Inspired by the collaborative book project I am working on, called The Energy of Abundance, I have created a 3-part series on my journey with abundance. I previously released Part 1: The Abundance Series: Patience. Here in part 2 I focus on Trust.
It is no secret that my start to life was not the easiest. I’ve gone through many hardships that left a lot of trauma and a lot of “why me” behind. At one point, life was really hard. So in order to attain what I thought would lead me to happiness, I turned all my focus on growing my bank account. I thought money would solve all my problems. That’s what abundance meant right? I was wrong.
No matter how much I earned, there never seemed to be enough. It wasn’t until I learned that abundance is an inside job where things truly began to change. During the hardest times of my life, I learned I could still feel abundant despite what I was going through. By committing to higher emotions, I started to rediscover trust, trust that everything was happening for me not to me. I rediscovered myself in that process.
I’d like to invite you into the 2nd part of this series where I take you inside my journey with abundance, what you can do today to connect to higher emotions, and what we can unleash inside of us when we lean into the power of trust.
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why money doesn’t equal abundance
How to feel abundant even during difficult times
How to commit to higher emotions by trusting
Why hiring a coach is a major shortcut
FEATURED ON THE SHOW
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello, hello, welcome to the Happy Productive podcast. I’m Jennifer Dawn, a business coach and founder of the Best Planner Ever. If you’re ready to start winning big and business in life, guess what, you’re in the right place. The Happy Productive podcast is your go to resource for learning how to bring awareness and clarity, maybe a little mental toughness and some determination into your daily productivity, so that you can knock those goals right out of the park and set yourself apart from the pack and start succeeding on a whole new level.
Now today, we’re going to be talking about abundance. This is part 2 of a 3-part series. And for today, we’re going to be focusing on trust. A few months ago, I was asked to write a book chapter on the energy of abundance. And in that chapter, I talked about my search for abundance. Now, if you ask me back then how to define abundance, I would have immediately responded with a gigantor bank account. To me that is what abundance really meant it was about having enough cash on hand to do or to not do anything that I wished, having the freedom to just buy any material possession that my heart desired, or even say no to tasks or projects that I didn’t really want to do.
To me, that’s what abundance was, it meant I never had to worry about finances again. And I could stop, you know, working myself into the ground for every dollar that I earned. And look, I’m not saying that a big bank account isn’t wonderful, it absolutely is. But it’s not the only thing that defines abundance.
And here’s the problem that I discovered when I was entirely money driven in my search for abundance. I found that I was always pushing and grinding and scraping to just earn more and more and more. And I did earn more, but it was never enough. And along the way, I just kept thinking, well, if I could just get to this, you know, this amount, like in my business, if I could just get to my first 100,000 then I could finally be happy and free. And then it was you know, 250,000 and then it was half a million. And it just kept going from there.
And I would achieve the amount, right, I would be like, Oh, we could just get to a million great, I get to a million and then I’d be happy for like 5 minutes and realize that oh crap, all my problems, were still there. And guess what, as you grow your business and you know, increase your revenues, the problems are still there. It’s just different problems, you have different problems. And so then I would get all determined again, and I would go back to work. And I would like more and this pattern would repeat year after year after year after year after year.
And during that time, I sacrificed you know time with my children, relationships with friends, even my own health got bumped down on the ladder to prioritize, you know, growing this business making money over everything else. And even during that time, I gave birth to 3 children. I went through not one but 2 divorces. I moved, including one move that was across the country while I was nursing my baby daughter. Think about this for a second. Like I have just had a baby. She’s like, you know, 8 weeks old. I’ve got 3 horses in the trailer and I am moving all the way across the country from Montana to Florida. It was not an easy time.
When I moved to Florida for my corporate job, it was wonderful for the first year and then it started to tank. All of this stuff actually put me into a functional depression. During that time, I lost 2 horses within a 30 day period. And as I was climbing my way out of all of this mess, there was even a time where I was on food stamps, right, to feed my kids. And so I of course kept thinking that a big windfall of cash would just fix this whole mess. And you know what it didn’t, it never did.
Even though in my corporate career, I was making great money, I was still living check to check. I was still going through all of these emotional things and these horrible, like heartache kinds of things, bad enough that they put me into a functional depression. Here’s the thing. It was not a windfall of cash that fixed the whole thing. And I really guys, I spent a lot of time like, oh, if I could just you know, have a bunch of money and buy my way out of this mess. It didn’t work. It didn’t happen.
