Life’s lessons are learned everywhere. The most pivotal lessons of our life, however, are learned within the framework of family and close friends. When we struggle in adult life with our emotions, our finances, our health, our relationships, our generosity, or indeed, in any area, it is helpful to take a step back, go within, and understand the impact that ‘stories’ from our youth have had on us.

Recently, I was asked an interesting question which set me thinking. The question was: "How authentic are you about your relationship to your money"? I have to say that it took me sometime to understand the significance of the question, and a much longer time to answer it with any semblance of satisfaction, and to accept that I really had significant feelings about money.

And so, I invite you to think of your own relationship with money, and the thoughts that automatically come to you when it becomes a topic of conversation. Can you say that you are authentic in your opinions of money at all times?

For many of us, our thoughts and conversations about money change dramatically, based on our circle of friends, on our perceived lack or surplus of money, and our need to ‘save face’ or possibly ‘brag’ about our own monetary situation.

Do you realize that the way we deal with our money today is as a direct result of the influences of our past? If someone has grown up in a household where there was a constant lack of sufficient money to live life above the existence level, as grown-ups there is a tendency to be either overtly frugal, or excessively wasteful.

Why is this? I suspect it is because as humans we always have to ‘prove’ something to ourselves. It may be that we wish to ‘prove’ that we are better money managers than our parents ever were, or we may wish to ‘prove’ that our lives are so well managed financially that we can afford to be generous in ways our relatives could not.

On the other hand, when one has been raised amidst affluent circumstances, there is a tendency to view money as merely a ‘means to an end’, there is the possibility of monetary abuse, of under-valuing the effort, thought and disciplined focus that was necessary to create the money surplus that is now being so casually taken for granted.

If we stop and take the time to think about it, we would realize that we are making choices similar to those we witnessed or heard in our childhood years and, we would then understand how little it took for us to become prey to these intrinsic values, and how diligently we continue to use them in our daily lives.

Katherine Whitehorn gave her opinion on money with this quote: "The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you have." It is a rule on which many of follow through, without even pausing to think, and this suggests that we all have undercurrents of fear concerning our money and our relationship to it that we are not willing to face.

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