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July/August 2002 NW Newsmakers
Job Concerns - Money Vs. Spirit

by Fred Brown

Fred Brown

"Why would a man need $200 million to live on for a year? He couldn’t spend that in a lifetime." I said to myself when I saw in the Wall Street Journal that a president of a large company was getting a $200 million annual salary package.

The answer that came to me was that he didn’t need the money but was driven to have it to satisfy his exaggerated need for financial security. Though gaining power may also have been a motive, my counseling experience indicates that presidents, like many people, often feel they never have enough money no matter how much they make, and that this form of poverty consciousness stems from the financial anxieties that they inherited from parents, family members, peers, and others.

In a society that fears it will never have enough money to be secure, I shouldn’t have been surprised that this president feels this way. The assumption this fear says is that more money brings more security. Yet people who make a lot of money have just as many financial anxieties (sometimes even more) as those who make far less money. The anxieties may not be the same but they create the same dis-ease. Wealthy people usually worry about holding on to money they earn, and poorer people worry about not earning enough money. One could say the latter is an easier anxiety to live with, but in truth, an anxiety is an anxiety...

Many clients have money issues around their job income, and I find using my "Family Money Visualization" helps them understand the roots of their fears. As clients learn how their anxieties stem from self-worth issues around money that they inherited from their family members and others, they gain the emotional understanding for managing their fears. This helps motivate them to get their jobs more in sync with their spirit. Often they need to be reminded that their jobs must fulfill their spirit as well as their pocket book if they are to gain true peace of mind, and that the former needs to take precedence over the latter.

 Yet in most cases getting clients to think about the spiritual aspect of their jobs requires that they first work through their financial fears, since they are often so immersed in their money concerns that they can’t rise to the higher level of thinking.

Last week I was pleased when an artist realized that she had to mass-produce some of her pieces that had been selling well.  She had been rebelling against my suggestion to do this because she hated the idea of mass-producing her art and losing her uniqueness. For more than six months her financial anxieties had been causing her a lot of stress and preventing her from enjoying her work. I told her that it was more important for her to get some financial peace of mind than it was for her to continue producing only unique items that sold sporadically and live in poverty.  She needed to realize that her creative spirit couldn’t thrive if it was bound up in her financial fears.

On the other hand, I remember a man named Sam who truly had his money, job and spirit integrated. Sam was a giant soul who had the most beautiful smile you have ever seen. My father hired him as a general handy man when my mother died.  My father occasionally asked Sam to drive him to work, and when I was young, I would sometimes go along with them.

As Sam deftly threaded through traffic, he would try to get my father to relax. My father was often embroiled in his concerns about making money in Wall Street.  Sam would keep reminding my father how lucky he was to have what he had.

I don't think Sam ever graduated from high school. At least he never talked about any formal education. But he knew what was important. He used to tell me. "I wouldn't have your father's job for a million bucks. No Sir!" Then he'd shake his head and say, "Your father, he's chained down by his worries. He needs to loosen up and take more time off."

I learned a lot from Sam. He taught me that even the most menial job could be satisfying if you had the right spirit for it. He used to say that it was the value of the job that was important not how much you were paid. Later in my life when I was thinking of leaving stock broking, I thought about Sam and those drives with my father. I knew that one of the main reasons I went on my own was that in the intensity of trying to make money in the stock market I found myself  starting to worry about money the way my father did.  I knew I needed more of the freedom and joy Sam had been talking about to find the peace of mind I was looking for.

To find the work that will bring us prosperity Deepak Chopra challenges us to discover our unique talents and ask ourselves how we can serve the universe. Then he says the money will follow.  I agree with his ideas but to make them happen most of us first need to learn how to manage our financial fears since these prevent us from doing this kind of meaningful introspection.

"There has to be a balance between making money and fulfilling our spirits for a job to be right for us." I concluded to myself.

Fred Brown, a Personal Financial Consultant/Therapist for over thirty years, has had five published books on personal finance. He can be reached at 503-771-7650 or through his web site @ moneyandspirit.com.