According to a recent survey, money is the number one worry for many Americans, ranking higher than health, family and even work. So, it’s no secret that feeling anxious and stressed at the thought of more money going out than coming in, is a familiar and overwhelming thought experienced by Americans across the country.
Former Bank Manager, finance coach and Wealth Creators facilitator, Canan Bekdik, knows firsthand what it is like to find yourself starting over later in life, and to recover from the experience of financial disaster. When Canan’s husband quit his job in 2004 and they retired to a small fishing village, they ended up losing everything they owned – and still had rising debt that threatened their future. Canan realized she had two choices: give in and continue to struggle, or to rise up, recover and thrive.
“My husband’s decision to quit his job and move to the seaside village, created a sort of disaster for our financial status,” Canan explains. “It was our mounting credit card debts that made me stand up and start doing what I truly wanted in life and end our financial troubles in the process.”
Canan now helps others rise above their own money issues to create wealth and success. Some of her top tips include:
1. How can you look at your financial situation differently?
When you focus on your financial situation as a problem, you keep struggle, difficulties, sadness, and anxiety in place. It is important to be aware that this mindset won’t work for you. If you want a way out of financial problems, you must put your attention on creating possibilities.
Rather than wondering “How do I fix this?” ask questions like: “What choices do I have to change this and make it easier?” “What other income streams can I explore that will allow me to create more money?” “What action can I take to create more revenue today and for the future?”
2. Is there an easier way?
Even if you are not happy with your finances, money struggles can be a comfort zone because it is the most familiar – many of us were raised in families or communities where financial stress or problems were considered the “norm.”
In addition to this, we’re often taught that achieving even a little success requires a lot of hard work and effort. It doesn’t actually need to be that way. Changing your perceptions about working hard can be as simple as asking, “Is there an easier way?”
It’s interesting how we adopt that struggling is right thing in this reality. Instead what if we could invite ease into our life? An Invitation of ease into our life can open the door to a life of kindness. Kindness is easiness. Taking care of ourselves is an act of kindness.
3. Take care of yourself, and step out of the self pity loop.
Spending time wondering why this is happening to you won’t help you change it. Stop looking for the reasons for your struggles. Stop judging yourself and your situation, and instead ask, “What else is possible?” “What else can I choose?” Asking these will open doors to finding new ways forward.
Asking “Why” keeps you in the loop. It keeps you in a hamster circle. “Why” is not a correct question. It is necessary to ask questions, but asking questions is necessary for creating awareness and possibilities. “Why” cannot create awareness. It keeps us in place where we don’t want to be. Take care of yourself, so that your mind and body are able to function optimally in your business or work through times of stress or tension. This will allow you to be aware and clear, to alleviate anxiety, to choose the right steps forward for you, when it is more important than ever to be so.
4. What changes can you make today?
Attempting to control outcomes takes a lot of energy – it creates more struggle. Rather than fixating on specific results, remain open to different ways for change to occur and don’t be limited by your imagination. A great question to ask is, “What change can I make today to create a greater outcome in the future?” Having a clear strategy to make the changes you need to manage your debt, relieves pressure and tension that may build. Focusing on problem will lead you to a conclusion. It can block creative and solution-based thinking. That conclusion stays forever and never changes. Focusing on joy is the easiest way of changing the problem we created.
5. Have long-term vision and don’t quit.
Lastly, you must have long-term vision and never give up on what you desire to achieve. Financial success and change do not happen overnight. Sit down and do some goal-setting journalling and exercises to help you visualize what you wish for your future business, career and life to be. Do this on a regular basis, or post a vision board in your office to look at daily, to keep your vision clear and inspired.
Once you are clearer, you can be the future you wanted to see. What does that mean? Whatever the thing you wanted to happen in the future you should bring it to present, thus you can create your future. In order to make this to present now, take the energy of all the things you asked and bring them here to existence.
For Canan, it was nine years of making different choices that created a path to the business and financial success she has today.
“When you have a vision and you never give up, no matter what and when you do not stop creating, you can have the future you actually want at any time,” Canan advises.
Canan Bekdik was a bank manager who became a full time mum before reinventing herself as the breadwinner of her family by introducing Access Consciousness workshops to Turkey in 2009. Canan is a Wealth Creators Anonymous facilitator, a specialty program of Access Consciousness, and is a national TV show host of her own program on Business Channel Turkey. She has touched hundreds of people’s lives and supported them to make money, move into more aligned career paths and choose happiness. Other areas she supports clients in include: Smoking Cessation, Awareness Cultivation, Access Energetic Slimming, Freedom from Parents and Suicide Prevention
