Pleasurable Money Podcast Transcription

Episode 26 | How to Get Over Impulse Spending

PODCAST INTRO:

This is the pleasurable money podcast. Hi, I'm Meaghan and I'm the divine alien driving this here spaceship. I'm a pleasurable money coach with over a decade of experience in finance. During that time, I've learned that a mix of systems and spirituality makes a perfect blend. I have helped hundreds of spiritual business owners heal their relationship with money, and I'm here to teach you how to become money's ride or die.

Stop treating money like a booty call using the help of tools like breathwork and pleasure, which will be featured on this podcast and learn from me and other experts about how to own your wealth. Together, we will break down what it looks like to be in relationship with money and to be in full embodiment with your pleasure.

MEAGHAN WALL:

This is the first episode back after my rebrand of the sacred wealth podcast. It is now the pleasurable money podcast. Hi. Hello. Welcome. Welcome. I'm going to jump right in to a question that I received from a friend and client. And the question is "How can I accumulate cash, and then exercise self control with my impulsive spending?

And then she says, and do I need a conservator? Sorry, Britney"

this is such a great question, because I think a lot of people struggle with how to control themselves when the impulse has become a habit, the instant gratification has become the habit and they have no idea how to walk into a store and resist their every impulse, their every want. And I have a few things to say about this, and I'm going to give you a few tips as well.

But the important thing to understand is that it is an impulse and once you become more and more aware of it, it becomes easier and easier to control or to, I don't want to say control because that, to me, uh feels a little bit restrictive, but I really would like to say it becomes easier to address.

Once we have awareness of our impulses. Once we can admit that we have a problem or that we have a habit or behavior that we'd like to change, then we can bring those behaviors into the conscious brain. Because an impulse, a habit, is a subconscious behavior. A habit is something you've taken the time, weeks upon months, upon years, doing the same behavior over and over again, so that it becomes subconscious.

So if the impulse is a habit, we get to take the time, the weeks, the months, the years to replace it with the habit that feels more aligned to us. An impulse is merely a lizard brain reaction to pretty packaging or advertising or marketing that speaks to us in a way that triggers something in our brain.

That's like, "wow, that's pretty. I want that!" The impulse becomes out of control when we are not able to slow down and address it. As we learn what our impulses are, the more frequently we're able to bring them into the conscious brain, the slower and less instant those impulses become. Suddenly we're able to become aware of the impulse in our conscious brain.

Whereas a month ago we would have grabbed that very beautiful pillow and put it in our cart immediately without second guessing, without thinking about it until we were unpacking our groceries into the car. Suddenly we find ourselves being able to say, "oh wow, that's so beautiful. I really want that!" And then bringing the question into our mind of, "do I desire that?" This is my first tip.

AD BREAK:

This episode of the Pleasurable Money Podcast is sponsored by the Drip Money Membership. Drip is a group coaching, pleasure-centered membership, where we infuse ritual into your relationship with money. Inside the membership vault, you will find my signature Sacred Money Method, meditations, Q and A's, moon ceremonies, and so many other tools to help you on your journey.

When you devote your energy to your relationship with money by joining this membership, everything changes. Your connection to self deepens. Your affair with spending and receiving becomes fun. And your alignment with your authenticity becomes downright sensual.

Forge new relationships with other spiritual entrepreneurs, prioritize money and life by joining Drip now.

MEAGHAN WALL:

Wants versus desires. To me, "desire" is a body word, "desire" stirs something up deep inside me makes my heart flutter. It makes my stomach fill with butterflies. "Desire" is a deep feeling. "Want" feels very surface. "Want" is a mind word. So when we take that word "want", and we drop it down into our body. It becomes desire.

And this is where the slowness to respond will come in handy because we're able to bring up this question of, "is this a want, or is this a body desire?" Do I deeply desire this? To where it becomes a carnal need. And I hope that you can conjure up something in your brain that, that you can relate this to.

