Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Brent Kessel. Brent is a certified financial planner who was named one of the top wealth advisors in the United States. Along with his teaching partner, Spencer Sherman, Brent founded Abacus Wealth Partners.
Brent’s knowledge in the financial field has warranted appearances in the New York Times, Yoga Journal, and on CBS News and ABC News. He is the author of It’s Not About the Money, one of Kiplinger’s top five business books of the year. He is currently working in collaboration with Spencer Sherman and Sounds True on The Money and Spirit Workshop, an online workshop as well as a home-study course that’s designed for integrating our spiritual and financial lives.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Brent and I spoke about the role of our unconscious mind when it comes to money. We also talked about a system of archetypes that he’s developed that he calls the eight financial archetypes, and what it might mean to find our “enough point,” that ability to feel as though we have enough financial resources in our life.
Here’s my very illuminating and grounded conversation with Brent Kessel.
Brent, I know you’re a yogi, someone who has been practicing ashtanga yoga for two decades now, as well as a top financial planner. And I’d love to know, right here at the start, the lessons from yoga specifically, the practice of yoga, that you think can be applied to how we manage our money.
Brent Kessel: Well, they’re sort of countless. But the biggest ones are first and foremost to look inward. I think the biggest differentiator of yoga compared to aerobics or running, or many other forms of athletic activity, are that we take our awareness into the body, and even into the emotional body, and look for what’s unconscious.
So my experience in yoga has been that my best teachers have helped me wake up parts of my practice that were asleep before. I wasn’t even thinking about working my legs in back bends for probably the first five or six years of practice, and now it’s almost all of the focus. And so it was this tremendous area of unconsciousness, and it made the back bends so much deeper in this kind of paradoxical way.
So I find the same thing with money, when we look into where we’re unconscious around money, what are the expectations we have for what it will give us or bring us, where are the places that we avoid looking at money or looking at the impact of our financial decisions on other people or on the planet. So making the unconscious conscious is one huge area.
And then the other really big area, which applies to investing as much as anything, is breathing through discomfort. I find that many people use money to make themselves feel better, that when we are sad or empty or angry, we will resort to a tried-and-true financial behavior to make ourselves feel better. It might be going out and spending and shopping at the mall, it might be meddling with our investments too much, trying to jump out of something that’s gone down and jump into something that’s gone up or that we think will go up, it might be controlling our partner or spouse around their financial decisions. But it’s almost always this attempt to get rid of discomfort with money. And I think yoga is this beautiful practice of intentionally putting ourselves into uncomfortable asanas or postures, and then breathing.
TS: Now, this idea when it comes to money, of making our unconscious conscious-well, of course if it’s unconscious, we don’t know it’s driving us. So how do we do this when it comes to our money?
BK: I think the first key is to look at where you’re most out of balance. A big part of the work that Spencer and I present at The Money and Spirit Workshop is around behavior patterns with money. It probably is worth saying that if you’re happy with it, if you’re content with the way you’re being with money and you don’t-
TS: Then you’re probably like one of a million people!
BK: Exactly. You’re probably about one in a million, or one in ten million, and you’re probably not listening to this anyway! But you know, there’s no agenda from our standpoint that you need to change, that everybody needs to transform their relationship to money. It’s just that most of the clients who have come into our offices at Abacus, or that we’re worked with in workshop settings at different retreat centers, have a money behavior they want to get rid of. They’re tired of avoiding looking at their credit card statements and bank balances, they’re tired of constantly overspending, they’re tired of being a workaholic and trying to accumulate more and more even though they have enough. It’s different for everybody.
But that’s the first clue as to where you might be unconscious, because where our behaviors are imbalanced is generally where we are trying to compensate for something that would make us uncomfortable if we didn’t compensate. So if I just stopped my habit, which is excessive saving, I start to feel a bit insecure at first. And I have to look at, what is the payoff of my excessive saving? And you know, there’s this sense of security or sense of getting rid of anxiety that saving has historically given me, but it’s impermanent, it’s very impermanent.
So I think as spiritual seekers, we don’t really want impermanent mandates. We want to transform ourselves and find something that’s got more integrity to it and much more long-lasting quality to it. And that I think is an invitation to use money as a spiritual practice, and to look to these imbalanced behaviors for the areas of unconsciousness.
TS: OK, so I identify an area that seems imbalanced. How do I discover what the unconscious roots are that this imbalanced behavior might point to?
BK: Well, this is a lot of the practices and workbook exercises and guided meditations in The Money and Spirit Workshop. But the short answer is that we generally need to trace back to past experiences, often in childhood, sometimes in very early childhood, where something painful happened-it’s usually something painful. It can occasionally be something very pleasurable, or that we see someone else going through that we think would be very pleasurable, like “My friend Bobby just bought a lake house with his family, and Bobby’s so happy that having a lake house or having a lot of money makes people happy.”
