June 16, 2026 • 34 mins
I can still remember being told by well-meaning adults in my life that “you can’t make money from your creative work.”
But is that really true?
In this episode, I trace back my beliefs about money and creativity and share what I’m learning about the inevitable connection between the two.
Thanks for following along!
Check out The Illusion of Money here.
Check out The Artist’s Way here.
21 day abundance challenge: https://gabbybernstein.com/challenge/abundance/
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up the pieces of your life,
put them back together with the word you write. All
the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start
too fun when you write your story. You got the
words and said, don't you think it's down to let
(00:23):
them out and write them down and cold. It's all
about and write you write your story. Write you write
your story. Hello friend, and welcome back to the Write
Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and
on today's episode, I want to talk about creativity and
money because this is a topic that has been popping
(00:46):
up again and again and again in my morning pages
as I'm going through the Artist's Way again. It has
been a theme that has been ever present in my
life for about as long as I can remember. You'll
notice this as I share some of my personal story
today on the episode. This is a theme that's just
been present with me from the time I was really young,
and I'll share a couple of stories to that effect.
(01:08):
But I wouldn't say my earliest memories, but some of
my very early memories include me asking questions about creativity
and money, and the theme has been especially present in
the last six or seven years of my life, this
period of time that I've talked about at nauseum on
the podcast, where my husband and I took this big
risk on a business venture that we felt like we
(01:29):
were really being called to pursue. We felt absolutely compelled
to do this thing, take this chance. There were many
people who told us this is extremely risky, this is
not a sure thing. You know, are you prepared to
accept the consequences if this falls through? We knew the
risks going in, and we both just felt this inexplicable pull,
(01:51):
like this was something we just had to do. And
I still to this day think we couldn't have rested
if we hadn't really seen it all the way through
to the very end. And yet, of course, if you've
been listening along, you know that there have been a
lot of really tricky consequences for following it through all
the way to the end. And I've talked about this
like my second deconstruction, I deconstructed from evangelicalism. And now
(02:13):
it's like I'm having to ask myself this question, is
it possible to follow your creative dreams and still make money?
And this is a question that has haunted me for
about as long as I can remember, and again over
the last six years. It's a theme that's played out
over and over again. And I always say, when I'm
helping someone to take an experience from their life and
(02:35):
turn it into a narrative. Let's say we're working on
a memoir or something, that there are these experiences where
you feel like you're circling the same block. It's like, Oh,
I've seen that tree before, We've been here before, I
recognize where I'm standing. And whenever you have these moments
that you're like, oh, this is a theme that just
keeps showing its space, then you can always be assured
(02:58):
that this is experience that's trying to send you a message,
is trying to show you something. In fact, there are
studies that show children will return to the same books
over and over and over again or the same movies
over and over and over again because they didn't really
understand them the first time, and by the time they
understand them, they will move on to another book or
another movie. But I don't know if you have this experience.
(03:20):
I have movies for my childhood that I watched over
and over and over and over again. And my kids
do this too. My son loves the movie Wally, and
he would watch that thing on repeat. You would watch
it three times in one day if I would let him.
He is just obsessed with the movie. But what kids
are really doing is trying to figure it out. They're going,
(03:40):
what's really going on here? What's happening? There are still
parts that they don't fully understand. And the same is
true for us. When a story in your life is
driving you crazy, it's driving you crazy because there are
still parts of it that you don't understand. And so
God bless our friends and our therapists who listen to
us tell the story over and over and over and
over and over, because we need that. We need to
(04:01):
be able to process the story that many times, and
you might judge yourself or fault yourself or think you
feel kind of crazy because you're like, why can't I
just let this go? Why can't I let this person
go or this relationship? Or why do I keep rehashing this?
Why do I keep going back to the same job
or the same community or the same person, or why
does the same why does even a different person in
(04:21):
a relationship feel like the same relationship? Over and over.
Whenever you're having that experience, you can be rest assured
that your life is trying to communicate something to you
and you just haven't fully understood it yet, not because
you're dumb or because you're slow, just because it takes
a while for these messages to really get through. It
takes a while for them to sync more deeply into
(04:42):
our systems, and this story that I've been living over
the last six years is really evidence of that. For me,
this idea for this today's episode started because yesterday morning,
I was sitting on the couch with my husband drinking
coffee and I was reading through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way,
and on this exercise that is in chapter six, this
(05:03):
is the week that I'm on a week six. Week
six is all about recovering your sense of abundance, and
this struck me as slightly odd because I've also been
I haven't talked about this as much. I've talked about
Artist's Way a ton, but over the course of the
past couple of weeks, I've also been doing a challenge
by Gabby Bernstein that is like a twenty one day
abundance challenge, and I haven't talked about that one as much.
(05:26):
But I've been going through the Abundance Challenge and I
just finished day twenty one. I'm on week six of
the Artist's Way and doing this thirty day Instagram challenge.
I'm just like all in it, trying to like reaccess,
reignite my creativity in my life, and come back home
to myself. And these are three different ways I've been
trying to do that. While I finished the twenty one
day Abundance Challenge yesterday, then I'm like, Okay, Abundance Challenge done.
(05:49):
Moving on from that, and I open up the Artist's
Way and see this exercise that's all about abundance. The
chapter I'm reading is about abundance. This exercise is about
money specifically, not just abundance, because abundance can show up
in a ton of different ways, but the exercise is
specifically around money. And all of a sudden, it was
like this light bulb went off in my head and
I was like, oh, creativity and money are inextricably linked.
(06:13):
They are absolutely positively connected, and in my brain they've
been connected in one way. But I'm wondering if maybe
I have been wrong about that deeply held belief all along.
One example of that belief, or one yeah manifestation of
it in my life is this experience I had when
(06:33):
I went away to college and people would ask me
what I was going to study or know what my
plans were, and I would say, I always have wanted
to be an author. That's something I've just wanted to
do since I was really young, and I had several
well meaning adults in my life tell me, oh, that's
such a nice dream, but you better have a backup plan.
You better go into education or something, or pick a job,
or you could get paid, because you're never going to
(06:54):
make money being an author. So that's a nice thing
to want to do on the side, but it's not
really a career path. That limiting belief around creativity and
money is one that was planted deep in my psyche
from the time I was sixteen and seventeen, when I
was making decisions about what I wanted to do with
my life. But these ideas about money start even earlier
(07:15):
for me. I mean, I can remember being so young,
like maybe fourth grade, when we had been living in
a house that we were renting, and the owner of
the house wanted to sell, so we had to move
out of the house, and we weren't sure where we
were going to go next, and so in the meantime
we were in this apartment. It was supposed to be
a really short lived thing. I believe I'd have to
check with my parents on the exact timing here, but
(07:38):
I think I was in about the third or fourth
grade we moved into this apartment. It was supposed to
be short lived while we figured out where we were
going next. Then we ended up staying for kind of
a long time. I want to say we were there
maybe two years. And so there were five of us
cramped into this small, too better apartment, and I just
remember being kind of on top of each other and
feeling like it was really cramped. And I was really
(07:58):
excited about the idea of moving into a house and
having my own bedroom again. And I remember saying to
my dad, how come we don't move into a house.
