If you think money is evil & have a business: you have a problem
Thoughts -> Feelings -> Actions = Reality
"Cogito, ergo sum" = I think, therefore I am
The famous first principle of the philosopher Decartes.
Is it true or not? We could argue about it I guess.
I believe that what makes me the Daria that I am, are more than my thoughts. It includes my feelings, experiences, emotions, actions, how I make others feel & how I am in relation to them.
And my soul! Holy moly, my whole energybody that I am carrying around is a big part of myself as well! & it’s the part that instantly interacts with everything in my surrounding. Subconsciously.
But let’s not deviate, the quote says that: what I think, I am.
& I agree to it, at least partially ;). There is also this other saying that our thoughts & our mind make up our reality.
If we dive into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) & one of their concepts called “The cognitive triangle”, we see that a situation triggers certain thoughts, those trigger certain feelings & emotions and those manifest in behaviours.
Let me be a bit more specific & share an example with you with regards to a challenge I faced in my business in my past:
I used to hate money.
I thought it was evil, dangerous & just does bad things to the world & humanity. My thoughts around money were negative & destructive.
As a result, I felt at unease about money, I felt like pushing it away because I did not want to identify myself with something evil. I felt disgust & a distance towards it.
As a further result, when I started my company, I wanted to underprice my services. I wanted to take waayyy too few money for a high-value service to ever be able to make a living from it.
Luckily, I had several coaches & advisors & a generally open mindset & clear awareness about this shortcoming of mine, so I started my journey to change these destructive & non-serving patterns.
The thing is: if you have thought something all your life, for 30+ years, it will take a while to un-think it. It needs patience & practice, exposure & failures to reprogram those thoughts.
It also needs high emotional awareness to catch yourself when you start slipping back into these old thought patterns.
With time, your thoughts will change, so will your emotions and the actions you are taking.
So yes, “I think, therefore I am” is true & you create your current reality based on your thoughts. BUT, you can also un-think & change who you are, therefore also your reality.
There lies a lot of power in changing our thought patterns.
However, it is just the superficial part, because way deeper are the emotions and what we feel about, in this case: money. They are much more tricky to change, but the key to true shifts in our reality.
I was at the point where I thought & was convinced that money is not evil. Yet, my subconscious feelings were not that quick to re-adjust & make me un-feel those feelings. It needed a while, conscious re-feelings & situations to switch that feeling.
As a result: I will never underprice my scientific illustration services ever again. I raised my prices with time & plan to do it every year, as I get better & better.
Plot-twist coming in!
I thought I had fixed my money-mindset for good.
But recently, when I started to offer a new service, it creeped back in again & I got myself into a coaching setting where I learned to peel of this next, deeper and more subconscious layer around money.
It was related to sales & my limiting mindset & dislike of the “sales” process.
Luckily, I can tell you that I am on my way to also resolve that one :-). Will keep you updated about it on the go!
Last anecdote about this topic:
all this does not only concern business.
My past negative money-mindset also affected me in my Daria-life. Because I extended it towards wealthy & rich people. Thinking they were bad people too, superficial & money-wasters, wouldn’t do enough good in the world & just be snobby, arrogant & mean to not-wealthy people.
Mind me saying that I am generally a very positive & optimistic person, super kind & I very much dislike to judge others.
These thoughts were coming from my hate for money & spilled over in an unreasonable way. Even though I did not know any rich person that reprsented this picture. On the contrary, several of my closest friends in highschool had wealthy parents & all of them were amazing people!
Anyways, back to my anecdote:
what my coach told me to do is, to go & find stores like Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton etc, enter these stores & observee what happens, in the external & my internal world.
My reaction to her suggestion: big eyes, laughter & immediate shame, because all my life I avoided these types of stores. I thought they were snobby & all people there were as I described above.
Yet, I knew I had to do it.
So I traveled 600km down south to Stockholm & embarked on this Luxury-store adventure.
And I can tell you: it was NOT AT ALL what my mind & my thoughts had made up! You can read the whole story in two of my former Substack posts here:
The experiment:
The conclusions:
So in the end: “I think, therefore I am” is not quite true 100%. Cos we can change what we think & who we are.
Let me know what your thoughts are on this topic! & I would love some feedback on this type of writing as well!
Love,
Daria