Today’s task:
Create your own list of financially abundant affirmations.
I’m taking deeper breaths today as I embark on day 2 of my adventures abroad. So many thoughts today. Super grateful that I had the chance to take the afternoon off and go find a bank where I could change my cash for local currency.
It was a good mini-challenge of sorts, finding my way on the bus, asking around to find a bank, only to realize that all of them had closed. Apparently banks aren’t open until 5 anymore, and the closing time is really more like 3:45 or 4:30.
This resulted in a nice long walk down a main road in downtown Costa Rica. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, and at the same time pretty freakin’ awesome.
The words of a dear friend came to me this afternoon – “Que todo fluye.” As soon as I decided to just get over my frustration of the banks closing and enjoy the scenery around me, a bunch of cool stuff started to happen.
But let me back up here. We’re forgetting a whole morning of goodness.
Miracle #1: The hummingbird that visited the birds of paradise plant while I was doing yoga
Miracle #2: Having good (enough) Wi-Fi to work and soaking up the sun while plugging away on my computer.
Miracle #3: A text message from a colleague about positive energy and spirit surrounding my trip and my search for a new place to farm while I’m here
Miracle #4: Chatting with some ladies from Germany over lunch and sharing what I knew from my travels here in the past
Miracle #5: Deciding to close my laptop at 3:50 and trusting that I have all the time in the world I need.
Here are some of the reflections I had today while I was working:
- I absolutely love creating marketing materials for people and working on design projects! Especially when I get to be the one to write original content. It feels so energizing to look at other examples out there and then give things my own original twist. I felt like I was humming with energy all morning long.
- The world is so big! And humanity is way more connected than we realize. Looking at the plants around me and thinking about all of the jobs that are in the world, and right here in Costa Rica, it just took away any doubts that what I want to experience is out there. Actually, it’s right here. And I’m doing it! But recognizing my proximity to creating the kind of life that I want, and feeling it today…I just know that I’m on the right path, and that feels really comforting, considering how lost and ungrounded I’ve felt over the last 9 months or so.
- Life is too short to play small. This was a pleasant reminder from the text message that I got. You miss out on so much when you tell yourself you can’t! I told myself I could, and here I am. I’m enjoying every single second of it.
- I’m getting much clearer about who my ideal client is for work, should I decide to pursue some 1:1 coaching with farmers later this year. This is what I wrote in my notebook while dining on arroz con camarones at Delfines del Mar:
- Personas que están comprometidas a su propio crecimiento
- Saben que las cosas tienen que cambiar pero no necesariamente saben dónde empezar o con qué
- Están abiertas a probar nuevas cosas que no son tan tradicionales o populares
- “Eres psicóloga” – This was a comment I got from a taxi driver on my way from the airport to my hostel yesterday, and I laughed because that was the first time someone has called me a psychologist. Not quite, I told him. But similar, in a way.
Here’s what happened when I decided to ‘go with the flow’ (the basic translation of que todo fluye):
- Chatted with a nice man selling flowers and got some suggestions for places that would be good to find a farm to work at. No specific leads, as he sells from a distributor, but he did tell me that the farmers from Cartago are robbers because of the way they hike the prices on their flowers around holidays. 😀
- Stumbled across a small place to exchange my money, which wasn’t a full-on bank, but a little pod in the middle of the street that was actually part of a bigger national bank. There was a security guard out front and everything. Not a scam.
- Wandered through Mercado Central and got to oo and aah at the market stands, especially the displays of bulk goods.
- Walking into a bookstore (these don’t exist in Jacó, where I have visited so many times before) and of course came across the section on spirituality, right next to the cookbooks. I had been telling myself that I wanted to find a tarot or oracle deck in Spanish, and I left all of my decks at home in the hopes of finding something here. Success! I got an amazing deck that talks about the 7 energies, and I’m so excited to use it during my trip.
- Getting a recommendation for a great place to get arroz con camarones when el Mercado Central closed, and another one that’s apparently better and cheaper from my Uber driver.
What do all of these things mean to me? Or how are they translating into other, bigger reflections?
I believe that for a long time, I’ve told myself that it’s not a good idea to move abroad permanently, because I might be contributing to some distortions in the local markets because of my spending, or where my money is coming from, or whatever other excuse I’ve come up with in my head.
