Patricia Reichgott O’Connor coined the term "financial cleansing" several years ago to describe what she teaches in her weekend workshops and in her private consultations with clients.

Financial Cleansing is designed to identify the emotional issues and limiting beliefs you have about money that keep you from reaching your financial goals. Maybe you have found yourself battling a "financial set-point." As with weight, this “set point” is a level of prosperity (or poverty) to which you seem to return despite your best efforts. Financial Cleansing helps uncover why you cannot move significantly away from that level. For example, some people have a deeply ingrained fear that financial success would compromise their integrity. Until you understand your reasons for holding your “set point," your best financial intentions are doomed to failure.

Here are some principles that Patricia Reichgott O’Connor uses to help you move away from your “financial set point” for good:

1. Money Is Energy
What is money, really? For many of us, it's simply a tool to "look prosperous." Money provides the means to buy the right car, the snappiest clothes, the latest high-tech cell phone or computer. In practical terms, however, we exchange our life’s energy for money.

 

Ask Yourself:

What do you get in return for the life energy you spend at your job? What does “looking prosperous” cost you in terms of time, pleasurable activities deferred, and frustration?

2. What Money Buys You — or How Much Is Enough?

The purpose of money is to serve you -- to allow you to DO things, rather than to have things.

Ask Yourself:
Suppose your credit cards all had zero balances, your cars were paid for, and you owned your house outright. How much money would you need to live comfortably? And what would you do with your time?

3. Identify Your “Line”

Most of us have limiting beliefs about money. Before we can reshape our financial future, we need to identify the toxic messages that are sabotaging our personal vision of success.

Ask Yourself:
What image do you have of a person with money? How would that contradict your own notions of personal integrity?

4. Finding Your Occu-Passion

Finding your occu-passion means discovering what it is you are meant to do. When your work is your occu-passion, you'll find that the Universe supports you, often in unexpected ways.

Ask Yourself:
What are your special talents and strengths? What work is so central to who you are as a person that you'd do it even if nobody paid you?

5. Keeping The Precious Balance

As you move forward toward your goals, it's important to keep that special balance between excitement and fear. This is called your “growing edge.” If you're not excited, you won't have the energy to move forward. But if you're tackling a goal that feels too huge and scary, you'll be immobilized by fear or find ways to sabotage your progress.

Ask Yourself:
What steps can I take toward my goals that excite me? Where do I notice resistance creeping in?

6. Breakdown - or Rest Is A Four Letter Word

When we move too far too fast toward our goals, we often experience a "breakdown". Sometimes it's a sudden unhappy event: a car accident; a throbbing headache; the onset of a mysterious illness. Sometimes it's just the feeling that we'd like to go to bed for days and pull the covers over our head. When you experience a "breakdown", it's important to recognize it for what it is: a sign that it's time to simply rest.

Ask Yourself:
How have you pushed too far or too fast toward your goals? Can you give yourself permission to simply step back and take a nap?

7. Deliberate Creating

Remember that creating the life you want is a process. As you begin to build a future based on your most deeply cherished beliefs and goals, you'll discover tools that can help you: affirmations, visualization techniques, supportive financial workshops and seminars.

Ask Yourself:
What old beliefs are no longer serving you? What techniques continue to help you achieve your goals? What new techniques could you draw on to support you in creating the life that you want?

• A breakthrough in your understanding of how money works in your life.

• Develop a plan to rid you of your debt.

• See money and your relationship to it in an entirely new light.

• Develop a plan for financial independence.

• Understand what financial independence really means and know where you stand in relationship to being
  financially independent.

• Step outside of what has directed you in the past and move you into the possibility of your future.

• Dismantle limiting beliefs that hold you back.

• Begin to develop a vision of who you are in the world.