Joan Sotkin
Month 6, Week 3
Prosperity Coach, speaker, author.
[These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The information on this audiocast is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.]
[Theme song playing]
ROBYN: Hello everyone and welcome to month 6 of the Self-Care Revolution™. My name is Robyn Benson. I’m a Doctor of Oriental Medicine and the founder of Santa Fe Soul. And I'm also one individual who is super excited about our weekend, Kevin.
KEVIN: Mm- hmm, oh my, gosh! The Bliss weekend! We are going to have a blast in bliss.
ROBYN: We are. And what's the definition of bliss?
KEVIN: Well, I think there are many. Norm who has his workshop before our weekend, he calls his oils that invigorate the chakra system as Bliss Oil. So, I'm really excited about that and having Norm Shealy here. We’re also excited to have many other speakers. And we’re very excited to have Joan Sotkin with us here today.
ROBYN: We’re very excited. Our month six is all about relationship to self, others, and money. Money is a big, big issue in today’s world. I think everybody has some connection to money one way or another, in a big or small way. I think it just continues to be something that impacts people’s daily life. Can you introduce yourself? We got sidetracked with the upcoming Bliss.
KEVIN: I'm Kevin Snow, The Desert Shaman. I work here in Santa Fe Soul.
ROBYN: Just so you know, the Bliss Weekend, why Self-Care Revolution™. So far, we are in our 6th month but it’s going to be a 12-month series and we’re certainly going to go into 2014. But this is really about a huge mission to completely transform healthcare as we know it on the planet by helping each person realize the absolute urgent need to practice self-care like never before. Because no matter what our precious little cells, we are as healthy as our cells and we’re being challenged in ways that we’ve never been before. And as much as we’re resilient, we are not ever going to become adaptable to certain, what do I call it, certain challenges, that we’re facing right now.
So anyway, this is also meant to help people. What we’re finding through our 55 speakers that we’ve had so far is that self-care is really about living your self purpose, your life purpose and really reconnecting to that essential self. That in today’s world, we’re living such a fast-paced life; we’re missing out on that.
Without further ado, we’re just going to go right to learning about our amazing speaker today, Joan Sotkin. And she also happens to be a friend of many of us at Santa Fe Soul Health and Healing Center. She lives here locally and she’s got a great message around money.
So Joan Sotkin has been helping people improve their relationship with money for over 25 years. She is the founder of the popular website ProsperityPlace.com, that’s www.prosperityplace.com, and author of the award-winning book, Build Your Money Muscles: 9 Simple Exercises for Improving Your Relationship with Money.
Joan is known for her insightful understanding of the connection between money and emotions and how family-of-origin experiences affect a person’s finances. Through her coaching and ongoing support program, Joan helps people adapt to the current economy so that they can find peace of mind and make wise financial decisions.
Again, thank you for being here, Joan.
JOAN: My pleasure. Glad to be here.
KEVIN: Awesome. Well, I thought where we’d start today with this topic is because this month is about relationship. I think some of our listeners might be asking, “How do you have a relationship with money?”
JOAN: Well if you look at it, I wanted to define what money is. Money is actually energy passing between two people or entities. If you look at that, it’s actually the energy of relationship, it’s energy passing between two people. And what I discovered along the way is that how you deal with money is how you deal with your relationship with yourself and others. Just as you have a relationship with yourself and others, you have a relationship with money. Everybody who uses money has a relationship with it. Every time you think that you don’t have enough or you're not using it well or there's not enough coming to you, that’s part of this relationship because it’s the same way you feel about your self or others. If you think you haven't got enough money, it really has nothing to do with money. It has to do with how you feel about your self.
So, your relationship with money, to me, money is a spiritual discipline because you can learn so much about your self by looking at how you deal or don’t deal with money.
KEVIN: Interesting. I definitely can relate to that. How did you get into this work?
JOAN: Well I came from a family where money was always an issue. My father was a compulsive debtor and my mother was considered a co-compulsive debtor. He’d come home and say, “I bought a boat.” And she’d go, “Cruise!” There was all this…he was the spender and she was the critical parent. My father was in business for himself and eventually went bankrupt. And I so I saw what that did to him and never really learned, they never saved any money. I never learned how to save money.
My brothers both became very successful financially. One was a sitcom producer in Hollywood, the other one a very successful businessman. And this was in the 70’s and early 80’s. And I couldn’t rub two pennies together. I asked the question, we come from the same family; we’ve got the same basic system. I had already gotten into metaphysics in the early 70’s and really believed that we create our own reality. I’d like to say we create our own life stories. And I wanted to know, well if that was true, why was I doing what I was doing and my brothers had done something very different? And that sent me on this path of trying to figure out (a) how exactly do we create our life stories and what could I do to change the outcomes of my life stories? And so, it’s been a study of mine and a practice on a daily basis since the early 70’s.
I mentioned at one point, once I started getting my act together, I built a business. My first business was Joan’s Crystals. I was selling crystals and minerals for healing and meditation nationwide. When I was sick, I figured I’d never get out of the house. So, I started learning mail order. And so, I started this mail order business and wound up with a showroom and a line of stones called Joan’s Stones that were in 600 stores.
In four years, I went from hardly earning anything to bringing in over $37 a month which, in today’s money, would be $50,000 a month. And I wound up going bankrupt because no one ever said to me cash flow management. I just kept buying more crystals. I had a Bookkeeper but I didn’t realize that I needed a Comptroller, not a Bookkeeper because the Bookkeeper just did what I told him.
That experience was very painful because I loved that business and losing it was very difficult. So, one of the reasons I teach what I teach today is because of that experience.
