Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
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Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
Money - Part Two: Talking Money Programming with Brian Rump - Unpacking Societal Expectations and Finding True Fulfillment
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What if the relentless pursuit of financial security is robbing us of present happiness? Join us as we unravel the "should monster" lurking in our financial lives with our insightful guest, Brian Rump - The Profit Coach. We challenge the ingrained beliefs that echo societal expectations, like "I should save more" or "I should have a retirement plan," and encourage listeners to question, "based on what and according to whom?" Through personal stories and deep discussions, we explore how these external pressures shape our monetary mindset and redefine what true fulfillment looks like.
We're rethinking the notion of retirement and life's fulfillment beyond conventional boundaries. Why postpone joy for a future that's not guaranteed? By sharing anecdotes, we emphasize the importance of aligning your life with personal values over societal scripts. Many overestimate retirement needs due to consumerist pressures, while overlooking the essence of living richly today. We invite you to consider if your dreams, like traveling the world, are genuinely yours or shaped by external narratives.
Pressure from societal expectations around financial responsibility can be overwhelming. With Brian, we explore balancing student loans, career aspirations, and personal growth amidst these challenges. We discuss generational shifts where personal fulfillment often takes precedence over traditional career paths. By questioning predefined paths and embracing individual desires, we encourage you to challenge conventional success and stability norms, making choices that resonate with your values. Through candid conversations about money, from tithing to spending on social connections, we aim to demystify financial discussions and emphasize the power of informed, authentic decision-making.
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Welcome and thank you for joining us for Coffee with Hilary and Les. Brought to you by the State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre located in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes, this is our almost daily community podcast about the mind and how we all might change it in the most simple and helpful ways. Every day we sit staring at the lake and sipping our coffee, chatting about hypnosis and how to make those meaningful adjustments to our state of mind, because nothing's more important than your state of mind.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're back on the line. We're back on the line with Brian.
Speaker 2:Back on the line with Brian and back by the lake, where we belong.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's the afternoon, so it isn't coffee with Hillary, unless we're thinking we should call it wine with Hilary.
Speaker 3:Ooh wine with Hilary.
Speaker 2:Maybe we'll get there. We'll take a pause as we go along, but it's a bright, sunny afternoon by the lake and Brian gets to stare at the lake.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is mesmerizing. How am I supposed to concentrate when I can just stare out at this lake here?
Speaker 1:What's up?
Speaker 3:It's pretty much a perfect day, too, in terms of how the lighting is and everything, so, yeah, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2:It's good to have you and we're going to keep this conversation about money going, so got any thoughts from yesterday?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know the last episode ended on Les going through a list of things he should do as it related to his money. And I thought we'd start there Because, as we go through the process of rewriting our money story, we really need to look at what I like to call the should monster, what I like to call the should monster. And you know, every time we say should and it often happens with money it's an opportunity to discover whose shame it is that you're saying it. So, you know should comes up with. You know I should be better with my money, I should, you know, save more money. I should have a retirement plan. I, you know I shouldn't buy a latte at the coffee shop.
Speaker 3:You know, when you start opening your ears to it, you know we are, you know, shooting ourselves all the time as it relates to money. And, as we've heard on this podcast, we know, you know should is shame and you know shame really is not useful at all. So, you know, part of the, the, you know trauma of money has a process that they recommend. That, you know, starts out with kind of a step of just uncovering these things. And yesterday we talked about some money narratives, some money scripts. You know should is another big one, and one of the things I learned that I've been practicing is you know when that word should comes up. You think you just ask yourself, or ask that question, you know, based on what and according to whom yeah, I like that and that to me is one where we can, yeah, kind of think and see where the trail goes.
Speaker 3:But you know, we really have to start uncovering these, you know things we have in our mind and understand like, do they actually serve what we want? Which is kind of the next phase, which is visioning our phase, our life and what we really want. So if we kind of go back and forth a little bit, we can break down some of those, you know should questions yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2:I like the idea of always remembering that there's nothing in your mind that you didn't receive from someone else. Yeah, right, like you come into the world, you're an infant, you're. You don't even know how to think yet, really, and all of a sudden you've got a whole catalog of crap in your head uh, some built around shoulds. You know rules and and the order of things, and then the only way I think to really overcome them is to first acknowledge that they're not yours and then look at where they came from yeah, where they came from.
Speaker 3:Why, um, you know, especially with money, we get things that maybe served a few generations ago. But are they really things we need to? You know, should and adopt for ourselves? Or just the idea of you? You know, sometimes it's. You know how much is enough. So, you know things like I should have a better retirement plan.
Speaker 3:You know we are bombarded with, you know, statements from older generations about what they would save. You know retirement has completely changed since those days. We're bombarded by commercials. You know I grew up on watching the, you know, freedom 55 commercials the suggestion that you know, if you don't save, you know a billion dollars by the time you're 55, like life's going to be over. Oh my God, yeah, life's going to be over for you. Oh my God, yeah. And when you dig into it, you know I don't know any working person who's retired and then found themselves homeless and starving to death. That's just my experience. You know things seem to work out. You may have to, you know, not make different choices. Or maybe, you know, not everyone gets the dream life of luxury that they may really want. But when we start thinking about these things and unpacking them, they kind of lead us to figure out, you know, what do we really value?
Speaker 2:I think retirement is a wild concept and I remember when my grandfather passed away and he wasn't even 65 yet and he had stopped working because of health reasons. But the whole idea of retirement to me is baffling. You know, people have different levels of health today, different lifelong expectations, a whole different view of what they should be doing with their time. I mean, I struggled with it when I retired from the college that you know. You think you're going to move into a world of, yeah, contentment, and I haven't found contentment to be a fun emotion.