But what did fix the mess was me healing myself. I got real and I really started looking at the patterns that were repeating in my life. And I started changing my focus to something much, much bigger than money. And I started to really understand that abundance was an inside job. It’s a continuous flowing, beautiful, eternal job. And when you truly start to feel that flow, I promise you it is a place that you never want to leave. And it doesn’t come from material possessions or perceived successes.
After I left corporate, I lost everything. I had no money, I had no success. I had no house, no job, no partner, right? It was just me. And it was my kids and my wonderful sister, who took us in for a summer so that I could figure out my life. And you know what? That was one of the best summers of my life. I’ve been working a job since I was 10. And so as an adult, I had never taken a summer off. And because I’d love corporate, I was trying to figure it all out. And my sister took us in, I’d never lived with anybody I left home when I was 17 and never looked back.
And you know what, though, that was the one of the hardest times in my life, but it was also one of the best summers I’ve ever had. Me, my kids, my sister’s kids, we rode horses, we swam, it was so much like the summers I experienced at my grandfather’s house, when we were growing up as kids, and those really were my best childhood memories, and I had a summer hanging out with the kids. And it was this, like, terrible thing going on in life, if you would have looked at, you know, the stats on paper, it’s like, oh, my gosh, what a loser like she has no job. She has no money. And yet, I was having so much fun just hanging with my kids, living life and healing myself and figuring out what my next move would be and starting to really understand what abundance is.
And here’s the thing, you guys, I’m not saying that I’m not all for having material things and nice material things. But we have to understand that it’s not the material thing that’s going to really bring us true happiness, material things will bring us short term happiness. And even in those darkest times of my life, and this went on for many years, I can still remember feeling joy, feeling abundance.
I remember while I was still in corporate, there would be Friday nights, and the weeks were so painful to get through. Like I said, I had dipped into a functional depression, things were just not good. It did teach me to get very present because I literally had to get through moment by moment to survive that. But after a very long, painful week, it would be Friday nights, I would go for a pizza run, I had to go to two different pizza places, right? Because my kids like different kinds. And then after my double pizza run, we’d all come back, we’d eat pizza, we’d watch a movie, we’d make popcorn. And here I was, you know, my career was kind of in the toilet. I’m going through this horrible divorce, I was living check to check. Even though I was making great money, I was still living check to check. I’m a single mom with three kids.
And yet, even in those times, I could still feel abundance, hanging out with my kids eating pizza, we would go to the beach. Like we were still making our way through life. And we were doing it through really difficult times. And we had an abundance of love for each other. That may not have happened if things were you know, all rosy. They weren’t rosy, me and my kids we had to pull together and that love, gosh, it was just so powerful.
And during that time, the other thing I had to rediscover was trust. And keep in mind, I came from a very abusive childhood, I grew up and I found myself in an abusive relationship, the things I went through in my life, my life was never like this easy walk in the park. Now, when you’re going through those hard times, it’s really easy to just start believing that life has it out for you that everything is happening to you instead of for you. It’s so easy to slip into that victim mindset, feel sorry for ourselves and really start to like spiral downward. Can you tell that I am speaking from experience here? I have been in the pity party, woe is me. You know, what did I do so wrong? Why, you know, why are so many bad things happening to such a good person, like I’ve been there.
But if we want to get back into the energy of abundance, it will require an internal shift in our emotional state, we have to be willing to seek out and identify those beliefs that are holding us back. And we have to be courageous enough to let them go. I know that sounds really beautiful. But frankly, sometimes life will just like kick the shit out of us until we start to really get it. I know that is exactly what happened to me. I just felt like I was just getting the crap kicked out of me over and over again. And I was and it required me to wake up and I had to start really doing something different. And that’s when I really started to get it.
And when I started to get it, it was almost like dipping a toe in the waters of pure bliss. And when I would have these moments where I would just feel really good despite everything horrible going on. I had to learn that to freak out, right and retreat back to that comfort zone of feeling like crap, because when you’ve been going through hard times, and it’s been year after year after year, I promise you feeling like crap starts to become a total comfort zone because pain never disappoints.
But I didn’t want to live in pain, I wanted joy, I wanted happiness, I wanted bliss, I wanted abundance. And so what did I have to do? I had to commit to those higher emotions, and I had to do what? I had to start trusting. I had to start trusting life again. When you grow up in abusive relationships, you learn not to trust us. And if you’ve been through that, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I really had to start trusting life again, I had to trust that everything that was happening to me was actually in my highest and best interest.
