When I allow someone to pay me money it’s a big gift

Since I’ve been 24 years old, my bank account had 7 figures. The way I got there was by the tried and tested formula that 99% of people on the planet live and work by: Grind it out, work hard, give it your all, put in the effort. This method works with variable results for people. Some people make a dollar that way, some make a million, some a billion.

What I’ve learned over the last couple of years has messed with my thinking on money and put my view of it completely upside down from the above. It’s impacted me so much, that just thinking about makes me smile and gives me relief and ease. And I want to share that perspective with you in the hopes it might have a similar effect.

Money is stored energy and aliveness as pain

Money to me today is the most universally accepted expression of stored pain and thereby energy and aliveness that we have. I’m writing that again because I love this sentence: Money is the most universally accepted expression of pain and thereby stored energy and aliveness, that we have. Pain, that is stored as energy on a piece of paper. 

When I take that pain (i.e. money) and mobilize it, I turn it back into energy and aliveness, creativity, action, you name it!

Let me unpack what this means to me: In order for me to buy something, I don’t have today, which by definition means, in order for me to become someone that I’m not today, I have to pay and mobilize something. That then creates change. And what I pay with is not a piece of paper with numbers on it, that is just the representation of what I’m paying for. Instead, it is a part of my identity stored as pain that I’m letting go of or letting become expansive again as energy. I’m going from “Leo that has $100 in my pocket” to a new person called “Leo that owns a new pair of shoes and doesn’t have $100 in his pocket.” To create that shift from being person A to being person B, there’s something that needs to shift within myself, naturally. The way I do it is by feeling and then allowing the pain within myself to shift. As I do that, it transforms itself naturally into energy, freedom, aliveness or whatever intention I set for myself. I believe that to take the leap for me to go from the first Leo to the second takes a degree of feeling fear and pain, which ultimately, I allow myself to ease into and then let go of and let expand. In the above example, this might be just a split-second. When I bought my car, this was a bigger shift of pain and energy.

Think back for example to something you really really wanted to have but teetered for a while whether you should get it. Maybe it’s a pair of nice shoes, the new iPhone, jewelry, a nice meal, whatever. Pick anything you want. Think back to something you really wanted and then, at first, you didn’t want to pay for it. Maybe you hesitated just for a second after seeing the price tag, or a day, a month or a year, because you needed to earn some more money first. My guess is that to a certain degree, you were scared, contracted, curled up, emotionally speaking. “No, I don’t want to give up that pain (i.e. money) to get this thing over there, it’s too much, too expensive, not worth it!”. And then, if you eventually bought it, magically to most, something gives and something clicks. You let it flow, you surrender. You take out the money or the credit card, you swipe it, you feel nervous and excited whether what you’re doing is the craziest thing in the world. And then, once it’s done, you walk out of there with your new pair of shoes in hand. Maybe still a bit guilty or uneasy, but slowly, something else is also emerging. A sense of freedom, a sense of lightness. You walk home and you open up the box and you put the shoes on again, you walk around in them, you feel great, they feel right. There’s aliveness, there’s a connection, there’s truth. You’ve changed who you were just an hour ago, even if just a little bit. You’re now a person with new shoes and those new shoes have catapulted you, even if only so slightly, out of the orbit of who you were yesterday. And into the more expanded version of yourself that has a sick pair of boots or sneakers. 

I think that this is the universal process of how we deal with money if we look under the hood of things. It represents pain, that we let go of, so it can transform itself into energy and help us feel alive. The same is true if I buy a loaf of bread or a million-dollar house. The angle and degree of pain may be different. 

Inviting people to transform pain back into energy and aliveness

To me, this is really important for the work that I do and represents a huge paradigm shift. When I work with people in my coaching practice 1:1, at first, I do so without an exchange of money. That has several reasons I’ll save for another article. We both pay and shift energy into aliveness in other ways at first, mostly with time, attention and awareness. If that investment transforms into enough energy and aliveness, after some sessions, I invite some people to take things to another level. I invite them to pay with and thereby transform another, new chunk of pain now, in exchange for even more energy and aliveness. This time, not in time and attention, but in money. 

