Know Your Money with Bronwyn Waner and Craig Finch
Know Your Money with Bronwyn Waner and Craig Finch
95. Transformational Therapies for Financial Freedom and Family Harmony
Join us as we unravel the intricate layers of money psychology and family dynamics with our insightful guest, Richard. Ever wondered how subconscious patterns and family expectations mold our financial well-being? Richard enlightens us with the notion of following one's bliss, a concept inspired by Joseph Campbell. Together, we explore how aligning with our passions can lead to stress-free financial abundance. Through engaging anecdotes, Richard illustrates the power of family constellations in easing the tension between personal dreams and familial traditions, with a particular focus on the significance of parental blessings and subconscious communication.
In a thought-provoking discussion, we further explore how deeply embedded subconscious patterns influence our lives and financial decisions. Techniques like constellation therapy, NLP, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy are highlighted as transformative tools for addressing unresolved childhood experiences and inherited behaviors. Richard shares a moving story about the emotional ties to a family home, shedding light on how generational conditioning can affect property decisions. Throughout this conversation, we encourage you to reflect on your own life choices and emotional connections, aiming to inspire a deeper understanding of the relationship between money, passion, and personal growth.
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Welcome to Know your Money, where we will explore our relationship with money and how the psychology of it impacts our financial decisions, as everyone thinks about money differently. In our podcast, we'll be presenting a variety of financial topics in an easy to understand way, which we hope will assist you with managing your money.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody. Welcome to Know your Money Warren. How are you today?
Speaker 3:Very well, Bronwyn. How are you? I'm very good, thank you, and Richard is back. Richard is back, yeah good to see you again. We are very glad that you are back. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 2:We really enjoyed last week's episode just understanding what Family Constellations is and then we thought we could maybe bring in a few different scenarios again and see if you could explain how someone could work on different areas. So, for example, maybe someone that keeps getting in debt. So they go into debt and then they clear their debt and it just is this constant pattern. Or sometimes people want to leave their money under a mattress or they don't want to save. They don't see the importance of saving for a rainy day. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, and if you can, also just keep delving a bit deeper into family constellations, for us, Sure, I'd love to.
Speaker 5:This is my passion, all right. So if I can kick off by saying that my philosophy around work and what we do is very much in alignment with Joseph Campbell's Follow your Bliss. So for me that's always the starting point. You know, do what you love.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And when you're doing what you love, the finances, the wealth flows towards you. So I have a little bit of a different approach from a lot of people who are trying to make the money or the wealth and to the security and stability. I've flipped it 180 degrees my whole life and I've never wanted for anything. It just keeps coming. The abundance keeps coming because I'm doing what I love. It really doesn't feel like work, it feels like a vacation, just meeting interesting people. So I just want to preempt it with that. So it might be a little bit different from some of the others.
Speaker 2:Well, that's what we want to try help people do more. We want them to not focus on finances, as this horrible thing it's. How does this become more freeing, more open, more loving in your life and not this worry and burden? And I think it is by doing what you love the money will come.
Speaker 3:And Richard, I'll say that I remember the exact thoughts I had when I was 18 and I'd finished school and I said to myself, because I had offers to go to very nice universities and it just wasn't for me. I wanted to do sound, I wanted to do audio. And I remember saying to myself one day I said if you just put in the hours and do this thing you love more than all of the other people doing it right now, you will be good at it and the money will come Touche.
Speaker 5:Well done, proud of you.
Speaker 3:That's brilliant, and I did that my whole career.
Speaker 5:Beautiful. I wish more people could do that and unfortunately we have to be realistic A lot of people can't. I have a lot of artists, you know. For example, come in, you know my wife's an artist and they would love to make that a career, but it's a really hard career, you know, to make a living. So they often got to do other things, you know. So it's not feasible for a lot of people. And also there's a very strong pattern, you see, where, like, dad's an accountant, all right, so now okay, you got to be an accountant, but hang on, I want to be a rock star, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5:So there's a clash. So now, at the subconscious level, in family constellations, what's going to happen there? All right, so you would work with that energetically, which you can do with truth. We call them truth statements. You might sound a little bit woo-woo, right, but essentially what you're doing is you're talking at the soul level or the subconscious level?
