Home - Denise Hughes Author Speaker Money Coach

Does This Sound Familiar? Any of It?

Your unopened bills are overflowing on your dining room table. Pink colored notices and 15 day shut off warnings are coming in. Tension is brewing.

You can’t seem to locate your checkbook, although you know it is somewhere in the house. Your manual checkbook register has scattered entries and is no longer reliable with an updated balance.

Receipts and old statements (from over three years ago) are piled up because you aren’t sure what to throw out and what to keep.

Money has fallen out of your wallet and is scattered all over your purse. When you open your car door, crumpled up dollar bills are in the cup holders, on the passenger seat and a couple have fallen on the floor.

The desk you pay your bills at has used food wrappers, crumbs and lots of dust balls. You can’t see the surface.

You can’t remember which of your five checking accounts has available money for spending. The bank teller knows you by name from calling frequently to check how much money is in your account. You are racking up debt using your credit card, only because you aren’t sure how much money is in your checking account to pay for every day expenses.

Silent scream!

OK, maybe this isn’t exactly your picture, but you get the idea. Disorganization, uncleanliness, vagueness, overwhelm, disrepect, and stagnant energy all live under the roof of “clutter.”

CLUTTER:

• is a heavy draining energy, show stopper, clogger upper, big boulder in your way
• prevents flow and life force from circulating in your life/money
• slows things to a snail’s pace
• non-productivity is its friend
• keeps you “in your place” in an imprisoned kind of way
• vibrates at the same energy as deprivation does
• keeps you in a place of “I don’t know,” (guess how much vagueness costs?)
• robs you of creativity, inspiration and brilliant ideas

MONEY LIKES (and this stuff helps it flow):

• respect
• systems allowing it to be received fully
• structure
• clarity
• order
• cleanliness
• a boss to tell it where to flow and go

READY TO OPEN YOUR FLOW WITH MONEY?  BEGIN HERE!

√ Pay your bills on time. Otherwise, you break an agreement of integrity for a service you were already provided. Late payments drain your account (and your self-worth) with late fees and you jeopardize emotional capital with your providers. When you don’t give per your agreement, you stop flow coming back into you.

√ Get a big enough wallet to hold your plastic, cash, coins, checkbook and register all in their own respective compartments. Money likes it when you give it an actual physical space to live that is all its own. This is a behavior of respect!

√ Create a special area in your home where you pay bills and manage money. It can be small, clean and supplied with a pen, post its, stamps, calculator, writing pad. Zen is good.

√ Invest in a good shredder and do it daily, just like flossing!

√ Money flows best when you tell it where it needs to go and when you set priorities for it. It needs a Cash Flow plan that allows you to track and analyze your expenses and income…to create the greatest conscious flow possible.

√ Create a file folder for each of your current bank / investment statements and all financial papers. Label each folder and place in a file drawer, banker’s box or portable designer carry case. Dare to locate important papers in less than five minutes when the need arises. Snap and there it is!

√ Clean up unfinished broken money agreements. Any unfinished act of in-completion is a heavy burden to carry. It stops money from flowing into you.

√ Have one bank account for personal and one for business. Clean up the clutter of old un-used accounts and multiple accounts. They breed stagnant energy. Consolidate.

√ Clean out mental clutter that blocks flow. Call this scarcity thinking, “I’m not worthy” of and all your limiting scripts that prevent you from “receiving.”

√ Befriend money. It likes being in relationship with you. It likes to have a weekly date with you. Even though its voice is silent, it speaks to you visually through spreadsheets…and you don’t need to wash those sheets!

P.S Line all of your dollar bills up (in your wallet) so the President’s face is facing you. That way when you give the bills away, they know who to come back to.

P.S.S. The same stuff that clogs up your finances clogs up your human relationships.

Do you have any ideas on sustaining “flow” in your financial life? Tell me your ideas, would love to hear about them.

Neuro-Economics: The Brain-Money-Spending Connection

This is a highly desired two hour talk. Financial Planning Chapters love this talk because Denise explains the core reasons why people make the purchasing decisions they do and the behavioral interventions needed to keep a client’s spending behavior in check. She explains the physiology behind why people buy more at Costco than they planned and the strategies stores use that loosen up our brain chemistry so we open our pocketbooks without a second thought. Because of her background in psychology, coupled with her education and experience in finance, she easily lays out an in-depth understanding of the brain-money-spending connection.

Five Secret Ingredients of the Million Dollar Woman’s Mindset

Maybe you have a favorite recipe and you know just the right ingredients to make a savoring mouth watering dish, right? Well, guess what? Denise knows the ingredients to help you grow your business to the size of your liking. She has worked with and interviewed over 150 women entrepreneurs helping them to grow their business revenues to the million dollar mark. She knows the secret ingredients that capitulate business women into success. This talk is filled with inspirational stories and the necessary ingredients to get you reaching for your dreams and creating a successful business.

Women, Money, and Power

Is your audience ready to support woman in taking off their financial burkas? Why is it that women know their bra size, shoe size, clothing sizes and yet don’t know the amount of money available to them in their checking accounts or how much money it takes to make their lives work well? This talk addresses the core emotional issues women have with their relationship with money. Uncover deep seeded myths of Cinderella’s glass slipper, Snow White’s Prince and the many spells that keep the veil of innocence in place with a woman and her money.

One recent Saturday, I visited a local coastal town’s (Bonny Doon) ecological reserve. I was on a docent lead hike with botanist, Linda. Linda opened our hike by saying, “we are going to begin our hike through an area where the fires seered the land about 5 years ago. Everyone here thought the fires devastated the land, which it did…but it also did something else. The fires opened this area to new growth. Ancient seeds started to sprout, new plant species came forth. The heat from the fire burst open the lupine and cyprus seeds, so this reserve now boasts they are one of the worlds largest population of Cyprus. None of these new plant species would have taken root if it hadn’t been for the fire and its heat.”

As in nature, so in life. Sometimes, we initially experience the financial fires of life as losses. Job loss, illness, disability, death of a spouse, and divorce, are common financial and emotional fires.

Elizabeth Lesser, author of the book, Broken Open, tells us that our losses can break us down and change us, in “making us a little more cynical or scared or unable to cope.” We can allow the experience of our losses to build mental scar tissue. This scar tissue embodies the qualities of restriction, pain, effort and keeps us living in a “woe is me” dynamic. Over time, it takes lots of energy to live with scar tissue. We get worn out.

However, breaking down, isn’t the only option. Elizabeth says, “There is this other possibility that after the breaking, we can open up more into who we are supposed to be, in the way that a flower breaks out of the confines of a bud into its full blossoming.”

HOW DO YOU OPEN?

Just like the lupine required the intense heat from the fire to bloom, the heat from our external experiences can be the catalyst in opening us to internal changes that sprout new growth. When we open from loss, we embody the qualities of freshness, elasticity, beauty, authenticity, simplicity and wisdom.

It doesn’t just have to be the extreme of a fire that causes us to open. Some people open themselves when they “act” on insights from divine “ah-hah” moments. Have you ever had an “ah hah” moment where (out of the blue) you received an idea or answer to something that helped you to flow and live in more open-ness in your life?

Others open themselves by paying attention to states of energy and discerning states of flow (open) from states of effort (constriction). Living in flow is like living in a state of magic. It reminds me of the childhood song of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. We are in flow when life is effortless, merry and just plain feels right.

In my financial life, I regularly examine where I am experiencing states of flow and states of effort. I give thanks to areas that are flowing and surrender to states of effort until they too begin to take on that quality of “flow.”

Judith Orloff, MD, is an energy psychiatrist. She tells us there are signs when we are pushing against an opening. These signs are: cycles of frustration, irritation, uphill battle, fixated on the same issue over and over again, strain, drain, feeling of heaviness.

Financially, where are you pushing against an opening? Lots of effort and heaviness come with credit card debt, living a larger lifestyle that what our energy supports, not earning our worth, being attached to a “woe is me” attitude, and living in a state of vagueness (yes, vagueness stops flow) about how money flows in our lives (expense and income).

As a financial consultant, I am always examining my own issues with money. I have under-earning behaviors to stay on top of. Right now, I am pushing against an opening with how to better package and offer my services. I bump up against my own mental scar tissue and the mental adhesions that keep me tied to a certain way of thinking.

“When we open ourselves to the energy of flow we make room for life force to dance.” This is a guiding light quote for me, by Judith Orloff.

THOUGHTFUL QUESTIONS TO SUPPORT YOUR OPENINGS

So, I have a couple of questions for you.

(1)  Where financially are you pushing against an opening?

(2)  What shifts can you make to open your particular situation to more flow?

(3)  What is keeping you from acting on creating this opening right now?

If these questions are too personal to respond to in this blog, just think about them privately. I would love to hear about how you move into the space of “opening” and what your experience is in that space.

Talking about money? I must say this is an art and a bit of a science too. Talking about money in a way that is good for both my husband and I took time, patience, practice, and stick-to-it-iveness. I find in working with couples, talking about money in a way that feels good and is solutions driven is the biggest challenge as well.

WHY IS TALKING ABOUT MONEY SO HARD?

For starters, it isn’t a habit. In the pie chart of life, most couples haven’t created a slice of pie for talking about money. Money conversations usually get fit in at the end of a day, when we have the least amount of energy to connect over it or when some financial crisis or unexpected event happens. Then we scurry to talk about finding solutions to money problems.

We come from a reactive space rather than a responsive space. Over time, our nervous system gets conditioned so that talking about money is stressful, our blood pressure increases, our stomach gets tied in knots and we will avoid talking to avoid this stress.

We have to be careful to not blame or shame our partner, which ends up in a stuck conversation. Here are some tips that work for us:

TIPS FOR WOMEN WHEN COMMUNICATING WITH MEN ABOUT MONEY

• Keep emotion out of the conversation. Emotion can overwhelm your man and the focus of the meeting can get derailed.
• Instead of money meeting, think household business meeting
• Cut to the chase, make the point, move on. Here is a really great 1 minute video on the differences of how men and women process things. Women are more into details, men are not. Click HERE to view. One of my husband’s favorite phrases that tells me he is checking out of our conversation, is “TMI, which is his code for too much information.”
• Keep an agenda, stick to it, minimize tangents. While a woman’s brain likes to connect the dots (bigger corpus callosum), a man’s brain likes to stick to one topic at a time. Click HERE for a humorous video on the difference between men and women’s brains.
• Focus on the solution, not so much on processing the problem. Understand that men like to communicate to fix or problem solve.
• Feel your feelings but don’t act your feelings out on him

TIPS FOR MEN WHEN COMMUNICATING WITH WOMEN ABOUT MONEY

• Be mindful of your body language and tone of voice, women pick up energy and emotion quickly and interpret your non-verbal communication regardless of the words you are saying.
• Before you jump into fixing any problem, ask her what she needs from you. Ask her how she FEELS about what is going on. Don’t fix, solve or jump to an outcome. Just listen.
• Ask if she wants solutions before you give them.
• Understand that women communicate to “connect.” Give her space and time to connect with you. Don’t rush communication.
• Repeat back (in your own words) what you hear your partner saying. Help her to feel heard and understood by you.
• Creating space to talk about the problem first reduces stress levels in women. Give space for this, then move on to finding solutions together.

 

WHAT MEN + WOMEN NEED FROM EACH OTHER

• Understand your partner’s point of view rather than defending your position. Here is a communication tool when a disagreement occurs. Say to your partner, “I’m not sure I see your point of view, however, I want to better understand your thinking on this and how you think it will work.
• Consider the needs and safety of your partner equal to the consideration you give yourself.

A book I highly recommend is WHY MARS and VENUS COLLIDE, by Dr. John Gray, Ph.D. John does a great job of explaining the science, differences between men and women’s brains, and how we can bridge brain wiring gaps in talking about money.

ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE, A NEW KIND OF WEALTH

Attitude of gratitude?   Joy, Love and Gratitude all live in the same vibrational house.   The experience of these energies in our lives is mind altering. When we are in a state of deep appreciation, dopamine (a neurotransmitter) washes over our brains.
This neurotransmitter creates a natural euphoria in us. This veil of euphoria helps us view the cup of life half full rather than half empty, it directs our focus on the virtues of another rather than character defects, and it gives us that warm honey feeling inside that opens up our flow of generosity.

I find it interesting that the same areas of the brain light up when scanned, whether experiencing deep appreciation or if taking an opiate, such as heroin. Practicing gratitude turns on our internal pharmacy, naturally creating that inner “high.”

So what does practicing the attitude of gratitude have to do with money? Well, research done by Dr. Michael McCollough, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Dr. Robert Emmons, of the University of California at Davis, suggest that gratitude plays a significant role in a person’s financial well-being and general well-being.

WHY AN ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE CREATES A FEELING OF “ENOUGH”

When we are in a state of internal fulfillment, there is less of a tendency for us to create fulfillment in external ways, like retail shopping.

People that practice daily gratitude define success in ways other than possession accumulation.  This alone is a positive bottom line way of thinking.

Living in an attitude of gratitude protects you from the behavior of comparing yourself to others. Comparison is a behavior rooted in lack consciousness. It cost money to keep up with the Joneses or the latest greatest (fill in the blank)_________.

People that practice gratitude realize that abundance comes in many forms, not just monetary wealth. Examples of other forms of abundance are: health, relationships, soulful work, pets, etc. Wealth takes many forms if we are open to seeing those forms and inviting them into our lives.

This research is important because Americans have a history of living beyond their means. Our focus is on better and more. We’ve become disconnected from what truly makes us feel satiated, which are things money can’t buy. These things are love, freedom, connection and purpose.

Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of the new book Stumbling on Happiness, tells us multimillionaires from the Forbes 400 list aren’t much happier than the average suburbanite. He says once basic human needs are met, a lot more money doesn’t make one have increased happiness.

I do a simple daily gratitude practice. I close both hands into a fist. Then as I release one  finger at a time, I think of one gratitude. This helps me to focus on ten things each day I am grateful for. I’ve been doing this for over five years and it has changed my internal chemistry and focus. Here are my top ten gratitudes that just about are the same every day.

• My connection with Source energy
• My health
• Relationships with my husband, friends and family
• Soulful work
• Our dogs, Sadie and Kiska
• Our home
• Hiking mountain tops with friends
• Connecting with the Sacred in nature
• Strong french roast coffee in the morning
• Sinking into a comfy down bed at night

One of the best things about doing a daily gratitude practice for me, is that it has gotten me in touch with my core needs. When my true and deepest needs are met, there isn’t much else I truly want. Do you relate to this?

I’d love to hear how your attitude of gratitude affects your money life!