There was a day where we were like all kind
of in each other's space, and I was like, why
don't we just move into a house. And I remember
my dad reaching into his pockets and pulling like the
lining of his pockets out of his pockets. As this
gesture he didn't even say a single word, but it
(08:19):
was like this gesture that was saying, Oh, we don't
have the money, so we can't move into this house.
And that's just one experience that's seared in my mind
that kind of represents the environment that I grew up
in as it relates to money. I won't get into
(08:45):
all the details of it, but I just remember there
being in my family a lot of stress as it
related to money, and I can remember when I decided
that I was ready to leave the house and to
make my own way, that I really didn't want to
to be that way anymore. In fact, I have a
very poignant moment where I argued with my parents about
(09:06):
something that I wanted to do. I wanted to do
this thing. They didn't really want me to do it,
and the threat was kind of put out there like, Okay,
if you choose to do this thing, then the ways
that we've been financially supporting you, you're going to be
on your own for those things. And this is like
a pivotal moment in my life that I can point
to where I decided that money for me meant freedom,
(09:26):
and so I was going to do whatever it took
to maintain my freedom, my sense of autonomy by making
my own money, and I was going to provide for myself.
I was going to create security for myself. I was
going to buy the things I wanted to go, the
places I wanted be the woman who I wanted to be,
all by making my own money. And I got a
(09:46):
job working at a restaurant. I started waiting tables. I
was like, WHOA, I can leave every night with cash.
This is amazing. I was like picking up every single shift.
Anytime anyone wanted to give up a shift, I would
take it. I was working around the clock. I was
really honing my gills at waiting tables, trying to get
better and better at it so that I could leave
each night with as much money as possible. I eventually
became a bartender. That was my first real experience with
(10:09):
entrepreneurship where I realized, Oh, the harder I work, the
more money I make, the more time I put in,
the more I get out of it. And now what
I get is financial freedom. Now I get to go
live my life however I want to live it. I
can go on trips, I can go on vacations, I
can buy things, I can take care of myself. It
was an absolutely intoxicating feeling of freedom and autonomy, and
(10:33):
it really set me on our trajectory through all of
my twenties most of my thirties. There was a blip
in there where I was married before, and inside of
that relationship there was again a ton of control around
money where I didn't have control over our finances. I
didn't even have access to our finances. I felt utterly
trapped because of that, and so when we split up
and divorced, this was another turning point in my life
(10:55):
where I realized, oh, if I hand over the financial
control of my life to literally anyone, I'm going to
be trapped. And so instead, I'm going to be my
own provider. I'm going to work as hard as possible.
I'm going to make away for myself. I'm going to
change my financial destiny. I Am not going to live
under financial stress the way that my family lives under
(11:17):
financial stress, or the way that I remember it being
as a child. Instead, I'm going to create this financial
abundance for myself, create this financial freedom for myself, and
do the things I want, go the places I want,
by the things I want, live the life I want,
and again it was utterly intoxicating, both that conversation with
my parents where I decided I was going to provide
for myself, and then also leaving that controlling marriage on
(11:40):
the other side of that and building my own business,
building my own career, building a name for myself. I
was just like, this is everything. Then in twenty eighteen,
as part of the business that I was running, I
was working with an author who was very popular and successful,
and he always puts on this big event every summer
that he invited me to come to. So because we're
(12:02):
working on a book together, I come to this event
as his guest. And at the event, there's a speaker.
There's a bunch of different speakers, but one of the
speakers was this guy named Kyle Cees. And Kyle Cees
gets on the stage and did something I had never
in my whole life seen anyone do before, which is
to get on the stage with no notes, no keynote,
no prep, and just riff like. This is a person
(12:26):
who he's a comedian in a previous life, so he
has a lot of stage experience. But it was something
that I couldn't explain that I was so drawn to it.
Was like, the freedom that this man has to just
stand up there and be so comfortable in his own
skin and just talk about what is interesting to him
and just share stories from his life. And even now
(12:49):
that I'm saying this, I'm like, oh, yeah, this podcast,
the way I do this is probably deeply inspired from
the influence of Kyle Sease in my life. Because I
had never witnessed anything like this. I didn't know that
this was possible to be able to just trust yourself
so much that you could get up on a stage
and talk to a room of a couple thousand people.
That was insane to me. And as part of his message,
(13:12):
he would bring people up on stage and he would
do live coaching with them, and you could tell that
this wasn't practiced or planned because he's doing it all
right on the spot. It's specific to this person's story.
He would help them overcome these limiting beliefs. I was
just absolutely mesmerized. I was like, I did not know
that that sort of essence was even possible, that someone
(13:32):
could just like be in their truth, be in their authenticity,
and just show up on the stage and command the
attention of a crowd. I was like, Oh, my gosh,
what is this man taking and can I have some
of it? And at the time, he was about to
come out with this book called The Illusion of Money,
and I remember I got a copy of the book.
It was an early copy of the book at the event,
(13:54):
and within about two days of coming home from the event,
I had consumed that entire book. I was like, this
is my new mantra. This is so important. It felt
so important for me to read this book. I handed
it to Matt, who was not yet my husband. I
think we were like a couple months away from our wedding,
and I was like, I need you to read this book.
This book is going to change our lives. I feel
(14:14):
like this book is going to just, you know, blow
open our financial abundance, Like we're going to be able
to just build anything we want to build, and become
who we want to become, and experience the kind of
freedom that this that I witnessed in this man on stage.
I was so excited about all of it and the idea.
The concept of the illusion of money is basically like
money's not real. This is just a concept we've agreed
(14:36):
on as a means of exchange for goods and services,
So why are we building our entire lives and identities
around this made up concept, this illusion of money. Instead,
if you're not a slave to the illusion of money,
then you can actually listen to your heart, listen to
your callings, you can be in touch with yourself with
in tune with your own authenticity. You can actually bring
(14:58):
your true gifts to the table. And he shares all
these different examples of people who are, you know, maybe
trading their lives for this big paycheck in the corporate world,
and they have this belief that the only way for
them to make money is to be this other person
that they think they have to be. But then they
leave and follow their calling or listen to their heart
or you know, chase after something that's really pulling at
(15:20):
their heartstrings, and they discover the depths of who they
never knew that they were. I'm not even doing a
good job of paraphrasing the book, Honestly, it's such a
phenomenal book and had such a profound influence in my life.
