When people think about lowering their bills, a lot of small purchases become suspect. Your daily Starbucks habit, at $32 per gallon if you calculated it that way, is an easy mark. A lot of people cut the cable, start eating most meals at home and buy a space heater rather than warm up the whole house.
It’s always a good idea to take a look at where you are throwing money away, and cut back where you can. But the real savings isn’t in these incremental differences between small, affordable luxuries and no luxury at all.
Stop thinking small. You’ve got a much bigger expense hiding in plain sight.
Your lack in personal intelligence is costing you a fortune.
Your lack of self-understanding and self-worth is what undermine your salary, when you accepted less than what you deserved or needed. A raft of mistaken beliefs about yourself created your blind spot, which obscures your future prospects.
You likely have never even seen someone with personal intelligence. Most people are walking around with an unexplored consciousness, so how would you have known what you are missing?
On a daily basis you fail to leverage your largest asset – what you have made of yourself.
Every one of us is self-made.
That truth often brings groans of dismay from my audiences. After all, if you can’t blame your boss, your co-workers, your student loans or anything else: who gets responsibility for what you fail to achieve or reap?
Sure other people have undervalued you and even trash-talked you. After all, like your first language: you had to learn it somewhere. Typically your disconnection from yourself starts at home when you’re young – not because your parents were malevolent. It starts because they worry for your safety, your health, your happiness and their own peace of mind. They communicate all that or simply fail to praise you, for as long as you are present there.
Then, when you leave, you never leave behind the self-image you built there. You are filled with self-doubt, worry, and a general lack of self-confidence, because you rarely if ever heard anyone say:
Wow! You are the best. You are loved. You are right.
Unbury the treasure that is you. Here’s how to start.
Yell STOP, anytime you’re giving yourself a dose of negativity. Yes, you can “yell” silently. Read stories about people you admire and compare yourself favorably. Yes, you and Angelina Jolie are both concerned about helping people. Yes, you and Lady Gaga both look good in a wig. You and President Obama like to enjoy bourbon now and then.
When you consciously raise your estimation of who you are, you raise ours. With that reappraisal, you raise your prospects for compensation, promotion and opportunity.
