In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise discusses six common money lies that keep people stuck.
The first lie is that money creates safety, but it is important to recognize that money is a man-made concept and should not be the sole determinant of our safety and value as individuals.
The second lie is that money equals success, but success is subjective and should be defined based on personal values and goals.
The third lie is that making lots of money is indulgent, but making money is not inherently indulgent or wrong.
The fourth lie is that talking about money is inappropriate, but it is important to engage in open and honest discussions about finances.
The fifth lie is that there is never enough money, but it is important to challenge this belief and recognize that money is not finite.
The sixth lie is that people with money have no worries, but worry is a universal human experience that is not dependent on one’s bank account.
Dr. Wise encourages listeners to challenge these money lies and create a healthier and more empowering relationship with money for themselves in order to help unlock the full potential for the future.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
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Hi there. I’m Dr. Cari Wise veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you are a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the joyful DVM podcast.
Today’s episode is a very important episode because we’re gonna be talking about money and money is something that actually influences all of us at levels that we don’t really realize. So here over the next little bit, we’re going to be talking about money lies that keep you stuck. And let’s start with lie number one. That money creates safety no matter how you cut it.
Money does not actually create safety, though most of us live as if it does. And we don’t even realize that we’re living this way if we’re being honest. What we do recognize is that when we believe there’s not enough money or that we are short on money, that we feel scared. And so that is our indicator that our safety is tied to money.
Now this idea of money being tied to safety is a generational belief. And what I mean by that is that you were likely taught by your parents and by your grandparents and your great grandparents. This idea has been just kind of passed on generation after generation, that accumulating money, having a job that pays money, having a regular income is a very important part of living in the world.
And I’m not going to say that having money isn’t important because money allows us to buy different things. It allows us to have a place to live. It allows us to have food, it allows us to give gifts. So there are a lot of benefits to money. So please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that money doesn’t have a place in our society because it does,
but when we start to tie money to our actual safety, believing that if we don’t have it that we are in danger, then we’ve given money way more power than it was ever intended to have. And we’re forgetting that money is actually a manmade thing. It’s this concept that we made up. As humans, if your safety is tied to something manmade,
then that just reinforces the belief system that you have to work your way into safety and even to value. And that is absolutely not true. So we have to take a step back and start to notice when is it that we feel afraid by money? Because wherever we’re coming up with fear around money, money conversations, money volumes, the amount of money we make,
the amount of money we save, what other people are going to think about our money as as long as fear is coming up around that, then we are linking our personal safety to the concept of money, which means that there is probably a threshold at which you believe you have enough money or you believe you don’t have enough money. And when you’re below that threshold,
you feel unsafe. When you are above that threshold, you probably feel safer but also still in fear that you will drop below it. As long as we have tied our safety to money in any way, we will remain tethered to money. We will be a bit of a slave to earning money and we will have a very hard time being in alignment with ourselves,
being joyful, maintaining a strong sense of wellbeing independent of our bank accounts. So the first lie that we have to start really unbelieving challenging within our own belief systems is that money creates safety because my friends, that is absolutely not true. Line number two is that money equals success. Our society loves this one. You look at people who you believe are successful,
you see them especially now in the day of social media. You see them out there, you see where they’re going, what they’re doing, what they own, what they drive, all of these tangible items that are tied to a dollar amount and usually a rather large dollar amount. And we look at those people and we often think that’s what success looks like.
That’s how you know when you’re successful, when you can go and do and buy all the things when your bank account is so full that you never have to even think about what’s in it because you know the money’s already there. And so if we are tying success in this lifetime to a dollar amount, then we are usually living in a constant state of insecurity.
We are looking again for this external validation of our own success. You’ve heard me talk about this concept before, this need to externally validate ourselves. And it’s something that is so integrated in our culture. It starts with our school systems and the way that we learn and the feedback that we get as we grow into adulthood and we no longer have those formal structures to give us feedback,
we start to create our own structures and our bank accounts is one of those structures. So the amount of money that we’re making, the amount of money again, that we’re saving those things, these tangible data points become these things that we’re using to decide whether or not we are successful. And so if we don’t make as much money as we believe that is necessary to be successful,
then we feel insecure if we don’t have enough savings again, we often look at that as a a evidence that we haven’t been successful. And this really ties two things together that were never meant to be tied together. Money is not evidence of success. In order to know what is evidence of success, you’ve got to define what success is for you. And I guess as I say that out loud,
I can take one step backwards and say, if you only define your success by the money that you’re, that you make, then money will equal success for you. But I really challenge you to not use money as your evidence because money is just a byproduct of all kinds of different interactions. It doesn’t directly correlate to the value to what you create to success itself.