Whatever the experience is at that moment, we tend to have a set of feelings about it that we’re not very conscious of. And as I said, nine times out of ten, this is a negative experience, something painful. And so we’re feeling anger or sadness or shame, and we don’t really want to face those feelings generally as human beings, and certainly not as a 10-year-old or 15-year-old or 21-year-old human being.
And so what tends to happen is we cling to a money message in that moment. Our mind says, “Wow, you should always [blank] with money” or “You should never [blank] with money.” And this is all happening at the unconscious level. But we internalize this message and we grasp onto it with very dug-in fingernails and live by it. And it tends to get reinforced through multiple experiences in our lives, until we can’t actually see the world any other way. We’re so immersed in this sense of-it might be for me that money is security. I’m saying “me” in my most unconscious moments as a kind of reflexive saver. For someone else, it might be that money is about enjoying life and really having sensory pleasures with money, and that’s the best value of it. So we all have our own versions, and these are defined in the eight financial archetypes, which are one of the sessions in The Money and Spirit Workshop.
But the key is to be able to identify which is your dominant financial archetype, and then go back and reexperience those feelings that you suppressed essentially earlier in life by clinging to these money messages. And that’s where you start to loosen the grip of the financial archetype.
TS: Now, I want to go into the financial archetypes in just a moment, but there’s one line that I wrote down as I was looking through your book It’s Not About the Money. I wrote down, “The unconscious wins every time.” What do you mean by that?
BK: Well, it’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek saying. What I mean by it is that our unconscious mind around money is much, much, much more powerful than we give it credit for. I’ve seen so many workshop participants and clients over the years who know what they’re supposed to do or what they want to do with money differently, but they just can’t seem to. It’s like there’s this giant gravitational force that’s pulling them in a different direction.
And I was asking myself this, after having practiced as a certified financial planner for about 10 years, I said, “Why is it that this client-not just one client, but client after client-can come in, and I can show them their financial planning projection, and show them that as long as they invest this way and save this much and give this much to philanthropy, that their financial picture will have this kind of outcome, it’ll have this integrity, it’ll look good, and they’ll be able to reach their goals, and yet they can’t seem to do it?”
It’s different for everybody, but one person might not be able to slow down and stop working and enjoy their money as much as I’m projecting they can. Another person might not be able to slow down their spending, and they just constantly go out and have these splurges that they can’t seem to control. And yet another person can’t seem to keep their hands off their investments, and they keep making one bad investment decision after another.
So that’s when I really started applying my yoga practice and my meditation practice to financial planning, and saying, “These are traditions that have studied suffering and awareness and consciousness and unconsciousness for millennia, and they must have something to tell us about this area in modern life that is so unconscious and is so without awareness for many people.” Really that’s what led to It’s Not About the Money. And “The Unconscious Wins Every Time” is chapter two of that book, and the reason it comes so early is that I want people recognizing that as a first step, noticing, “Wow, I really have been guided for the most part by my conditioning, and not by conscious choice around how I want to live with money.”
TS: You also make what I thought was a bold statement, and now I’m quoting from the book: “We have the relationship with money that our unconscious mind wants right now.” That’s the statement, that whatever our financial situation is and our current relationship with money is, that that’s what our unconscious mind wants.
BK: Yes. “Wants” is a tricky verb, but I would say it’s what our unconscious mind is most comfortable with, most conditioned to. So the unconscious mind, one could argue, doesn’t really want, it doesn’t really have volition. It’s just kind of attuned to one way of being or another. And it’s almost like a nervous-system-vibration thing; some people have a resting heart rate of 60 and some people have a resting heart rate of 74. And what decides that? Well, it’s genetics and it’s stress and it’s diet and it’s exercise and all these kinds of things. And it’s almost like we have a-you know, your nervous system has a resting heart rate around money.
And part of the way of looking at that is around scarcity or sufficiency. So are you constantly just clawing to make ends meet, and even if you get a little windfall, somehow it magically evaporates within a month or two, and you’re back to the same level of scarcity that you’ve lived with for years? Or conversely, you always seem to have enough, you always seem to land on your feet. I’ve just marveled that most people don’t seem to change very significantly this resting-heart-rate idea, or what the unconscious mind is most attuned to as a way of being with money.
And again, these bold statements that you’re referencing, I’m trying to be interruptive in that part of the book, and Spencer and I are trying to be interruptive in the beginning of The Money and Spirit Workshop, because if what you’ve tried for all these years isn’t really giving you what you want around money, you need to shake things up a bit. You need to say, “There’s something going on here that’s much deeper and much more powerful than I’ve ever realized.” And you’re going to have to take a new look. And it’s going to require a lot more emotional fortitude and a willingness to bring your best personal growth and spiritual resources to bear on your relationship to money, if you really do want to change.
TS: And then this system of the eight financial archetypes that you’ve developed. These are based around our eight different patterns of unconscious scripting that we have. How did you come up with these particular eight, this original system that you’ve come up with?
BK: Well, obviously there’s been a lot of archetype systems in the world, so this is not original thinking, it’s more just my application of archetypal thinking to money. I worked closely with a mentor of mine named Robert Strauch, who’s a 40-year psychotherapist in Los Angeles and who had done a lot of thinking about archetypes and money for some years. So he was a big part of helping to define these. And Spencer and I, and then certainly my work with clients, had a big influence as well.
But I think that classically people talk about the Spender, the Saver, and then some people talk about the Giver. So the person who when money comes into their life, it suddenly just gets spent. That’s the first sort of impulse to do with money. The Saver, money comes into their life and they instantly save it. And the Giver, no matter how much comes into their life, they’re always taking care of other people, and perhaps taking more care of other people’s needs than their own.
So for me, those have slightly different names. The Saver has the same name, but I was looking- The Spender spends for different reasons, different motivations, and so someone who spends money on sensory pleasure-they really enjoy the way clothes feel, or the way a car drives, or looking at art on their wall-that person is what I call the Pleasure Seeker.
And I want to just go on record as saying there’s nothing inherently negative about any of these. When people first hear about the eight financial archetypes, there’s so much shame, I think, embedded in our culture around money that we tend to hear them as labels, as negative sort of blaming labels. And I’ve tried as best as I can to use language that’s neutral. So each one of them has positive attributes and negative attributes.
But the Pleasure Seeker is using money to experience sensory pleasure, which is a great thing. It’s the medicine that the Saver most needs, it’s often the medicine that the Caretaker most needs. And the Caretaker is my version of the Giver, and that’s someone who’s using their money to express compassion and generosity. So that can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a very self-limiting thing if we’re doing it to get emotional needs met, like wanting to feel needed, wanting to feel loved, and we’re not able or willing to look at what those underlying needs are, and instead use money to fill them to our detriment, where we’re not taking care of our own needs enough.
TS: OK, so I’ve got the Pleasure Seeker, the Caretaker, and the Saver. Can you introduce the other five archetypes, and then how you came up with this? I mean, I understand you were working with a mentor on an archetype system. Was this based on observations of your clients or just-keep going, and let’s get the map out.
BK: Sure. So I’ll define the other five. I’ve sort of gone a little out of order, I’ll do my best to remember all of them!
The next one is the Guardian. The Guardian is someone who is alert and prudent around money. On the negative side, they can be excessively worried or anxious beyond what their financial circumstances warrant, but the positive side is that they’re not the kind of person who is going to get caught with a mortgage that’s going to adjust, and then have their payment double or triple and they lose their house. They tend to do their research before making financial decisions.
The Empire Builder is someone who thrives on the innovation and creativity necessary to build something of enduring value. So this is often a business. The negative side of an Empire Builder is their vision of their empire is so compelling that they’ll be a workaholic, their relationships will suffer, they might actually sort of tread on many other people’s needs, either family needs or employees needs, in order to reach their goals. The positive side of the Empire Builder is they can be very focused on a need that society hasn’t yet met, and trying to build something larger than life that’s got a legacy component to it that really does fill a societal need.
The Star is a little bit like the Pleasure Seeker in that the Star often spends money, but instead of spending money just for sensory pleasure, the Star is often at least partially motivated by how other people will see him or her. There’s a desire to be recognized a certain way. So the positive attribute of the Star is when they are engaging in a behavior that really is worthy of that emulation; they’re trying to do something that others should want to emulate or would want to emulate, and it’s a good thing, it does good things for society to model this behavior.
The negative side is more obvious to us. It’s when we just want to buy the flashier car so people will think we’re more successful, or perhaps more akin to Sounds True listeners would be buying the Prius or the hybrid electric plug-in so people will think we’re more environmental than we might really feel ourselves to be. So it’s looking at “What am I doing to be recognized or approved of?” versus “What am I doing intrinsically just for myself?” whether it’s my sensory pleasure or other needs that I want my money to meet.
TS: We have the Idealist and the Innocent left.
