Money and Psychology
Is it cruel to write about the topic of money right after the ACA launch experienced a big fail, and middle-income Americans realized that most of the healthcare plans would not directly benefit them? I hope not! It appears that I owe my community a blog post about money and financial depression. I’ll tackle the first part – money and money disorders – and the second part you’ll read sometime in early 2014, when some of the dust post-ACA settles.
How I got where I am today, on the other side of my own money disorder, is a story in itself. I’m painfully aware I’d rather break some bones in my hand than talk publicly about money. Apparently, this is the norm, and I am not alone.
Last year, my coach Patrick Snow helped me lay out the table of contents for my book project, “Designing Your Practice: An Artist’s Approach”. He told me to take out twenty-one pieces of paper, label them Chapter 1 through Chapter 21, and add a couple of blank pieces of paper to hold the title, content, copyright, and bibliography pages, so on and so forth. He then told me that not only should I have a chapter on the topics of change and leadership, I’m required to write a chapter about money. What how-to book would be complete without talking about money? No sh-t, right?
When the time came around to write my money chapter, there were, and perhaps still are, parts of me that would much rather take a hammer and break my fingers one by one so that I wouldn’t have to write about such a personally painful topic. A chapter about money requires me to share money stories. I felt a level of embarrassment on par with farting in public. I bumbled through the chapter, and then I did everything possible to forget about too many words and too much pain. I did such a good job of forgetting, I forgot to share some of those stories here, where they might do some good before the book gets published.