Speaker 2:Like it hasn't been enjoyable to try to move into contentment and then realize I'm not and then realize, well, there's things I want to do about it, right?
Speaker 3:So I think when somebody is like today, if you're 30 years old today you should just reject every idea there is about retirement and a bit of a plan, are going to have a different vision for, you know, their next five years than you're going to have when you're 30. Yeah, and these things really, you know, hijack what we worry about. You know, I've met people and I think I was someone in my 20s so worried about retirement and saving for retirement. And it's easy to do because you know you pull up a, you know a little cash flow calculator and you know you plug in the numbers and it's like, hey, if I only save you know $100 a week for the next whatever years, I could be rich. And it seems easy. Yet you have other, maybe trade-offs you want to make and people will get so worried about retirement that they might make choices that take away from investing in themselves or investing in experience they want to have and I'm not advocating ever for you know spending everything and getting in lots of debt and just never worrying or caring.
Speaker 1:You know, but it's finding the balance that works for us and people get so caught up, you know, in something like retirement and it kind of short-circuits everything else in their, in their life yeah, and I think that should gets caught up there too, because so many people feel like they should work until they are at their max retirement, remember, and you just never know what's going to happen. Right, you, you could die, right, and then it's just all for naught.
Speaker 2:Well and you might miss opportunities. You know, like I look at the last 20 years of the globe right and how countries have changed and leaderships has changed and safe places have become unsafe places and unsafe places have become safe places. And if you put off things like travel and you say, well, I'll do that when I retire, you're going to miss out on stuff. And if you think about the different things in your life that you want and you say, well, I'll have that when I retire and I'm guilty of those thoughts, I'll have that when I retire, you really miss out on just a lot of joy in life right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you really do, and that's part of you know understanding these should things. And you know and it might not make you a completely abandoned you know retirement savings but it might help you not worry about. You know sacrificing yourself today for a future that you may not even make it to or even know what you're going to going to want at that point, and you know retirement's one of those things. You know extra savings, you know it gets back to what we were talking about yesterday is, I think there's some freedom and understanding like you're never going to fully protect yourself against everything. You're still going to have to collaborate, so kind of the earlier you can design your life around what you actually like and value. You know collaborate with people. You want to collaborate. You know find the type of work that you like doing and is fulfilling.
Speaker 3:You know maybe you work a few extra years than everyone else and that's the difference between you know you might sacrifice in your 20s so you can quote, unquote, retire early. But you might be miserable and are forced to retire because of health reasons or then not able to enjoy it. But the alternative could just be well, find something you like and want to do anyway. Then people are living longer, they're healthier, they may just work a few extra years, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah other people's ideas that get trapped in our heads. Yeah, I had a buddy. He was a lot older than me and he was a lawyer and he was like in his 70s and he was practicing law and I remember asking, like, are you gonna retire? And his answer was hilarious.
Speaker 3:He said what am I gonna do less watch tv yeah, like we're meant to be activated and stimulated and create and some of the happiest people I know keep, just keep going. They maybe they work a bit less, they take some more vacation time, but yeah, like the idea of doing nothing to some people is just not yeah, not what they want to do.
Speaker 1:Society has set it up so that work is head down. You know moving forward and I can relax when I'm retired.
Speaker 1:But, as we were talking about this morning, we are kids in adult bodies basically right we are creative beings, we are naturally wanting to be creative and so when you now retire thinking oh, I just had my head down for the last 40, 50 years, now I can relax. There's this pushback because naturally you as a human maybe you don't want to work the same way, but you want to do something you're naturally wanting to be doing something out there, and that's why I think so many people that just stop working.
Speaker 1:I see it every, not every day, but I see it in the business, uh, where I work with people that are in retirement, the retirement phase, and they're trying to figure out who they are and they're trying to get out of a depression that hit, and you know all this stuff that comes up when we feel like we're supposed to relax, we're supposed to just not do anything yeah, these really big core ideas that we latch onto and then build.
Speaker 2:Build a towards a horizon that we don't even really know what it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we probably, you know, overestimate how good that's going to be. Yeah, and you know you don't take the time and this is where, sometimes, releasing these things, taking the time to know what you really want, you realize, realize, like you know, maybe I don't need as much money as I think, especially if we take care of some of those money scripts. So, for example, if you're a money worship person, who's the workaholic, who's always just spending, spending, spending, you know in your mind you probably need, you know in your mind you probably need, you know, $10 million to retire. But if you heal that, maybe you think, oh, I only need $1 million, and I already have four.
Speaker 2:So maybe I can now choose to like structure my life different and not worry about money as much. And in that script there that, that program that says you know, I'm not happy unless I'm getting stuff and new stuff and having stuff like the whole world of stuff.
Speaker 3:That's a program unto itself yeah, it's a whole and I should, right, I should buy this. You know my neighbors have this thing. I should do that. I should check this out. I, you know I should travel. Travel is another thing that interests me because, you know, people really only travel places because they heard a story about someone traveling to that place or they read a book about it and they want to see it and there's nothing wrong with that. I also think that's kind of human nature and hearing those stories and wanting to travel, like because human beings, we want to travel and explore and, you know, meet other people from other places and we were talking about today traveling and and we were talking about today traveling and just writing and did like home, like going like this, so for anyone listening, just hands over your eyes, looking down, close out the world.
Speaker 1:Close out the world.
Speaker 2:Don't see anyone else, just the beach just the beach yeah just me writing on the beach, yeah yeah there's nothing wrong with that yeah, I guess I think about you know just well, you guys know this because you know me. I just always think of everything as a program. I just wonder how much is in our minds that is genuinely us right. What is genuinely me Is genuinely me sitting on the dock all day long, every day, doing nothing. No, but it was kind of a dream for a while.
