Before You Post Your Online Personals Profile - Assess Your Finances!

By April Braswell

April Braswell, leading expert Romance Coach and Online Dating Coach discusses some pre-dating foundational work to do.

First things first. Before you just throw up your Online Personals Dating Profile and expose yourself to the world, you first need to do some self-assessment.  And before you run screaming from the room thinking this is going to be like your annual review with HR (ok, now you are running screaming from the room...), pause, breathe, and trust me.

This is going to be fun!

One of the areas in which to assess yourself is Your Financial Picture.  Like getting on the scale (you own one, right?  If not, getteth thyself over to QVC, look up TANITA...)

How are your finances?

Do you own or rent?

If you rent, how much is going out the window each month into someone else' bank account?

If you own, how much is outstanding on your mortgage?

And if you own, how much actual equity do you have in your house?

Do you pay off your credit cards 100% each month?

How much are you carrying on your credit cards each month?

Do you have 401K savings?

Since 401K savings programs were originally set up as a way to share the wealth of the company with employees, profit sharing, is more than 50% of your 401K in your employer company's stock?

Do you realize having that be the case puts your retirement at risk like former employees at Enron?

Kevin Hogan's Millionaire Mind  program is the best complete teaching program that I have seen out there (and I've looked and worked on this stuff for years and am always searching for really high quality resources for my own continuing education and to further help my clients.).  Part of what is uniquely superb about Kevin's program is he DEEPLY and THOROUGHLY addresses our self-sabotaging mechanisms.  This program is all about money, our relationship with it, and quite a number of ways to increase and build wealth. 

However, he very thoroughly provides a detailed process (it's not just a 2 minute process appetizer that is really a cheap ploy to hook you to go to a $6997 seminar to really get the process.  Just like his internationally best-selling book, The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Hogan provides a lot detailed examples to follow as a model, to replicate to help excavate and work through things in our own lives, and he does it in a way that is affordable, managable, and with lots of practical examples so we actually do this and are successful at it. 

Now the interesting thing to remember is that MONEY is like LOVE, FOOD, and TIME.  So, maybe your money situation is ok.  Or it is at least now in your current mindset.  (Ah, are you really planning your retirement 20 years ahead?  Do you have life insurance that isn't just term associated with your job.  Trust me.  I am widow.  What they have isn't enough.  It's SOMETHING, but 97% of the time, it's not enough.  But that's another topic.  Just wanted to show you the example for now.)

So, LOVE, FOOD, TIME, and MONEY.

You need to think about those things as well.  They are all tied up together in our mind.  Don't we all have at least some image of Mom, or The Ideal Mom, displaying Her Love for Us with a full course, sit down meal, the table overflowing with Food like at Thanksgiving?  Picture this.  She comes in from the kitchen.  Perhaps she is wearing an apron.  Carrying a platter of some hot, steaming dish.  Can you smell it?  Is your mouth watering just thinking of this image.  Yup.  Food = Love.  Food.  Love. Money.  And yes, that costs Money.

In my relationship work with both men and women, and I haven't done comparative research (yet!) to quote statistics at you, but something I have noticed to date is that more women seed to equate their love with free, ergo, My Love is Of No Value.  I need to GIVE it away to you to be a good person.  With some women, and these are successful business women, competent, beautiful, lovely, feminine in many ways.  And yet there is some part in our feminine brain which is holding onto a message of, "I have to DO and ACHIEVE to EARN LOVE."  And related to that then is "I have to GIVE you Money..."  or "I have to BE the PRIMARY bread winner...." to GET a man's love.  And in the same vein, just doing the opposite is the part of us that wants and craves Sugar Daddy where The Man will take care of EVERYTHING and we just sit home and eat bon bons so we FEEL loved.  OK, we all want that one for at least 2 hours a month on a Saturday morning while we sip coffee and watch the BBCA's "What NOT to Wear!" while wearing a peignoir.  But to live that 24x7 really IS a fantasy and not a healthy one.  Over time, really, it would be BORING.  Bleah.  Not that. 

Whereas men predominately seem to have less emotional baggage about that Love has a value and things, and time with you, costs money.  More men don't seem to Feel Bad about that.  Women Feel Bad about that.  So we have more messy boundaries around that.  Can't easily even identify some of our boundaries.  Ergo, when we can't ID those boundaries, we don't even communicate them well.  Poor men.  No wonder they are ready to throw their hands up in the air in frustration and utter, "Oye!  Women!  Who can understand them!  She doesn't even know what she wants!"  No, in many cases, she doesn't.  It's buried. Or by the time we can ID a boundary, we have hit like nuclear warfare annihilation.  The, I won't take this anymore or I'm leaving and walking out on you.  And women in our chat groups will affirm this behaviour with each other, sometimes even encouraging it when a couple is in a Relationship already.  Once in a relationship, the rules of engagement are we have agreed to communicate and to strive to communicate through difficulties.  Not walk out on each other when the going gets tough.  Yup, that's commitment.  So, yes, this article could over in the Relationship Articles section as well.  But I thought I better help you early on in your foundation building towards a Relationship as well so you GET THERE. 

So, with Kevin's Millionaire Mind  program, you can actually EXCAVATE a lot of what is driving you about LOVE, FOOD, TIME and MONEY.  He also then walks you through step by step how to unplug those self-sabotaging mechanisms.  As you are listening to his voice on the CD after you order it and actually get it in the mail (They ship it out really fast, so cooly enough, you can be doing this in a couple of days as opposed to like 6 wks from now after you've lost the impetus.), and he gives you the exercises to do about MONEY on CD number 3, do the exercises around MONEY.  Then replace the word MONEY with LOVE or FOOD for the exercises and see what comes up for you. 

People ask me all the time for advise about how to address what is essentially a symptom of the cumulative effect of poor communication which resulted from simply having buried our feelings and buried even KNOWING how we felt about a situation.  Which results in the poor man feeling smothered and panicked over the idea of marriage and committed relationship (associating it with PRISON in his mind) and the woman is PUSHING for that (associating it with SECURITY. PEACE.  FREEDOM in her mind.).

You can see how this will result in major problems.  No wonder more couples are avoiding actually making the commitment to MARRY these days.   And some preachers, bless their hearts, then preach about how great marriage is, how it is designed by God in the Bible for our mutual joy and benefit.  But if they don't help equip us with tools to identify and work through the real problems in our self-sabotage, we'll avoid marriage or get married and STILL have those problems making marriage a misery where the only relief is DIVORCE.  Are you crying yet just thinking about it?  Yes, it's frustrating and upsetting. 

Part of the thing is, our Self-Sabotage mechanisms are there as a actual communication.  What we self-sabotage for is itself a communication.  When I overeat, I am communicating, like a 3 year old, that we want attention and probably didn't feel safe to actually communicate in a health productive manner what it is that we are actually feeling.  And the compensating behavior with FOOD, TIME, and MONEY (or other comps like cigarettes or other THINGS) then actually so stuffs and numbs the feeling, that over the years, we often don't even KNOW what it is that we are really feeling.

Now, I am not promising that Kevin's Millionaire Mind  program is The Magic Pill to change Allll the things in your life so that MAGICALLY EVERYTHING works!  (Can't you just see the flashing image, Buy Now!  Buy Now!)  Yeah, right.  Oye.  Yeah, I'll just sit back and it will allll happen magically on it's own.  No.  But you will find that it is an incredibly helpful and practical tool with LOADS of content.  169 pages.  14 CDs.  And not those crappy 10 minute audio files that some places put out under the name of other world famous teachers.  Kevin's stuff is actually content-rich.  Well, like his website.  LOTS to help you. 

What I will also recommend to you as a best practice is that you go through the materials.  When you do CD 3, have paper and pen ready to do the exercises.  Do a thorough once through then with all the CDs.  You'll be implementing galore and seeing better results in multiple areas of your life.  And then let's say once a quarter early on Sunday morning when everyone else is asleep and you can get some quiet time again, go through CD 3 again.  Innnnterestingly enough, you may have the same things you are working on.  You will have experienced some excellent, excellent improvement.  But now, well, there are still some nuances to work on.  Or you got ride of and unplugged the level 13 nuclear annihilation tool.  But you're still shooting yourself in the foot with a level 7.....  Do the exercises again.  Like getting your car tuned up, this is a program you will want to do repeatedly to continue to build upon the strong foundation you are starting to build now.  In 6 months, you will add another layer.  Think of it as building a really good house.  Right now you are digging the hole for the foundation and pulling up roots that would ruin the concrete. 

After you have done this sort of work, then talking about advise and tactics to use in relationships makes sense.  Without it, we're just moving about sun chairs on the deck of the Titannic.

After you have gone through the materials once, done all the exercises and are implementing some different approaches and behaviours, yes, go ahead and email me at apriljbraswell@aol.com for some coaching for actual implementation support and coaching.  I'd be happy to help. 

All the best and blessings,

April Braswell