BK: So the Idealist uses money to-well, I should say they prioritize creativity or spiritual practice or social justice or social activism over financial pursuits in and of themselves. So the kind of lower functioning or negative attribute of the Idealist is when we are more victimized, we feel like the system is inherently corrupt and there’s a cynicism and a skepticism that is coupled with inaction. There’s a lot of words and not a lot of action. The positive side of the Idealist is when we may feel just the same way about the economic system or about social justice, but we are using our resources-our money, our time-to effect that change, the change that our ideals would most like to see in the world.
And the Innocent is someone who avoids putting significant attention on money, and believes or hopes that life will work out better. So the Innocent often has stories that go like, “The Universe will always provide” or “I’ll land on my feet because I always have.” There’s this inherent faith and trust, and you could even say optimism. And that’s the positive side of the Innocent. Many Savers, many Guardians, many Empire Builders could use much more of that.
The negative side of the Innocent is that they can be very avoidant: “I don’t want to look at my credit card debt, I don’t want to know how much I spend or much I make, or how much I have or how much I owe. Those things are a bummer, they’re a downer. Money’s kind of a drag, and I’d just rather be in my heart or be in some other part of life, and trust that money will take care of itself.”
So the interesting thing-I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but my experience is that this is much like yoga, where the archetypes are merely a language. And by naming these different behavioral tendencies and looking at what the payoffs are that they are fulfilling for us, we can start to emphasize the ones that are most dormant. So much like my early teachers, who said “Strengthen your legs in your back bends”-or there’s all kinds of examples in asana practice we could point to-in this financial archetype practice, what we’re saying is, look for the archetypes that are most dormant in you, the most unconscious tendencies, and start to strengthen those. Start to emulate the positive attributes of the archetypes that are most dormant, most asleep, in you. And that’s the best way to create some balance.
And it’s not going to be easy, because in order to strengthen the dormant archetypes, the dominant archetypes have to let go of some of their death grip on our financial life. And that means facing some of the emotions that they’ve been there to protect all along. So this is where it starts to become much deeper personal growth work in order to create lasting change around money.
TS: Now, just one question, I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but I can imagine people listening and saying, “Well, you know, 20 percent of me feels like this, and 30 percent of me feels like that, and I’m a pastiche of all these different archetypes.” Is that a pretty common response?
BK: Extremely. Everybody’s a combination of several. Our quiz is in the workbook, I believe, and it’s certainly in the brentkessel.com website where one can answer the relatively few questions; I think it’s about five minutes to get to the answer. And the answer is a combination of three archetypes, with actual percentages on the three dominant archetypes. And then you go from there.
I mean, that’s kind of cute and entertaining, but the real value of it is, “Well, now what? What do I do, knowing that I’m 40 percent Saver and 30 percent Innocent and 30 percent Idealist? How do I create balance? What are the actual imbalances that this represents in me?” And that’s I think where this work really starts to get interesting.
And for me, and for some of my clients, what I’ve noticed is that as we do that work, they shift around. You actually go through different phases in different parts of life. For example, the Guardian might have been really dominant for two or three years, where you were very prudent, sometimes excessively anxious. And then you go through this shift, and you’re much more in a generosity, sufficiency place, where the Innocent and the Caretaker are the dominant ones.
So I think of it a lot like I do my asana practice. Where’s the fine-tuning that I can do now? What’s most dormant right now in my life that could use some more expression, use some more support, to create this balance? And I almost think of the ultimate financial person, if there is such a thing, would be equally balanced among all eight.
TS: That’s so interesting to me. You know, as somebody who’s very identified with one of these archetypes, when you mentioned, “Well, you’ll have to let go a little bit of the one that you’re so identified with in order to start balancing your energy out with the other seven,” and then you said, “And that’s where the real work is, can you loosen that? And you’ll have to deal with the psychological issues underneath,” I thought to myself, “OK, Brent is pretty psychologically sophisticated for a money guy.” But then the question is, that work of dealing with those underlying psychological issues that formed this identification with one of the archetypes, that is very deep work. I mean, can you, using an online course, a book, an audio series-I mean, that’s the sort of core material I’ve constellated my whole life around. How do you see people really, genuinely making those kinds of shifts?
BK: That’s a great question. I think each tool takes us as far as it can take us, right? So you may have done classical psychotherapy for 10 years, and that took you to a certain point, but maybe your therapy never actually got into money. Many, many therapists have a certain avoidant personality around money. And I don’t want to generalize therapists; I’ve got about 15 therapists as clients in Abacus, my mom was a therapist, as I said this mentor I was very close to was a therapist for 40 years. I love therapy and therapists and have tremendous respect for the work. And it seems like, as a generalization, there’s a lot of idealism among therapists, and there’s some innocence, there’s some avoidance around money for many therapists.