Speaker 5:if you were talking psychotherapeutically, right, the client's soul to dad's soul, with things like Dad, I honor your career being an accountant. It gave us a beautiful upbringing and a security and stability. I'm deeply grateful for that. Please bless me if I do something differently from you. My passion is to be a rock star, all right. And please bless me if I follow my passion, all right. And this changes it at the subconscious level. Yeah, all right. And then he goes and he visits his dad a couple of weeks later and his dad says you know what? Some rock stars make a lot of money, don't they? And you say, oh no, they can. Yeah, well, maybe it's worth giving it a shot. Then you know, you get this sort of feedback and then you go. What sort of magic is this so, richard?
Speaker 3:you basically described my early twenties. You've basically described my early 20s. I mean, my dad is an accountant by trade. He's the CEO now. I didn't do it when you heard.
Speaker 3:No, but it's very interesting. We would butt heads constantly because he couldn't believe I wouldn't go to the London School of Economics or Oxford or anything. I did very well at school and working so hard at school I knew it was never for me, it was always for him and for my mother. There was a pressure of being sent to a very expensive boarding school in the UK and expecting to do well out of it and then expected to go to university. And when I said I wasn't going to do it, I mean, oh, it was very awkward. Yeah, and further to what you said, with my dad, we would, you know, I would. I was still living in the UK and following my passion and when I would come back because they'd moved back to South Africa by this point and when I would come back, we would just not get on. Yeah, and again, as I said, my dad is my best friend now, he's so important to me and we just didn't get on. We'd argue all the time and he just didn't get it. He didn't understand what I was doing with my life Until his birthday I think it was his 50th birthday, my mom.
Speaker 3:So the band I was working for was playing Rock in Rio, which is an enormous concert 200,000 people, odd and we were the co-headlining band and him and my mom said, well, they want to go to Rio anyway, can they come see me? So I said, sure, I'll get you all the passes, we'll get all sorted, you can access all the area, all that stuff. And he came and he stood next to me when I was doing what I was doing and he just went. I get it now and I'm sorry. Wow, what a gift. And from that moment onwards, nothing but pride in what I do. Wow, so funny. You mentioned the rock. I mean, I'm not trying to be a rock star, but doing sound for big bands and him being an accountant. It really hit home there. Anyway, carry on, sorry.
Speaker 2:That's so true and even just that, like by doing Family Constellations, it could have been five years more of that proudness and doing those kind of things. We all do go through hardships, and it's not to say you can't get over it by yourself, but sometimes you can just have a coach or do something that can help these little moments in your life, which are hard. You know. Your dad had to be there to see it.
Speaker 3:And how different maybe it would have been for those years before that if I had the ability or had the knowledge you've just given me now of how to approach it mentally, in my own mind and with him.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's why it has a magical component. That's why it has a magical component. So what makes it different and a little bit hard for people to grasp sometimes is there's not a left brain approach to it. So if you think about someone who's got a debt problem, a credit card maxed out and all that sort of stuff, and you send them to a financial advisor and helps them do financial planning and get out of debt and all that sort of stuff, it works for a while and then they're back in the loop again.
Speaker 5:Yes, I have that often Okay, but that's all happening at the logical level at the 10% level, Right, so you've got to just park that now and go. Okay, I work at the 90% level, the subconscious level.
Speaker 2:And that's why I think it's so important that two go together. And no one is doing that, because financial planners can't change the 90%.
Speaker 5:There's room for both, of course.
Speaker 2:We want to be 100% right, so we're not excluding that you need both, yeah.
Speaker 5:So let me give you a couple of examples we don't prescribe. Okay, a client will tell me what's going on in their lives. Listen, I'm overspending. I've been to consultants and this is just not working. I'm good for a couple of months and then the next thing is I'll max out the credit card. I don't have any preconceived ideas of what that might be. All right, I will set up a constellation with her and her mom and her dad, wherever I feel appropriate, and we'll see what's going on.
