Discovering Financial Wisdom Beyond Boundaries

What if your financial struggles had less to do with dollars and cents and more to do with deep-seated beliefs and emotions? Join me, Sherisse Alexander, as I recount my transformative journey towards a new mindset around money management. With personal anecdotes and insights from my career as a mortgage broker, I explore how shifting from closing deals to fostering meaningful client relationships has redefined my approach to financial success. You'll hear about my quest to find the perfect expert to guide me through unconventional financial strategies and how it led me to broaden my search beyond female experts, ultimately reshaping my perspectives on money.

Ever felt a nagging physical pain that just wouldn't go away? I did, and it turned out to be tied to my fears about money. Inspired by Louise Hay and serendipitous discoveries through books and podcasts, I delve into the concept of money trauma and the guilt that often accompanies financial success. Listen as I share how addressing these deep-seated fears led to both physical and emotional breakthroughs, with my sciatic nerve pain dissipating as I healed my financial mindset. This episode sets the stage for my upcoming personal money series, where I'll continue to explore unique approaches to managing finances. Join me on this enlightening journey, and you might just find insights that resonate with your own financial experiences.

Chapters

• 0:11 Exploring a New Money Mindset
• 10:39 Healing Money Trauma and Mindset
• 19:03 My Money Journey Begins

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome to your Collective. My name is Charisse Alexander, your host of your Collective. So today we're going to dive into something that, interestingly enough, I've been involved in for the better part of my adult career and I can be a bit of a planner, and so when I was planning you know the outline of this podcast and what I wanted, like the first year of episodes to talk about, money was on there. And when I was thinking about it I was like, okay, who do I know who's really got their money point, on game or on point? Sorry, that's what I mean their money point, their money game on point, their money game on point. And and I was trying to think or bring to my mind somebody who is female and perhaps somebody who had approached it in a way that was like, not necessarily traditional, because there are a lot of resources available for managing money, you know, in a very traditional sense, and what I mean is like you know, you've got your bank accounts, money in, money out, budgeting, you know savings, rrsps, tfsas, da, da, da, da, da. And I wrote down a name of somebody who I'd come across and she's a pretty big personality, but I was like you know what? I'm just going to put it out there because you never know.

Speaker 1: 1:49

And, uh, you know, as I was getting closer to the time when I wanted to introduce what I'm going to refer to as the money series and why it's important to me, um, I had reached out to this person and I didn't hear back and I was just like, okay, no problem, but then the more. And how did I find this person? I found this person because they wrote a book and I liked their story. But when I started to actually dig in to their approach to money, I realized that it was traditional and I was trying to get away from that. So then I started thinking, okay, well, maybe I shouldn't make it so specific to women, maybe I'm being too limiting within this. So then I decided I would talk to a financial planner. But when I talked to the financial planner and he's a great guy I was just again came away from the conversation feeling like that's not quite right either. It just didn't feel right. So I was talking to a friend and I told her what I wanted and I said not only am I looking to work with somebody personally for myself, but also somebody who I can have on the podcast to like share their tips and tricks, for you know the broader audience. And she said don't worry, you put it out there, it will come. And that was probably about a week ago.

Speaker 1: 3:16

Now let's just roll back a little bit to why I wanted to talk about money. Because money is such a big part of our individual experiences and I have personally never had a problem earning money. Earning money has never been a roadblock. I dare say I am excellent at earning money. My challenge, I guess you could say, is holding on to it. And you know when you look at it at a really high level and you know when I'm having conversations with people I'd be like no, I'm like not, I'm not a frivolous spender. Because I'm not, I'm not a frivolous spender, like I don't buy meaningless things, like you know, I wouldn't call myself frugal, but I'm not a shopaholic. But then I started to really think about my shopping habits and what motivated me to spend money and it dawned on me I'm like maybe, just maybe, I'm not as thrifty of a spender as I thought that I was.

Speaker 1: 4:20

And because this is obviously not an experience that's just unique to me, almost everybody who I have an experience with in one way or another is talking about the scarcity of money, and I witnessed in my own experience so for I don't know, from 2008, I became actually my entire adult career. For the majority of my adult career I have been involved in money like credit and consumer financing, commercial financing, that sort of thing. So the entirety of my adult career. So I have, I would say, a strong comfort with money. I understand money, so on and so forth. But as a mortgage broker, this is really where I witnessed it, because I'm wholly responsible for what I earn. If I don't do the work and be disciplined in how I approach the work, then there may be a paycheck, there may not be a paycheck. So I was, generally speaking, pretty disciplined about it.

