Overcoming Underearning – Interview with Financial Expert Barbara Stanny

written by Bari Tessler December 5, 2013

Golden Nugget #6: Money Healing

Today we’re diving right into one of the deepest, tenderest areas in all of conscious money work. Hold onto your tiaras and cowboy hats, folks. Today, it’s about …

The Question of Value

Everywhere we turn — especially in the online entrepreneurial world — we’re bombarded by affirmations and commands about value.

“Charge what you’re worth!”
“You deserve to make a comfortable, posh living.”
“Your time/health/relationships/native genius are where true value lies.”

Value is certainly intimately intertwined with money. With how we spend, earn, save, charge for services — and how we relate to all of those experiences.

But value is a far richer, nuanced mystery than your hourly rate or net worth.

Value reveals the gap between our reality and our potential — whatever we perceive those to be. It reflects our definition of “enough-ness,” and our capacity to relax into gratitude — whatever our bank statement says. It’s expressed in our ability to set boundaries, boundaries, and more boundaries — around what we deem vital, sacred, and solely ours.

Value has everything to do with the beliefs we hide in plain sight.

It challenges high earners and low earners, alike — though sometimes in different ways. For example:

There are a number of beautiful souls in my community who could be considered under-earners. Their challenge right now is working on their boundaries, their no’s and yeses, their relationship to over-giving, charging enough, and/or creating savvier business models. This is a challenge with value and its real-life, embodied expression.

Others in my community are very high income earners … yet they have a heckuva time saving money, directing it where they want, or even peeking at their numbers. They don’t feel in control of their money, their choices, or their life. This, too, is a struggle with value.

Hidden right below both of these scenarios is a challenge — an invitation — to value ourselves. To fully claim sovereignty over our lives, our choices, our money. To take our seat in the courageous, living, breathing commitment to freedom, empowerment, and self-love.

So what is claiming, growing, and expressing our value all about?

Finding ways to earn more? Finding ways to be content with whatever we have, right now? Taking charge of our money maps, savings goals, and earning ceilings? Redefining what it means to have enough? Or is it something else, entirely?

Yes, yes, and yes. To all of the above. And so much more.

I recently had the honor and absolute pleasure of discussing these sorts of questions with one of the world’s leading authorities on women, money, and value: Barbara Stanny.

In this interview, we discuss how to overcome under-earning, how to grow our sense of value, and women’s strengths and challenges around money. Plus: hear her lead me in an exercise about my earliest money memory — and the decisions I made because of it.

I hope you enjoy the discussion. It was such a privilege to interview such a thoughtful, powerful woman!

… Exciting news!

Barbara Stanny will be joining us as a guest teacher in my year-long program, The Art of Money. She will dive deep with us into the Inner, the Outer, and the Higher work of wealth … and how all of this can transform your relationship to money (and under-earning!) forever.

The Art of Money registration opens soon. Click here for details, registration, and samples.

I know the subject of value and under-earning is a tender one for many in my community. (And I’ve certainly navigated it, myself — for years and years!) I’m delighted to welcome Barbara Stanny and her seasoned perspective to the Art of Money curriculum!

Your Turn:
What assumptions about your value are you ready to reconsider?
What is your earliest money memory? And what decision did it provoke?
In what ways are you ready to grow your sense of value?

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