The underlying mechanism and reaction I’d describe as follows: When I tell someone what chunk of pain (i.e. money) I’m asking you to give up and mobilize, the first reaction in 99% of cases I’ve experienced so far was one of contraction. There was one time only where someone remained completely relaxed and said: “No matter the number, I already decided I would work with you.” They had already paid and transformed ahead of time! The money exchange was just a formality. For most of us, myself included, it’s different, the body stiffens, the shoulders come up, the eyes break eye contact. Secretly, I love it when that happens, I feel mischievous. The question that’s in their minds then I’m guessing is “Do I want to give up this much pain to create energy again? Is that safe? Is that really what I want? Is it going to work? Can I trust him? Can I trust myself?”. And to say yes to that question takes tremendous courage and a considerable capacity to be able to handle the associated fear and contraction in the body that wants to shift again. Which, secretly or not so secretly, is exactly the reason I’m doing this. Because for me, I want to only work with people that have learned, by themselves to mobilize that amount of fear and pain back into energy. That’s one way for me to know that they are in their power, don’t look toward me as their guru or savior and we will continue to go deep, continue to show up and step into our fears and pains together, session after session. In a way, it’s a most important lagging indicator as Eric Ries used to tell us when we brainstormed building features for the software company I founded, on future behavior.

And that is, of course, the reason I love what I do. Because once people clear those barriers, commit to it, and it’s hard to fake it, they will transform their lives in the way that they want to. And to me, there’s no bigger gift than that, both for me to receive to witness and for them to step into.

A mindset, not a gimmick

When people say “yes” to my offer, I double-check with them that they are doing this from a place of expansion and aliveness. Meaning, to see if they have actually done the work, gone through the hell of feeling and then giving up that pain and fear to arrive at aliveness and expansion to say “yes! This is what I want!”. This process has been dubbed the “Hell yes or no” framework in the coaching world. I like that, but I think it doesn’t explain the underlying mechanism of our body’s nervous systems very well. Someone can say “Hell yes” and not really mean it, it’s something that has to be felt in the body and something that luckily every human can tell if it’s true or not. Ok, with a little bit of training that is maybe. But we can’t fake a true “Hell yes”. 

On the flip side, we also have to fully embody this mindset when we’re inviting someone to pay us money. If we don’t truly and fundamentally believe that we are making a gift to them, I don’t think it works. And we can’t fake it either. 

Making the gift

This brings me to my most important point. The one that I’m celebrating and feeling giddy over every time that I think of it, since I’ve had that insight. Which is that when I invite people to pay me money, I’m making a huge gift to them. I’m inviting them to take a chunk of pain that they have and to transform it into aliveness and energy, to create the life that they want. There are few things more powerful and meaningful in my world than that. 

In other words, I’m allowing them to pay me. This is not a trick, this is not a gimmick, it took me a long time to arrive at that insight as truth from my own body. But now that I’m there, it is so powerful. 

Not offering the gift

Conversely, sometimes I don’t allow people to pay me money. In fact, about 60% of the time, I don’t. Because I don’t have the sense that their bodies or nervous systems are ready for that much mobilization of pain and fear. Another 20% of the time, I get it wrong and they decide that they are not ready for it. That is fine too. But those that are, that go inward, that sit with the pain and the fear, transform it into aliveness and then come out and say “Fuck yes, let’s do this!”, those are the people I love to work with. And from that place of depth, honesty and truth, pure magic happens. Session after session. 

Whatever you do in your life, but especially if you are an entrepreneur of any kind that is selling a product, try asking yourself this: Who do you want to allow to give up pain and fear through giving up money? I’m curious to hear what this brings up.

PS: My own fear around money

For those of us that are in positions where we invite others to pay us money, there may be a lot more layers to it on our own side. For me personally, I’ve had years of built-up shame and fear around putting myself into a position of asking other people for money. It took me a lot of sessions to break through those old beliefs. Even before doing so, I had already made a lot of money by most people’s standards. Ironically, the way we had set up our software business was in a way so that I never had to ask someone for money directly – people could only pay us through the website by buying a subscription without speaking to a human. I don’t think that’s an accident and shows how fearful and scared I was about the topic of money. 

The freedom I feel today around the topic of inviting others for money is so relieving. And money also continues to be a growing edge for me at the same time. If this is true for you too, my encouragement is to give yourself time and space to allow things to unfold and expand in your own time. 

What I was hoping to do with this article was to point to a new mindset that when you’re inviting someone to pay you money, your focus can be on them and how you’re serving them, not on you and what it means to you. If your own fear around money is so tremendous, because you need to pay rent and buy food this month, that you can’t authentically embody what I’m describing here, the wise words someone shared with me once were this: Don’t do this kind of work as your full-time job then. Have a day job or a paycheck job or any other kind of setup, where that is off the table or minimized and not stressing you out every few days. And experiment and grow a coaching practice or any other business where you’re inviting people to pay you in your free time. That piece of advice, I believe can make it a lot easier and lower stakes to experiment with the mindset that I’m describing here.