So sometimes what that can mean is that there’s almost a collusion going on where the therapist and the client are avoiding imbalanced financial behaviors, because they’re just not comfortable being talked about. Neither party is comfortable bringing them into the room. So if I’m a sort of save-aholic, and I just keep saving and saving and saving more and more and more, and thinking that’s going to bring me some deeper ultimate security, I’m not actually being pushed, or not growing to let go of some of those savings and deal with the other side of it.
Now, conversely, I’ve been around this work for years and years, and even though as I’ve said I’ve had therapists in my family and much exposure to it, I haven’t done a lot of classical, traditional psychotherapy on myself until just the last few years. And I bumped up against stuff, bumped up against my own anxieties that really have nothing to do with money now, but needed that traditional psychotherapy to get through.
So I think the online course and the workshop and the workbook are an incredible opening for most people that have experienced them, where we’re shining a light in a part of life that is usually very, very private, it’s usually quite shameful. There aren’t very many experts who can both spot the financial patterns that are problematic, and then map those onto the psychological causes and emotional crutches that they’ve become. And so that’s I think what your production team and our work have really hopefully done a good job of putting out there, is something that has both of those poles covered. And it’s an entry point, with a lot of tools that someone who wants to really practice with this stuff can use-the guided meditations, the exercises-to go very far, I think, into uncovering and changing these financial behavior patterns.
And then if they get to a point where classical therapy is needed, hopefully they’ll go and seek that, or bring it into an existing relationship. I also think there are places where silent meditation practice is tremendously helpful beyond anything that therapy could do, and beyond anything that our exercises could do.
So that’s the beautiful thing about Sounds True, is you guys have so many of these resources and products for people to call on. But I think this combination of money and psychology hasn’t been as deeply explored as I would hope it would, given how much suffering is in the culture around money.
TS: Now, you seem to have intimated that the archetype that you’ve been the most strongly identified with is the Saver. Is that correct?
BK: Yes. I mean, if I had to choose one, it’s that one. But there’s definitely been Guardian and Empire Builder and Caretaker and even a lot of Pleasure Seeker the last 10 years.
TS: And just to-you can take any one of them, but I would be curious if you could, as an example and also just an act of transparency, show us how you broke that down. What was the underlying core story of your identification with that archetype? And what helped start to shift it for you?
BK: That’s a great question. So yes, I’ll do the Saver. A story that I occasionally tell in my workshops, that I may even tell in the audio part of The Money and Spirit Workshop, is when I was 23 years old, I had been out of college for about a year and a half, two years, and I was a mortgage broker.
Let me back up for a second, just so that your listeners can know why I’m telling this story. As I said earlier, these archetypes are often formed by early experiences that are painful, and that we then cling to a money message. So I’m going to share one of the stories that contributed to my Saver archetype getting emboldened.
So I’m a mortgage broker at 23, and I was already a Saver. I’d been a good Saver as a teenager and always pretty frugal, and seemed to always have more money than most of my friends. I liked that; I was identified with it. I remember being 10 years old and having my grandfather open my first bank account for me, and seeing $100 in a pink savings passbook, and just having this rush of adrenaline and pleasure go through my body, much like what I imagine people who love spending or going shopping have when they buy something they’ve been craving for a long time. But for me it was saving.
So at 23, because I had transitioned into this mortgage brokerage profession where I was only paid when a mortgage deal would close, I had actually racked up about $5,000 of credit card debt, trying to just pay the rent, pay for food, and so on. Which was very uncomfortable; I really didn’t like that feeling. But I had this ace in the hole, which was a mortgage deal on a piece of land in Venice Beach, California, and I’d found a local bank that was willing to finance it. This was in 1991, so it was kind of in the middle of the last real-estate recession, when it was very hard to find loans on anything. And this bank had said, “Yes, we’ll do it.”
So it’s a Friday afternoon, and I’d gone over to my parents’ house to visit. And I called up the Chief Financial Officer of my client, which was a real-estate development company, and I said, “So we’re all set to close on Monday, right?”
And he said, “Well, actually, there’s something I didn’t tell you, which is that I submitted the loan to another lender at the same time as I submitted it to you, and they’ve actually come back with an interest rate that’s a 1/4 percent lower, so we’re going to go with them.”
And I remember this moment: everything just kind of turned white, and I was petrified. I mean, I felt this kind of hot and maple-syrup kind of textured thing drip down the back of my neck and the backs of my arm. It was just fear, it was just like if fear could be a physiological substance, that’s what I was sensing. And I somehow got off the phone and sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands. And I remember at that moment saying to myself, “I’m going to make so much money and save so much of it that this can never happen to me again.” And it was this moment of just believing, of my mind saying, “I’ve got to find a way not to feel this.” And believing that accumulating money would be that thing.
