Getting to the Bottom of Your Investing Fears
Feb 23, 2024
As-Salaam-Alaikum everyone! Welcome back to Muslim Women Invest.
Today, I want to discuss the concept of Raouf and it applies to our financial life, as well as give you first dibs on accessing my upcoming investing quiz!
A Raouf is a person who has empathy—a person who listens to understand, not to respond.
If you want to educate somebody, if you want to persuade somebody, if you want to make epic changes in your relationship with your children, with your parents, with your spouse, with your coworkers, and with your friends, you should embody this principle or this characteristic of the Prophet.
Here is how this applies to finances and money…and what it has to with an investing quiz.
Empathy for Money-Sensitive Individuals
Make no mistake: money is a sensitive topic. It is not often talked about openly, so when clients first start their journey toward financial literacy, they often struggle to open up about their money.
Making financial literacy accessible is what I’m here for. So when I have a client who works with me, my goal is to listen to whatever that client does have to say about their money, and I make sure I pause to understand their situation without jumping in or trying to save them or overwhelming them with solutions.
For example, I want to understand why someone doesn't invest. Sometimes it has nothing to do with money—instead, it has something to do with how money was spoken about when they were little.
Scarcity vs. Spending
If you have trouble investing, trusting some people with your money, or taking risks with your money, the reason may be hidden in the way your parents talked about money when you were little.
Did your parents have a scarcity mindset, where they always spoke about money as something finite that they never had enough of? That is very likely a root cause of your own fear around money.
Even if your parents had a healthy relationship with money, they may have ended up overly spending money and landed in debt, which could have also caused some timidity around spending or “risking” money.
This is important because if you do not understand what your fear is and where it is coming from, you will not be able to explain it to me, and I will not be able to lead you to a way of handling your finances that is going to be sustainable and feel like success to you.
Success means different things to different people, and if I don’t understand what is keeping you from achieving your goals on your own, it will be difficult to help you change that.
Childhood Lessons
It’s important to identify how was money spoken about when you were small, because children do not come out of their mother's womb with these preconceived notions about money. These conclusions are shaped in childhood.
As parents, we often don’t consider how a child is absorbing all of their parents’ fears at this stage. They’re making sense of the world and becoming self-aware through their own experiences, but they are also looking at the world through your eyes as parents.
So to identify the root of your fears, ask yourself what feelings come up when you think about money, then dive further to think about how was money spoken about when you were little.Just by asking these two questions, you’ll find a lot of emotions start to come out, and then we can finally identify where your biggest fear is stemming from.
In my methodology, I ask people to only invest whatever amount they're comfortable with every single month—an amount so insignificant that builds up their confidence. And that amount becomes easier to identify!
Take My Investing Quiz!
This is why I strive to be a Raouf; so I remember to listen closely to my clients and help them open up.
To help you get to the root of your investing struggles, I am coming out with an investing quiz that is going to answer questions about your investment personality type, the why behind how you think about money, and more!
You can opt in to this investing quiz now, and it will be available soon!
WORK WITH MIRAL:
Sign up for my investing quiz waitlist: https://www.invest4lifemk.com/quiz-waitlist
If you're ready to transform the trajectory of your life and the lives of your family members through investing, book a consultation with me: https://www.invest4lifemk.com/services
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