For quite a few years, in celebration of Mother’s Day weekend, my mom and I have run the half-marathon in Santa Barbara. When my daughter turned 16, she also started running with us.
The funny thing is that I never saw myself as a “marathon kind of person”. I didn’t grow up running… certainly never more than a few hundred yards at a time. I also still can’t quite believe that I have a daughter old enough to run a half-marathon – much faster than I run it by the way. When she first asked if she could join us, it occurred to me that what started as a bit of a lark, has now become a sort of tradition. Each year, I marvel at the fact that there are three generations of our family out there together… and find myself imagining the day that I might run the race with my own granddaughter – who’ll stand (having already had time to shower and change) cheering for her Granny as I cross the finish line.
Traditions are interesting because, like this race, we don’t always know that we’re creating them. And our traditions can easily spread way beyond particular holidays and events. You wake up one day and realize that you have a particular way of doing things or a particular belief system. You can’t necessarily say why you do (or believe) what you do… maybe it’s just the way your parents did things, and your grandparents before them.
This may not be a problem when it comes to Thanksgiving that absolutely cannot happen without your family Ritz cracker stuffing… but when it comes to our beliefs about money and the way that we handle our finances – tradition can be a bit less positive.
My parents both grew up in foreign countries in the kind of poverty that many of us cannot imagine. They came to this country for university – both ultimately becoming successful professionals.
These were some of the positive belief systems that they passed on to me:
- If you put your mind to it – there is absolutely nothing you cannot accomplish.
- Where you are starting from does not have to have anything to do with where you end up.
- As soon as you are able, use your success to help your family, friends, and others, with the support they need to improve their own lives.
But there were also ideas about money and success that it took me years to question; and that, while they may have served my parents on their journeys, actually became obstacles to my own progress and development:
- If you’re not willing to suffer and struggle and suffer some more… you cannot expect to have anything good in your life.
- Intelligent, hard-working people get advanced degrees and choose careers like law, medicine, or perhaps investment banking… they most definitely do not pursue acting.
- Success is marked by regular salary increases, homes, vacations and other purchases that indicate stability.
This week, I’d like to ask you to take some time to look at your inherited financial traditions and beliefs. Without judgment, try to list your own ideas about money… Put down the ones you know you learned from your parents or other adult figures/mentors. Do you have money beliefs but you’re not sure where they came from? List those too.
Once you have a list, I suggest you highlight all of the beliefs that are NOT actually serving you. This doesn’t mean that they’ll magically disappear. But by bringing consciousness to ideas that we have unconsciously accepted as TRUTH – we can begin to develop our own financial understanding – rather than simply moving forward blindly with the viewpoints that were passed on to us.
Starting right now, we each have the ability to create our own traditions – financial and otherwise. We can start a tradition of saving, of donating to causes we believe in, of tracking our expenses and earnings, of giving gifts that are meaningful without being expensive. Yes – dear one, these all count as traditions! And we can build them not only with our families – whatever those may look like – but also with our friends, our colleagues and with anyone who matters in our lives.
Years from now, when my daughter is asked how she is celebrating Mother’s Day, her natural response may be: “Oh, the women in my family always run a half-marathon that weekend.” And this, I think, as long as everyone involved is still enjoying themselves…will make me quite happy. By constantly bringing awareness to our own financial beliefs, to the financial traditions that may exist in our families, and to the financial conversations we have with all of our loved ones, we can hope that our “money traditions” will also be largely healthy and empowering.