Speaker 2:No, but it was kind of a dream for a while, and embracing that maybe yeah, maybe that was even something I would have wanted to do when I was younger for a period of time, and that maybe that's not a lifestyle, that's just a nice hobby, right, something that's actually healthy and helpful. But you know, I buy into the story of retirement being this shut it down and be content kind of lifestyle and it's not satisfying. It's not satisfying for me anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we get sometimes.
Speaker 3:That's a sign of burnout when you're younger and it's like fantasizing about sitting on the dock all day for eternity. You're just like, oh, that would be really nice. And you know, I think too like there's nothing wrong with sitting on the dock. And you know, right now I'm looking out at the water and it's beautiful and it's healthy, but it doesn't mean that's what I have to do all day, every day, forever. It's often seeking that. You know we can use the word balance, of making sure you're fitting those things in and if you're recharged and that helps you recharge, it helps you. Maybe you know work and do things a bit longer yeah, where did that idea come from?
Speaker 3:even I was listening to a conversation recently with Dan Sullivan who was talking about even the concept of retirement, because in his program Strategic Coach, he has a few ideas. One is the lifetime extender and you know he plans to live till he's 126. And he's in his late 70s now and in his earlier 70s he decided he was going to write 100 books and he writes a mini book every quarter for 100 quarters. So that's part of his plan and he's continually, you know, developing team and collaboration around him. So he gets to do the work that he loves and enjoys the most and is kind of working kind of less hours and to him it's like, well, why would I ever retire? Like his job is thinking and creating tools and being around interesting people.
Speaker 3:So, um, you know, retirement even as a concept is fairly new because people you know, would kind of work their trade or do their job in the community. They may slow down but they didn't really stop until maybe a few years before they passed away. But it was the, I believe the french who invented it for generals and it was when they were older. They would have people kind of retire so that younger people could take over. And he made a little joke, whereas you know the french have a long history of understanding that it's not good to have young people angry and unemployed so because of the revolutions. So if you have people retire to kind of make room for younger people, that was kind of the original concept yeah and even then people didn't live.
Speaker 3:You know, it wasn't like now, where I remember a lady in Fenlon Falls, frida Kelly, who lived to, I think, 102 or she was pretty old, but she had been a full-time school teacher and at one point, talking about how, you know, she'd been collecting a pension longer than she worked, For her.
Speaker 3:And you just think, yeah, like retirement wasn't longer than you worked. You know when we roll back and and as we get healthier, as you know, we learn more about how to take care of ourselves, and medical science, and even you know the internet has helped us. You us connect to people who can help heal you and help unpack these things. So why not change the concept of retirement and lend to retire?
Speaker 2:Well, and it reminds me of what's gone on for my kids. We have this big should about saving and planning for someplace way down the road and we program that in, but the flip side of that is that the economy has shifted and there's not a lot of loyalty out there. There's not a lot of loyalty from employers to employees. I watched my kids get into jobs early in their working life that you know. I felt like the employer didn't respect them. I felt like the employer wasn't honoring them and they were there knocking themselves out, looking for something that the employer had no intention of giving them, which was all locked into. How do I save to have all these things that I'm supposed to have, because that's what everybody told me I should have.
Speaker 2:And then two of my sons did, I thought, amazing things. My one son he worked in advertising. He did all kinds of really great creative work. He's a wonderful artist and he's a musician too.
Speaker 2:But what he did was he'd work hard for agencies on a contract basis and he'd make himself a nice little pocket and then he'd buzz off for three months and travel Europe, right, and and it got to the point where I was sort of saying, well, where are you going next, right? What's the next plan? And I liked it and I respected it, because what he was really saying, I think, to employers was you know, if you're not going to make a commitment to me, then I'm going to live a life, I'm going to give a life that I like my other son he took. He was working for banks and he finally got a good position in the bank but said heck with it, I'm taking a year off. And he took a year of leave and he traveled around the world, Right, and he did that young, like in his early 30s, Right. And that again, I was really, I really admired that he had no obligation to anybody except himself and he, I think in a lot of ways he really honored that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love those stories because I think that's the the choice we have and unpacking some systems as well, because even that system of loyalty goes back to the Industrial Revolution and I think the employers used to be, I think, more loyal and expected more loyalty. But it was. We didn't have the same freedom of movement. You know, people might live in a company town near the manufacturer and they wanted to, you know, get people to kind of have consistent labor for a long time, so they had some better packages. They were also smart, I think, in. You know, pay people less now but they might have had better benefits to kind of kick the can down the road for the company into the future.
Speaker 3:And a lot of that stuff changed in the kind of late 90s, early 2000s. You know they stopped doing pension funds and it was all. You know, all the employer contribution things. So we have some built-in better choice as employees where a lot of pension plans are guaranteed but they'll contribute, which just means you could take that with you a bit more. And some employers complain that there's no loyalty, employers complain that there's no loyalty but they kind of created that new system as a response to not wanting to have the liability of loyalty that comes with that trade-off. And when you understand that you can choose to do things like work hard for eight months and take off for three and what's the worst that happens, you work an extra couple of years and it probably for your son. It allows them to not get burnt out and work extra years, and also that travel probably fuel, fuels that creativity even more. And you know, I think that's the type of thing, as humans, we want to do.
Speaker 1:I feel like, too, the um, our mind is probably obviously the biggest thing that gets in the way of doing those things that we want to do, but maybe we think it's off in the future and I don't have enough money right now. There are countless stories, whether they're real or not, like that I've seen or I've witnessed online or I've heard of, where people just go and they, they just go and and do what they want to do and it's somehow like you were saying yesterday, it works out. Right, these things work out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they find a way of working out, and you understand the world's different, and you're right. So many people say, well, I just don't have the money right now to do this, and that may be true, but when you start unpacking sometimes, why don't you have it? And it could be well. I need to work hard and that's a should, right. You should work hard. You should get a good, good, stable job like. I left the bank as well, um, and it's like people thought I was insane because it's like, oh, the bank, like that's a good job. You, you know, be there forever.
