Stop Pushing Money Away: Seeing The Pattern Underneath

Money comes in, but it leaves just as fast.

You hit a number and it still doesn't feel like enough.

You see someone with money, and something in you gets triggered.

You work harder, and you keep hitting the same ceiling.

What do you believe money is going to give you? Freedom. Security. Fun.

When I went underneath those, I didn't find money at all. I found something much deeper. Once you see what's underneath for you, your relationship with money begins to change.

The question is, are you ready to explore that?

This conversation is about money but not just how to make more money from a tactical standpoint, but the relationship underneath, and what we expect money to do for us.

For a lot of people, and for me for a long time as well, money isn't just money. It carries something else attached to it, most of the time.

Until you see what that is, more effort or pushing forward doesn't change your relationship to having more of it.

The real question.

Over the last 18 months, my relationship with money has drastically transformed.

I've seen my bank account hit zero multiple times, and I've also signed some of the biggest deals in my business so far.

Along that journey, I've been asking myself a variety of different questions to look at my relationship with money in many different ways.

One of those questions completely cracked me open. I'm going to share what I found, how it works, and how you can use it for yourself.

So let's start off with this mysterious question that changed everything for me.

The question was: if I was to remove everything I think money is going to give me, what is left?

The projection.

One of the key things intertwined with this question was understanding how much we actually project outwards onto money.

If you answer the question from its basic standpoint, what am I expecting money to be, things like freedom come up. Things like security.

They were the surface level ones for me. Everyone would likely say something along those lines.

When I started to go underneath that, what I found was very different.

It was a quiet, painful and familiar feeling of chasing.

As a boy, I deeply craved my father's attention and recognition. Due to how he was raised and the dynamics within our family, he wasn't able to do that the way I needed, at the times that I needed it.

This is not a unique case. Every boy craves their father's attention and recognition, at least to some degree.

Along that path, I learned that love had to be earned. I had to prove myself in order to receive that.

Somewhere along the way, especially as I got older, I believed that money was going to be the way to do that.

If we think about it for a second, as a kid our parents tell us what we can and what we cannot do, more often than not.

Whether we do that or not is up to us, but there's an authority there that is guiding us in some way, shape or form towards one or the other.

When we start to grow up and become an adult, money becomes the same kind of thing.

Money tells you if you can buy the thing or you can't buy the thing. How much money is in your bank account determines what you can and can't do.

So it's kind of like the same authority, in many ways.

When money takes the seat of that authority figure, it's almost like it inherits the unmet needs from the original authority figures. Then we project that onto money.

There's a scene in the movie Fight Club that shares this in an interesting way. Brad Pitt plays the character of Tyler Durden, and Edward Norton plays the main character.

No spoilers, but in one scene they talk about their fathers, and how they were let down by absent dads.

When Tyler makes the point that "our fathers were our models of God", this demonstrates what we're talking about here. If the father leaves, what does that say about God?

We learn here that our father is the first authority. When that need for safety and attention is unmet, it doesn't just go away. It just gets redirected towards something else.

For a lot of people, and for a lot of men specifically, that new place is money.

One thing I want to be clear about here: money, love, recognition, all of these are real human needs, and they're important. We all deserve them, and money matters as well.

This isn't about making money less important. It's more about removing the emotional charge that's attached to the story you have about money, that keeps pushing it away, or makes it hard to get, or like there's never enough of it.

I started to see the correlation in myself. My chase for money was a direct correlation to the chase for attention that I felt I didn't get in certain cases growing up. Attention is often tied to love as a child.

This hit me deeply.

When I allowed myself to fully feel that, I cried a lot, for three days straight, all around this. I was releasing a lot of the emotion and the shame that came from that feeling.

It took me a while to get there, in terms of being able to release that emotion. When I did, it just obliterated so many of these stories, because the emotion underneath was allowed to finally move.

The feeling that I was really looking for, money couldn't give it to me. Trying to force money to give it to me just made chasing it feel even worse.

So it was up to me to be able to lean into those emotions.

These are similar to the patterns that I help people see and release within themselves, so they can experience more of what they want in life.

Loyalty to the pattern.

We all know that a tree grows stronger by growing deep into the ground and stretching up towards the sky. We actually operate the same way, but we sometimes forget that.

We could say that the more that we want in life is up at the top. This could be more money, more clients, more love. Up there, we are reaching towards more.

It's easy to think about more, and to think, to get more, I must do more. Like input, output.

It's partially true, but it's not the full story. When we are doing more from this pattern that we're talking about here, or from a place of fear, we create a ceiling for ourselves. It's a push from behind, rather than something that's pulling us forward.

So we create a ceiling on what we can receive, because of our relationship to receiving.

In this case, the ceiling could be burnout. It could be wanting to just burn everything to the ground. It could be just that things aren't clicking the way that they could, even though the effort that you're putting in is to the max.

The roots, down below, are interesting, because this is the part that many people will ignore. This is the body, the relationship to self, the identity, the nervous system. There are so many aspects to this.

Most of it is correlated to the stories that we tell ourselves around what we must be or do in order to have this more that we're talking about here.

These stories can oftentimes be the thing that helps us avoid an emotion. The avoidance of the emotion underneath is what oftentimes causes the projection onto money.

So for example:

• Money is going to give me power, so I don't have to feel powerless.
• Money is going to give me pride, so then I don't have to feel shame.
• Money is going to give me love or recognition, so I don't have to feel rejected or unworthy.

Every one of these is a real need, and we're not ignoring that. It's just not money's job to provide those.

All of the things that we've discussed so far are just things that we're asking money to carry.

The more that we stretch our roots down, by leaning into the emotions without judgement, looking at our identity, looking at the stories we're creating around these things, the more these things on the surface shift as a by-product.

We start to grow our tree in alignment with how far we're going deep within ourselves.

Over time, we stop tying these different emotions to money and projecting them onto money. We allow ourselves to release them, and allow money to be what it is: a neutral tool.

If you were to look at some of these, which one of them is yours? What are you expecting money to be?

Finish the sentence.

Money is going to give me (Safety, love, recognition, whatever the case is)

Be honest about it. Whatever comes to mind is perfect. That will give you an idea of what you're asking money to be.

I've noticed a pattern in my past self, as well as in clients I've worked with, when it comes to the grind or the hustle. This drive to do more, get more, have more, which is all great.

When it comes from what we're talking about here, it creates a lot of resistance. It creates these ceilings, and it burns people out quite easily.

So where does the grind really come from? Well, for sure, some of it is ambition. In this case, a lot of it is loyalty to the pattern of chasing the thing that you think money is going to give you.

One of the biggest lessons with this for me was understanding that money won't feed that pattern of grinding and hustling.

It may come for a short time, and it'll go. Money just mirrors your emotional state and your relationship to more.

I see this with the clients that I work with as well.

One client was stuck at the same income for about 18 months or so in his business, and his pattern was tied to an emotion of guilt. We allowed that to be released, felt and seen, among other things that we did. Within the first 30 days or so, his revenue doubled.

What he was doing at the top of the tree didn't change very much at all. It was the same business, the same process, the same strategy.

Down in the roots, he had expanded his capacity by leaning into the intensity of the emotion that he had been running away from. His actions carried a different emotion. He felt different in his body and he aligned himself with the more that he wanted in his life.

This is in no way promising that you're going to do the same thing if you lean into these different emotions. It's a demonstration of what can happen when you welcome the intensity, and lean into it.

Money as a person.

When I was going through this breakthrough, I journaled so much around this topic, because there was a lot being released at that time.

I remember going through this process of almost personifying money. I'll walk you through what that looks like, because it's funny, and it's also quite disruptive in terms of how you can see money as well.

Picture money as a person for a second, and imagine saying this to them.

I expect you to give me everything. Everything. Even when you get close, I'm still going to remind you that it's not enough.

Imagine what that person would say back to you. What do you think the response would be?

It would just be straight up like, hey, I'm not doing that. You can find someone else to do that. That's not going to be me.

When I started to see things through that frame, I started to feel a deep empathy for money, as this imaginary person, for that moment.

I was like, wow. Money is just this thing that is completely neutral. It's non-personal. Everyone is just coming along and dumping all of their projections, and their emotions, and their unmet needs onto money.

Money is just standing there like, bro, can you stop? Please. I want to come to you. I want to support you. You keep expecting me to meet these needs that I cannot meet.

I was feeling this real empathy and sadness for money. It's obvious. If money was a person, they would be like, I'm out.

The overall verdict was: if you keep dumping your unmet needs onto money, eventually money is just going to leave. The same way a person would.

As I started to think about this more deeply, a couple of things came to me.

Money likes to flow. So don't hoard it, and don't give it all away either. Have this giving and receiving flow that naturally happens, because it likes that.

Money also likes to be in a secure relationship. So don't project all of your unmet needs or attachments onto money, expecting it to do that, because it will leave.

Money just wants to have a secure relationship with you, the same way you want to have a secure relationship with money. Like a person, it tends to stay where the relationship is secure.

There's an old story about King Midas. You may have heard of the Midas touch, where everything you touch turns to gold. He was a king in Greek mythology, and he was extremely wealthy.

One day he showed kindness to a friend of the god Dionysus. As a reward, Dionysus offered him one wish. Anything he wanted.

