Jessica Irvine - Money with Jess

My name is Jess and I'm good at money. Bloody good, in fact.

And you can be, too.

I know, because I'm about to show you how.

Let's get started, shall we?

Before we get to the action parts of this book, where we organise your money and figure out where you want it to go, we need to stop for a hot minute and figure out how you currently think and feel about money.

In my career as a finance journalist, I've observed the way lots of people — such as readers, editors, fellow journalists, politicians and voters — think about money.

Overwhelmingly, I see people stuck in a pattern of thinking money is just too complex — too overwhelming — to understand. It's also common to believe that money is boring (this one hurts my soul!) or that it's just the case that some people suck at money.

The good news is that if you're one of those people who believe these things, honey, you're wrong. Don't feel too bad about it. An entire financial system exists that profits from your overwhelm. To fight it, you need to learn to manage your thoughts and emotions about money, which is what we're about to do now.

Perhaps some of us pop out of the womb knowing how to make good money decisions. But, believe me, most of us don't. The ability to manage money is a skillset that needs to be learned.

Unfortunately, many of us miss the memo and by the time we're old enough to control our money, we're already trapped in a toxic relationship with it.

We turn a blind eye to our overall financial position. We spend up big to calm our inner storms. We stick our heads in the sand and just hope our money problems will figure themselves out, one day. So much mental distress is caused this way and so much of it could be avoided, I believe, if we just took some time to really stare our money in the face. That's what this whole book is about.

But before we start looking at your personal money situation, I want to spend part I of this book really getting to the bottom of all the unhealthy attitudes towards money you may have unconsciously internalised — and then to help liberate you from them.

I'll teach you how to become a mini emotions detective, able to root out all the feelings you feel when you think about money. We'll then trace the origin of these emotions back to the thoughts you're having about money. And then, we'll replace those old thoughts with some more helpful ones.

Be warned: it might take some time and effort to really rid yourself of these unhelpful beliefs about money. But you'll feel so much better when you do, I promise!

It's never too late to start reframing your thoughts and feelings around money. So let's get into it.

I want you to start by really focusing on that word for a moment: MONEY.

Say it out loud with me: ‘MONEY’.

Or, if you're in a public place (and you haven't already embarrassed yourself), just really stare at that word on the page for moment: MONEY.

What emotion do you feel in your body when you see that word or hear it spoken?

MONEY

MONEY

MONEY

Don't worry. If you're anything like I was, you may struggle with this exercise.

I've been seeing a psychologist on and off for about half a decade now. These days, I usually enjoy our sessions — they're like a workout for my brain.

Most of my very early sessions, however, consisted of my kindly therapist bookending everything I said with the question, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ and me just shuffling uncomfortably in my seat and staring back somewhat blankly.

After one particularly difficult session, that dreaded question came up again: ‘How did that make you feel, Jess?’

‘Analytical’, I replied, adding, ‘Is analytical a feeling?’

‘No, Jess’, came the reply, ‘analytical is pretty much the opposite of a feeling’.

Oh.

It wasn't until one day when my therapist actually provided me with a potentially relevant word to describe my emotion that I began to connect the dots.

Truth is, unless you've been taught how, it can be difficult to recognise what emotion, or what combination of emotions (there can be many!) you are feeling at any point in time.

Yet it is so very important. Because emotions drive our behaviours; and it's our behaviours that produce our outcomes.

Now, I can almost hear you thinking, ‘But Jess, I am a very evolved person. I always put reason ahead of passion. I am not driven by my emotions!’

To which I say, ‘Bless you, dear reader. Yes, you are. You just don't realise it — yet'.

Despite our protestations to the contrary, so many of us these days exist in a perpetual state of emotional arousal. I used to have just one blanket word to describe how I was feeling: ‘stressed’.

When you are ‘stressed’ you spend quite a bit of time — and money — running around trying to distract yourself from that sensation with alcohol, comfort food, internet dating — or whatever your distraction of choice is. Been there, tried that.

Until you do the work to identify and label the root emotions you are actually feeling — sadness, fear, loneliness — you're really just running on a treadmill (and not the good kind that gets you fit!).

I don't think I deliberately set out to suppress my emotions. Well, not entirely. I think I just genuinely lacked a sufficiently rich vocabulary to describe the feelings I was experiencing in my body.

Realising this, my therapist quickly supplied me with a so‐called ‘feelings wheel’ or ‘emotions wheel’ to help me when I got stuck.

There are lots of different versions of this on the internet, the origin of which is contested. On the next page you will find one version that I like.

As you can see, in the centre of the wheel sit six core human emotional states: happy, sad, disgust, anger, fear and surprise. Psychologists disagree about which ones should occupy the central space, but these will do for our purposes.

Fanning out from the centre, you see ever more nuanced words to describe subsets of the core emotions. Let your eye roam over the middle and outer circles for a moment. Do you just feel sad? Or do you also feel despair or powerless? Do you feel just fearful, or also anxious and overwhelmed?

The reality is, you can feel multiple emotions, from different slices of the wheel, all at the same time.

These days, I keep a wheel just like this plastered in the front of every journal I write in. I refer to it regularly to help me identify my emotional state. I sometimes make it a personal challenge to name as many relevant emotions as I can!

I have found this simple act of naming my emotions to be an incredibly powerful tool for helping to dissipate the very emotions I'm feeling.

‘But Jess, what's all this got to do with money? I've read several pages of your book now and I still don't feel rich. What gives?'

Okay, let me come to the point.

I want you to now look at the emotions wheel and identify exactly which words apply to you when you think about money — either your own personal financial circumstances or the notion of money in general. You can circle the words on the page, or write a list in a separate notebook. Try not to judge yourself — nobody is watching. Just try to name as many relevant emotions as you can.

Here are a few of the very common ones people gravitate to:

scared

overwhelmed