What does, if money is the byproduct, then what is success for you? Is it helping a certain number of people? Is it losing a certain amount of weight? Is it moving to a location where you’ve always wanted to live? What does success look like for you? How are you going to know that you’re there? And many of you will have a hard time with this question because you are in such a habit of believing that you’re not successful and you’re using your money as evidence to prove that,
that you don’t even know how you would know if you got there. And here’s the tricky thing about tying success to money by using money as your external evidence of success, is that as you approach whatever that dollar amount is that you have believed is what is needed for you to feel successful, then the target moves as you approach it, all of a sudden you realize,
wait, I don’t actually feel more successful now than I did then. So this must not be the number. And so you make it a higher number and then you work really hard to get to that number and you still don’t feel successful. And so you make it a higher number. So even though we’ve used it as this external evidence of success, we don’t actually ever allow ourselves to get there.
And this all comes back to the idea and the, the reality that success is an emotion. It is not a tangible event. So if we are tying money to success, what we are really doing is trying to tie money or to make money the pathway to feeling the emotion of success. And so if money isn’t there, then we feel insecure or we feel like failures.
And the truth is feeling the emotion of success will never come from any circumstance in our lives. Remember, emotion is not created by circumstance. Emotion is created by story. So it’s what you’re telling yourself about your finances that has you feeling scared and insecure in sometimes like a failure. It’s also what you’re telling yourself about your finances that can allow you to feel successful.
The actual dollar amount is never going to matter. And that’s why money equals success is lie number two, lie number three, making lots of money is indulgent. Now many of us carry this story because it’s been something that’s handed down generation after generation. So if we have been around people who have talked about money in a way that they are a bit harsh and judgmental toward people who make money,
making kind of snide comments about that and even believing, like sharing their beliefs with you that there’s no reason to have that much money. Nobody needs to make that much money. What are they gonna do with that much money? So those kinds of things, especially when the the, the families and the communities that we have grown up with have been maybe not have had,
have not had as many re financial resources. That familiarity of being a little bit strapped for cash, if you will, is the norm for a lot of our family and friends generationally. And so if you step out of that, so you break that generational habit of poverty or of just barely getting by into a place of financial abundance that can feel very uncomfortable because it’s kind of new.
And because the people who are close to you may have always shared an opinion of people who have money as a negative opinion. And so we can carry with us then this belief that having excess money is indulgent. And this can make us feel very cautious in sharing anything about our financial situation because underneath it, we are afraid of being rejected by the very people that we care most about because we have had this money abundance in a way that they haven’t experienced themselves.
So line number three is that making lots of money is indulgent. It absolutely isn’t. It’s just a circumstance. So what does a lot of money even mean That’s gonna be very individual to you. But if you are carrying with you a bit of, of almost like fear, this cautiousness about making money, if you’re not allowing yourself to accumulate money because of a belief system that having it isn’t doesn’t make you a good human.
And I don’t mean that having it is the equals good human. That’s not at all what I mean. What I’m meaning is if you’ve been taught that people with money are not good people and you have put yourself in a situation where you are able to create a lot of money, just notice that if you’ve been taught that good people don’t have a lot of money,
then that is going to make you very cautious around the very people who taught you that. So we have to challenge what these belief systems are and recognize how we are carrying belief systems that have been offered to us and how that’s influencing the way that we interact with our finances. Money line number four is talking about your money is inappropriate. So this one kind of goes along with the one above,
right? So talking about your money is inappropriate somehow in our world, the idea of talking about money, talking about finances, talking about what we make, talking about how much we’ve saved, talking about the way that we’ve invested, somehow that has become a very inappropriate conversation. So when somebody starts to talk about money, a lot of us feel uncomfortable.
Again, this is a generational thing and it’s because of many of the, the lies that I’ve talked about already, this idea of that money creates safety, that money is evidence of success, both lies. But if we are in a financial situation that is not abundant, is not stable, if you will, then we don’t believe that we’re safe. We don’t believe that we are successful.
And so we definitely aren’t going to talk about that because we are afraid of the judgment of it. On the flip side of that, if we’re believing that making a lot of money is indulgent, it’s extra, it’s not necessary, then again we’re not going to talk about it again because we’re going to feel afraid. We’re going feel like we’re going to be judged or ashamed for making a lot of money,
money. So you just notice that you can’t win on either side of this money conversation for most people right now, what I wanna show you is that this is just all a lie. That if we are afraid to talk about money, if we’re believing that money is inappropriate to discuss, we have to ask ourselves why is that? Well, it’s not because of the person that’s talking about money.
It’s because of what the way that people feel when other people talk about money. And the truth is, there are a lot of people out there that have zero emotional impact in a conversation about money, their money or somebody else’s money. But if we’ve been taught that talking about money creates discomfort, then we will be hesitant to talk about money or to engage in conversations about money or even listen to somebody else talk about money.
And we will take it as far as to judge that person for talking about money, saying that they are rude, saying that they are unrealistic. Believing that they are indulgent is another word that they, that they are boasting or bragging. And that is not necessarily true at all. So just notice that this discomfort around talking about money and this belief that talking about money is inappropriate leads us to judge others for our mon their money situations,
whether or not we actually know the full story. And I will tell you most of the time we never know the full story. So is talking about money actually inappropriate? I don’t think that it is. I think that we need to talk about money more, talk about income, talk about earning, talk about saving, talk about spending, talk about debt more and more and more.
Because if we don’t, because of how all of these negative emotions compound, it can really create a lot of pressure for us when in reality money is just a neutral circumstance. It’s just a data point. It doesn’t have any connection to your value or your worth as a human. And it certainly isn’t going to be the thing that limits what’s possible for you though many of us believe that it will.
So we believe that lack of money can limit what is possible and I want you to consider that maybe they’re not even connected, that we have just erroneously connected these two things and then just continued to live into that reality and reinforce it with a bunch of lies. And then that brings us to lie number five, that there’s never enough money. How many of you have said that?
That there’s more month than there is money, that you don’t have enough to do whatever, that there’s never enough. The other way that this shows up is that an underlying belief that if somebody has more, that means that you have less when they’re actually not connected. Because money is universal, money is infinite. And I know some of you’re gonna hear me say that and you’re gonna get a little twisted up inside and you’re gonna say,
that’s not true. There’s only a finite amount of money. And so if somebody has X amount of money, then I can’t have X amount amount of money too. So if they have a lot of money that I can’t have the same amount or more money, that means if they, if they get more, I get less kind of thing. But we have to go back to remembering where money came from in the first place.
It cannot be a finite resource because it was human created, it keeps getting created, my friends. So money is not finite, money is just the exchange of energy if you would consider it that way. And because of that, there is limitless possibility to make money in all kinds of different ways when we start believing that there’s never enough money, that we never make enough money,
that we can’t save enough money, we end up creating this self-fulfilling pro prophecy of scarcity. We live in a scarcity mindset and as long as we’re looking at money through the lens of not enough, then not enough is exactly what we are going to experience. On the flip side of that, you’ve gotta ask yourself what is enough? Because as long as you look at your money and your finances through the lens of enoughness,
if that’s a word meaning not enough or is enough, you’re never gonna know when you get there because enough is not definable. So if there is a dollar amount that you’re eager or interested in creating for yourself, focus on that because that’s gonna move you closer to it. As long as you just hang on to an underlying belief that there’s never enough money,
then that will be your experience. And many of us who are anchored in this idea of there’s not enough money, again, this is a learned behavior, there are people in your lives who probably told you over and over and over again that there wasn’t enough money. Maybe when you were growing up you were not allowed to purchase certain things or participate in C certain activities because there’s just not enough money.
And I’m not blaming your families for the way that you were raised at all. But I want us to just notice that when we share those kinds of statements, that it comes from scarcity, it comes from fear. But as young people who are very impressionable, we start to believe that as absolute truth and it’s never true. There are endless ways to make money.
And even though you are in a career likely in veterinary medicine, if you’re listening to this podcast episode, don’t buy into the ideas that you are destined to be broke because you are a veterinary professional. That is also not true. Our ability to earn money is directly tied to what we believe is possible. And as soon as we start to shift out of the industrial norms that have continued to teach us that we will be limited financially because we chose this career,
as we shift out of that, we can can start to create something completely different for ourselves. So it is absolutely a lie that there is never enough money. That scarcity mindset will keep you repeating that lie. But if you want to believe something different, you just get to do so. And I promise you you’re gonna find that that is equally true as well.
Finally, lie number six, people with money have no worries. People with money have no worries. How many times have we made just an offhand comment about somebody who apparently has a lot of money? And let’s be honest, most of the time we’re talking about stars, right? People with celebrities who are out there in the world doing all the things,
we see them on tv, social media, wherever, and we make these flip comments about, well, they just never have to worry about money. They don’t know what it’s like to be me. And the truth of it is that whenever we express that, we are experiencing a lot of resentment. What’s also true is that worry follows you everywhere. So it doesn’t matter what your bank account has,
it doesn’t matter how much money you earn, if you are in a habit of worrying, that worrying is not going to go away. So there have been many examples of people who have shared their stories of their despair, their anxiety, their depression, their suicidal ideations who have been by all tangible measures, successful and wealthy. And so we have to remember that this,
like they are still humans in a human experience and their bank account might be different than our bank account. But having money doesn’t solve anything. It just kind of comes with it, like creates some new opportunities. Might get the money part outta the way. So we, we like to make money because we like what money can provide for us. Like I said before,
food shelter experiences, that’s all wonderful and fun. But having all of those things, food, shelter experiences, is not enough to stop the worry habit. The worry habit is an internal game. And what’s so beautiful about this one, when we start to realize that we are living in a belief system that people with money don’t have any worries, there’s actually two things that is really beautiful about this.
Number one, we can stop chasing money as the solution to our anxieties. And number two, we can tackle the real solution to our anxieties and worries and eliminate the worry right now, no matter what our bank account says fascinating and so important to really call this lie out for what it is. If we continue to live with a belief that people with money don’t have any worries,
then we are just going to resent people with money. And some of those people who are making incomes more like what you want to make, have a lot of information they can share on how they got there. But if you are resenting them for being there, you will never learn how they did it, which means you’re just going to keep that reality from yourself.
There’s no reason why any of us need to keep reinventing the wheel. When we see people who are experiencing the types of things in our lives that we wanna experience, whether it’s financial or otherwise, if we see them and we resent them for it, then we cannot learn anything from them. And I’m not saying that you’re even directly going to learn something,
like go of them and say, Hey, how did you do that? But their experiences will also show will leave breadcrumbs, which means you have that opportunity too. Whenever somebody else has done something and you look at what they’ve done or achieved and you wanna do that for yourself, they are evidence that it is possible. They are not evidence that the opportunity is gone for everybody else.
So we have to be really aware. So these six money lies. Let me run through ’em one more time. Money creates safety. Money equals success. Making lots of money is indulgent. Talking about money is inappropriate, there’s never enough money, and people with money never have worries. Those six lies left without challenge, left without intentional disbelief in them create stacking negative emotion around money.
They create fear, insecurity, cautiousness, shame, scarcity and resentment. And think about that. If the way that we think about money, what we believe about, money keeps stacking on these very intense negative emotions, how are we ever going to change our financial situations? We aren’t. Because when we are in those lower spectrums of emotion, especially intense emotions around money,
then we are just gonna continue to withdraw. We are going to continue to feel resentful and scarce and afraid, and we aren’t going to take the actions that would allow us to create a different money experience for ourselves. So the solution, if we are unhappy with our financial situation, isn’t to work harder. It is to first get really clear on what your personal money story is,
what stories around money are you carrying around that somebody offered you as true? How does your situation change if you stop believing it in what different areas of your life does money keep coming up as the excuse for you not pursuing what it is on your heart to pursue what it is on your heart to experience even relationships that you want to build and cultivate? Where is money being the roadblock for you?
The scapegoat if you will, because money doesn’t actually stop us from doing anything. It’s the belief around the money that does. And here’s the beautiful part of all of this. What you believe about money is you and you alone, yours and yours alone, to decide what you believe about. Money is yours and yours alone to decide. So even if you have people in your life who have very strong opinions about money,
that’s fine. You are not required to adopt those opinions. And I would encourage you if the opinions of people close to you in regard to money are not empowering, if they are defeating, if they are limiting, if they just breed anger and resentment and frustration, I encourage you to pick a new money story for yourself. These money stories are generational.
There’s absolutely generational financial trauma that has been passed from generation to generation and it’s very evident in this world right now where so many of us have, I would say every one of us have somebody in our lineage in the last 13 generations who have had some very real financial struggles. We have the opportunity to change that for the generations to that come next. If we don’t,
we will just keep passing on the same financial traumas to our kids and our grandkids and our great-grandkids. So my friends, hanging onto the money stories that were offered to you is optional. And I encourage you to consider what is it that you are believing about money that has you living small in your life, and how can you change that belief system to give yourself permission to live fully into the experience that you were always meant to have?
All right, my friends, that’s gonna wrap it up for this week. I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.