Midas was a man who already had everything, but he asked for more. He wished that everything that he touched turned to gold.

It worked. He walked around turning stones to gold, trees and branches to gold. Everything was turning to gold all around him.

Then his food started to turn to gold, and his wine. In some stories, his daughter as well.

He was surrounded by wealth, but he was literally starving.

Midas believed that having more gold would give him more of everything. Gold could only be gold, not everything. It couldn't feed him, and it couldn't let him hold the ones that he really loved.

We do the exact same thing to money when we expect money to be our safety, our security, our father or mother's approval, or our love.

Money only does what money does.

So the problem isn't money. It's what we're asking money to be.

The Reclaiming.

The famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung talked about projection quite thoroughly in his work.

He says when you see what you have put onto something outside of yourself, and you take that back, you end the turmoil. You start to come back home to yourself.

Next, I'm going to walk you through the five different steps that I went through personally to come to these different realisations across the different areas of my life.

01. Ask what money is going to give you.

Number one is asking yourself the question: what do I believe money is going to give me?

Start off there, and write everything that comes to mind. It could be freedom, enjoyment, fun, whatever the case is.

02. Go one layer deeper, to a feeling.

The next step is to go one layer deeper, until you find a feeling.

This is where tuning into your body is going to be really powerful, to see what you feel as these different things come up. As well as potentially looking for a face, a memory, an event, something that starts to come to mind.

This may not come to mind straight away. You may have to sit with this a little bit. You may have to just allow it to do its own thing over time.

The act of you doing this opens up the pathways for you to receive an answer here.

03. Ask who you first wanted it from.

The third one is a question again, asking: who did I first believe I was going to get this from?

04. Let yourself feel what comes up.

The fourth stage of this, for me, was allowing myself to feel what arose for me.

Sometimes it can be difficult to start to tap into emotions if you're in your head quite a lot. If emotions are a new thing, it may be challenging. So don't be too hard on yourself.

Something that worked for me throughout the last number of years doing this work, was music that triggers something within me, or makes me feel sad.

That gets me into an emotional place where I can access more of the truth that's within me, and allow myself to feel these things. That's something that helps me. It may be different for you. Explore and get curious.

You may experience judgement in your mind, or wanting to fix it. That's normal. You don't have to fight that.

Try to observe your mind as it starts to judge you, and bring yourself back into a breath, or a slow pace, just to be with yourself. There's no way to do this incorrectly. Just by engaging in it, you're already doing the work.

05. Give the need back to where it belongs.

Number five is to give the need back to where it belongs. Tune into what you need to do in your own life, to be able to provide the needs that may not have been met, to yourself.

Creating a sense of safety for yourself — or whatever else you think money is going to give you. How can you create that for yourself?

This is the question where some lifestyle changes may come up, where certain ways of doing things may change. You may experiment with certain things.

Are there things that you can add into your daily routine? Are there things that you can stop doing? How can you fulfil the need yourself?

As you start to do this over time, you'll start to see money as what it's just meant to be, which is just a neutral tool. Something that you can align yourself to, depending on what you want to see in the world.

That reduces the charge that was originally attached to it, because you're meeting your own needs rather than expecting money to meet those needs.

It's not just money we're talking about here. It's anything.

Your business can't be a source of intimacy. Your audience or followers can't be your source of recognition. World travel can't be your source of home either.

I've been travelling for the last five years, and I love it. It's something I really enjoy doing. A part of me, for the longest time, was trying to find a sense of home in travel.

Every new location was a new opportunity to find home.

After going deeper into these things we're talking about here, I found a sense of home within. I stopped needing travel to be that source, because I was able to give it to myself.

We carry everything with us until we give it to ourselves, and release it.

I believe that's when we really start to experience the fullness of what life truly has to offer, because we don't need it, and we're not attached to it.

There's no perfect process to any of this. It's all about experimentation and discovery, and seeing what works for you.

So now, the more I ask myself this question, what do I believe money will give me, the more the answer gets simpler and simpler over time.

Nothing that I don't already have.

It can amplify what I feel, but it can't give me what my inner child needed growing up, at the times that I needed it. That job is for me now, as the adult.

When I let these different things go, I can consciously choose what I want money to be.

It can be a way to share more of what I love with others. It can become something more beautiful, rather than something that's charged by an unmet need.

Now, when I see people who are very successful or have a lot of money, I can look at them with inspiration, and with joy and happiness for them.

I don't believe that they're holding something that I'm missing.

King Midas got his life back, by the way. He washed his hands in the river, and all the gold started to flow off.

Seeing the projection is the river in this case.

So the question that I'll leave you with is: what are you asking money to be?

Supporting you,

Jordan