You can see where I'm going with this. This was
in the middle of twenty nineteen. Matt and I got
married in November of twenty nineteen. Then in March of
(15:42):
twenty twenty. We came home from our honeymoon in I
don't know, December of twenty nineteen. Mid December, found out
I was pregnant with Nella. Then in March, the world
shut down. And when the world shut down, my husband
shut down his business because he was working in live
events at the time. We saw the writing on the
wall very early. He decided to stop the bleeding before
it got too bad. He fired his team, he moved
(16:04):
out of his office space, et cetera, et cetera. And
we're in March slash April of twenty twenty, and I
don't know how to explain what happened to me other
than just trauma, other than just like, this experience of
being in the pandemic and having the world shut down
and being in that environment of fear and scarcity and
(16:27):
uncertainty triggered something deep and primal for me. And I
was just like, I will do whatever I have to
do to provide security and stability for my family. It's
beyond logic what I did. But I really almost dissociated.
It was like I was five months pregnant. I was
(16:49):
so tired already. I was just I was so scared,
and I just was like, I have to do this.
I will literally kill myself to make sure that my
family has taken care of and that we're all safe
and that we have what we need. And so I
just started working around the clock. And the weirdest part
(17:10):
about all of it is that the strategy that had
worked so well for me at twenty and at thirty
that time during the pandemic, how old would I have
been thirty seven, I guess, really stopped working for me.
It became so remarkably ineffective. It was like I was
spinning my wheels and the money really wasn't coming, and
(17:31):
things were getting tighter and tighter, and the squeeze was
getting harder and harder, and it was an extremely extremely
stressful time around money. And yet I kept doubling down
and buckling down because I was just like, I know
this works. I've done it before. And Kyle talks about
this in the book and just in his work. He
(17:52):
talks about how when our patterns stopped working is when
they're ready to break. So these patterns that we create
from the time we're very young in order to protect ourselves.
The purpose of the pattern is to protect you. The
purpose of the patterns to keep you safe. It is
there for your benefit. And yet when you're done with it,
when you're ready to evolve past it, the pattern will
(18:14):
stop working. And that is exactly what was happening for
me at thirty seven years old, is the pattern had
stopped working. But I am stubborn as i'll get out,
and I was convinced that I could make the pattern
keep working. And I had almost just forgotten entirely that
I'd read this book called The Illusion of Money, and
so I just doubled down and just was working harder
and harder and harder. And I can't even go through
(18:35):
it would take too long in this episode to go
through in detail all of the things that happened from
March of twenty twenty to I would say, like December
of twenty twenty two, in my physical body just absolutely
falling apart. You know, I like so many different things,
so many different symptoms, so much just burnout, absolute burnout
(18:57):
and exhaustion. And you talk about losing your gative spark.
I lost my creative spark because I traded it for
what I thought would give me financial security. I traded
it for financial security and then I didn't even get
the financial security. And it was in the midst of
all of this that Matt was given this opportunity to
(19:19):
create this thing. It was a community built around the
concept of surf. So essentially, in the state of Tennessee,
a man made lake, a several acre lake with an
apparatus that creates man made surfing waves, and you could
bring surfing to Tennessee and we could build this community
(19:41):
around a surfing lake and build a community that aligned
with the values of surf, which were about living connected
to nature, sharing what you had, being in community with
one another, connecting to God, to something bigger than you,
yeah sa resources, being together, being in nature, being connected.
(20:04):
It was just like that was so exciting to us,
and it seemed like this really lofty thing. But after
we had both read illusion of money, we could feel
the way that this opportunity was pulling us toward it.
It was like a magnetic I couldn't explain it, and
it didn't immediately make sense of something that was going
to pay us all this money. In fact, when the
(20:25):
idea first started, it was just like a lot of
talking and creative brainstorming between Matt and his business partner
and then over time obviously became something much bigger than that,
where there were a lot of partners at the table,
but it was so compelling to us we couldn't stop
thinking about it. We were just like, maybe this is
what Kyle Cease was talking about when he talks about
(20:46):
following your calling. And we, over the course of months
and months and months, decided to go all in on
this project. Well, not to jump forward too far, but
you know how the story ends. We ended up losing everything.
(21:07):
We nearly filed for bankruptcy. There were a couple of
years in there where I wasn't sure, you know, month
to month, how we were going to pay our mortgage.
We were putting groceries on credit cards. It was a very,
very stressful time as it relates to money, and I
really lost touch with my creativity during that time. And
this is I'm coming all the way back to where
(21:30):
we started, the inextricable link between creativity and money. There's
a thread here that's really really important. And in order
to explain what I'm talking about, I want to share
with you this exercise that I did with Matt the
other morning. That's in the artist's way. It's in chapter
six of the Artist's Way. This chapter is called Recovering
(21:51):
a Sense of Abundance and it's on page one thirteen
if you want to look it up in your own book.
But basically, this is just a really rapid fire, intuitive
exercise that you can do to unearth hidden beliefs about
money slash creativity. I'm going to almost use those words
interchangeably about money and creativity that are buried in your system,
(22:12):
that are in your unconscious, that are creating your reality,
that are driving your life, that are controlling you, that
are dictating the choices that you make. And this was
so illuminating for me. I want to share this exercise
with you and then I'll talk a little bit more
about how I used this to really think through how
these beliefs were creating meaning in my own life. Okay,
(22:35):
so the exercise includes twenty phrases that are incomplete. They're unfinished,
and the idea is, as I read these phrases, you
just let your brain automatically fill in the blanks. You
want it to do this within like three seconds, and
your brain there's certain statements that your brain may not
immediately come up with an association to. But the ones
(22:55):
that you do immediately come up with an association to
are going to be extremely revealing and telling to you.
So I'll read these to you and just give you
a little pause so you can fill in the blanks
with your own brain. Number One, people with money are two.
Money makes people three. I'd have more money if four.
(23:20):
My dad thought money was five. My mom always thought
money would six. In my family, money coused seven. Money
equals eight. If I had money, i'd nine. If I
could afford it, I'd ten. If I had some money,
(23:43):
i'd eleven. I'm afraid that if I had money, I
would twelve. Money is thirteen. Money causes fourteen. Having money
is not fifteen. In order to have more money, i'd
(24:04):
need to sixteen. When I have money, I usually seventeen.
I think money eighteen. If I weren't so cheap, i'd nineteen.
People think money twenty. Being broke tells me, Okay, think
(24:31):
to yourself for a minute. If there's one of these
answers that really surprised you, I'll tell you which ones
really surprised me. There's a theme. You'll see it, and
I don't know if it'll be as obvious to you
as it is to me how this theme is creating
my reality. But Number three, I'd have more money if
my brain said I worked harder. Number fourteen, having money
(24:54):
is not my brain said easy. Number fifteen. In order
to have more money, I'd need to work harder. Number twenty.
Being broke tells me I'm not working hard enough. So
you notice the theme there. That's how my brain immediately
filled in those blanks. What that tells you is that
you might consciously think one thing, like I consciously can
(25:17):
look out in the world and tell you that not
every single person who has money has worked hard for it,
and that working hard doesn't automatically equal having more money.
