One of the key elements of being a stress proof entrepreneur is being resilient.
And to be resilient you have to take extremely good care of yourself in mind, body and spirit — including your financial wellbeing.
But, here’s the thing.
If your bank account is in a scary place, you’re not going to feel good no matter how much self-care you do.
Your wellbeing requires a healthy bank account.
This is how I define true prosperity — if you are able to feel good in all areas of your life because you feel safe, you feel secure and you can use your resources to help lift others up.
Too many of my good, good entrepreneur friends are sacrificing safety and security for doing the right thing.
Their own ability to thrive and prosper are hindered by being caught in the web of paradoxes of earning an income and making money as conscious entrepreneurs.
When your financial wellbeing is low, you will feel it in all areas of your life.
This month I’m focusing my work around what it means to practice liberated money practices, a concept I have been learning about and really focusing on for a very long time as an online creator and coach and that has been reiterated I’m really redefined by the work that I’ve been doing this year with Kelly Diehls and her We Are The Culture Makers Program.
Your financial wellbeing matters just as much as your physical wellbeing. Feeling safe and secure is vital to your own flourishing. You must make earning a thriving income a priority.
I can speak from personal experience that for a long time I had my worth tied up in my bank account — and this is a topic I’ll be exploring in the next episode.
Once I learned to cut my worth off of my income, I found another issue.
I was so busy trying to be nice, to be good to people that I had sacrificed my own thriving and flourishing.
And I can tell you that I was doing a lot of self-care but as long as I was pinching pennies and working hard to make ends meet — and experiencing countless nights of insomnia on how the mortgage would be paid …
I suffered.
I really want to talk about paradoxes that we as highly conscious wholehearted entrepreneurs bring to the table and the conditioning that we have been informed by around money making.
Listen to this episode now — or keep reading below.
I talked about money in the last episode on my framework of Money, Meaning and the Greater Good and how we can build businesses that don’t really truly bring all of that to the table so that we are not depriving ourselves of money, we’re not depriving ourselves of joy and we’re not depriving the world of our activism or our beliefs or our strengths or our values.
When we build a business based on those three things, we thrive.
But all too often now we are surrounded by a great sense of greed and unethical sales strategies.
I want to tell a story. I’m in a Facebook group where the leader is all about helping you make a lot of money by offering high ticket offers. I was brought into this group by a third-party. It’s not my kind of group but I enjoy seeing what the leader of the group is saying from time to time.
But recently, this group leader started to call out the “ethical sales” movement which I am a fan of and follow wholeheartedly ….
This entrepreneur is making millions of dollars by selling offers strictly to help people try and make millions. She was calling out ethical marketing advocacy as being harmful to women and preventing us from being able to make money.
I was watching this thread and in the responses to it because I am I am a proponent of an ethic of care and love and concern in our sales in our marketing but I’m also a student because I still have work to do on how to incorporate all of this in and still make money.
To call out ethical sales and money making without encouraging conscientiousness is harmful. I was glad when another more active member of the group said as much.
The truth is that making money ethically is harder. Much harder. But it’s not impossible.
I’m earning a thriving income right now and I’m doing it in a way that feels good, feels aligned and feels ethical and I’m being conscientious — very conscientious — about my practices.
But it’s not easy by any stretch.
There is a lot of mixed up information out there that has people confused and doing things like tactics and strategies that may not always work, that won’t feel good to you.
I am talking to conscious entrepreneurs right now. This is for those who struggle with asking for money, asking for the sales, who struggle with pricing.
So I want to talk about some of the paradoxes of money making as conscious entrepreneurs or conscientious entrepreneurs.
Here are 3 Paradoxes in Money Making as Conscious Entrepreneurs
PRICING AND WORTH
so the very first one that I want to address right upfront is the most obvious and that is our pricing oh there is so much juicy loaded complicated stuff stuff it is stuff around pricing and everybody seems to have the answers and I don’t know that anybody is correct I don’t know that anybody is wrong I just know that it is loaded and it’s filled with paradoxes.
There are essentially three school of thoughts around pricing. If you charge too much, you’re pricing out marginalized people and being inaccessible. If you charge too little, you are under earning and undercharging, which can make your work seem less valuable. The third way, which is the way I support, is finding the just right number that allows you to thrive while also keeping pricing accessible for most of your aligned clients.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do what you need to thrive financially and what feels right for you and if it’s working, it’s working and if it’s not it’s OK to switch things around. Don’t charge X rate because someone else says you’re too cheap. Do you have enough money coming in at the rate you have and are you able to maintain a high level of capacity for those clients and the rest of your life and business? Then it’s enough.
TIME IS MONEY
We learn at a young age that time is money. And so one of the paradoxes we are seeing now is a real movement to make more and earn less. And, at the same time, a whole lot of hustle and grind is unfolding for people hoping to get lucky and strike it rich. As it turns out, time is money. Making money takes time. We either want ease or we want money. It’s rare that we get both.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do what you need to do to handle the important stuff and when things are fine, let them be fine. See a therapist or work with a coach on how to cope through or how to make moves that are for future self and future business impact. Don’t waste time wasting time for that time is money conditioning.
GREED VS. THRIVING
Another paradox is in money making to thrive. Conscious entrepreneurs don’t want to look greedy so they tend to undersell and undervalue their work and worth. And yet being human is very costly and money is needed not only to survive but to thrive. This paradox of greed vs. thriving is important to break down.
THE MONEY MOMENT: Do you have enough money to pay your bills and feel like you are living a prosperous life? Do you have just enough, barely enough or plenty? Let this guide you on how much more pushy you could stand to be. Honestly? I could use more money. We have a lot of medical bills and inflation. I need to be more pushy so that I am experiencing prosperity.
Prosperity should be available to everyone. And, that may mean you have to learn new ways of putting your work into the world. As I have mentioned, my framework of being Business Brave is all about ensuring you thrive because you are running a business that is making money, making meaning for you the founder and making a difference in the world either directly or indirectly.