There’s two things that came up in the last 24 hours that tell me that I’m probably wrong, and have given me more to think about:
- A comment from my Uber driver after explaining what I do for a living and what lights me up. “Costa Rica necesita más personas como Ud.” (Costa Rica needs more people like you)
- A comment from a man I met from the Netherlands yesterday – “People are going to move, regardless.” He was talking about people’s decisions to move all across the globe, and me talking about the influence of the expat community here in Costa Rica.
This made me think about how there’s so many people that are getting displaced anyways from their home countries, for whatever reason, who are choosing to leave their country and go elsewhere for political, economic, or social reasons. Who am I to say that being forcibly removed versus moving by choice are any better than the other? Can’t they just be different, instead of assigning a meaning of ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
I say all of this because in the same way that I’ve felt like what ‘the responsible thing to do’ is to stay put living in Minnesota and continue to build out a professional and personal career there, I also feel like I’m ‘shoulding’ myself into saying that the ‘responsible thing to do’ is to continue living in the U.S. and settle for less than what I really want.
Well fuck. That. Shit.
I may come home with a tattoo this time around. Who knows? The sky is the limit, the world is full of miracles, and there are no such things as coincidences.
Let’s bring this post home so that you know what you’re task is for today and why you’re doing it.
Create your own list of financially abundant affirmations.
What is an affirmation, you’re asking?
It’s basically a statement that could describe something you are striving for personally, it could be something that embodies the person you want to be but don’t identify as, it could be a statement that inspires you, or gives you a feeling of confidence, lightness, or even clarity around next steps when working to make a decision.
When you’ve found an affirmation that works for you (or a thousand, because there’s a lot out there), you’ll know. You’ll feel it in your body when you say the words out loud.
How do you use affirmations?
However the hell you want! That’s the great thing about them. It’s literally just a sentence that resonates with you, where you’re going, what you want more of, or perhaps something else that strikes your fancy.
You can write affirmations on little note cards and put them around your house, in your bedroom, in your pantry, in your linen closet, next to your toothbrush, on your mirror (I’ve been known to write “I am enough” on my bathroom mirror in lipstick), or even save it as a screensaver on your phone.
I have found that some of the most effective ways I create affirmations for myself are:
- As weekly, monthly, or even daily reminders on my phone (“Drink More Water” goes off every day around 2 p.m., “You have all the time in the world you need” goes off daily at 7:30 p.m.)
- As a screensaver on my phone
- As written notes scattered throughout my apartment
- As the decorations on the front of my folders for my notebooks I use to work
- Represented as photos for my screensaver on my laptop
This is the affirmation that I wrote in my notebook today:
Soy generosa con mi sabiduría. Comparto lo que conozco, pero realmente es el trabajo de mis clientes cambiar. El deseo tiene que venir de ellos.
This translates to “I am generous with my knowledge/wisdom. I share what I know, but it’s really the work of my clients to change.”
I feel like everything about this takes the pressure off when it comes to business. Because I can let go of associating my own self-worth with the success or results of the people I work with. I cannot assume responsibility for their future, only mine. As I write this, I’m feeling a tingling in my entire body, and I just had an image pop in my head of me walking down the pathway from Playa Herradura to the apartment I used to stay in.
There’s something about the possibility I felt during those walks, the inspiring podcasts I would listen to as I thought about what my future could look like, who I would get to work with, where I would get to go, and the kind of impact that I could have on people’s lives…
I think it all has to do with letting go.
Let go. Trust that what you’re seeking is seeking you. Keep forging ahead. And by golly, play!!
Why should you create affirmations regarding your finances?
Why not? Let’s skip this question and get right to the homework. 🙂
Your homework
- Write a list of affirmations related to your finances that inspire you and make you want to jump out of bed every morning. I’ll share a few with you that I’ve saved over the last year or so, and have thrown into my financial goals document:
- Everything I do services the creation of abundance in my life
- Making money is as easy and natural to me as breathing.
- I welcome wealth, in any form it takes.
- I am skilled at managing money, and it multiplies for me in return.
- I am deserving of abundant wealth.
- The more I serve the world and share my talents, the more money I generate.
- I am happy to help others achieve wealth beyond their wildest dreams because I trust that there is an endless supply and more than enough for everyone.
- Financial freedom is a reality that I deserve.
- I am unafraid to share my wealth in the service of others. The more I give, the more I receive.
- My financial abundance supports me to make a difference in the lives of many people.
- I deeply trust myself to make the best decisions for myself regarding my money and finances, and that anything that might not go well is not a reflection of my self-worth
- I have endless gratitude for all that I have been given and know more is yet to come.