And it could be something, you know, purely physical, like that pillow. You needed that pillow, it lit you up in all the right places, started to make you tingle in all the right places. And you knew that that purchase was going to be so soul aligned that you had no questions about it. And I want to be clear here when we can be so fucking lit up about our purchases, this is when money becomes pleasurable.

And I also want to be clear that if you're paying a bill and it makes you fucking angry so much so that it ignites something inside you, that you're gonna, that you, you know, swear to yourself, you make this oath to yourself that you're going to somehow change this bill. That's also pleasurable because it's igniting something inside of you.

And my definition of pleasure is feeling anything. Anything at all. The opposite of pleasure to me is ambivalence, is boredom. Pleasure is life. Pleasure is anger, fear, desperation, even. Deep desire is pleasure. So let's talk about this word "desire" because maybe desire's not doing it for you and I, if you know me, I, you know that I love to find, I love my thesaurus.

I love to find different words for something that doesn't make my body react. So I've pulled up my thesaurus.com here. I've got desire, and I wanted to offer you a few different alternatives to the word desire so that you can evoke this feeling from your body. So when you go to ask yourself, "do I desire this? Or do I just want this?"

The desire is what's creating an evocative response. Okay. So a few of the words that I want to give you are appetite, craving, devotion, hunger, lust, need, passion, thirst, yearning. Is this a yearning or is this a want? Can you feel the difference between those two words in your body? Want feels so, ah, like lame, you know? What about ravenous or veracity?

I feel voracious for this purchase, not just, I want this. How silly does that sound? If we weren't talking about a problem with impulsivity, if we weren't talking about this, this habit of impulsive spending, I would say there's absolutely nothing wrong with a want. Sometimes it feels good to be bad, right?

Like doing the thing that we know we're not supposed to do by spending money on a want can feel so deliciously dirty. But when we're working on creating a new habit from a habit that has been destructive to our lives for so long, it's important to place so much importance on every single purchase. Because as it is right now, the spending is not important.

The spending is frivolous. When we are so in alignment with our authentic code, that we don't have a problem with impulsive spending. Speaking of your authentic code, let's talk about my second tip. And that is to know what is important to you so deeply that it becomes etched into your rib cage, etched into your bones, etched into your heart.

You know yourself so deeply that you would never spend money on something that doesn't align with your values. For instance, if you and I were working together, we would come up with a list of categories that you could easily take each of your purchases and filter that purchase through your categories.

Some common categories I've come across in my work have been supporting local small businesses, organic whole produce, travel, luxury, convenience. So let's take the pillow purchase, for example, if that was your list, the categories that I just mentioned, you would take this pillow and run it through each of your categories.

Does this help me travel? No, not necessarily, unless it's like a very luxurious sleep, you know, airplane, pillow, in which case go for it. How about is this helping me support local small businesses? Well, I'm in Target, so that's a no. Is this luxurious? Well, let me read the, the materials tag that's on the side and see if it's made of mostly polyester or plastic materials.

Maybe it's a hundred percent cotton. Maybe it's a hundred percent silk, and that is luxurious to you. In which case, go for it. So you can kind of see how building this list, it doesn't have to be super long, it can be three to five major categories that stick out to you the most that feel like your soul put into words, so that you can start to, again, bring these impulsive urges into the conscious brain and become aware of them so that we have some semblance of calmness around them.

I don't want to say control. I want to say calmness. So that it's not causing our nervous system to become out of whack. You ever get that feeling where like, you may have had a thought and then you immediately forget it, but it stays in the body for a while.

And you're like, man, why do I feel like this? All of a sudden, you remember? Oh yeah. Earlier I was thinking about that thing I got to do that I didn't do today. That's, that's what happens with this subconscious impulse. You have a spark of a thought and then it's gone, but it hangs out in the body for longer than the thought could even begin to hang and you feel, you know, uncomfortable and squirmy and anxious, and you have no idea why. But when we're able to bring the decision-making out of the lizard brain, out of the subconscious brain and into the conscious, adult brain.

