Can you relate to this? You start thinking about what you “have to do” and think the thought- “I don’t have enough time.” Discover how to shift your beliefs about time, money, and energy to create abundance and embrace a life of limitless possibilities.

Or, you daydream about something that would be so amazing, like a vacation, or a renovation, or quitting your job to volunteer full time, or whatever- but catch yourself thinking – “I don’t have enough money for that.”  Or, maybe you get excited about a new idea or passion-but then you don’t take the first step to pursue it because you know it will take a lot of energy. Does that sound familiar?

Believing that I didn’t have enough time, money or energy is exactly how I have been thinking for decades – but now I think I’m on the tail end of that belief system and let me tell you- it feels so good! It is so freeing! I have my whole life ahead of me with all the time, money and energy that I need!

I think I figured out how I can always feel like I have plenty of time, plenty of money and plenty of energy. And so far, it has worked so well for me. 

I’m using the phrase “so far” not because I have any doubt that this is going to work for me for the rest of my life (I know it will) but because I have just started to use this in the past year or so and I feel like it’s just the tip of the iceberg- so what I know and have used so far is already giving me great results and I’m so excited and curious to see what else this does for me and how else I can use it. 

Back in October of 2018, I was writing to my intuition (this is something I learned from Jess Lively who I will devote an entire post to in a few weeks) and I had probably been doing some models to uncover my thoughts and realize the results they were creating for me. 

So, during that writing, I asked my intuition, “how can I come from abundance?” and the answer I got was “there is always plenty of time and plenty of money.” This was a perfect answer because it immediately quieted my mind and I knew it was true (and really it has been true for me my whole life). 

“There is always plenty of time and plenty of money” feels like a perfect statement because it doesn’t say how much time or how much money, just that there’s always plenty of it -plenty can mean the exact amount I need, or more. That’s so reassuring.  

It might have been even before I had this dialogue with my intuition but that’s when I started the habit of noticing myself feeling worried about a problem, and then reassuring myself with the “mantra” there’s no problem that money or time can’t solve, and I have plenty of both.” 

Let’s just pause here for a moment and check in- do you notice any weirdness or resistance coming up for you as I’m describing my intuition and repeating a mantra to myself? If you do.. I’d love to hear about what it’s bringing up for you! And, on the other hand, if your brain is saying: “intuition? -check! Mantra- check! This all sounds completely normal..” Then you’re in the right place, my friend! I’ve got a bunch of posts coming up where we’ll really dive in to mantras and intuition and inner voice work!

Mantra

But for now, back to the mantra “there’s no problem that money or time can’t solve, and I have plenty of both.” That mantra has helped me avoid so many spirals into worry and doubt and fear. As soon as I noticed myself stepping down into the spiral, I’d just remind myself: “hey, there’s no problem that money or time can’t solve, and I have plenty of both.”   

So, for example, if our Air Conditioner broke, and I’d start to freak out about how much it would cost, I would just remind myself, I have savings for this, and if savings doesn’t cover it, I can borrow money to fix it- then it’s just a matter of time to pay off that borrowed money. So, the problem is fixed, either immediately with money that I have- or over time.  The problem is solved with time and/or money.. No reason to stress out. 

I probably used that mantra for about 6 months, and then I totally forgot about the mantra because it just became a part of my core beliefs about myself. I didn’t need to repeat it because I automatically, unconsciously knew it whenever something popped up. Do you see how I pre-programmed my brain to divert freak outs?

Probably around the same time I dropped that mantra, I started noticing that I frequently felt scarcity around energy. For example, maybe I would come up with an idea to create something, or try something. Or even just an idea of something I thought I should do around the house- like organize my closet or declutter a bookshelf. I would refute my own motivating thoughts with a fear of something taking too much energy. 

Like, yes, I could clean out my closet, but that’s going to take so much energy. When I heard myself think “that’s going to take a lot of energy” I noticed the parallel of feeling scarcity around my own energy the way I used to feel around time and money. 

I realized I could just add the word energy into my belief about myself. I already believed I will always have plenty of time and money, why not just add energy on to that? So I tried it. “I always have plenty of time, money and energy.” And it worked! And I started believing that I do always have plenty of time, plenty of money and plenty of energy. 

And I used that belief whenever I needed it – like, when I was going through my coaching certification program in addition to working full time and finishing out some contract work I had been doing, my sister asked me – “how do I have time for all of that?” 

To be honest, her question startled me a little. I was like “what do you mean? I have plenty of time!” And I really did!

Or, as I was planning a vacation. My tendency is always to try to get the best bargain and find the smartest deal, but as I was planning all the activities for our trip, I realized, I have plenty of money, and I’d rather just book this now so that it’s scheduled and confirmed, rather than hunt around to save a few dollars. It was so liberating.. And time saving.. And I still felt like I got an awesome deal!

Resistance Check

Ok- let’s pause again here for a moment and do another resistance check. When I say “I always have plenty of time, money and energy” what do you think? Are you thinking something along the lines of “easy for you to say” or “must be nice” or “I’m glad that works for Bex but that would never work for me”  or something else?Or, maybe you’re saying “Yes, that’s totally obvious! Why did she take so long to figure that out?” I hope you are saying that and if you are.. I’d love to talk with you and get to know you and learn what else you already know that I don’t know yet!

Going back to any resistance though- notice those thoughts that you’re currently having! Think about them. If you’re at a time and a place to do it right now, pause this episode and write down those thoughts or record them in a note on your phone. These are all just thoughts! And you get to choose your thoughts- you can keep them, practice them, recite them, or you can discard them, refute them… whatever you want!

Great Minds Think Alike

I want to tell you about something that about knocked me out of my chair- except I was sitting in the car at the time. Last Fall, as I was preparing to launch this podcast I was sampling a bunch of different podcasts to hear how people used their intros and their music, how their editing sounded and notice how they placed ads and all those details. So even though I’m not shameless, and I’m not a Mom, I downloaded episode 317 of the Shameless Mom Academy so I could check it out. 

The title is “Absolute Truths of Abundance” – a title which I love by the way!  – so I was half listening because my mind was wandering and again, I’m not shameless and I’m not a mom, and I was driving home after a long week, and as I was backing into my garage, I heard her say something about energy, time and money – which sparked my interest, since those 3 words are part of one of my favorite mantras- so I stopped mid-back up in my driveway and hit rewind and listened to again it more closely and she said

“I have all the time, energy and money that I need every day.”  She went on to explain how she reminds herself of that affirmation throughout the day and daily and the phrase helps her behave that way. She knows that she’s resourceful and resilient. Crazy right? That 2 different women in 2 different lives and 2 different parts of the country could come up with the exact same belief independently! 

I have to say, when I heard that, it made me 2nd guess myself. It made me wonder if I had actually heard my mantra from someone else and adopted for myself, and that’s maybe how we both had the same mantra – but when I thought back to it (and when I reread what I had written that October morning) I confirmed, this mantra was self created out of my own thought models and writing to my intuition, and the fact that she had the same mantra must just mean that it’s a good one and great minds think alike!

Crisis of Faith

Since adopting this mantra, it hasn’t always been rainbows and daisies – and I actually did have a little crisis of faith last fall. I had a confluence of circumstances happen all at once, a perfect storm, if you will,  and I had some choice thoughts. (That’s a strange phrase for me to use, because I actually didn’t choose those thoughts deliberately). 

I started worrying that I didn’t have enough time and I didn’t have enough money and what if my physical reality was that I didn’t have enough energy. Without going too far into the dramatic details (which actually aren’t that dramatic) over the course of a few months, I drastically reduced my income and drastically increased my spending. Some of it was planned, but not for that specific timeframe, some of it was unexpected – but it all started to hit me at once as I looked at my finances every morning. 

Because I allowed myself to step into that scarcity spiral, I also noticed how I was frequently thinking that all the things that I wanted to do and that I wanted to fit into my schedule just didn’t fit and I heard myself thinking the unhelpful and untrue thought “there’s not enough time.” And. I believed it. This was so scary for me. I had so much confidence in my belief that I did always have plenty of time- and now that belief was being shaken.. And I was finding so much evidence to disprove my own mantra. 

What I Did

I did lots of thought downloads. I wrote down all those thoughts. I tried to just write, without judgement, without acceptance. I really had to separate what were the facts and what were just my thoughts. 

I also had to practice so much acceptance and drop so much resistance- I wasn’t prepared for that – so I did have resistance to my own resistance. I basically had a few mental tantrums and meltdowns. I judged myself for my own human thinking. And then I berated myself for judging myself. It was harsh. 

I got coaching. I wrote out intentional models with new thoughts for me to practice thinking. I tried to get comfortable being uncomfortable. I tried to be open to what this scarcity was teaching me. I also learned to accept my feelings of scarcity as part of my human experience instead of resisting those feelings and glosssing over them and trying to psych myself out of them. 

I remembered that the reason why we have so many amazing, beautiful, heart wrenching love songs is because songwriters have been through heart break. That’s where they get a lot of their best material! So, even though my heart wasn’t broken when I was going through my struggle – it felt like a crisis. 

And now I know, me going through my scarcity crisis wasn’t really a crisis at all.. It was a beautiful learning opportunity that happened to feel very uncomfortable and made me feel terrible and made me doubt and question myself. 

Finding Abundance

And, through this struggle, I learned that I have the opportunity to practice feeling and finding abundance even when I’m thinking I can’t feel it and can’t find evidence of it. I took every tiny possible sign of abundance as ABSOLUTE PROOF that I have plenty! And I repeated those tiny examples back to myself as hardcore, scientific, irrefutable evidence. 

For example, during that time, I was parking in an assigned parking space a few times a week, and one day I noticed a dime laying on the ground when I opened my car door to get out. I saw it, but it didn’t really register. The next time I parked there and got out of my car, I saw that dime and now there was a penny too. Eleven cents. Now I couldn’t resist, I picked it up and put it in my car. Then, the next day, I was getting out of my car in a completely different parking lot, and as I stepped out, I looked down and saw another dime and another penny- another eleven cents- just waiting for me. 

Did 22 cents make me feel abundant! You KNOW IT! 

The universe is basically just laying money out in front of me to pick up! And, when I ignored it the first day, it added more! And when I might have just assumed it was a fluke to find money on the ground, I found the exact same amount in the exact same way. I’m calling it! That is hardcore, scientific, irrefutable evidence that I always have plenty of money!

And, here I am on the other side, still believing and still finding evidence that I always do have plenty of money, plenty of time and plenty of energy. And, as a bonus, I learned that I have the option to release my own resistance to what I consider to be negative feelings. Instead of resisting those feelings, I can sit with them, be curious about them, allow them, watch them. 

I don’t have to try to eradicate feelings just because they don’t feel great. Instead, I can wonder what those feelings have to teach or show me about myself. 

By the way, you know what was making me feel scarce? It wasn’t that confluence of circumstances. It wasn’t that perfect storm. It was my thoughts! 

What do you think? Is this something you would want to practice? Or maybe money, time and energy aren’t the elements you need in your mantra. Maybe, you can practice thinking you always have plenty of creativity, or peace or love.. Or patience? Whatever you choose to intentionally think.. I’m right here believing it with you for you!

Ok- that’s it for today. Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed learning how I think YOU can always have plenty of time, money and energy! 

And now I want to hear your thoughts and your reactions. Leave me a comment below to let me know what you think!