And so it’s still my dominant archetype. And I mean, I do say to people, “Don’t expect your dominant archetype to ever fully go away.” That’s not the point either. It’s your strength, and it’s what’s served you for a very long time. And when we think we can just do away with that, we tend to get very discouraged, because you’re not going to make much progress just trying to shut down something that’s worked for you for this long. But what I’ve basically done is over the last 15 years or so, I’ve emphasized more and more Pleasure Seeking and more and more Caretaking, which are the two that I felt would create the most balance for that Saver.
And every time that I would push my limit a little more and make myself spend some money on something that would bring me sensory pleasure, or a family member sensory pleasure, the Saver-I mean, there’s one part of the Saver that said, “Ah, I’m scared, I’m petrified, don’t do this!” or “Let me go and make some more money, or save some more money, so I can keep up with the spending that you’re wanting to do.” But there was another kind of balancing point where I was actually enjoying my money, rather than just kind of counting it, and that created more integrity, and I think just more-I was more fun to be around, I was more fun for myself to be around.
And then with Caretaking, which is generosity and compassion, that’s been the biggest one, because I think the unconscious mantra of the Saver is “There’s never enough,” and when we’re giving money away philanthropically, we’re actually saying to the unconscious mind, “There is enough. There’s more than enough.” That’s just by definition: here I’m handing something to someone else, there must be more than enough. So whether or not our Saver believes that, it does start to retrain the unconscious, and it allows the Saver to let go a little bit.
And I don’t know, there’s more relaxedness. And in an ironic way, each time I’ve stretched these boundaries a bit, whether it’s through Pleasure Seeking or Caretaking, my income has shot up. And so the Saver has actually been rewarded by letting go a bit of how much control he was trying to have.
TS: That’s a very interesting observation. That’s wonderful. You know, talking about this idea of “enough” and finding enoughness, I know this is a theme throughout The Money and Spirit Workshop, this idea of sufficiency and finding our enough point. How can you help people with that, regardless of which archetype they identify with, to find that place of enough?
BK: I think the first step is that each of us, for ourselves, find the motivation to want to find our enough point. And it’s a huge first step, because we live in a culture where that’s not the accepted norm. The accepted norm is, “You don’t have enough. You can’t possibly have enough. No one has enough.” And people look at you funny.
It’s like that old story about the businessman who goes down to Mexico and encounters the fisherman sitting on the side of his boat at the end of a long day of work, and hanging out just looking at the sunset. And the businessman says to the fisherman, “Well, why don’t you buy a whole fleet of boats, and then you could make so much more money and sell all your fish, and then you could retire and just relax here on this beach?”
And the fisherman looks at him kind of funny, and says, “Well, that’s kind of what I’m already doing!”
So it’s hard to compute in this culture that it’s possible to have enough and it’s possible to relax. It is possible; there are many people who do, there are many people who do with less money than you, me, or any of your listeners. And the key moment is deciding that you want that, and that you’re going to focus on it and make it happen.
So once you’ve focused on it, then I think the-I mean, there’s a number of exercises in The Money and Spirit Workshop about this, but the biggest thing, it goes to what Thich Nhat Hanh often says, and said to me during my interview with him for It’s Not About the Money when I was at Plum Village a few years back, and that is that “The seeds that we water are the ones that grow the most.” Or as Adyashanti, another teacher I’ve studied with, says, “Wherever you put your attention, grows.”
So all these different traditions have-well, both those guys have a lot of Zen, but many traditions talk about wherever we put our attention, that grows. And I think if we put our attention on enoughness, on where we already have enough in our life-and it doesn’t have to be about money. It can be where you have enough love, it can be where you have enough health, it can be where you have enough good weather, it can be where you have enough travel or food to eat or clean air to breathe. I mean, it really doesn’t matter. It’s the process of training the mind to focus on contentment. And the more you do that, the more it does it by itself.
And it’s this weird metaphysic thing, that when you meet someone who has cultivated that practice, they exude this very magnetic energy. It’s like you want to be around someone who doesn’t need anything from you, and doesn’t need anything from their surroundings. They’re at rest, and it’s just this very attractive energy.
And so in our financial lives, that shows up as an ability to make more money. You’re able to sell more if you’re in any kind of a sales position. You’re able to make more money or get a better bonus or a bigger raise if you’re an employee. You don’t do it from a manipulative place just to make more money, because then that sort of lack of integrity tends to break the whole thing apart. But just putting that attention on where we already have enough is a huge part of it. And we’ve got, like I’ve said, some exercises where you actually document that. And you even track some places where you have more than enough, where you’re spending more resources than are really paying off for you into a certain area.
And by backing off of those, by taking resources away from those and just getting to that apex of your enoughness, and not going beyond that apex, is a wonderful step as well. That’s because it starts to reverse all this programming that we have had for years and years, and that we see all the time with advertising and with friends and whoever, that there isn’t enough, and that if you buy this thing, or make some more money or save some more money, or listen to this course and do everything just right, then you will have enough. And there’s no “there” there. There’s nowhere to get. So it’s really one of the most important ways to be in the present moment around money.
TS: Now, Brent, let’s say I look at my life, and I say, “You know, I have enough friends, I have enough creative outlets, I have enough beauty, I have enough good weather, but I actually don’t feel like I have enough money, actual cash. I have this kind of debt, or I wish I had this nicer furniture than I actually have. I don’t feel like I have enough money when it comes to that one part of my life.” What would you say to that person?
BK: That’s a great question. Well, the first thing is, there’s nothing objective, right? There’s no such thing as a definition of “enough.” I mean, there’s various bodies that try and define what the poverty level is globally, and there’s a lot of happiness studies that talk about once you make beyond a certain amount-and it’s usually a much lower amount than any of us would think it would be, like $30,000 or $40,000-then there’s no real added happiness that the behavioral psychologists can measure for that additional income.
So often my first point is that you could live on a lot less than you live on now and be happy, from a purely objective standpoint. Not talking about you, your psychology or emotions, just purely objectively, there are people who live on less than you and are happy and content, and feel like they have enough. And I can say that universally, just because there’s very, very few people that come to our workshops or buy a course like this or become clients that are living on $6,000 or $8,000 or $10,000 a year. And I know people on those kinds of numbers who feel like they have enough.
So once you accept that it’s not an objective measure, then at least we’re getting into the realm of subjectivity, of “Well, what would ‘enough’ feel like to you?” And there’s different parts of us, right? So one of the longest evolving parts of the mind is what the Buddhists call the wanting mind, and it’s the part of us that craves. And it serves a very useful evolutionary function. It’s how we feed ourselves, it’s how we shelter ourselves, it’s how we seek a mate to procreate with. Without wanting, without desire, one could argue that there’s no growth, there’s no kind of stretching to evolve one’s self or the species. But it’s incessant; it’s never sated. The wanting mind basically always wants more; it can never get enough.
And so when someone says to me, or when I catch myself saying to myself, “There’s not enough money,” I have to ask what part of me is saying that. And what would satisfy that part of me? So if that part of my mind that’s saying “You don’t have enough” says, “Well, if you just got an extra $5,000 into the bank and had those extra savings, then I’d be happy.” One of my practices that I give people is to audit that. So go ahead and do that, and let’s make some other sacrifices to get that $5,000 in the bank. But then we’re going to come back and audit it, and we’re going to write about and journal about, what were the promises you made to yourself about what you would feel when you got that $5,000.
And then, what do you feel now? Do you actually have the peace of mind? Do you have the contentment? Do you have the fun or the joy or the playfulness that-whatever all the little qualities were that your mind told you that you would get if you reached this goal, do you have them? If you do that enough times, you start to realize the salesmanship, the sort of sleazy salesmanship, of the wanting mind, that you never quite get to the promised land that it’s saying you’ll get to with this idea of “enough.”
Now, that’s just one version of it. There are obviously many, many people who are suffering a great deal and are out of work, who don’t have enough, who have lost homes, so I’m not trying to minimize their plight. And in those situations-I mean, sometimes it’s just out of control and there’s nothing more they can do, they’ve done everything they can, and they are victims of a very tough set of circumstances. If there are things that they can do-you know, there’s a lot in the course about the choices one can make to get enough, essentially, and to redefine what “enough” means to you.
So one thing I like to say to people is that financial planning is where you can have anything you want, you just can’t have everything you want. And often not having enough, it’s always a function of-
TS: I’m not sure I understood that, Brent. Can you explain that? Sorry, not to be dense, but what does that mean, “I can have anything, but not everything”?
BK: You can have one thing. If you said to me, “The one thing I really want to have is a house on the ocean where I can see the waves,” then everything else is in service of that. That may mean you need to work more hours than you. It may mean you need to invest in a different way than you do. It may mean you have to curtail your other pleasure seeking or your philanthropy or your caretaking of family members more than you do. So it’s those kinds of trade-offs that we’re often unwilling to make, that the wanting says, “No, no, no! I don’t want to give anything up. I just want more.” And that’s what the saying is trying to get at, is that you can’t have everything.
So the other thing that’s really interesting about not having enough, especially the kind of person I just described, who really has fallen on hard times, is that we fear downscaling our lifestyle much more than we need to. Human beings are unbelievably adaptable. We can easily go from a 2,400-square-foot house to an 800-square-foot apartment. And once we’ve gotten over sort of the image-consciousness part of it, the actual impact on us, the actual day-to-day living experience of it, is rarely as bad as we fear it’s going to be before we go into it.
It’s so often that the sense of not having enough is predicated on “I’ve got to keep my same lifestyle going, and the only variables that I’m willing to focus on changing are making more income, but not spending less.” And that’s often what we have to tease apart. It goes back to the first part of our conversation today, and it’s asking yourself: What are the payoffs that living this lifestyle are giving you? Why have you become as attached to it as you seem to be now?
One interesting data point is that in the fifties, the average American home was 1,200 square feet, the average family had one car, there were obviously no cell phones, there was typically one rotary-dial phone in middle-class and upper-middle-class houses. It was just a much more Spartan existence. And yet that was the peak of happiness, according to all the psychological studies in the entire 235-year history of the country, or at least modern history of the country
And now the houses are 2,300 or 2,400 square feet on average, and everyone has their own car from age 16 on, and everyone has a cell phone, even if you’re living below the poverty line. And the actual quantitative measures of quality of life are so, so much higher, and yet people aren’t as happy.
So we’re ridiculously adaptable. We adapt upward very easily, and we can adapt downward very easily, but we emotionally and psychologically don’t want to. So you can tell that in your question there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be unpacked. There’s no simple answer to “How do we get to enough?” because that is such a hard-to-define term.
TS: I thought your answer was very complete, very helpful. Brent, just one final question. Our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and I’m curious, here you are, you’re somebody who’s really an expert at this nexus point of our inner deep psychology, money, and the spiritual quest, and I’m curious what questions you’re asking now, what questions you’re asking as you work with your clients, as you see people starting to receive these teachings on money and spirit? What are you noodling around with inside?
BK: I think the biggest question for me-I’ve been very future focused through most of my life and most of my career. I’m a financial planner, which by definition means we’re planning your future, and there’s rarely a whole lot of risk in the present moment, in the present year, for the kinds of people we work with at Abacus, and even the kinds of people we work with in workshops. But what I’m realizing more and more is that there really is no destination, that this isn’t about doing everything just right and balancing your archetypes just right so that one day you get that gold star that says you’re a master with money, and you can chill out and relax now.
So it’s a practice. And I’ve realized this in my yoga practice now, and I think certainly realized it all along in my sitting practice. We even talk about all these pursuits in terms of an end goal, in terms of enlightenment or in terms of creating inner peace around money. There’s all these kinds of destinational descriptions. I guess the more honest I am with myself, and the more attention I pay to my own experience and to my client’s experiences, the more I realize there’s no such thing.
And so I think the question I’m noodling around with most is, how do we make the journey so compelling that it’s enough, that one wants to be in this work and in these questions for its own sake? So I want to figure out where I’m unconscious around money, because in those moments of waking up, of experiencing new insight, I’m free. And something relaxes, and something lets go. And that, just in and of itself, is enough. Whether I get out of credit-card debt or not doesn’t matter. Whether I get a million dollars into my 401k or not is incidental. It’s really the insight and the moment-by-moment steps I’m taking to increase my consciousness that are the reason I’m here.
And so I think the question, because that was how you asked me your question, it’s like how do I make this work feel that way, to myself and to other people, so that I invite people to enter- You know, if your listeners haven’t yet bought The Money and Spirit Workshop and if they’re planning to, I invite them to enter it with that spirit, that this isn’t a course that you listen to for eight or nine hours and do all the exercises in the workbook or however many you want to, and then you’re done with it. You really enter it the way you enter yoga practice or meditation practice. It’s something you may want-I mean, you don’t know yet, because you’re not in it, but you’re open to it becoming a real part of your life that you stay with.
It’s a wonderful opportunity, because we touch money dozens of times a day. And we hear about our partner doing something with money that pisses us off or makes us jealous, or we see the neighbor come home with a new car, or our kids do something irresponsible, or they do something very touching when they’re generous with their money. There’s just these thousands and thousands of moments that money affects us. And so if we make it part of our spiritual practice, it’s got tremendous ability to continually wake us up and wake us up and wake us up to who we really are. And I think that’s to me the sort of cutting edge of where I’d like to be heading with this.
TS: Wonderful. I’ve been speaking with Brent Kessel. Along with Spencer Sherman, they’re the authors of a new home-study course from Sounds True called The Money and Spirit Workshop, also available as a six-part online series, beginning on March 21, 2011.
Brent, thank you so much for being with us on “Insights at the Edge.” Very illuminating and heartful, very wonderful. Thank you so much.
BK: Thank you, Tami. I enjoyed it.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