That's when we make solid, calm, confident decisions. I talk about this a lot when I talk about my CEO archetype. My CEO archetype, my CEO self - she is calm, she is strong, she is confident. She walks into that boardroom in her beautiful - oh, I usually think of it as like a deep green, like a forest green power suit with a blazer and the - and the slacks and the heels.

And I just look like I am here and I'm in charge and I'm not going to take shit from anybody. That's what my conscious brain looks like to me. And when I'm able to bring these unconscious decisions that are being made for me, pretty much. That are being made from my habit and not from my authentic self, then my CEO self gets to feel like a fucking bad-ass.

Lastly, I want to leave you with a tip about systems. So I teach on a system called profit first. You've heard me talk about it before, if you've listened to this podcast or, or follow me for any amount of time on social media, but profit first allows you to separate your money in real life, in your bank accounts, and also in the buckets in your brain.

Instead of having all of your money compiled into one account where you're like, ah, I dunno, like it's so fuzzy. Like, I don't know what's for bills. I don't know what's for fun money. I don't know what's for my emergency fund. Implementing profit first assigns every dollar a purpose.

So you know that you only have $200 a month to impulse spend. So once that $200 is up is up, is gone, there's no more. The system allows you to separate out your bill's money from your impulse spending money. It allows you to account for you to impulse spend, especially if you're in this like baby stages of creating a new habit.

And you're like, okay, great, Meaghan, I'm going to start creating this new habit tomorrow. I'm going to be so good. I'm going to, I'm going to do it tomorrow, but I've been doing this impulse spending thing for years. And I don't know how long it's going to take for me to allow myself to begin and maybe mess up and begin again and maybe mess up because we want to allow for us to be human, right?

Like we want to give us, give ourselves some slack. So implementing profit first accounts for you to be human. It gives you the space to have your bills paid and also gives you money to play with and maybe blow accidentally. And the next month you're like, okay, I'm going to be better this month. I'm going to only blow $50 instead of a hundred dollars, but you have that padding built into the system.

It is a masc- masculine structure. Built for your feminine to be able to flow and play inside. And if you want to think about it, think about it like an adult structure that your 30 year old self, your 25 year old self has created for your child to play in, if that feels better than you can think about it, that way.

If you sign up for my newsletter, which is in my link tree, on my website, on my link tree on Instagram, on TikTok all the places, you can download or add to your Google drive a free profit first spreadsheet. And I teach entrepreneurs every single day, how to use this system to organize their finances, to have enough money to save for taxes, for business expenses, for owners pay.

And there's even a section on that spreadsheet for your personal finances as well. Bills, savings account, daily expenses, and even an investment account. These accounts, the spreadsheet that I created for you, is based on the exact accounts that I use every day and have been using for I think over five years now in my business and in my personal life.

So sign up for the newsletter, add that free Google sheet to your Google drive and DM me on Instagram if you'd like to sign up for a 90 minute Jam Session so that we can implement this system into your bank.

Okay, so just to wrap up and to review, the three tips that I provided today in this episode were identifying what's a want versus a desire. What is a want versus a lust or a yearning or a craving or a devotion? These body words. Introduce body words into your money journey and everything will feel so much more clear. Number two was identify your authentic money code, which is something I also teach in my signature Sacred Money Method.

You can get that experience inside of my private coaching or inside of my money membership, inside of Drip. I have my Sacred Money Method inside of Drip. So you can get that there as well. And then lastly, I highly recommend introducing some sort of tool where you can segregate your money into buckets so that in your mind, and in real life, every dollar has a purpose.

Okay. I love you so much. I'll see you next time.

PODCAST OUTRO:

You've been listening to the Pleasurable Money podcast. If you want to attract more money into your life, subscribe to Pleasurable Money wherever you listen. And if you learned something today, DM this episode to a friend. Reviews help this podcast reach the rest of the world, so if you leave a five-star review on iTunes, it could be featured in a future episode.

Love you so much. Bye.