling. If you would be genuinely happy to imagine a loved one, or someone you deem “worthy” be abundantly, luxuriously provided for (let’s say your kid, someone who is overcoming hard circumstances, someone you really respect)…
… but when you imagine yourself enjoying the same, it feels uncomfortable, we are no longer talking about your sensitivity to injustice.
We’re talking about “I am uniquely unworthy to enjoy nice things”. If you don’t heal that, you’ll always create and serve at under your full capacity.
(3) You are automatically suspicious of success and abundance, and equate wealth with greed or evil.
Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of people whose wealth is earned and hoarded in suspect and gross ways. Clearly, there are. And our society is rigged to encourage, enable and abet that in so many ways.
And it’s damn wise to hold onto an awareness of that.
But there are also all a lot of well-off people, financially comfortable people, who have kind hearts and discerning minds and are working damn hard to leave the world a better place than they found it, and ARE succeeding at that in many important ways…
… just as there are a lot of poor people who are shitty, cruel people that leave the world worse off than they found it.
Equating financial abundance with evil wholesale is lazy thinking, on top of the fact that it is a super effective way to make sure you stay under-resourced.
Being a leader of any kind requires the audacity of belief.
Being willing to try on, find evidence of, and indeed, create evidence of what you wish to see in the world, what you envision creating with your one-and-only, limitless, God-given life force.
If your current beliefs are working for you, keep them. If not, dare to imagine having something different.
Feb 14, 2023 |
So many entrepreneurs stay stuck in the same income level because their nervous systems literally don’t feel safe receiving more. And how much you can receive is directly tied to how much you can give.
(This post is for you if you suspect that you have trouble with receiving.)
Here’s my best tip: make a mini donation.
Here’s the thing. Everyone has what I’m gonna call their “giving comfort zone.”
If giving $2-5 to a cause you care about feels okay, that’s your giving comfort zone.
If you’re used to giving $20-30 and that feels pretty comfortable, that’s yours.
If you have more money, and it’s no trouble to part with $500 or so at a time, that’s yours.
Whatever range of money feels customary (for you) and not-scary to give away for a good cause… that’s your giving comfort zone.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pick an amount that is just sliiiiiiightly out of your comfort zone… but not so much it will screw up your finances or fry your nervous system.
So, if $20 feels good, give $23.
If $5 feels good, give $6.
If $300 feels good, give $350.
If you feel a slight edge, a little nervousness, but you know it’s realistically okay, that’s the right number.
I believe that incrementally building safety is the best way to expand capacity.
We’re not shocking anyone’s system into it. I strongly believe that the most sustainable and generative kind of expansion doesn’t work that way.
Feel that slight edge of the slightly bigger number… (and make sure it’s slight!), hit that donation button, and take a few deep breaths, reminding your body that you are safe.
Then, take a moment to visualize your money traveling to where it will go to benefit someone in need, adding more goodness to the world.
One new increment at a time.
Practice this every time you make a donation — to the extent that you’re not jeopardizing your financial safety.
(Please, there is no glory or wisdom in setting yourself on fire to keep others warm.)
And you will experience — as if by magic — an expanded ability to feel safe receiving greater amounts of cash.
Does it work? I am living proof.
I remember when I first donated $20 to Obama’s campaign in 2008. It was a significant amount of money for me at the time, fresh out of college. It made me feel powerful.
The biggest lump sum I donated in recent years is $250,000, to aid refugees of the war in Ukraine.
You better believe the expansion in my ability to give was, and is, directly correlated to my ability to give.
May 24, 2022 |
Here’s the shocking thing I am learning from having made millions of dollars.
Here’s why money is so attractive to good people, and why making and having a lot of money is such a powerful experience for so many of us.
It’s what money gives us, which I personally experienced for the first time in my life: a true abundance of options and a great sense of safety.
I come from an ancestral legacy of colonization, war, and poverty.
Mind you, there was great dignity in our resilience. And honor in our values, ways of life, and the way we stewarded resources.
But needless to say, a deeply felt sense of physical and spiritual safety, AS WELL AS having access to an overabundance of options, was and is foreign to us.
This is what money bought me and my family. It felt like more than just “it’s sweet having nice things!”
It felt like a cleansing. A medicine. A redeeming. And a sense of coming home.
Because here’s the thing: you don’t have to be Korean to have inherited a legacy informed by theft, violence, trauma, and diasporic displacement.
You can be Indigenous American. Black. Latine. Irish. Jewish. Palestinian. Armenian. Romani. Uighur. Tibetan. The list goes on.
And/or the economic underclass of basically any society.
And/or just NOT a cishetero male.
For us, HAVING a lot of money will, for the first time, and at least briefly, give us that sense of SAFETY AND OPTIONS.
The option to exist.
The option to care for our loved ones abundantly.
The option to do what we like, not what we are forced to do.
The option to make decisions for joy and thriving, not mere survival.
But money was never inherently what gives us these things.
WE HAD THESE THINGS IN THE BEGINNING.
SAFETY AND OPTIONS TO LIVE RICH, JOYFUL, FREE LIVES ARE OUR BIRTHRIGHT.
And for so many of us, money was what allowed us to BUY THEM BACK .
In the past few years, having money allowed me to feel a complete freedom to be my entire self and live out ALL of my values without compromise… for the first time.
The trouble is…
MONEY IS NEITHER THE THING ITSELF, NOR THE SOURCE OF THE THING.
When we mistake money as being THE THING itself, our relationship with money morphs into a different subjugation and bondage.
(I have seen it happen a lot. I know you have, too.)
As a business coach, my highest and most aligned aspiration is NO LONGER giant piles and piles of money for you.
It is now the reclamation of your spiritual birthright.
Your spiritual birthright to an over-abundance of safety — the kind that recodes your nervous system.
To an over-abundance of options and freedom.
To a powerfully felt experience of what your ancestors, too, had, before they were stolen from and subjugated — THE JOY OF ALIVENESS, CREATION AND INTERDEPENDENCE.
For some of you, the journey of reclamation may very well involve making giant piles and piles of money with your business…
…and learning how to steward that wealth in ways that break toxic paradigms and create new ones.
For some of you, it might not.
It might mean just getting you to a place financially where you can easily meet all of your needs, aligned desires and commitments to the ecology that surrounds you…
… and seeing where the spirit of your business wants to take you from there.
The aligned path will differ for each of us.
And it will ask us to wrestle with what it means to reclaim what is ours in a world dominated by cruel, dignity-stealing, earth-depleting systems of supremacy.
It will ask each of us to bring our unique gifts and perspective to the table to be part of the healing.
But I am no longer available to co-sign the falsehood that wealth is the ticket to freedom and aliveness.
Freedom is the ticket to freedom. Aliveness is the ticket to aliveness.
And both are already parts of your soul.
They cannot be purchased. Only claimed and activated.
And it was only ever the legacy of imperialism that ever bamboozled us into thinking that we needed to earn them…
… by making and hoarding millions of dollars through participating in a wounded economic system.
If you’re resonating with what I’m saying, thank you for being here.
We got big work to do together.