Speaker 1:Um, how boring is that. How terrifying is that you'd be there forever.
Speaker 3:Oh, I remember one time thinking like I worked with a lot of people who had been there a long time and I remember I was in fenland falls working in fenland falls. I was cutting my lawn one day and thinking, is this it like? Is this going to be my life for the next 40 years? Like am I going to retire from here? And it didn't scare me that much, but I just remember I didn't really have the tools I have now to really think through that and now my life's changed like probably 10 different times over and over since that point and just knowing, like how things can change it's just a reminder like you can explore something else and to understand like, yeah, why am I doing this?
Speaker 3:You know some other shoulds around, that is, people might say things like well, you should never turn down work and people who work a crazy amount of overtime. And I find some of those people are also the ones who never have any money for the things they want to do right now because they're usually soothing themselves with maybe buying a bigger house or buying bigger, more expensive vehicles or just spending. And you know they're in credit card debt. So they're in this trap of working extra because they're told they shouldn't give up work and they're exhausted and burnt out and don't feel like they can have a break because you know they have too many big life obligations that probably don't serve their vision for how they really want to live either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it, just it's so.
Speaker 2:It's such an enormous program what people live in terms of becoming an adult and then all these things that they think they should acquire and they should have and they should be, and you walk through suburban neighborhoods filled with these 40 year olds that have two kids and a lawn to cut and a mortgage, and it's not so much that they own a house, but the house owns them, because everything in their life is designed around that and they never, ever, like it was never, considered that question of well, what do you want, what would you like to do?
Speaker 2:Like I really admire people who say I don't want to have kids, I don't want to have that lifestyle, I don't want to be stuck in a job for 30 years. I really admire people who are, because I see it as a dramatic challenge to the programming that went in for decades, really in the first 20 years. That went in for decades, really in the first 20 years. Just so much of a worldview of this is the way it's supposed to be and this is what success is, and if you're not that, then you're not successful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it just makes me think. I grew up and my dad worked for Nortel, which doesn't really substantially exist anymore, and his whole life was there, like all these people he talked to had been there forever. So I grew up around all these people who you got a job, you stayed loyal and you were there for all these years and you'd hear of people leaving and I remember thinking what are they going to do? Like their whole life is ruined. And then when that plant they closed and my dad was sort of forced to retire early. Like it's just so dangerous and you're like not sure what to do. But everyone found a way. I think of all his friends and these people he worked with and it was great. But people worried about danger and, like you know, they'll never find a good job again, they won't be able to accomplish any of their goals and all of them found something else to work on.
Speaker 1:Like you know, things have a way of working out it's kind of like it reminds me of someone who wants to quit smoking and thinking about the side effects or or what's going to happen after they quit smoking. The words escaping me right now for some reason withdrawal withdrawal symptoms and everything, all symptoms and everything.
Speaker 1:It keeps them from quitting Right. So it's sort of the same with money and jobs and these ideas that we have in our mind that we should be doing the exciting kind of freeing, able to breathe again. Thoughts, in a sense, are held back by. Well, how do I get there? What do I have to go through?
Speaker 3:All I go through is, I think, the common theme of like we have to go through certain stages of life and I know for me I lost in some ways like parts of my 20s and 30s, trying to like spread to head because I think about, you know, coming out of school. It's like, well, I should pay off my student loans really fast. I should also be saving for retirement because, hey, I'm young and the longer I save, the more money I can make. And oh, I should also buy a house and I should also have a car, and I should also do this and this, and it just stacks on top of you and you just can't do it all at once. And even advancing at work and learning like I know now, it was unhealthy, but I was always doing extra courses, extra certifications and it just it could take away so much. Just add all of this stress based on things I thought I should be doing yeah.
Speaker 3:All related to money, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I.
Speaker 2:Think, when you can ditch should, then you can start to make choice. It's not what should I do, but what do I want to do. What appeals to me Right? Like a big question that I'm so proud of my kids, where do I want to live? Like?
Speaker 3:I can live almost anywhere in the world really, why couldn't I?
Speaker 2:the only reason I couldn't is my own limitations in my own mind. And yeah, and my kids up and moved to Vancouver and they're just loving life. It's a different lifestyle. It's certainly different geography and with that comes different personalities. There's a freedom, I think, that we're afraid of when it comes to making choices.
Speaker 3:This reminds me. I have a friend named Ian and he recently said to me he's like I can see many future versions of a happy Ian. Hmm, and I really like that because, say it again, many future versions of a happy Ian. I like that and currently lives in Montreal, works for his family business, which is in Ontario. So he does some online work and some studying and lived for a lot of years in korea and really enjoyed it there and at one point like felt like home for him and one of the things I learned from him is even just many versions of you know, you will adapt to the lifestyle.
Speaker 3:So there in cities, like he had a stove but he never cooked at home. So in his apartment he had this tiny little cooker they would call it um but he never used it. Because he's like you could just walk out on the street and the street food was so inexpensive that he's like why would I cook something? I can just walk down my stairs, walk out and for $2 I can buy you know something from one vendor and for another $2 from someone else and you just make your meal based on walking through the street and that's so different than you know loading up the truck from Costco and coming home to your big freezer and he thought it was weird coming back and he thought he hadn't froze something or he barely refrigerated anything because it was so close. And he just thought it was so strange to him to come back to that Because you just you know you have to trust the food vendor is going to be there the next day. But that was just a different lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Are we scared of freedom? What is it about freedom that might scare us? That it might go away if we have it.
Speaker 2:That it might go away if we have it. I think of the line from the last Matrix movie, which I'm a big fan of those movies, and in that movie the character Morpheus says just as not all wish to be controlled, not everyone wants to be free, and I guess there's a. You know, when I think about this, I always think about there are certain things that we need to concede to Like language. Like language allows us to grow, it lets us learn it, lets us connect with each other. Language is something. Why would I fight what language I would learn? Why would I resist learning more than one language? Language is one of those things that we conform to but it's really valuable.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, why would I think in terms of jobs and careers, how does that benefit me? And why would I think in terms of ownership of things as the only method? And I guess you know some people really love the idea of doing the right thing, and doing the right thing requires that the right thing be defined for them, and some people really like the idea of doing, I don't know. Maybe the better phrase is I want to do the next thing, the thing that I have instincts and impulses to do. Um, and I think those people are less, less in need of being told right and wrong, and good and bad and I don't and bad and I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it might be generational as well. I know when I was a teenager I don't know what they do now in high schools but it was what do you want to be?
Speaker 1:You've got to be, something that is going to bring in a pension, right, it was all about teachers, lawyers, doctor, you know, not an artist, god help you right? And I see even just 10 years younger, so 30s people not feeling like they have to be something that's going to bring in a pension. I also see almost in my generation, your generation, like a giving up.
Speaker 1:I know you see that there's okay, well, okay. Well, I guess you know pensions aren't a thing any longer, so you know. But I see these younger people and unfortunately they're criticized by it for it. I see I see a lot of people critical of it, usually older people, um, but this fact that they're just doing what they want a lot of them, not all of them- but they're being criticized by people who think that there's a right way to do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah and I think what's what I like about this is, you know it's a suggestion you would have got from an older generation based on what I think they saw like. I know I was raised as you should do this, this and this. Basically, it's because people I know who do this, this and this have these great pensions yes, and even the idea of a pension. Some people don't even know what that means and they don't know what their pension is or what it means. I remember being in the bank and people breaking down in tears because they had these professional jobs with great pensions that they didn't understand and didn't look at the payments and then when they found out how much money they were actually getting every month, it was not at all what they thought it was going to be. They had been kind of conditioned to say like this is your free ticket forever.
Speaker 3:And I remember especially some teachers thinking thinking well, I can't live on this. This is only 50 of what I make now and I'm already overextending myself. How am I going to? You know, live next year? And you know you have to learn to make choices in freedom. My favorite definition of freedom really is having an ever-expanding choice set. So you have choices. So I think we are afraid of freedom because some people are afraid of choosing and ideas like pensions you know they really were only around for a little bit and now no company's really doing them the way they existed before and they even before. They changed them because they were only really meant to last a couple of years, like it was like, give your life to the company and you know, between 65 and 68, when you're gonna to die, we will pay for it.
Speaker 3:And some companies did some creative things. A friend of mine from Atlanta was saying all his uncles moved to Detroit way back when and you know, if you passed away part of their retirement was your house got paid off. But that was, you know, in exchange for probably some lower wages at the time. But they were looking for kind of lifetime employees and that doesn't exist now.
Speaker 2:No. Well, when my son said they were going to travel the world, what I said was that the key to freedom was being debt-free and no financial responsibility for somebody else. If you don't have a financial responsibility to take care of somebody and you don't have any debt, you have more choice.
Speaker 3:Oh, heck yeah. And I think that's where you know understanding, you know, and we have all these tools things like debt that's another one is like, oh, I should pay off all my debt too fast or I should never get into debt. And you know when you look at it, if you look at, a lot of business is built on leverage and proper smart leverage. There's also, you know, if we get into, you know, racial inequality, white privilege. You can look at which groups of people are able to access debt more and then you know it can be a wealth builder if used properly. But again, it's a should right and you know, when you don't have it, you have more choice and freedom and you can focus on, I think, developing yourself and your own skills. That then gives you more freedom and choice.
Speaker 3:Your son, who's the artist that has traveled, probably is a very talented and skilled person who has a lot of choices. Skilled person who has a lot of choices and, yeah, can't just live life and travel forever and you know, maybe never. You know, live that life of luxury but knows that when they need to maybe go into a season of earning, has a lot of choice. So it's probably not even going to be terrible. It's not like he's going to the coal mine and like scrubbing people's boots or something it's. Hey, I have these skills. I can go focus and apply them for a while and then go do something else I see that almost like a muscle, like a building of a muscle of choice knowing that you have choice right.
Speaker 1:So he has put himself in a situation, in situations over and over and over again, where he's tested himself and seen results right, and so it's, it's like he's, he's, he's built up this knowledge that you know, we know that knowledge that you know, we know that, well, to get woo-woo, like the universe will provide, let's say right, he knows that he can go out and find something and it will happen and he'll get through. And I think it's a, I think that is something that would be good for all of us to to, to test to, to build that muscle of knowing that we can have choice I love that.
Speaker 3:You're brilliant, as per usual. I wrote that down in big letters the muscle to have choice and knowing I think the universe will provide you a choice versus maybe you know some people like well, if I know, imagine an apple and I needed an apple, an apple will appear.
Speaker 3:Maybe that's you know I used to like laugh at that. Maybe it will, but it will maybe give you a choice of how to get an apple. A friend of mine was talking about when he was younger, driving up to the Yukon with a friend of his and he's like we just kept going and then we realized we had no money if we had no gas. But they came upon a gas station with a restaurant and they were. They had enough work for them to do. They just asked kind of for a job and they let them do a bunch of inventory work and all these jobs that got them a tank of gas so that they could drive on. So it provides choices for us.
Speaker 2:When you got no debt yet, don't owe anything to anybody, then then you're in a position to make those choices. I, you know, I, you guys know me choice is a huge idea for me and it's just everything. I've written about it, I've studied on it, I've taught it. It's really important to me and for me. You know, I've tried to do that. I left the practice of law. I said I don't like this, I don't like this lifestyle. And I didn't leave it like saying, saying I'm throwing you out the window, just I'm gonna take a break. And then I I tried something else because I was doing a lot of public speaking.
Speaker 2:I tried teaching and then I got given a choice really early on to sort of go all in on that, that teaching at that level, those kinds of and I felt really good about exercising that choice.
Speaker 2:And then recently I retired and again it feels good to the soul to say you know, I've had enough of this, this is not working for me anymore. This is not, this is not speaking to me in any kind of meaningful way other than my bank account, right, and I'm going to take it. Take a choice, and it's not so much that you throw yourself perilously into being broke, but if you've managed to not find yourself up to the eyeballs in debt, then it's not that big a risk. It is starting to realize just how you know, we're all so filled with curiosity and creativity and there's so many talents we have and it's never just one and we lose sight of that. We lose that trust in ourselves, and that just comes because we're busy listening to other people doing the shoulds, doing what we think we're supposed to, rather than what would be really exciting.
Speaker 3:I love starting out all my engagements with I call it the Spice Girls question, which is, tell me what you want, what you really really want, and I think I'm on a multiple year journey to be able to even answer that question. Yeah, Because you start unpacking, like you know the things I should want, Right, Like, and then you start trying to, you know, hold each one up and be like do I actually want this?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Do I want to own a house? And you know, before we wrap this out, I'll do my rant on housing because I think that's a big one that people are conditioned. It's like buy a house, you know the value is going to skyrocket and it's your ticket to everything. And that's usually based on you know something from a previous generation. A lot of those gains have happened and I've watched some early 20s people just sick with anxiety because they feel like they're going to be a failure if they don't buy a house before they're 25 years old without having thought about where do they want to live. Do they want to have a family? Without having thought about where do they want to live? Do they want to have a family? Like you know, they buy a house set up for a family and then they realize they don't want to have kids and kind of forcing yourself into these other people's choices early really gets in the way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like there's this strange combination of somebody else's script of what a good life is supposed to look like, combined with a kind of a, a terror, a fear of what the future might hold and that fear of looking back and saying, oh geez, I failed. But failure is well you know, you've heard me say it it's non-existent. Failure just means you quit trying, because if you really want to attain something, you'll just keep trying until you do, and that's what we've learned to be. But failure often isn't failure. It's waking up and saying I don't really want this, I don't want to pay this price for that. I don't want to put in that time. Give up these aspects of me in my life and it's time to take a new direction. And almost always that's the result of somebody else's script, adopting somebody else's script even that fear of like.
Speaker 3:I know I have a lot of business owners I coach who are afraid of you know, bankruptcy or what happens if their loans go bad, and something that's I often say is like I've never met anyone in Canada who's been hauled away by the police because their business went bad or bankrupt. Like you know, bankruptcy, you know even foreclosure on a house is so relatively rare and you have so many choices along the way to make a change and I know several people who have gone through things like that. They all bounced back better than ever.
Speaker 1:I don't know anyone who hasn't yeah, because it almost gives you that freedom yeah, a little bit right, so load off yeah, forces you to a choice, or you think it's this giant failure.
Speaker 3:Then you realize oh actually I'm happier and less stressed yeah, yeah and turns out I didn't want a big, giant house anyway and all of these things that you know. Had you kind of done some of this work earlier, you might have realized earlier and made some more choices for you what are some more shoulds you got there to me, the big ones.
Speaker 3:I think we've kind of covered retirement house, what we're spending on. I guess another one is things we shouldn't spend on. That bother me. So things like, oh, I shouldn't buy a lot of its food, shame or consumption fate. Like shouldn't buy the latte, I shouldn't get takeout, I shouldn't go out for dinner, and I understand that and I you know there can be times where that spending is problematic to our long-term future goals. But food has always existed and food's always been a part of community and connection.
Speaker 3:And I also have this weird fascination with beverages and I think you know beverages, like tea, are a way to like collaborate with leaves from around the world and all the people who were involved in getting it to you, and then you can drink it and experience it through your body. So you know, if we think our souls are here to live in this body, we can experience a lot of things by putting it through our body. Yeah, and the history of the world can be told through beverages. You know exploration tea, you know. I remember.
Speaker 3:You know samuel l jackson, if I can swear on this, did a documentary and was in south america and a coffee plantation and some of the very first slaves from africa were brought for coffee and he was like all of this for a motherfucking drink. I'm like I love that saying and like especially with samuel l jackson saying it his way I was like that's true and what I take from that and you know, things like coffee shops are places to gather, places to connect, so when we walk in and then shame ourselves, it's completely useless. So I know and I the same, I'll count up where I spend my money each month, because I have long-term goals, short-term things, and I've done so much work and I continue to do it to take my should away from my, you know, spending at kindred and court northward, because it's not really realistic to live a life where you just never drink a nice beverage so where's the balance there?
Speaker 1:where's the balance where you know spend like a millionaire? And you'll get there one day. Where is that? Because even I mean, I struggle with that absolutely. I think about saving and I think, well, I have the limiting belief of, well, there's not enough coming in to save, right, so it goes out the door quickly. So when I walk into a coffee shop, I think, well, what the hell? Yeah, right, I don't have that. Oh, I should save this. Maybe I should have more of it.
Speaker 3:Well, all these shoulds, yeah, and I think it comes back to visioning what you want for yourself and trying to deal with those beliefs about not enough coming in. It could also be a sign that you don't need as much coming in, maybe, but the answer is always it depends right on what you really want and then why. So when you imagine your life and what's really of value, you know you can understand what you're going to do. I think with food too the other part you know food and money. I think you know it could be everything you ever just deal is on.
Speaker 3:Is you know why am I like I've come to the conclusion or not conclusion but the idea that a lot of my spending is for connection. So when I look at my kindred bill every month, it's like, oh, what I'm really getting is I'm soothing, my need to go sit in a place where I see people and connect, so that, in a way, is not that expensive. It's not necessarily you know what I'm eating. If I take something like takeout, for example, I think there's a correlation with almost everyone of how much takeout am I getting versus how much of my may be overworking and soothing, maybe something I don't want to be doing. So it's a, you know, an invitation to find some balance, because I you know, I think, um, and I follow some other woo woo stuff about when you create and make your own food, you know it's your nervous system taking care of its own needs to a certain level.
Speaker 3:But I also think if you only do it for yourself, you're missing out on the connection and the opportunity to share and trade somewhere else. So everyone's going to have a balance of some sort. And that's the invitation of digging in to figure out what that means for you, versus saying, oh, I should never get takeout again and then every time you get takeout, you just sit and shame yourself while you eat it. Um, and I, you know I'm a master at shaming myself and master at some of that over life, and a lot has changed now where, like, I'll sit in a restaurant and eat and think about who made it and kind of the collaboration, and I see it as you know, a way to connect to those people and a way to, you know, eat in community. And you know there's something there for that, knowing that. You know it doesn't fit my lifestyle to do that, you know three times a day every every single day.
Speaker 3:But you know there are times a day, every single day. But you know there are times and cultures where that's, you know, the people who take care of the food, and then everyone gathers and, you know, does something else, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:What do you think and maybe this is for our next podcast, because I think it might be a big subject what do you think about? I'll use myself as an example. I think I told you this before, but I think that if I don't look at my money, I'll be okay right so.
Speaker 1:I do not check my credit card. Do not check my credit card, I do not check this is like so many things are making sense now. You know, I get the I, I. You know I have a, I just I just don't look as much as I maybe should. Is that avoidance?
Speaker 3:oh yeah, that's totally the script of money, money avoidance. So you know, money avoidance and it's very common and especially the type of business you have, like money avoidance is a thing and a lot of it, you know um comes down to. You know, releasing some of that should probably lots of money, specific shoulds to give back to someone uh, self-worth as well, you know, if you feel guilty for desiring money as part of you know one of the things in there and knowing that you are, you know, worthy to be able to receive and hold that. But yeah, it's definitely a money-avoided script that needs to be rewritten.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, yeah, I wonder what the writing should be. Tite wants to play with you, so what's been coming into? My head as we're sitting here and maybe this might be a good place to break this wine switch to the wine with Hillary yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Shift to the wine shots of whiskey. Chapter 3 on this podcast, the idea of. I think that there, the idea of. I think that one of the big things we don't do well in our world today, and especially in the society that we're living in, is we don't balance very well or very clearly our obligations to ourselves and our obligations to the whole, to the community. We find that we have a community where there are people out there who give, give, give, give, give. They're always involved in everything. They think their job is all about serving the community.
Speaker 2:You know, I have a buddy and the self-talk that he has is you know, what am I going to do today to deserve to be part of this community? And like this is there's there's a real spectrum on this. At the same time, there's, to me, there's a there's a natural awareness of oneness, of connectedness you like using food as that conduit into connection. And we are connected. We are because each of us are. We only exist because others exist. Yeah, we are what we are because of our relationship with others, for better or worse. I mean, apart from the shoulds and the programs, we still are, you know, an extension of each other. And then what we do is we build an economic system and you know me, I've always said it whatever's created can be recreated, and we've created this economic system.
Speaker 2:Right now there's a lot of people who don't want to recreate it because they've got too much at stake. They're doing really, really well and others are not doing well at all. You know, how do I honor myself and benefit and grow and have what I want to have, do what I want to do, be what I want to be? How does that intersect with all of this? Is facilitated because we live in a larger society that that allows that. Um, how do I, you know, like what I I feel like sometimes? That's what leads to avoidance. That's what leads us to have some of these scripts is that we, we don't know how to balance our contribution with our, what we receive. We don't know how to create enough so that we're taking care of ourselves and and then have, you know, this idea of surplus, this, this extra that we share, um, these are, I know, big, big kind of goofy questions and I think about I don't like the word responsibility.
Speaker 2:I think about the idea of responsibility. I like responsibility in the idea that cause and effect. I act and there's an effect. I look at the effect and that causes me to act in my next action cause and effect, embraced, understood and then lived out well, is to me responsibility anyway, big, big idea in question, but you brought me here. You guys are going to talk about this stuff. It's going to make me think these things.
Speaker 3:So it's not, it's not my fault about these big ideas. I love it because I think for me, responsibility I learned a recently reframe that helped me is it's your ability to respond, which is kind of like you say, these things happen and I can choose how to respond and you know it comes back to knowing and loving yourself and your gifts so that you can respond to those things. But it's not this grander thing of you. Know, I am responsible to serve for others, for others, and as someone working my way out of that, you know, we I always thought the alternative was kind of selfishness, of like, well, if I'm not giving and giving and giving and serving, and serving and serving, well, that's selfish of me. Now, kind of, where my mind is at is if I fully love myself and I have skills and abilities I've developed, that I'm able to collaborate with people and share back and forth, that's responsible, versus this idea that I have to go out and, you know, save everyone and give, give, give, give, give and maybe if I give enough I'll get something back or I'll earn the right to get something back
Speaker 3:so I think it's a um, it's like almost like a day-to-day cycle of give take, give take. And when you started your question I was going to say, you know to me the kind of christian idea of tithing. It's not necessarily about money but it's about contribution to the community or overall trust. So I was going to say, you know one in 10, you know we give one in 10 and keep 90. But I actually think it's probably closer to 50-50 of that responsibility, of like time for me, time to kind of give to the collective. But that's not all necessarily work or serving. You know, even in things like conversation or talking to people, you know you're giving and collaborating and learning. So you know, maybe it's closer to that 50 50 balance, knowing that.