Speaker 1: 5:24

But a pattern that I witnessed in my experience as a mortgage broker is that anytime I started to get anxious about money, or I started to worry about money, or I wasn't motivated for the right reason for money. So in other words, there's this phrase I would always use chasing the deal. If I was chasing the deal, the deal either a would fall apart or B. It would be an excruciating experience for both myself and the client. So I really tried to shift my approach to my clients from one of I got to get that deal to I only want to work with the people who are right to work with me. And as soon as I was able to genuinely put out there that I only want to work with people who can see the value in what I am bringing to the experience and want to work with me, and it wasn't about the money anymore, it was just about creating an experience of education and empowering the client to make really great decisions about you know what is often the biggest purchase of their lives. It shifted everything.

Speaker 1: 6:36

And the last time I had to learn this lesson was a few years ago and it was I was co-brokering quite a few of my deals at that point in time with another broker and I was in this real strong scarcity mindset like, oh my gosh, there's not enough and I have to share. I have to share with this other broker. And so I'd made a very conscious decision of I'm not sharing the next few deals that come in. And I think I had like 13 deals or something like that something ridiculous come in and I decided I wasn't going to share and that was our agreement. It wasn't nefarious or anything like that, it was just, you know, I can work on the ones that I want to, and I won't share commissions, and the ones I share with you are the ones that I share with you.

Speaker 1: 7:21

But because I was in this scarcity mindset, um, I I remember the energy and I was like I'm going to keep all of these deals to myself. And, as luck would have it, yes, 13 deals came in, but 13 deals did not close. I think every single last one of them fell apart, and for various reasons, not because the clients weren't great, but they were just so painful, they weren't flowing, and it was at that point that I was so frustrated by the end of it, because I put in all this effort, all this energy chasing the deal and every one of them fell apart. And I was like you know better by now. You know better and it's. It was interesting to me because, you know, the divine is always reminding me that everything that I need will always be provided, and I mean everything. So the trick isn't, you know, make your needs smaller. The trick is make your receiving tank bigger, dream bigger. So, anyways, that was the last time that I needed reminding of that.

Speaker 1: 8:28

So the money series came up on the outline because it's such an integral part of all of our individual experiences and I don't even just mean as individuals, I mean, if you're an entrepreneur, owning a business like, money is always at the forefront of your mind, or whoever's mind in the business. And I think as soon as we understand intention and the energy that we put out and that currency, money, is an energy, it is meant to flow, and I find that saying I'm saying that to my people often right Like, instead of being supremely tight fisted about never letting this money go, as soon as we recognize that it's meant to move like and that doesn't mean be irresponsible with it and spend all of it, it just means that it is meant to be used, to be out there in circulation. So I decided that this next, these next few episodes, would talk about money and, to a certain extent, my, my own, and this is a journey, an active journey, like right now. So, as soon as I made the decision that I was not only going to look at how I approach money but also kind of share that experience with you, and I went down this path of like, okay, well, how do I want to do this and something super interesting happened. So, as soon as I recognized that I didn't want to have this experience with a traditional mindset and in my mind, what traditional is is exactly what I said, right, like money in, money out, budgets, tfsas, rrsps, et cetera, et cetera and I really wanted to be able to do this in a way where I could infuse my spirituality and rely a little more no, not even a little more, a lot more on my intuition and being guided down the path and how we were actually going to have some success with this particular phase.

Speaker 1: 10:39

And so the other day I was just I had made a list. This happened like two days ago. I made a list of all these things that I wanted to accomplish and I looked at the calendar and I'm like, okay, there's like four and a half months left in the year. I'm like this is a heavy list, but I believe that everything is possible. Everything is possible. Every possibility of everything that can happen is possible. That's legitimately how I think about things. So I was like, okay, and money was one of the things on my list. As soon as I literally put pen to paper, I put it. So there, I had the idea. I put pen to paper. Now I've actually set this intention.

Speaker 1: 11:19

That same day, my sciatic nerve starts killing me, and on my right side. So I go to my trusty book and you guys have talked about this book before, louise, hey, heal your body, heal your life. And I look it up and sciatic nerve is about fear of money and this made no sense to me. I'm like what? I'm not scared of money, I want more money, I want to be better with it. What do you mean? I'm scared of it and it and it just it didn't even go away. So I was just like, okay, so this is some. And I mean, like I'm going to yoga, I'm doing like deep hip stretches, I'm like trying to like really open this up. So I have an awareness that it has something to do with money, but it doesn't quite make sense and it's not going away. But the more I started to dive into the path and which way I wanted to go with this, this is the super cool part and the reason why I just love this journey so much. Most days I try to love it, let's say it like that.

Speaker 1: 12:30

So I was looking up this author, that I was telling you like that. So I was looking up this author that I was telling you about I didn't mention her name and she had a whole bunch of other authors on her website and one of them was talking about healing your trauma around money. So I tried to go to her website and I got one of those do not go here pop-ups and I was like, and I tried to go twice and I couldn't go. So I was just like, okay, clearly I'm not supposed to go that way, so I'm not going to go that way. And then the idea dawned on me Okay, let me get on audible, let me see if I can find a book or a podcast that talks around about healing. You know limiting beliefs around money. And so I put that in healing money, money healing and this lady pops up and that's the name of her podcast, the money healing podcast.

Speaker 1: 13:21

Okay, and so I read her description and I mean this is a synchronicity. That's the point of my story. I'm reading her description and her description talks about being a money coach that works with healers, lightworkers you know, people who are in like that line of work and how to like free yourself from the scarcity mindset that often can come when you are working as a healer and how to like heal the trauma around money. And I was like ding ding, ding, ding ding. This is absolutely the way to go. So I listened to like her first podcast or second podcast and then I was like okay, and as soon as. And then, of course, it's always like a rabbit hole, because then I listened to another person's podcast who was on her show, and this lady was absolutely talking about the trauma and I use the word, it is a catchphrase these days, but I love the way that she actually said it on her podcast and what she said was you know, money trauma isn't what happened to you, it's events that you witness or experiences that you have and how you internalize them. So, ultimately the story we begin to tell ourselves about money.

Speaker 1: 14:40

And she used a really relatable example. She said she had this entrepreneur that made really great money, but she couldn't hold money. And so once they started doing this deeper work around, it's like okay, we like okay where? And it's it is work, because you gotta, you gotta figure it out, you gotta find it. It's not. It's rarely like a. You know, this is the problem. You kind of got to go through a case of like investigating yourself.

Speaker 1: 15:06

So once she'd gone through this process, she realized that, uh, this entrepreneur had guilt around being so successful but living in an environment where there was abject poverty. So because she had this guilt, yes, she could earn money, but she was also giving it away as quickly as it came. And that really resonated with me, really really resonated with me. And so, and I guess the reason it resonated with me is because now I don't, actually I won't get into what my guilt is, but I recognize periods in my life where I have felt guilty about something. And because I feel guilty, my automatic go-to is let me throw money at it. Let me, let me throw money at it, cause that'll make me feel better about how shitty I feel about being guilty or feeling guilty about this other thing. And so I am super stoked because it's as soon as and I was going to sit down this morning and write in my journal about whatever I was going to write about, and then it dawned on me I'm like, oh my gosh, my sciatica is gone. All week it's been bothering me and today I was just like it's gone.

Speaker 1: 16:27

And that's how I know I found it, because as soon as that thing flares up in my body, that I can feel, and I go down this path of investigating, like, what is it? What is it that I need to, like, peel back more layers on, and I knew that money was something that I needed to deal with, because the other thing that I started paying attention to is how often things come up in conversation conversation and on a previous podcast with somebody else I was. It wasn't specifically about money, but money can be related to success, depending on what your definition of success was. And in this podcast we were talking about it and I'd already identified. Only in that moment, when I'd said it to the guest and I think it was Jessica Danikin, I think I'd said I think the block in my mind, or what I grapple with, is the mindfulness that I always want to remain rooted and grounded and centered in love.

Speaker 1: 17:27

I never want money. I never want to be distracted by what money can do for me. I know what money can do for me, but I don't want to lose control of that and I'm trying to be very careful with my verbiage, because I do believe that when you put words out there, you're also putting intentions out there. So I think what I'm really trying to say is I wanted to ensure to the very best of my abilities that money allowed me to stay true to who I am at my core, and that somewhere in my programming there is an idea that money, or lots of it, will not allow for that to happen. Now I can see now that that's shifting and changing because the awareness is there, and because the awareness is there, I can be more mindful about it, I can be more intentional about it, I can be more conscious about how I'm spending my money and where I'm putting my money. So this is a huge thing for me.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Money is often something that is spoken about with shame and embarrassment, and I personally would love to take the shame and the embarrassment away from it. In fact, I'm a strong believer that we should be talking about money more. How do we create wealth as individuals, as businesses, for communities, for our children, for the next generation? How do we create literacy around it? And so for me, I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 1: 19:03

So this is, you know, part one in my money series. It's my intention to share the journey with you, because I have a couple of ideas on how I'm going to share this so that it can be relatable. And for those of you out there who are amazing with money and the traditional way works for you, I'm extremely happy for you. I genuinely am. All that I know is that it wasn't working for me. I needed to approach it in a very different way, and I'm so happy that the divine has led me to walk this journey on money and have this conversation very openly with all of you. So I hope you enjoy the next few episodes that are going to dive a little bit more into money and until next time, take care.