“Money doesn’t change people, it reveals them.” (Unknown)
Many years ago, I was at a seminar when the speaker ran a little game. He asked everyone to stand up, take a note out of their wallet, walk around the room, and make sure you ended up holding a different note to the one you started with. That was the basic instruction.
What happened next was extraordinary. For five minutes the room was in chaos. People were snatching notes out of each other’s hands. Some ended up with far less than they started with, a few walked away with double or triple, and lots of people were genuinely upset, some even in tears, saying they always get ripped off. All over a simple instruction that was completely misread by so many.
The Simple Thing Nobody Did
When it finally settled, the speaker asked people to put their hand up according to the note they had originally pulled out, from a hundred-dollar note all the way down to a five. He suggested, gently, that the ones who reached for the biggest notes were often showing off a little, and the ones who pulled out the smallest sometimes carried a tighter, more worried relationship with money. You could call that judgement. There was a grain of truth sitting underneath it, and the next part landed like a ton of bricks. The instruction had been simple.
Any one of us could have quietly swapped a note for another of the same value with the person beside us or simply taken a note of the same denomination out of our own wallet and swapped it. The game was only to end up with a different note, and it could have been over in seconds. Almost nobody did that. As it happened, I had swapped a note with the person next to me without even realising the chaos unfolding around me.
You Play As You Are
Then he said the line I still carry with me. ‘You play as you are.’ The people who got ripped off, the ones who lost their money, the ones who grabbed and doubled theirs, they do the exact same thing in their life. The game did not make anyone greedy, fearful, aggressive or passive. It simply revealed what was already inside them.
That is the uncomfortable truth. How you play the game of life, how you handle money, pressure, people and opportunity, is a mirror of who you are on the inside. Put a hundred of us in the same room with the very same rules, and we will each play it completely differently, because we are each bringing a different inner world to it.
The Game Changes When You Do
If how you play comes from who you are, then changing who you are changes the whole game. When you play from ‘The Tip,’ the fearful, cluttered, scarcity-driven place, you tend to grab, panic, protect and lose. When you play from ‘The Garden,’ calm, clear and trusting that there is enough, you move differently, and so do the results. As a hypnotherapist, this is the work I love most, helping people shift who they are on the inside, while the outer game quietly transforms.
A Question to Sit With
This week, carry one gentle question with you. And please hear it with no judgement, we have all grabbed, panicked or frozen at times, it is part of being human, and most of it was simply how we learnt to play:
‘When life hands me any game, how am I playing it, and is that really who I want to be?’
‘You play as you are.’ Change who you are on the inside and watch how differently the whole game begins to play out.’
Have a great week,
Michael
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