Speaker 3:You know and this goes back to some of the stuff we talked about in the last one, about not getting, you know, not concerning yourself with the politics of getting ahead. Sometimes we're all racing trying to. It's like we're all racing trying to stockpile apples or something that maybe only lasts a few days. It's like if you, you can have your big pile but it's just gonna rot before you can eat it all and you know that's not helpful. So you kind of have to trust, trust the flow a little bit yeah, I was.
Speaker 1:I was just over here thinking about the idea of avoidance and it makes me think about how, growing up, it was said to me this is totally a limiting belief. That's coming to mind now. It was said to me over and over by someone close to me like we don't talk about money, you don't ask about money. Right, I couldn't ask as a child. Well, even a teenager, child, teenager couldn't ask about money in my household, right, it was like you don't ask anything about it or you get in trouble yeah, it's dangerous.
Speaker 2:It's dangerous to engage with money, and that's a story that needs to be rewritten yeah, I had that conversation with my older sister about a year ago you know she was.
Speaker 2:We were talking about retirement, we were talking about investing and where would you put money in house? What's a good way to grow money while at the same time protecting money and these kinds of things. And she pointed out, although there's information out there although you could do some web searches and you could hire yourself an expert it's just not the kind of thing people talk about freely. And she was really concerned that you know why couldn't she sit at dinner with her friends and talk about well, what are you doing and what's working for you and how is that helping and what's some mistakes that you've made? So I don't make those mistakes. And it was really, you know, like it was heartfelt from her that this was something that she thought our communities are our collections of friends and families should be able to talk more freely about maybe because everyone wants to be seen as doing better than they are?
Speaker 1:yeah, and if you start opening up about it and that's the power structures as well.
Speaker 3:As you know, it's designed on people not knowing and this is where, like you know, there's no economic profit in the long run. If you want to know the best thing to do, currently it's index funds. You know, this is not an advice channel, but like the average, if you can get average, that is the. That's the real best. And when I talk to people I truly see as experts. That's where their own personal money is. It's boring stuff, but as humans and people trying to get ahead, you know they, they jump in and they do risky stuff and then everyone else piles in and it creates a market you know dan sullivan talks about. You know, if you're trading turds and everyone's like, hey, I want some turds too, the prices go really high for a while and then everyone realizes like, oh, these are turds, they're not worth anything, and the price crashes and in the middle someone made some money off of that because they were averaging it out with other things and it's it's kind of dangerous to look at.
Speaker 3:You know, and even in that world, a lot of people just don't know, they avoid it, they're worried that they're. You know, they don't want to make a mistake or they don't want to be the person who lost all their money on something. And to me, the fundamentals are like, you know, if I were to write a letter to my younger self, it's develop your skills, develop your abilities for who you are. You know understand the life you really want and what the cost of that is. You know earn more than you spend. And you know in investor, save in the average and don't worry about it. And I say this as someone who's a. You know, I have a financial planning designation. I've probably read more than any financial planner in this community, for sure, um, and all of my conclusions point back to, like you know, there's no economic profit in the long run. There's no exact right answer.
Speaker 2:There's lots of wrong answers well, and that would be the only thing that I would. I would add to what you just said, which is, I think, for many people it's not so much can I do the right thing with my investments, but more the resulting paralysis that they don't do anything right, I said that to my kids I said that the only mistake you can make is to do nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it triggered my youngest son. He was for a little while I was just blown away because he suddenly got into got himself a wealth simple account. He got a little bit of money, he got into non-fungible tokens he was just having a riot and, as a result, he, like a couple of hundred dollars and then, you know, bought a used car because of the money that he had created for himself and he became really quite fascinated with it for a while and that has waned. I think that you know one of the biggest mistakes that we make and I think you're right.
Speaker 2:the system is not built to help people. It's not built to go out of its way to facilitate everyone thriving, and I think that we keep certain messages away from people and they take that story and they build that shame. I don't know how to do this. I couldn't do that. I don't have what it takes. They get guilty because they're not doing anything and all that does is make them not do anything even more.
Speaker 2:And then go soothe with, like, something else that costs money, that's right Spending the money on something that doesn't doesn't serve them, because sometimes people, you know they, they soothe um with stuff they know doesn't serve them. They, they comfort themselves even in things that they don't really want. That, that script, that story, you know I should, I should do this because everybody else is doing that and I'm wasting. Anyway, I think that there are a whole combination of limiting beliefs that lock people down, keep them afraid of money and keep them afraid of doing things with their money, and I think that that might be the place to start Chapter 3.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Does that sue you super long.
Speaker 1:No, that's great. There's something I want to bring up in Chapter 3. Maybe it's a good opening actually, so I'll save it Alright. See you later after some drinks. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that maybe it helped even a little. If you have any questions, we would love you to send them along in an email to info at psalmhypnosiscom. Thank you for being part of the State of Mind community. For more information about hypnosis and the various online or in-person services we provide, please visit our website, wwwsomhypnosiscom. The link will be in the notes below. While you are there, why don't you book a free one-hour journey, meeting with Hillary or Les, to learn more about what hypnosis is and how you might use it to make your life what you want it to be? Bye for now. Talk to you tomorrow, thank you.