Speaker 5:We'll let what we call the field the term is a morphogenic field or a field, for short. This is this energy field where the structure of the family sits, and we let the field show us what's happening there. What's going on? Where are the hidden loyalties to mom or dad? Is this daughter, by overspending, actually, at a subconscious level, honoring her mom in some way? Was this a pattern of her mom's? So, even though she as a personality, as the daughter says, I want to be different from my mom. I don't want to do the same thing. The 90% says if you spend like crazy, you're actually loving and honoring your mom.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 5:How many times have you heard people say I don't want to be like my mom, and then you hear her words coming out of your mouth.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's very common. Okay, it's very common?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so there could be a hundred different reasons why that person might be, you know, following a pattern like that.
Speaker 2:So could it be following a pattern or also doing opposite. A pattern Correct.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it could be the opposite pattern. So I was chatting to you earlier about another example, right? So I get quite a lot of men who are sort of workaholics and it's like just chasing that buck and there's no off button. They're doing 16-hour days and that sort of thing. What's the reason for that? You don't know at the surface. You chat to them and say please take a holiday, blah, blah, blah, right. And they say yes, yes, yes, and they mean to at the 10% level. They really do. He said they mean to at the 10% level, they really do. Then you go down to the 90% level. Why is this person working 16 hours a day? Then? The type of thing that might be presented to you, for example, was that he was one of a twin in utero and that one twin died. It left early. So subconsciously he's trying to live out two lives in one, subconsciously living out his dead twin brother's life and his, okay, trying to cram it all into one life.
Speaker 5:Yeah, you do a consolation you honor the brother who left, all right, and you ask for his blessing to live your own life and not both of them.
Speaker 2:And it's amazing, suddenly the dude yeah, and that's so good for your family, your finances, everything, and it's something that you would never even think of, like no one would even know some people are twin yeah, it's so bizarre to me hearing this Is how light bulbs are going off and saying I've never considered the relationships with the previous generations of my family and how they've affected my subconscious decision making.
Speaker 3:Yeah, which is what I'm hearing, and the more I'm now thinking about certain relationships I'm like, okay, that kind of makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and this is why I asked Richard to come here, because it's just to help people think about certain things we just, like Lisa, explained on the NLP course when you get in a car, what's the first thing you do? You don't really know. You put your seatbelt on, you close the door. It's all just subconscious stuff, it's automatic.
Speaker 5:It's just automatic, yeah, correct.
Speaker 2:And there are so many things that are just automatically in us from our parents, our grandparents and all of those sort of things, and if you just can stop and shine some light on things that may not be serving you, you can just be a happier, more fulfilled person, and that's the point of what we're trying to do here.
Speaker 3:No, and ultimately I think it makes your financial life a lot easier. We always come back to that is that the rounder you are as a person, the happier you are, the more you believe you have abundance or deserve abundance, or whatever your philosophy may be. The closer you get to that in your mind and in your body and in your soul, the better off you're going to be financially ultimately.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then you live that life. Like Richard was saying, you don't want for anything because you're focusing on the right stuff. You've got balance in your life. You've worked on certain things to give you that space and the money does just come. Anything that you do want is there and provided for.
Speaker 3:And I can ask something. You started talking about the left brain earlier. What about the right?
Speaker 5:Well, the left brain is traditionally associated with the thinking.
Speaker 3:Logic and all that, and the right is the creative.
Speaker 5:So this work, you function. You work with the sense, the right brain, essentially right To the degree. When I work with a client, they look into my left eye and I look into their left eye because it's connected to the right side of the brain. Okay, that's how we do it. So if I'm looking at you now, this is how we would do the constellation right. Yeah, on a one-on-one.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I'd be reading your eye, because the eye is all. The winner to the soul. Yes, and I'd literally see it. And I'd look at you now and I'd say how are you feeling? What would you say?
Speaker 3:and no, I'm serious. I'm serious because I've actually never do this. I'm only focusing on your right eye, oh, oh so, and it's giving me a very different perspective of your face. Yeah, I don't know why.
Speaker 5:Really, yeah, well, it gets even more bizarre because when we do that, because you're connecting energetically to that person yeah, let's say I'm representing your dad. Yeah, representing your dad. Yeah, all right, sometimes my face will morph to the client. They will let out a yelp and go oh my God, you look just like my dad there. Well, I'm connecting to your dad's energy so we can do this healing with him.
Speaker 3:So I've got you know the feeling when you listen to a song you love and you get that sort of like tingly feeling over the back of your head. I'm getting that now. That's why I said I'm feeling weird.
Speaker 5:So when I'm looking into your eye there, what I would have seen in your eye just before I asked you that question was an uncomfortableness, all right, a little bit of a trepidation in your eye. But I don't tell the client, I ask them. It's a client-led process, like in traditional psychotherapy, and something I wanted to add to it while you were chatting there. That's relevant.
Speaker 5:Some of these patterns aren't necessarily transgenerational, right? A lot of them are embedded in that subconscious in the early part of our life. So say, for example, you're a young man there and you're talking to dad and he says at some stage you'll never amount to anything, you'll never be successful, right, and it sticks. This is more in line with sort of the traditional psychotherapeutic models we work with. All right, that gets taken on as a belief at the subconscious level and you forget about it. You grow up, you get married, you have kids, we set up a constellation and I work with a client and suddenly he's back at 12 and he bursts into tears on what's happening. I've just remembered my dad told me when I was 12, I'd never amount to anything and that's why my career is not flowing. I believe this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So then you reframe. I mean similar to NLP you know some aspects of NLP, because Hellinger incorporated NLP and many other modalities in this right. So then you work with changing that which is a current life pattern, not a transgenerational pattern. So it covers both areas. All right, not everything's transgenerational.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So part of the work is also something called IFS, which is internal family systems. So there's actually parts of us. We've all got archetypes, different parts of us, and some of those parts fight with each other right, they don't get on with each other, they undermine each other. So you can also work with the two parts. There might be a part that's driven for financial wealth and security and stability and another part that goes 100% counter to that within you and you've taken on those beliefs at some stage, and so you open a dialogue with them and you get them to be friends.
Speaker 3:No, that makes a lot of sense. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, for every now and then I'll catch myself because I'll have a thought when I'm doing a mixing or whatever I'm doing, and I'll be like you should be doing this this way and I'll just carry on doing what I'm doing and then a couple of weeks later I go do you remember that time? You had that thought. I'm talking to myself in my head.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:As you should do it this way. You're now doing it. This way. You would have saved yourself two weeks. Yeah, so there is definitely I mean for me.
Speaker 2:There's two different people in my head. Earlier you were saying the one part that knows that you should charge more and the other part that doesn't. You know, those are two parts of you farting inside. Potentially it might not be a….
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah. So which part is honoring who? As well, you see.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because you'll find an easy example, because it happens such a lot. People get divorced. All right, and if there's two kids, you'll very often find one aligns with one and one with the other energetically. All right, but at the subconscious level of the individual person, part of them wants to honor dad, part of them wants to honor mom. That sets up a conflict within them, because if I love dad and align with him, I'm dissing mom. If I align with mom, I'm dissing dad, and that creates a schism within them. You see.
Speaker 5:So, all these little parts inside us need attention as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 5:Besides the transgenerational stuff. So you can see if there's so much happening underground there that doing the left brain structural, conceptual things has only got a limited potential, unless they're both addressed at the same time. Because if the subconscious patterns, if that blueprint's redone and then you put on top that 10% of, okay, well, here's how you do it at a practical level, here's the experts who can do this and that and that. That's why I work nicely with psychotherapists who refer to me or I can also refer to them. Now I call it the dolphins and the whales. I've just written an editorial I sent out. I don't know if you saw that.
Speaker 5:I did so. For me, that's like working in the waves. Dolphins are beautiful, they work in that area, they strata, that's their expertise. It's delightful, right, but this work is like the whale it goes down, it goes to those deeper currents underneath that are driving the waves at the top.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So why not work with both? This is fascinating 100% fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:And also just what is really awesome is the group constellation.
Speaker 2:So what a group constellation is is you can just go sit in and be a part of the circle and you don't necessarily have to participate or be the person that's come with the problem for example, or the thing that you want to work on, so Richard, come with the problem, for example, or the thing that you want to work on, so Richard would sit with you, for example, and then he would say to you okay, go choose someone to represent you, and go choose someone to represent your dad, out of the circle, and the person that you choose to be you most likely is dealing with that issue on their own way or pattern. When I was a part of it, it was amazing and it's just such a nice experience to to go and do and, um, just to be a part of it. Maybe what we can do, richard, if you open to it, is opening up one, you know, just for our listeners and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:we'll well, maybe if we get Richard back, yeah.
Speaker 2:No, we'll open up a constellation and actually have one, and people can come and….
Speaker 5:That would be cool.
Speaker 3:Yes, that would be wonderful With great pleasure, because I love sharing this work.
Speaker 5:So there's something else that might be interesting, aligned to this right. So we're talking about family constellations and the family system and the hidden dynamics. You also get organizational constellations, which we do for companies.
Speaker 4:Amazing.
Speaker 5:Now there, we don't use these kind of flaky-sounding souls and stuff. We use more corporate kind of language. But it's really interesting because Unresolved stuff with dad guess where it comes out. With your boss yes, okay. Security with her boss Unresolved stuff with dad, all right. Unresolved things with your brothers Guess where it comes out. Your colleagues in work Colleagues yeah, all right. So I don't do it. There's other people who do it, but obviously it comes up every now and then. And why I'm reluctant to do is because I love the family work, because that's where it all starts.
Speaker 5:And what happens? When you go into an organizational context, the family stuff comes up, because here's the players and you can see them. Well, there's my brother, there's my sister, and if you're working with an MD or CEO and there's middle management, they don't want to expose their wounded family shit in front of us. Excuse my French. Of course yeah yeah, so then you have to do a breakaway, or? Get them to come and do it privately with you, all right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because it's a different system. So now it gets really interesting, and this relates to Korea as well. You will have a man inheriting their dad's business, for example, all right. And then there's three brothers and they inherit the business. Now there's a natural hierarchy Dad comes first, then oldest son, then second son, then third son. We can see in society that usually the oldest son inherits the business or the farm or whatever. That's part of our tradition. But the second son might have a better aptitude for running a company because the oldest son's a frustrated artist. Okay, so you start to get an interesting dynamic happening there. All right. But now actually they're running this company together.
Speaker 5:So there's an organizational structure which is a different system, because in the family it's dad, oldest son, next son, but in an organization you've got the CEO, the MD, but you might have a guy who's been there for 40 years, who's really good at his job, so he's got seniority.
Speaker 5:But a 25-year-old guy who's just done his MBA and who knows and they've brought him in to shake things up comes in.
Speaker 5:Now he's put in a senior position, maybe to that old chap who's been there, right? So there's a clash in the hierarchy there, yeah, right, and this all affects the business world, the career world and all of that. So you can get the clash of systems when the two come together and you can get the clash of the hierarchy, with people coming into a new company and not honoring and it's beautiful to see because you can set up a constellation and you can literally honor that old guy for his expertise and all of that you know, and say I'm not here to take your place, you came before me, you have precedence, you have seniority. All right, please bless me if I take it forward for the next generation and you can neutralize that clash, because that's why they come to you. They say listen, you know, I've got a clash between this old guy and I don't have fire in me, he's part of the furniture, you know. Yeah, this is fascinating, this is fascinating.
Speaker 3:I wish that I could listen to you talk all day. I think I keep going back to my mind is how people run on a rinse repeat sort of thing every day. You know the decisions we make often and I think about the stuff I do so much of it. I'm not actually making decisions, I'm just going through the life, going through the motions, and the majority of the things that I think I've chosen to do. If I look back on it now, they weren't necessarily real choices of mine. They were something else. Every now and then something will stick out. You've done something spontaneous and that isn't part of your normal routine or your normal decision-making pattern in your mind or whatever. Sorry, I'm just a bit blown away here.
Speaker 2:No, exactly, and one of the biggest things is it could be conditioning mind or whatever. Yeah, sorry, I'm just. I'm a bit blown away here. No, exactly, and it couldn't like. One of the biggest things is it could be conditioning, like you go to school, you go do this, so you try to follow that condition. But it's, it's because that's you know in your generations. Two generations before didn't get to go to school. So now you have to go to school.
Speaker 3:It's just trying to and so funny, yeah, like figure that all out. Even money stuff. So why have I taken a certain path? Because we've talked about it before, with having a property in the UK and I see that as my retirement. So why have I done that? What is it about that decision? Did I really decide it? Are you honoring someone else? Am I?
Speaker 5:honoring someone.
Speaker 3:Or is there something deeper going on there?
Speaker 2:yeah, and the thing is, if you can tap into that and figure that out, you could potentially do something so much more for your family. If you decide, okay, no, we are supposed to sell that and do something else, or you can be okay with it, that like, yes, this is going to be our retirement and it's not going to be a question anymore.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's accepting.
Speaker 3:Because that's where I'm sitting with it at the moment. I constantly think should I just sell it, Should I just sell it?
Speaker 2:And that is something as simple as that. You can come to Richard as a consolation, correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And work through it.
Speaker 5:You've just given me another idea, another example I can give to you, if I've been blown your way yet. People sometimes come to me because they can't sell their houses and you can go and select it because a household's an energy. I mean, we know that. Have you ever come to someone for dinner and you walk in there and you can feel it, because they've just had an argument before right and the energy is sitting in the house. We can feel it.
Speaker 2:We felt that you guys had a very good energy. This morning.
Speaker 5:So no farts this morning.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 5:So someone comes and I had this a couple of years ago. This lady in Pringle Bay and the house had been on the market for two years, no one had ever looked at it, even right. So she came and we set up a constellation. Right. So she came and we set up a constellation. Now, sadly, her husband had been killed. He'd been murdered in the garage, so there was this pain body trapped there.
Speaker 5:So I did this on site. I went there you can do this stuff remotely as well but I went there and I did a process there to release the energy from that and two weeks later she got an offer. Wow. But the interesting thing was when I was trying to find the house, I drove past it three times. I literally, energetically, didn't see it and I had to get on my cell phone and say where are you? And she walked out of the house and she was 50 meters away. Wow, and I had driven past it three times and not seen the number. So there was something happening at an energetic level and we changed that that. So I thought, oh, this is funky. So I've done it many times since then.
Speaker 5:When people go and sell their house, and the most common pattern I see is the woman is usually emotionally connected to that house. Maybe it was their first time and they got married there. All the kids were born there when she inherited from her folks. So at the subconscious level again, she doesn't want to let go of it. If I let go of this house, I'm giving away everything my mother and dad worked for.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, I've just realized what it is. And you haven't even done the work. I've realized what it is, what I remember being so proud. It was my first house I bought and it was just after my dad had finally just said you know, proud of you for what you do. Wow, and it was my hair's just standing up. Yeah, and I've been holding on to that feeling of like this was me financially doing good.
Speaker 2:And that, no, I also think it's the feeling of your dad's proudness.
Speaker 3:That's a lot, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know, that.
Speaker 3:yeah, Our listeners know me too well, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I talk about too much.
Speaker 2:Richard, this was absolutely beautiful. Thank you again for your time and.
Speaker 5:I hope to see you soon yes thank you, I enjoyed this thank you, richard.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, ron yeah, I love it, I'm just glad that we could bring it in can't wait for the next one. Really, thank you I hope it can change people's lives thanks guys, thanks everyone thank you for listening.
Speaker 4:If you have enjoyed this podcast and would like to subscribe, please visit our website wwwgrowthfpcoza. The information we have provided in this podcast is our personal opinion. For more detailed information, please discuss your financial situation with a financial planner.