But just because I can see with my eyes that
I can empirically see as I look out into the world,
that that's not a fact. Still, there's a buried belief
in my system that is dictating my behavior around money
(25:39):
and around creativity. That's causing me to act and live
in certain ways. That's literally creating my reality. And if
I really believe that in order to have more money,
I need to work harder, I need to hustle harder,
I need to go faster. I mean, like I feel
that in my cells, my body told me that in
the middle of the pandemic. My body told me that.
When I went through my divorce, my body told me
(26:00):
that all the way I go all the way back
to twenty years old, when I had that conversation with
my parents where they're like, hey, you know, if you're
going to make this choice, then we're not going to
be financially supporting you anymore in these ways, and I
was just like, Okay, it's time to buckle down. I'm
going to make this happen for myself, and I'm not
even having judgment for myself because that patterning in me
(26:23):
literally created the path to where I am today. So
thank God for that pattern because it paved the way
for the woman I am today. During that time of
my divorce, I look back and think, thank God that
I rescued myself out of that situation, because that was
a horrifying situation that I would never in a million
years want to go back to. And Yet, what if
(26:45):
something new is available for me today? What if I
change my mindset today and something new is available to me.
That version of me at seventeen years old that took
in the belief that you can't be creative and also
make money from it. What if that just wasn't true.
What if that was just something some adult believed and
told me. What if the younger version of me picked
(27:06):
up on these subtle cues that money is really hard
to earn and not everybody gets to have money. And
those are beliefs that I'm carrying around in my subconscious
that are at least participating in the creation of my reality.
And what if I can shift my beliefs around those things.
What if I can decide that actually money and creativity
are both were drawing both of them from the same Well,
(27:30):
if what Kyle ces says is true that money is
just this illusion, It's just this made up thing that
doesn't even exist. You know, creativity is where all of
our strength is, is where all of our power is.
What if we started listening to obeying following chasing down
you know, our creativity instead of chasing down money, could
(27:54):
it possibly shift our reality? I think one of the
reasons why the I'm a Surf Club journey and the
failure really broke my heart so much is because I
think I really wanted that story to answer my question
can I be creative and still make money? I wanted
the story to end where following our creative passion filled
(28:15):
our bank account with all this money. And at the
end of the story, it was just like, oh no,
what if the truth is you can't follow What if
everyone was right my whole life and you can't follow
your creativity and make money. What if that's really what
this story is trying to teach me is that you
just have to be more practical than that. You have
to be more responsible and you keep your feet on
the ground, get your head out of the clouds, girl,
like you got to get a real job. You can't
(28:37):
just be an author for your whole life. And I
think it really scared me that that was the takeaway,
that that was the message of the story. And yet
the deeper I look at it and the more I
realize my own beliefs around money, that this, namely this
idea that you have to work so hard in order
for it to happen, I'm realizing how the entire sh
(29:00):
shape of that investment experience, the entire shape of how
you know, we followed that dream. It was all about
us hustling, It was all about us doing it, us
creating this thing, and somewhere along the way, our creativity
really got lost again. We started bowing to the god
of money. And you know, people who had a lot
(29:22):
more experience than us and more smarter than us, would say, well,
if we're going to do this, you got to make
the you gotta make it pencils. What they'd say, you
got to make the numbers work. You know, you got
to do this. We have to kind of I know
this was your original vision, but we're gonna have to
do this instead because we got to make it pencil
And I'm realizing how even though we thought we were
following our authentic creativity, we actually along the way slowly
(29:45):
got led down the path of following money. This is
the pattern that's dying for me. And maybe this whole
experience was really just about witnessing the death of this pattern. Hey,
it's not going to work for you anymore. Ali to
hustle so hard for your worth that was back then,
This is now. This is done for you. It's time
to move on to something new. It's time to sink
more deeply into your creativity. It's time to be more
(30:06):
of who you are. It's time to open your heart
and stop intellectualizing everything and stop trying to do it perfectly.
And it's time to get okay with failure and be
okay with the fact that not everything is going to
work out the way that you said. It's time to
notice the abundance in your life that is not financial.
Because there is so much abundance in my life. I'm like,
I feel like I've missed it in these past few
(30:28):
years because there has been so much money stress that
I wasn't used to. You know again, from the time
I was twenty until I was until this, until you
know a few years ago, there was so much financial
freedom to just buy and go and do and yes, yes,
let's do that, let's go there. And this experience was like, no,
(30:48):
we can't do that, we can't afford that. I don't
have that, I can't It was so hard for me
to shift my perspective out of can't have. Don't have
to wait a second, take a look around you, like
you have more space, more time in your life, more
you have these beautiful children who are right in front
of you, who are just the most perfect little miracles
(31:08):
unfolding in front of your eyes. My mother in law
moving in next door, starting this preschool. There have been
so many beautiful things that have been born out of
this time. I think it's showing me that actually, the
deeper you go into your creativity, the more abundance you have,
and the experience has been trying to show teach me
this message, deliver this message to me that abundance doesn't
(31:30):
have to look like money. Abundance can and I still
desire and aspire to have financial abundance, but I am
no longer a slave to the dollar, to the almighty dollar.
I face down my fear, my worst fear of bankruptcy,
my worst fear of Oh no, we're going to lose
our house. Oh no, someone's going to come and chase bank,
(31:52):
is you know, litigating against us. We're being served papers
at our house? And are they going to come and
pick up our cars? Am I going to not have
a cars? Going to be a mom with two little
kids with no car? You know, I've faced all those
fears and realized, oh, I don't have to bow down
to that god in my life anymore, the god of money.
I can actually come awake and come alive to the light,
(32:16):
to the energy of creativity, to all the gifts that
I have to bring to the world, and hopefully maybe
I do believe that they will bring me financial abundance
numbers in my bank account. And also it's all just
an illusion. None of it is real. I mean, like,
I can't tell I can't even explain how I know that,
(32:36):
except that I lived through it where I panicked every
day that someone was going to come and take our house,
and then no one did, no one ever did, And
here we are, and I'm sitting in my beautiful house
and all is well, and everything's fine. And I don't
know where any of this lands on you. Maybe the
money stuff doesn't really speak to you the way it
does to me. Maybe for you it's something different. Maybe
(32:57):
for you, you're living some other story over and over
and over again, and that you feel you need to
explore more deeply. I process out loud because I think
it's so important for us not to wait until the
story is all perfectly wrapped up to share it. I
think people distort the story when they do it that way.
You share it in a weird way. If I share
(33:18):
this with you in five years from now, when you
know we were completely out of the woods financially, we'd
rebuilt our financial lives, I think I would tell the
story differently, and I'm telling the story authentically from the
middle of it that I don't really know. I can't
speak with utter authority about the connection between creativity and abundance,
but I'm telling you that following your creativity is a
(33:41):
heck of a lot more interesting than following money. Following
a dollar, following ten thousand dollars, following one hundred thousand dollars.
