Ongoing financial stress can take a real toll on us. It can sap our energy, our self-confidence and our emotional resilience.
I am certainly familiar with all those feelings and emotions as I had to deal with them all at one stage in my life when I was facing near bankruptcy due to defaults on payments from my most significant client at the time. I describe the lessons I learned in working my way through those challenges in my book “Overcoming Financial Stress: How to Conquer Your Financial Fears and Create a Better Future” so as to help others facing the same challenges.
Dealing with challenges such as this are made much worse if you are hampered by inner struggles.
Speaking more broadly, at some stage in our lives, most of us find we are faced with some sort of inner struggle: things like anxiety, stress, overwhelm, procrastination, loss of confidence etc. This is on top of the normal stresses that life’s challenges are throwing at us.
Generally, we’re able to sort these problems out. While it might take time, we’re normally able to work them through.
Unfortunately, at other times, these inner struggles seem persistent, and they keep arising time and time again in different, but related, situations no matter what we do.
We find that our emotions tend to overwhelm us, causing us to have a disproportionate response to the situation that we find ourselves in – something has triggered us.
On the other hand, rather than occurring and being triggered at particular times, it can sometimes be more continuous, so we feel as if we are perpetually struggling with ourselves, feeling as if we are under threat, when, in fact, we know that we’re perfectly safe. It’s like we have an alarm chronically warning us of something, but we don’t know what it is. The alarm seems stuck on.
This can happen particularly with financial problems, which at a deeper level represent a threat to our survival. Our inner struggles make these problems worse and also make it harder for us to address them creatively and constructively.
When this happens, we have trouble moving forward. Our ‘freeze, fight or flight’ response kicks in, pumping adrenaline through our veins, tensing our muscles so that we are prepared to deal with the challenge. But there is no challenge to immediately be met, and so there’s nowhere for these feelings and this response to go.
If this happens repeatedly, we find that we can easily become overwhelmed, we lose confidence, and we start to procrastinate because we’re not sure what to do. Over the longer term, it can lead to us feeling exhausted and burnt out, especially as we search over and over for solutions that always seem to evade us.
This is because solutions are hard to come by when we’re in a ‘down’ state, simply worrying about staying safe. We are most creative and best at coming up with solutions to our problems when we’re in an ‘up’ state, feeling good about ourselves and the world, feeling that we are capable and strong.
Of course, we are sometimes able to successfully figure out why we’re feeling like this way, why we’re having these inner struggles, and by understanding the cause of the problem, we are well on the way to resolving them.
But often the answers that we come up with are not the correct ones. That’s because the deeper problems underlying these inner conflicts are not conscious-mind problems but instead, are unconscious-mind problems.
Just as a headache, raised temperature etc are merely symptoms of the ‘flu rather than the bug itself, the stress, overwhelm, anxiety, procrastination, self-confidence issues etc that you might experience are symptoms of the underlying cause of your inner struggles, not the underlying issues.
These symptoms can arise when unconscious programming that we have taken onboard many years ago, frequently during childhood, echoes back in our unconscious mind causing us to react inappropriately and suffer needlessly.
This childhood unconscious programming is triggering us, all these years later.
So, returning to the title of this post, this is why ‘the problem that we have often isn’t the problem that we think we have’.
While there is a lot that can be done to work on conscious mind problems, and many of my posts on my blog and on my social media pages describe these, it’s pretty hard to work on your own unconscious mind problems because, well…, they are unconscious!
In my one-on-one sessions held on Zoom, I help clients quickly let go of these sorts of inner struggles so they can tackle their life challenges such as financial worries with greater confidence and clarity.
Of course, there is a lot more I could say about this, so, if you would like to learn more about it, check out a Free On-Demand Masterclass called ‘The Ultimate Guide to Overcoming Your Inner Struggles’ that I am making available for a limited period of time. This can be found at:
