Finances
Making the Shift to
FINANCIAL FREEDOM:
You Must Believe
By: Vincent K. Harris
5 Things
You Need to
Know About
Your Why
by Cheryl Pullins, CPC
On a beautiful summer day, I took a drive to
Washington, DC to meet with one of my coaching
clients. The drive is about forty-five minutes from
my house, and I used it as an opportunity to reflect
on some things.
While driving, my mind began to wander and I
started thinking about my best friend of seventeen
years, Janice.
Let me give you a little background.
The only limitation you have in life is how you think. Now that
you have removed or taken out the trash, let’s now put the
truth about money into your mind. Understand, it’s a difficult
process because our society and our systems (e.g. school,
media, etc.) endorse the trash. You will feel like an odd ball as
you begin to think exactly the opposite from the masses that
spend a lifetime struggling financially without understanding
why. Here are your new realities you must embrace to succeed.
You must believe….
The purpose of a salary is to buy assets, not just to pay bills.
The cash flow from your assets should pay your bills and buy
your luxuries. If you use your salary only to pay your bills and
debts, how do you get ahead in life? It is important in life to
pay your bills as they arise. You must remember the primary
purpose of the salary is to purchase assets. You want the cash
flow from the assets to pay your bills even though you continue
to collect a salary.
You need multiple sources of income and any one of them
alone should adequately provide an enjoyable lifestyle for you
and your family. You must quickly understand one source of
income jeopardizes your current lifestyle. It is important to
have multiple sources of income from jobs, self-employment,
businesses, investments, and real estate. Each one of them
should individually provide enough income alone to provide
18 W O M E N O F S T A N D A R D . O R G
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NOVEMBER 2013
for your family. Your salary and self-employment income
should only be temporary sources of money until you learn
how to obtain assets (real estate, investments, and businesses).
An informal education will make you a fortune, but a formal
education will make you a living. School teaches you just
enough to have the qualifications and understanding of a job
that makes someone else wealthy. However, it’s the informal
education you obtain from seminars and successful mentors
that will help you to become wealthy.
Money is only an idea; those who lack money simply lack ideas.
The best source of money is ideas you have learned to turn into
assets. Money will always follow an idea whose time has come.
If you spend just as much time thinking as you do looking for
a job, you will never lack money.
You need a team to be successful. You will never reach your
full financial potential without a team. Your team is required to
help you solve financial problems, stretch your mind, think at
levels you never thought existed, and to allow you to take on
projects you never could have done alone. Principle: One is too
small of a number for greatness!
Once you master these realities life begins to change for the
better, fast. What you believe about money (your realities) is
more important than what you know about money.
When I met Janice she had been recently widowed
and I was going through a nasty divorce. Our
children went to the same school, which is how I
met her. We developed one of the most amazing
friendships an individual could ever want. She was
truly my sister from another mother. My friendship
with Janice was my first experience of having a
true sisterhood where there was absolutely no
judgment, just genuine care and love.
Our friendship was such that we had a pact, if one
had money, the other had money. Period.
During the course of our friendship my life began
to change and I made significant changes and
started on my path to understanding my purpose
and how I fit into God’s bigger plan.
I wanted Janice to go with me and grow with me. But
that didn’t happen. I made a couple unsuccessful
attempts at getting her to assess where she was
in her life and had committed to helping her move
beyond where she was to where she really wanted
to be in her purpose and life.
The last time I hung out with Janice was July
2010. My husband and I were living in Florida and
she came to the area to attend a conference. We
planned to spend a day together, and we did.
During our time together I brought up the
conversation about moving her life forward. She
tried to avoid talking about it, but I wouldn’t let
her. I wanted her to hear my heart, and I wanted
her to know she had a bigger purpose for living.
It was no secret we both knew she wasn’t living
to her fullest.
That day she heard my heart and agreed that she
needed to make some adjustments if she was
going to live to life to her fullest potential.
Three months passed. It was time for Janice to
celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The weekend before
her birthday her son threw her a big celebration.
She had hit the milestone age of fifty. We had our
usual text messaging banter. She said she would
call me the next day. She didn’t.
It was a Wednesday afternoon, when I would take
my usual mid-week trip to the mall, but this time
I decided to stop at the shoe store first. While
walking through the store I was checking my social
media stuff and saw that I had an inbox message
from Janice’s cousin. She wanted me to call her.
I thought it kind of unusual. Immediately after
that, my phone buzzed with a text message from
my daughter. She asked if I had heard about “Aunt
Janice.” By this time my heart was racing, my hands
were sweaty and I needed to find out what was
going on.
I started walking back to the front door of the store
while dialing the phone to call Janice’s cousin. In
my mind, the worse news I would hear is that she
had been a bad car accident. Janice loved driving
and often times drove while she was tired. But
the words I heard caught me by total surprise and
shock.
While standing outside the door of the shoe store,
I heard that my best friend of seventeen years had
died. She had died in her sleep two days after her
fiftieth birthday.
I was devastated. Not only had I lost my best friend
of seventeen years, I knew something that many
didn’t know – she never lived the life she truly
desired.
Knowing she had so much potential and that she
knew she had never reached her full potential, it
broke my heart.
You may be wondering, why I shared this story.
During my drive to Washington, DC I connected
with my true why. Yes, I have a desire to have
things, experience things and make a difference in
the lives of women, but it is on a much deeper level
than I initially realized.
My massive global why is that I want to do
everything I can to empower every woman I can
reach to live to their fullest potential. I will share
my gifts, my talents and my abilities to mobilize
women to get started and take action now. Don’t
put your dreams off for another moment. Don’t
wait until perfect. Perfect will never come. Now is
the time. This is your time. Seize every moment and
opportunity to live your dreams.
My why is bigger than things and much greater
than stuff. It is motivated by the death of my best
friend of seventeen years who took her dreams to
her grave, and driven by my passion to do what I
can to ensure that no woman is left behind.
Here are five things you must know about your
why:
1.
It’s the thing that motivates you to keep
going, no matter what.
2.
Your why helps to put your on the path to
your purpose, your mission in life.
3.
You will discover more about yourself
than you thought you knew.
4.
Knowing why you do what you do
connects you with the people you have
been called to serve.
5.
Why you do what you do is more
important that what you do.
Take a look at your major life centers (finances,
spiritual, relationship, health, professional) and ask
yourself two simple questions, “What am I doing
and WHY and I doing it?”