How you look at money is how you see life. If you see money as scarce, that scarcity mentality will be reflected in other areas of your life such as eating, spending (or not) and time. If you see money as an obstacle, it will likely be difficult in one way or another. If, instead, you see money as exciting, interesting or as a tool to living life, your approach will be very different.

Mastering the tool of money first requires you to understand that is just that, a tool not unlike any other household tool that we use on a regular basis. Using a fork, for example, we learn to master at a young age because of its usefulness for eating. A pitchfork for gardening, however, might never be used unless you take up gardening. And, if you do garden, you will quickly realize that a pitchfork is far more useful for digging a larger garden than a smaller hand fork. You will also ascertain that a garden fork serves an entirely different purpose than a fork you eat with even though they look very similar.
Using this analogy, you can easily see that if you’re looking at a large garden bed that needs the soil turned over it would be a long, tedious task to use a smaller potting fork to prepare the soil. You turn over the soil in a garden to prepare it for planting and to facilitate growth. You use an appropriate tool to prepare for the change necessary for the new growth. The secret to successful gardening is to first prepare the soil beginning by selecting an appropriate tool.
The key to successful finance is to recognize your perspective, and understand that you can plant seeds that, with nurturing, grow into a beautiful garden. But, before you do, you must realize that at some point you’re going to have to dig into the dirt of your current thinking that has created the current situation, then use an appropriate tool to plant and grow your garden before you can harvest the crop.

Okay, so if money is almost as important as oxygen for survival in our society, then what does it really mean when you hear people say, or perhaps you say yourself, that you don’t like money? If anything to do with money issues creates stress for you, or every time something to do with money comes up that you would rather avoid, then stop and ask why? Consider some of the following questions to determine if your values, beliefs and priorities around money are serving you in your life or holding you back from what’s really important for you:
•   What don’t you like about money?
•   Why don’t you like dealing with money?
•   What about money causes you stress?
•   Why does money cause you stress?
•   What do you associate with money?
•   What do you like about money?
•   What does money mean in your life?