And then I had to, like seek out and really start to see how that was so. When the stuff was, you know, hitting the fan, I had to stop feeling sorry for myself, I had to stop the complaining, the whining, I had to stop playing the victim. And I had to really take a close look at what was happening to me. And I had to look at it through new eyes. I had to start believing that there was a higher purpose to everything that was happening. And I promise these emotional states can be really difficult to attain, especially when you’re stuck in your own thinking. Because our thinking will create a reality of sadness, depression, anger, you know, you’ve been there, that hole Poor me, I’ve been there too. And I know how much it sucks. But I’ve also climbed my way out of that.
And I’m telling you that it can be done. But it only can happen when you start with the inside first. Now you might be asking, okay, how in the world did you do this, Jennifer? And you know that I’m a huge fan of practical, tangible tools of how to implement these ideas into your life. And one of the ways that I found my way back to trust was through a daily gratitude practice. Now I know if you’ve done a gratitude practice, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’ve heard or you keep hearing, you should do a gratitude practice, you might be like, oh, I’ve heard that I don’t want to hear it again.
But please try and hear it again. Especially if you’re here listening to this and you’re like, wow, I’ve heard like, 2 or 3 times now I should do a gratitude practice. I want you to just for a second, really hear the power that can come from a gratitude practice. Because in this kind of a practice, you stop focusing on everything that’s wrong and you start focusing your attention on everything that is right, okay.
You can also look at the “bad things” that have happened to you. And you can start asking, what did I learn from this? What good came from this? What good can I pull from these experiences? And gratitude helps us do this. This is one of the most important practices there and it really started opening my eyes. And I started to see that the “bad things” that had happened to me were really there to help me learn, to help me grow to help me evolve, to help me heal, I had to heal these things that were keeping me stuck in these patterns of just, you know, self sabotaging over and over and over again.
And it wasn’t until I had the crap kicked out of me that I got down to that lowest place that I had to be like, wait a second, this isn’t working. Let me find some other way. And thank goodness, that I found that other way. Because now I get to live the life that I have now, which came from all of this. This is truly a friendly universe. But you can’t see it when you’re looking through pain filled glasses. So if you’re in a place right now, where maybe you’re struggling, or maybe you also like me, really struggle with trust, right? Consider please a gratitude practice.
If you’re not sure where to start one of my favorite ones, there is a book, it’s called Magic and it was written by Rhonda Byrne. She’s the woman who did The Secret. If you’ve heard of that. If you haven’t, you can check it out on Netflix. But Rhonda also did an amazing book called The Magic which is a 28 day gratitude practice. And so you just simply do one page a day for 28 days. And if you really want to explode the energy of abundance in your life, this is such a great place to begin. I’ve done this gratitude practice several times in my life, whenever I start feeling like I’m a little off or maybe I’m not trusting. As much as I’d like to be. This is one of my go to tools to swing back around and do a 28 day gratitude practice.
The other thing that you can do if you don’t have the book, you can also just simply every day, make a list of 5 or 10 things that you are grateful for. Even look at bad experiences that have happened in your life and make a list of 5 or 10 things that you learned. How did you grow? How did you evolve? What good came from it? And this is going to help you so much to start to reconnect to the energy of abundance and also align with the higher emotion of trust.
Here’s the thing you guys, if you really want to get the results, you have to do the work to get it. You can’t just be like, oh yeah yeah I know I’m supposed to do a gratitude practice and blow it off and not really do it. You won’t get the result. You’ve got to get in there and you’ve got to do the work. And if you do the work like I did, you absolutely will get the results you’re going to align with that energy of trust and guess what. When you do that abundance is just going to naturally start to flow it is such a beautiful thing.
Okay, if you enjoyed this podcast the only thing I ask is that you please share it with others. Pay the goodness forward. It can help other people in ways that you can’t even imagine. You never know what people are going through and maybe these words will help them. I know in my time of need, they certainly would have helped me.
Now if you yourself would like some help with this. Please come check us out. If you need a better planning tool and you’re like hey, I want to win the day check out the Best Planner Ever. And you can do that at bestplannerever.com. If you’re looking for more motivation, community and support while you’re meeting your most important life goals, come check us out in the Goal Achievers and again you can find that at bestplannerever.com. If you’re a business owner and you need help in your business come visit us at jenniferdawncoaching.com or a little fine tuned boutique coaching and consulting practice for really committed entrepreneurs and I tell you we work with just amazing people.
In our practice, we coach the mindset to succeed and we consult the changes that are necessary to transform your business. Okay, you guys, thank you so much for listening today. I hope you got something special out of today’s podcast. I appreciate you taking time out of your life to listen. Now go out there and have a Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer