Our goals are a place to come from, not a place to get to

With many thanks to Hayley Carr for the inspiration

Oct 15, 2024

Recently, my latest self-improvement project has been to work on my relationship with money.

Like most people, I have a complicated history with it, which of course can tarnish and inform my relationship with it in the present day.

In short:

My parents set up a number of businesses when I was younger, all of which didn’t work out for one reason or another
And that led to them losing their home, not once but twice
Along with a heck of a lot of rows, strife, anguish and a near miss with divorce, only narrowly avoided after a year spent apart for the dust to settle and the emotional wounds to heal
My paternal grandparents were also rich, and they wielded that money like a weapon, attempting to use it in different ways with each of their three kids to manipulate them into doing what they wanted them to do (it mostly didn’t work, and drove a wedge between them and their kids, so more fool them 🖕)
My dad was made redundant when I was a teenager, and if I was to say that my mum did not respond well to that, it’d be the understatement of the century
I’ve been made redundant twice myself, and that was part of my reason to retrain in 2003 and to head into the relative stability of a teaching life
I was bankrupt after a relationship/brief marriage with a man whose chaotic financial landscape didn’t seem to be affected by the fact that he worked as an Independent Financial Advisor 🙄

All in all, once I sat down and looked back at it all like that, it was fairly obvious to me why my stomach clenched up and twisted into knots whenever I thought about money.

However, during 2023/2024 — my ‘Year Of Me’ — I’ve done a heck of a lot of work on myself, starting with recovering from the grieving which the end of a long relationship can bring with it, then focusing on rebuilding my self worth, and I’ve done a lot of training courses to help me to get my career in the arena of self-help/mindset change/personal development off the ground.

I’ve also done a lot of work on the topic of visualisation as well as the concept of vibrational energy, or as I like to term it ‘using your reticular activating system (RAS) to your advantage’ - while I’d love to allow myself to truly believe that there’s something more mystical about it, I think a lot of our luck comes down to putting ourselves in a state of mind where we’re open to seeing opportunities we would’ve missed in a different mindset, honestly.

a cartoon of a woman sitting meditating, with a dream castle in a cloud in a thought bubble by their head — Created with Bing’s Copilot

And I do believe that if you’re panicky about money, and if you break out into a cold sweat whenever you think about the merest possibility of being financially abundant and independent, then that’s going to hold you back from manifesting the life you really want to lead.

So, long story short, I’ve been reading a lot of books this last few weeks about money mindset and financial abundance, namely:

I’ve enjoyed all of these, and gleaned a lot from each.

The upshot of what I’ve learned is:

Upskill yourself for the world you live in - knowledge is freely available, and there aren’t the barriers to entry that there used to be (i.e. having to get yourself into copious amounts of debt in order to get a qualification from a prestigious institution)
Live in as cost-effective a way as you can, without feeling like you’re denying yourself too much
Save as much as you possibly can
Build as many revenue streams as possible

One other thing I’ve been doing is to meditate on financial abundance, and the title of this article comes from one I’ve been using daily for the last couple of weeks. You can find it here on Insight Timer:

Money Making Abundance by Hayley Carr

At the end of the 15 minute meditation, Hayley repeats these words:

“Our goals are a place to come from, not a place to get to”

The first time I heard her say that, I was out walking my dog, with a set of earbuds in, while I meditated and those words stopped me dead in my tracks. What on earth did she mean?

When I got home, I wrote those words down at the top of the next page in the pad I’m using when I do my daily thinking time, and I gave it all some thought when I sat down.

We all set out goals and dreams for ourselves, building some kind of castle in the sky in our minds where we want to eventually get to. But sometimes, thinking about that as some kind of faraway dream, some thing which seems way off in the future, can feel incredibly demotivational.

Hayley’s words were a total paradigm shift for me.

What if you can believe that you’ve already achieved your goals and dreams, somewhere in the future, and all you need to do is to draw that day closer to you?

Doesn’t it feel different to assume it’s already happened and you just need to create a map to get you there? It does to me.

Does it feel like you can take more risks, do harder things if you assume those things have already happened, and you just need to work towards them? Sure, life is hard and the unknown is something we all need to live with, but if a paradigm shift like this could help, then in my mind it’s well worth giving it a try.

After all, what’s the worst that could happen? You try it, it doesn’t work and you go off and try something else. No harm, no foul.

As a final point, all of this work has led me to a new mindset around money, which boils down to:

Money is love

Why?

Because money flows abundantly to me when I give people something they value, and which can help them in their own lives = Love
And if I have enough money to live on, then I can focus all of my attention on this work and thereby help more people = Love
More disposable income means I can give money away to charities/share that wealth = Love
And I can also take care of those closest to me, e.g. my Dad, who’s not getting any younger = Love

So, what do you think? This may be a small shift in perception, but often it’s the smallest changes in the short term which can make the biggest difference in the future. As they say about airplanes, if the course a pilot sets is off by only 1 degree, the destination they’ll reach at the end of the journey will be very different than was originally intended.

Do you think you could use this meditation to help to heal your own relationship with money, or might the idea of your dreams already having been fulfilled help you to face the uncertain future with more confidence?

If you have your own hints and tips to share about goal setting or money matters, I’d love to hear them!

And if you want to find out more about the amazing Hayley Carr, who’s been a film and TV actress, world champion martial artist and interior architect and is now a coach, you can find her online here: https://hayleycarr.tv/

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