TWM Podcast Recap
Last month on the podcast we were joined by Conscious Leadership Group Co-Founder Diana Chapman. Diana is also the co-author of the best selling book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.
Here’s Chapman on operating “above the line” in her work and life: “When I am operating above the line I am open, more specifically open minded and curious. I am also open hearted in my desire to want to be in connection with people around me and in my emotional openness. So if something comes up that might be challenging or unexpected I get to respond from a place of curiosity and ask ‘what do i get to learn from this experience?” See the full clip (2 minutes) below:
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
What I’m Reading
The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
Relative to how long our species has been around, money is actually a pretty new thing, and our relationship with money isn’t one that many fully understand or even think about.
The author, Lynne Twist highlighted that “rarely in our life is money a place of genuine freedom, joy, or clarity, yet we routinely allow it to dictate the terms of our lives and often to be the single most important factor in the decisions we make about work, love, family, and friendship.”
This book highlights the importance of examining our attitude towards money - earning it, spending it, and giving it away - and how that exercise can offer insight into our lives.
Here were my top takeaways:
What we believe about money matters: Our habits often rise out of our beliefs, so if we don’t change our beliefs, our money outcomes likely won’t change either. If we have beliefs about money such as that we don’t deserve it or that money is bad, we run the risk of repeating the past and making those beliefs come true.
True abundance flows from enough; never from more: A word I’ve grown more fond of over the years has been “sufficiency”, the author uses sufficiency as an antidote to scarcity. It’s easy to fall into a trap of continuously looking out into the future and feeling that we need more and more, however a recognition of the resources we already have as enough can open us up to greater levels of freedom, flow and integrity.
Money is a powerful form of intentionality and agency: With every transaction we have the opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, when we use money in-line with our goals and values, powerful things can happen. One of my mentors used to say “money decisions are moral decisions”.
Something to Think About
Alan Watts has this concept called The Law of Reversed Efforts in which he described the counter-intuitive nature of how life often works. He says “To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”