What are your perceptions of money? Do you think it is dirty? Can you be successful and spiritual? How do you want to perceive money in your life? Bring awareness to your perceptions and change your thinking with this issue’s Abundance Tip.

What are your perceptions of money? Money is a unifying faction in every scale and in every sense of our society and one’s life. It’s important to get a handle on what you think about money.

To get a better handle on your perceptions of money, rate the following statements based on whether you strongly agree (10), agree (8), have no opinion (5), disagree (3), or strongly disagree (0) with it.

• Earning money is a hassle and/or distraction.
• Having a lot of money causes problems.
• Striving for wealth will not allow time for anything else.
• I wish I didn’t have to deal with money at all.
• Money is the root of all evil.
• If I am rich, people will want something from me.
• I don’t deserve to have money or be rich.
• To have more money than I need is greedy.
• As a woman, it is more difficult to be successful and wealthy.
• If I am successful, some of my friends and other’s will like me less.
• For me to succeed, others must fail.
• I cannot be more successful than my parents.
• I cannot strive for wealth and be happy or spiritual.
• I’m too old (too young) to be successful.

These statements and how you agree/disagree with them can give you a strong insight into your perceptions of money. Do you think it is dirty? Is only some of it dirty? Is money earned by the rich not worthy? Do you think you can be wealthy or successful considering your past or your education or your current situation? These perceptions will create your reality around you, as that is where your energy is focused.

How do you want to perceive money? Do you want to change your perception of money based on what you’ve learned in this rating exercise? Look in particular at those ratings that are close to ten or close to zero. These indicate your strong agree/disagree statements and are the areas that are mostly likely candidates to shift.

The first step to changing your perception is to bring awareness to it. Awareness will bring new insight. With awareness and insight, you are better able to alter your thinking when you are next in a similar situation and these ideas come up. The next step is to actively work to change your thinking. How do you alter your thinking? In what direction do want your thinking to move? This Tip offers two methods of changing your thinking patterns.

One way to alter your thinking is to write (handwrite) or speak (aloud) affirmations that express your new thinking. Affirmations are positive statements that when repeated by writing and saying, they create that energy in your system and help bring that to you. For example, if you strongly agreed that you could not strive for wealth and be happy or spiritual, then your new thinking would be that you could do all these things. The best form for affirmations are as follows:

“I’m creating the possibility that ____<your affirmation statement here>____.”

Or for example, “I’m creating the possibility that I can strive for wealth and be happy and spiritual.”

You want your affirmations to be positive statements; therefore never use a “not” in an affirmation. By adding the “I’m creating the possibility” clause, you create positive statements now, which ultimately creates that belief itself within you.

The second method to change your thinking and alter your energies is to use the concept of future questions. When using future questions, you imagine a new scenario of belief and life, say, three years from now. (You pick the timeframe in days, weeks, years, etc.) After imagining this changed life, then ask yourself:

• What were the steps that led me here?
• What did I do to get here?

Or for example, imagine yourself three years from now, successful, healthy, happy. Ask yourself “What were the steps that lead me here? What did I do to get here?”

Whenever you ask yourself an open-ended question like these, your subconscious goes to work and won’t rest until it has answered the question. Because your subconscious can’t tell the difference between the now and the future imagined time, your subconscious believes you’re asking these questions for real. Therefore you can use these future questions to seed changes in your life. As these answers become known in your subconscious, they will filter into your life as new statements, beliefs, and changes you can sustain.

Repeating the affirmations or future questions will allow you to change your belief patterns in your life. Each day while you work to change a belief or pattern, you need to tend to and practice an alternative way of thinking.

So how do you want to perceive money? Think about it. Then set aside a copy of this Abundance Tip and repeat the statement perception exercise in a month and again in six months or so. You’ll notice right away how your perceptions have changed.

Next Month: How you spend your money is how you spend your power.