It's just a heck of a lot more freeing, a
heck of a lot more exciting, heck of a lot
more interesting. I hope that this episode helps you, and
I will see you back next week on The Writer
Story podcast.
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up the pieces of your life,
put them back together with the word you write. All
the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start
too fun when you write your story. You got the
words and said, don't you think it's down to let
(00:23):
them out and write them down and cold. It's all
about and write you write your story. Write you write
your story. Hello friend, and welcome back to the Write
Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and
on today's episode, I want to talk about creativity and
money because this is a topic that has been popping
(00:46):
up again and again and again in my morning pages
as I'm going through the Artist's Way again. It has
been a theme that has been ever present in my
life for about as long as I can remember. You'll
notice this as I share some of my personal story
today on the episode. This is a theme that's just
been present with me from the time I was really young,
and I'll share a couple of stories to that effect.
(01:08):
But I wouldn't say my earliest memories, but some of
my very early memories include me asking questions about creativity
and money, and the theme has been especially present in
the last six or seven years of my life, this
period of time that I've talked about at nauseum on
the podcast, where my husband and I took this big
risk on a business venture that we felt like we
(01:29):
were really being called to pursue. We felt absolutely compelled
to do this thing, take this chance. There were many
people who told us this is extremely risky, this is
not a sure thing. You know, are you prepared to
accept the consequences if this falls through? We knew the
risks going in, and we both just felt this inexplicable pull,
(01:51):
like this was something we just had to do. And
I still to this day think we couldn't have rested
if we hadn't really seen it all the way through
to the very end. And yet, of course, if you've
been listening along, you know that there have been a
lot of really tricky consequences for following it through all
the way to the end. And I've talked about this
like my second deconstruction, I deconstructed from evangelicalism. And now
(02:13):
it's like I'm having to ask myself this question, is
it possible to follow your creative dreams and still make money?
And this is a question that has haunted me for
about as long as I can remember, and again over
the last six years. It's a theme that's played out
over and over again. And I always say, when I'm
helping someone to take an experience from their life and
(02:35):
turn it into a narrative. Let's say we're working on
a memoir or something, that there are these experiences where
you feel like you're circling the same block. It's like, Oh,
I've seen that tree before, We've been here before, I
recognize where I'm standing. And whenever you have these moments
that you're like, oh, this is a theme that just
keeps showing its space, then you can always be assured
(02:58):
that this is experience that's trying to send you a message,
is trying to show you something. In fact, there are
studies that show children will return to the same books
over and over and over again or the same movies
over and over and over again because they didn't really
understand them the first time, and by the time they
understand them, they will move on to another book or
another movie. But I don't know if you have this experience.
(03:20):
I have movies for my childhood that I watched over
and over and over and over again. And my kids
do this too. My son loves the movie Wally, and
he would watch that thing on repeat. You would watch
it three times in one day if I would let him.
He is just obsessed with the movie. But what kids
are really doing is trying to figure it out. They're going,
(03:40):
what's really going on here? What's happening? There are still
parts that they don't fully understand. And the same is
true for us. When a story in your life is
driving you crazy, it's driving you crazy because there are
still parts of it that you don't understand. And so
God bless our friends and our therapists who listen to
us tell the story over and over and over and
over and over, because we need that. We need to
(04:01):
be able to process the story that many times, and
you might judge yourself or fault yourself or think you
feel kind of crazy because you're like, why can't I
just let this go? Why can't I let this person
go or this relationship? Or why do I keep rehashing this?
Why do I keep going back to the same job
or the same community or the same person, or why
does the same why does even a different person in
(04:21):
a relationship feel like the same relationship? Over and over.
Whenever you're having that experience, you can be rest assured
that your life is trying to communicate something to you
and you just haven't fully understood it yet, not because
you're dumb or because you're slow, just because it takes
a while for these messages to really get through. It
takes a while for them to sync more deeply into
(04:42):
our systems, and this story that I've been living over
the last six years is really evidence of that. For me,
this idea for this today's episode started because yesterday morning,
I was sitting on the couch with my husband drinking
coffee and I was reading through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way,
and on this exercise that is in chapter six, this
(05:03):
is the week that I'm on a week six. Week
six is all about recovering your sense of abundance, and
this struck me as slightly odd because I've also been
I haven't talked about this as much. I've talked about
Artist's Way a ton, but over the course of the
past couple of weeks, I've also been doing a challenge
by Gabby Bernstein that is like a twenty one day
abundance challenge, and I haven't talked about that one as much.
(05:26):
But I've been going through the Abundance Challenge and I
just finished day twenty one. I'm on week six of
the Artist's Way and doing this thirty day Instagram challenge.
I'm just like all in it, trying to like reaccess,
reignite my creativity in my life, and come back home
to myself. And these are three different ways I've been
trying to do that. While I finished the twenty one
day Abundance Challenge yesterday, then I'm like, Okay, Abundance Challenge done.
(05:49):
Moving on from that, and I open up the Artist's
Way and see this exercise that's all about abundance. The
chapter I'm reading is about abundance. This exercise is about
money specifically, not just abundance, because abundance can show up
in a ton of different ways, but the exercise is
specifically around money. And all of a sudden, it was
like this light bulb went off in my head and
I was like, oh, creativity and money are inextricably linked.
(06:13):
They are absolutely positively connected, and in my brain they've
been connected in one way. But I'm wondering if maybe
I have been wrong about that deeply held belief all along.
One example of that belief, or one yeah manifestation of
it in my life is this experience I had when
(06:33):
I went away to college and people would ask me
what I was going to study or know what my
plans were, and I would say, I always have wanted
to be an author. That's something I've just wanted to
do since I was really young, and I had several
well meaning adults in my life tell me, oh, that's
such a nice dream, but you better have a backup plan.
You better go into education or something, or pick a job,
or you could get paid, because you're never going to
(06:54):
make money being an author. So that's a nice thing
to want to do on the side, but it's not
really a career path. That limiting belief around creativity and
money is one that was planted deep in my psyche
from the time I was sixteen and seventeen, when I
was making decisions about what I wanted to do with
my life. But these ideas about money start even earlier
(07:15):
for me. I mean, I can remember being so young,
like maybe fourth grade, when we had been living in
a house that we were renting, and the owner of
the house wanted to sell, so we had to move
out of the house, and we weren't sure where we
were going to go next, and so in the meantime
we were in this apartment. It was supposed to be
a really short lived thing. I believe I'd have to
check with my parents on the exact timing here, but
(07:38):
I think I was in about the third or fourth
grade we moved into this apartment. It was supposed to
be short lived while we figured out where we were
going next. Then we ended up staying for kind of
a long time. I want to say we were there
maybe two years. And so there were five of us
cramped into this small, too better apartment, and I just
remember being kind of on top of each other and
feeling like it was really cramped. And I was really
(07:58):
excited about the idea of moving into a house and
having my own bedroom again. And I remember saying to
my dad, how come we don't move into a house.
There was a day where we were like all kind
of in each other's space, and I was like, why
don't we just move into a house. And I remember
my dad reaching into his pockets and pulling like the
lining of his pockets out of his pockets. As this
gesture he didn't even say a single word, but it
(08:19):
was like this gesture that was saying, Oh, we don't
have the money, so we can't move into this house.
And that's just one experience that's seared in my mind
that kind of represents the environment that I grew up
in as it relates to money. I won't get into
(08:45):
all the details of it, but I just remember there
being in my family a lot of stress as it
related to money, and I can remember when I decided
that I was ready to leave the house and to
make my own way, that I really didn't want to
to be that way anymore. In fact, I have a
very poignant moment where I argued with my parents about
(09:06):
something that I wanted to do. I wanted to do
this thing. They didn't really want me to do it,
and the threat was kind of put out there like, Okay,
if you choose to do this thing, then the ways
that we've been financially supporting you, you're going to be
on your own for those things. And this is like
a pivotal moment in my life that I can point
to where I decided that money for me meant freedom,
(09:26):
and so I was going to do whatever it took
to maintain my freedom, my sense of autonomy by making
my own money, and I was going to provide for myself.
I was going to create security for myself. I was
going to buy the things I wanted to go, the
places I wanted be the woman who I wanted to be,
all by making my own money. And I got a
(09:46):
job working at a restaurant. I started waiting tables. I
was like, WHOA, I can leave every night with cash.
This is amazing. I was like picking up every single shift.
Anytime anyone wanted to give up a shift, I would
take it. I was working around the clock. I was
really honing my gills at waiting tables, trying to get
better and better at it so that I could leave
each night with as much money as possible. I eventually
became a bartender. That was my first real experience with
(10:09):
entrepreneurship where I realized, Oh, the harder I work, the
more money I make, the more time I put in,
the more I get out of it. And now what
I get is financial freedom. Now I get to go
live my life however I want to live it. I
can go on trips, I can go on vacations, I
can buy things, I can take care of myself. It
was an absolutely intoxicating feeling of freedom and autonomy, and
(10:33):
it really set me on our trajectory through all of
my twenties most of my thirties. There was a blip
in there where I was married before, and inside of
that relationship there was again a ton of control around
money where I didn't have control over our finances. I
didn't even have access to our finances. I felt utterly
trapped because of that, and so when we split up
and divorced, this was another turning point in my life
(10:55):
where I realized, oh, if I hand over the financial
control of my life to literally anyone, I'm going to
be trapped. And so instead, I'm going to be my
own provider. I'm going to work as hard as possible.
I'm going to make away for myself. I'm going to
change my financial destiny. I Am not going to live
under financial stress the way that my family lives under
(11:17):
financial stress, or the way that I remember it being
as a child. Instead, I'm going to create this financial
abundance for myself, create this financial freedom for myself, and
do the things I want, go the places I want,
by the things I want, live the life I want,
and again it was utterly intoxicating, both that conversation with
my parents where I decided I was going to provide
for myself, and then also leaving that controlling marriage on
(11:40):
the other side of that and building my own business,
building my own career, building a name for myself. I
was just like, this is everything. Then in twenty eighteen,
as part of the business that I was running, I
was working with an author who was very popular and successful,
and he always puts on this big event every summer
that he invited me to come to. So because we're
(12:02):
working on a book together, I come to this event
as his guest. And at the event, there's a speaker.
There's a bunch of different speakers, but one of the
speakers was this guy named Kyle Cees. And Kyle Cees
gets on the stage and did something I had never
in my whole life seen anyone do before, which is
to get on the stage with no notes, no keynote,
no prep, and just riff like. This is a person
(12:26):
who he's a comedian in a previous life, so he
has a lot of stage experience. But it was something
that I couldn't explain that I was so drawn to it.
Was like, the freedom that this man has to just
stand up there and be so comfortable in his own
skin and just talk about what is interesting to him
and just share stories from his life. And even now
(12:49):
that I'm saying this, I'm like, oh, yeah, this podcast,
the way I do this is probably deeply inspired from
the influence of Kyle Sease in my life. Because I
had never witnessed anything like this. I didn't know that
this was possible to be able to just trust yourself
so much that you could get up on a stage
and talk to a room of a couple thousand people.
That was insane to me. And as part of his message,
(13:12):
he would bring people up on stage and he would
do live coaching with them, and you could tell that
this wasn't practiced or planned because he's doing it all
right on the spot. It's specific to this person's story.
He would help them overcome these limiting beliefs. I was
just absolutely mesmerized. I was like, I did not know
that that sort of essence was even possible, that someone
(13:32):
could just like be in their truth, be in their authenticity,
and just show up on the stage and command the
attention of a crowd. I was like, Oh, my gosh,
what is this man taking and can I have some
of it? And at the time, he was about to
come out with this book called The Illusion of Money,
and I remember I got a copy of the book.
It was an early copy of the book at the event,
(13:54):
and within about two days of coming home from the event,
I had consumed that entire book. I was like, this
is my new mantra. This is so important. It felt
so important for me to read this book. I handed
it to Matt, who was not yet my husband. I
think we were like a couple months away from our wedding,
and I was like, I need you to read this book.
This book is going to change our lives. I feel
(14:14):
like this book is going to just, you know, blow
open our financial abundance, Like we're going to be able
to just build anything we want to build, and become
who we want to become, and experience the kind of
freedom that this that I witnessed in this man on stage.
I was so excited about all of it and the idea.
The concept of the illusion of money is basically like
money's not real. This is just a concept we've agreed
(14:36):
on as a means of exchange for goods and services,
So why are we building our entire lives and identities
around this made up concept, this illusion of money. Instead,
if you're not a slave to the illusion of money,
then you can actually listen to your heart, listen to
your callings, you can be in touch with yourself with
in tune with your own authenticity. You can actually bring
(14:58):
your true gifts to the table. And he shares all
these different examples of people who are, you know, maybe
trading their lives for this big paycheck in the corporate world,
and they have this belief that the only way for
them to make money is to be this other person
that they think they have to be. But then they
leave and follow their calling or listen to their heart
or you know, chase after something that's really pulling at
(15:20):
their heartstrings, and they discover the depths of who they
never knew that they were. I'm not even doing a
good job of paraphrasing the book, Honestly, it's such a
phenomenal book and had such a profound influence in my life.
You can see where I'm going with this. This was
in the middle of twenty nineteen. Matt and I got
married in November of twenty nineteen. Then in March of
(15:42):
twenty twenty. We came home from our honeymoon in I
don't know, December of twenty nineteen. Mid December, found out
I was pregnant with Nella. Then in March, the world
shut down. And when the world shut down, my husband
shut down his business because he was working in live
events at the time. We saw the writing on the
wall very early. He decided to stop the bleeding before
it got too bad. He fired his team, he moved
(16:04):
out of his office space, et cetera, et cetera. And
we're in March slash April of twenty twenty, and I
don't know how to explain what happened to me other
than just trauma, other than just like, this experience of
being in the pandemic and having the world shut down
and being in that environment of fear and scarcity and
(16:27):
uncertainty triggered something deep and primal for me. And I
was just like, I will do whatever I have to
do to provide security and stability for my family. It's
beyond logic what I did. But I really almost dissociated.
It was like I was five months pregnant. I was
(16:49):
so tired already. I was just I was so scared,
and I just was like, I have to do this.
I will literally kill myself to make sure that my
family has taken care of and that we're all safe
and that we have what we need. And so I
just started working around the clock. And the weirdest part
(17:10):
about all of it is that the strategy that had
worked so well for me at twenty and at thirty
that time during the pandemic, how old would I have
been thirty seven, I guess, really stopped working for me.
It became so remarkably ineffective. It was like I was
spinning my wheels and the money really wasn't coming, and
(17:31):
things were getting tighter and tighter, and the squeeze was
getting harder and harder, and it was an extremely extremely
stressful time around money. And yet I kept doubling down
and buckling down because I was just like, I know
this works. I've done it before. And Kyle talks about
this in the book and just in his work. He
(17:52):
talks about how when our patterns stopped working is when
they're ready to break. So these patterns that we create
from the time we're very young in order to protect ourselves.
The purpose of the pattern is to protect you. The
purpose of the patterns to keep you safe. It is
there for your benefit. And yet when you're done with it,
when you're ready to evolve past it, the pattern will
(18:14):
stop working. And that is exactly what was happening for
me at thirty seven years old, is the pattern had
stopped working. But I am stubborn as i'll get out,
and I was convinced that I could make the pattern
keep working. And I had almost just forgotten entirely that
I'd read this book called The Illusion of Money, and
so I just doubled down and just was working harder
and harder and harder. And I can't even go through
(18:35):
it would take too long in this episode to go
through in detail all of the things that happened from
March of twenty twenty to I would say, like December
of twenty twenty two, in my physical body just absolutely
falling apart. You know, I like so many different things,
so many different symptoms, so much just burnout, absolute burnout
(18:57):
and exhaustion. And you talk about losing your gative spark.
I lost my creative spark because I traded it for
what I thought would give me financial security. I traded
it for financial security and then I didn't even get
the financial security. And it was in the midst of
all of this that Matt was given this opportunity to
(19:19):
create this thing. It was a community built around the
concept of surf. So essentially, in the state of Tennessee,
a man made lake, a several acre lake with an
apparatus that creates man made surfing waves, and you could
bring surfing to Tennessee and we could build this community
(19:41):
around a surfing lake and build a community that aligned
with the values of surf, which were about living connected
to nature, sharing what you had, being in community with
one another, connecting to God, to something bigger than you,
yeah sa resources, being together, being in nature, being connected.
(20:04):
It was just like that was so exciting to us,
and it seemed like this really lofty thing. But after
we had both read illusion of money, we could feel
the way that this opportunity was pulling us toward it.
It was like a magnetic I couldn't explain it, and
it didn't immediately make sense of something that was going
to pay us all this money. In fact, when the
(20:25):
idea first started, it was just like a lot of
talking and creative brainstorming between Matt and his business partner
and then over time obviously became something much bigger than that,
where there were a lot of partners at the table,
but it was so compelling to us we couldn't stop
thinking about it. We were just like, maybe this is
what Kyle Cease was talking about when he talks about
(20:46):
following your calling. And we, over the course of months
and months and months, decided to go all in on
this project. Well, not to jump forward too far, but
you know how the story ends. We ended up losing everything.
(21:07):
We nearly filed for bankruptcy. There were a couple of
years in there where I wasn't sure, you know, month
to month, how we were going to pay our mortgage.
We were putting groceries on credit cards. It was a very,
very stressful time as it relates to money, and I
really lost touch with my creativity during that time. And
this is I'm coming all the way back to where
(21:30):
we started, the inextricable link between creativity and money. There's
a thread here that's really really important. And in order
to explain what I'm talking about, I want to share
with you this exercise that I did with Matt the
other morning. That's in the artist's way. It's in chapter
six of the Artist's Way. This chapter is called Recovering
(21:51):
a Sense of Abundance and it's on page one thirteen
if you want to look it up in your own book.
But basically, this is just a really rapid fire, intuitive
exercise that you can do to unearth hidden beliefs about
money slash creativity. I'm going to almost use those words
interchangeably about money and creativity that are buried in your system,
(22:12):
that are in your unconscious, that are creating your reality,
that are driving your life, that are controlling you, that
are dictating the choices that you make. And this was
so illuminating for me. I want to share this exercise
with you and then I'll talk a little bit more
about how I used this to really think through how
these beliefs were creating meaning in my own life. Okay,
(22:35):
so the exercise includes twenty phrases that are incomplete. They're unfinished,
and the idea is, as I read these phrases, you
just let your brain automatically fill in the blanks. You
want it to do this within like three seconds, and
your brain there's certain statements that your brain may not
immediately come up with an association to. But the ones
(22:55):
that you do immediately come up with an association to
are going to be extremely revealing and telling to you.
So I'll read these to you and just give you
a little pause so you can fill in the blanks
with your own brain. Number One, people with money are two.
Money makes people three. I'd have more money if four.
(23:20):
My dad thought money was five. My mom always thought
money would six. In my family, money coused seven. Money
equals eight. If I had money, i'd nine. If I
could afford it, I'd ten. If I had some money,
(23:43):
i'd eleven. I'm afraid that if I had money, I
would twelve. Money is thirteen. Money causes fourteen. Having money
is not fifteen. In order to have more money, i'd
(24:04):
need to sixteen. When I have money, I usually seventeen.
I think money eighteen. If I weren't so cheap, i'd nineteen.
People think money twenty. Being broke tells me, Okay, think
(24:31):
to yourself for a minute. If there's one of these
answers that really surprised you, I'll tell you which ones
really surprised me. There's a theme. You'll see it, and
I don't know if it'll be as obvious to you
as it is to me how this theme is creating
my reality. But Number three, I'd have more money if
my brain said I worked harder. Number fourteen, having money
(24:54):
is not my brain said easy. Number fifteen. In order
to have more money, I'd need to work harder. Number twenty.
Being broke tells me I'm not working hard enough. So
you notice the theme there. That's how my brain immediately
filled in those blanks. What that tells you is that
you might consciously think one thing, like I consciously can
(25:17):
look out in the world and tell you that not
every single person who has money has worked hard for it,
and that working hard doesn't automatically equal having more money.
But just because I can see with my eyes that
I can empirically see as I look out into the world,
that that's not a fact. Still, there's a buried belief
in my system that is dictating my behavior around money
(25:39):
and around creativity. That's causing me to act and live
in certain ways. That's literally creating my reality. And if
I really believe that in order to have more money,
I need to work harder, I need to hustle harder,
I need to go faster. I mean, like I feel
that in my cells, my body told me that in
the middle of the pandemic. My body told me that.
When I went through my divorce, my body told me
(26:00):
that all the way I go all the way back
to twenty years old, when I had that conversation with
my parents where they're like, hey, you know, if you're
going to make this choice, then we're not going to
be financially supporting you anymore in these ways, and I
was just like, Okay, it's time to buckle down. I'm
going to make this happen for myself, and I'm not
even having judgment for myself because that patterning in me
(26:23):
literally created the path to where I am today. So
thank God for that pattern because it paved the way
for the woman I am today. During that time of
my divorce, I look back and think, thank God that
I rescued myself out of that situation, because that was
a horrifying situation that I would never in a million
years want to go back to. And Yet, what if
(26:45):
something new is available for me today? What if I
change my mindset today and something new is available to me.
That version of me at seventeen years old that took
in the belief that you can't be creative and also
make money from it. What if that just wasn't true.
What if that was just something some adult believed and
told me. What if the younger version of me picked
(27:06):
up on these subtle cues that money is really hard
to earn and not everybody gets to have money. And
those are beliefs that I'm carrying around in my subconscious
that are at least participating in the creation of my reality.
And what if I can shift my beliefs around those things.
What if I can decide that actually money and creativity
are both were drawing both of them from the same Well,
(27:30):
if what Kyle ces says is true that money is
just this illusion, It's just this made up thing that
doesn't even exist. You know, creativity is where all of
our strength is, is where all of our power is.
What if we started listening to obeying following chasing down
you know, our creativity instead of chasing down money, could
(27:54):
it possibly shift our reality? I think one of the
reasons why the I'm a Surf Club journey and the
failure really broke my heart so much is because I
think I really wanted that story to answer my question
can I be creative and still make money? I wanted
the story to end where following our creative passion filled
(28:15):
our bank account with all this money. And at the
end of the story, it was just like, oh no,
what if the truth is you can't follow What if
everyone was right my whole life and you can't follow
your creativity and make money. What if that's really what
this story is trying to teach me is that you
just have to be more practical than that. You have
to be more responsible and you keep your feet on
the ground, get your head out of the clouds, girl,
like you got to get a real job. You can't
(28:37):
just be an author for your whole life. And I
think it really scared me that that was the takeaway,
that that was the message of the story. And yet
the deeper I look at it and the more I
realize my own beliefs around money, that this, namely this
idea that you have to work so hard in order
for it to happen, I'm realizing how the entire sh
(29:00):
shape of that investment experience, the entire shape of how
you know, we followed that dream. It was all about
us hustling, It was all about us doing it, us
creating this thing, and somewhere along the way, our creativity
really got lost again. We started bowing to the god
of money. And you know, people who had a lot
(29:22):
more experience than us and more smarter than us, would say, well,
if we're going to do this, you got to make
the you gotta make it pencils. What they'd say, you
got to make the numbers work. You know, you got
to do this. We have to kind of I know
this was your original vision, but we're gonna have to
do this instead because we got to make it pencil
And I'm realizing how even though we thought we were
following our authentic creativity, we actually along the way slowly
(29:45):
got led down the path of following money. This is
the pattern that's dying for me. And maybe this whole
experience was really just about witnessing the death of this pattern. Hey,
it's not going to work for you anymore. Ali to
hustle so hard for your worth that was back then,
This is now. This is done for you. It's time
to move on to something new. It's time to sink
more deeply into your creativity. It's time to be more
(30:06):
of who you are. It's time to open your heart
and stop intellectualizing everything and stop trying to do it perfectly.
And it's time to get okay with failure and be
okay with the fact that not everything is going to
work out the way that you said. It's time to
notice the abundance in your life that is not financial.
Because there is so much abundance in my life. I'm like,
I feel like I've missed it in these past few
(30:28):
years because there has been so much money stress that
I wasn't used to. You know again, from the time
I was twenty until I was until this, until you
know a few years ago, there was so much financial
freedom to just buy and go and do and yes, yes,
let's do that, let's go there. And this experience was like, no,
(30:48):
we can't do that, we can't afford that. I don't
have that, I can't It was so hard for me
to shift my perspective out of can't have. Don't have
to wait a second, take a look around you, like
you have more space, more time in your life, more
you have these beautiful children who are right in front
of you, who are just the most perfect little miracles
(31:08):
unfolding in front of your eyes. My mother in law
moving in next door, starting this preschool. There have been
so many beautiful things that have been born out of
this time. I think it's showing me that actually, the
deeper you go into your creativity, the more abundance you have,
and the experience has been trying to show teach me
this message, deliver this message to me that abundance doesn't
(31:30):
have to look like money. Abundance can and I still
desire and aspire to have financial abundance, but I am
no longer a slave to the dollar, to the almighty dollar.
I face down my fear, my worst fear of bankruptcy,
my worst fear of Oh no, we're going to lose
our house. Oh no, someone's going to come and chase bank,
(31:52):
is you know, litigating against us. We're being served papers
at our house? And are they going to come and
pick up our cars? Am I going to not have
a cars? Going to be a mom with two little
kids with no car? You know, I've faced all those
fears and realized, oh, I don't have to bow down
to that god in my life anymore, the god of money.
I can actually come awake and come alive to the light,
(32:16):
to the energy of creativity, to all the gifts that
I have to bring to the world, and hopefully maybe
I do believe that they will bring me financial abundance
numbers in my bank account. And also it's all just
an illusion. None of it is real. I mean, like,
I can't tell I can't even explain how I know that,
(32:36):
except that I lived through it where I panicked every
day that someone was going to come and take our house,
and then no one did, no one ever did, And
here we are, and I'm sitting in my beautiful house
and all is well, and everything's fine. And I don't
know where any of this lands on you. Maybe the
money stuff doesn't really speak to you the way it
does to me. Maybe for you it's something different. Maybe
(32:57):
for you, you're living some other story over and over
and over again, and that you feel you need to
explore more deeply. I process out loud because I think
it's so important for us not to wait until the
story is all perfectly wrapped up to share it. I
think people distort the story when they do it that way.
You share it in a weird way. If I share
(33:18):
this with you in five years from now, when you
know we were completely out of the woods financially, we'd
rebuilt our financial lives, I think I would tell the
story differently, and I'm telling the story authentically from the
middle of it that I don't really know. I can't
speak with utter authority about the connection between creativity and abundance,
but I'm telling you that following your creativity is a
(33:41):
heck of a lot more interesting than following money. Following
a dollar, following ten thousand dollars, following one hundred thousand dollars.
It's just a heck of a lot more freeing, a
heck of a lot more exciting, heck of a lot
more interesting. I hope that this episode helps you, and
I will see you back next week on The Writer
Story podcast.
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