ROBYN: How long ago was this? Because you’ve been doing this business for 25 years right now, really helping people with their money.
JOAN: I was doing that when I was in the crystal business too. The crystal business was in the mid to late 80’s. And when that closed, I started something called ‘Build Your Business’. And in the early -- I lose track of the time. The early 90’s, I guess it was, I wrote ‘Prosperity is an Inside Job’. And that’s when I really started getting into this stuff and really beginning to understand how our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors affect our financial position.
ROBYN: Well so it’s great to hear your family-of-origin story and how you grew up. And then your own experience having success in one way and then ending up going bankrupt. So did that whole relationship….Money is just part of everyday life. There is no separation from our relationship with money. So, you wrote a book. Give us a little bit of scenario how these last 25 years have played out for you financially? And how you’ve gotten (inaudible).
JOAN: It’s been interesting because my goal wasn’t to get rich, because I knew enough rich people to know that that wasn’t going to be the pathway to happiness. I know a lot of wealthy people who aren’t very happy. And so, I knew that money wasn’t the answer. I was more interested in learning about money and what fascinated me was the connection between emotions and money. At the same time, I was on a very intense spiritual journey, wound up giving my things away for the first time in the early 70’s, I guess it was. And just listening to that inner voice and travelling around. I've given away everything I own on three different occasions. So I don’t measure…at the same time, I had a lot of physical problems. I was told I would never be healthy.
So the healing was not just financial. It was physical, emotional, and financial. So, my goal was not to get rich, it was to get healthy. That’s why I love the theme of your Self-Care Revolution™ because I had to figure out how to fix it because I knew that allopathic medicine was not my path. In the early 70’s, there wasn’t a whole lot of information. There was one health food store in California. I discovered in 1973 that I was really allergic to sugar and carbohydrates, and I gave up sugar in 1973. This is going to be my 40th anniversary on August 11th of not eating sugar, no fooling! Because if I eat it, I get depressed.
So, I had to get over being a depressed personality, being a sick personality, and the financial was just an extension of who I was. The more I got into the energy, the emotions in money, I just followed where I was led. And whenever I, I would go up and down, up and down. And when I was in the downs, it was like that’s when I knew I could really get to the emotion. Because when I have a lot of money, I feel fabulous. When it starts going low and I have to really manage the pennies, that’s when I get in touch with the emotions. And so, my goal was to get really clear emotionally so I could experience peace of mind and not worry about anything.
I had a spiritual teacher say to me in 1972, worrying is a waste of time. And I wanted to live that. I realize now that very few people, no matter how much money they have or don’t have, worry about money all the time. I don’t have to do that. And so, I'm comfortable with money now and make enough money to allow me to live what I consider a comfortable lifestyle. And I can decide how hard or not hard I want to work.
ROBYN: I just want to touch upon something you said. I mean, I've never heard of anyone who’s given up sugar for that long. Honestly, out of my 80,000 patients, I've never heard. Honestly, congratulations. That is a huge accomplishment. I just want to ask you, Joan. Where do you think you’d be if you didn’t make that choice financially? I mean how much do you think…(inaudible).
JOAN: First of all, I’d be dead because I was a suicidal depressive for 15 years. Two days after I gave up sugar, I wasn’t depressed anymore.
ROBYN: Well you know our first month with the Self-Care Revolution™ was all about Thoughts and Food as Medicine. Believe me, I see so many people who struggle with these food - sugar, carbohydrates issue. It affects productivity. That relationship with food is a big one in terms of prosperity.
JOAN: And finances, because you can't have the amount of ambition and energy you need if you're eating junk. It just doesn’t work. I can't eat any flour. The only food I can eat is apples. I'm really sugar-sensitive and carbohydrate-sensitive. And it’s worth it to me because, “I want to eat…” And food is not the most important thing in my life. I have more energy at my age than most people who are 20 years younger than I am. And I really see how the deleterious effect of eating that way.
And I have a lot of coaching clients who are in their 50’s and 60’s, “It’s too late…” No, it’s not. Sixty is a great age to start to reinvent yourself if you’ve got the energy. And since food is the fuel for your body, then it matters what you're eating.
ROBYN: Thank you for bringing this up.
KEVIN: So the relationships, how do you know when you have… and you’ve shared some of these already. But how do we know when we have unhealthy relationship with money or a healthy relationship with money?
JOAN: Ok, so signs you have a lousy relationship with money. And incidentally you can't get wealthy if you have a lousy relationship with money. I see people on the path who talk about abundance and prosperity and they don’t know anything about money. So, the two things don’t go together. If you spend so much that you're always living on the edge, if you carry an uncomfortable amount of debt, if you feel like you never have enough. In my book called ‘Build Your Money Muscles’, I talk about living it just enough, not enough, or more than enough. Most people live either just enough or not enough.
Would you like to save more? If you're not saving anything, you're probably saying, “Ahhh, I can't save any money.” ‘Can't’ is not a word that I buy into. If you suffer from financial vagueness syndrome, which means you're never quite sure how much money you have and as a result, you bounce checks and you look at your bank balance too often. And when you do look at your bank balance, you get these feelings of shame and your whole body contracts. It’s a contracted relationship if you undercharge for your work. If you hate to deal with money, people will say to me, “I want to get rich but I hate to deal with money.” I always laugh at that because it’s like, “Mommy, take care of me but I'm not going to tell you I love you.” Money is like people. It goes to people who love and take care of it, if you have a problem asking for money. So, those are just a few of the signs that you’ve got a lousy relationship with money.