Holes in Your Socks = Holes in Your Plan

My big toe is longer than all the others. Sometimes it pushes through my socks right at the seam and creates the world’s most annoying hole. Throughout the day the hole gets larger and larger until it is cutting off all circulation in my toe.

It occurred to me recently that I have been finding that to be an acceptable part of my relationship with socks for about two decades. Once I realized I was doing it, I made this decision to stop. My coach, Difference Press author Tami Mathisen, taught me it was safe to discard anything in my home that I don’t 100% love. So out went the socks with holes and in came $500 worth of Cashmere socks from Neimann Marcus.

$500 on socks might sound like a frivolous spend to you and I get that. Clearly it did to me too considering my drawer full of holey socks. But what I’ve learned is living like you deserve to have great socks changes everything. Having a few, really nice things as opposed to lots of junk seems like it wouldn’t have a major trickle down effect in your life, but it does.

Let me explain.

I have a 2 ½ year old top-of-the-line Mac Book Pro. There was nothing broken with this computer. Most people would say, don’t fix what’s not broken. I realized though in every corporate job I ever had, every 2 – 3 years the IT Department would come around and replace my machines. Rarely did my work machines go until they crashed. With my personal machines, though, I would wait until disaster struck.

Now, in my life and in my business – whether we are talking socks or Macs – the question I ask myself is how would someone who makes $1,000,000 a year make this decision. It’s different than just saying money is no object. I didn’t have an extra $3,000 laying around for a new computer an ymore than I had $500 laying around for socks, but what I did have was the mindset to treat my toes with respect and to treat my business like a valuable asset that needs to be taken care of.

What I realized is that if I lived like I made $100,000 a month, some pretty revolutionary things started happening…Namely, I started MAKING $100,000 a month!

The day after I bought those $500 socks, I made $6,000. The day after I bought the new $3,000 Mac Book Pro, I made $22,000.

I do think something happens in your brain on a purely scientific level of retraining yourself or rewiring what you think is possible. When I invested $3,500 in myself, I was not only declaring my own value to myself, but I also created room for $28,000 of the world’s money to be trusted in my care. The universe was getting the message that I wouldn’t get “holes in the socks” of the people who invested with me; that I wouldn’t wait “until their computer crashed” to fix their problem.

If you have chips in your mugs or pulls in your sweaters, or cups-filled with pens with dry ink, I encourage you to see how those exact things are showing up in your business.

Do you have relationships with clients that are pretty good except for a small sliver that isn’t working right – like, oh, say, they don’t pay you on time?

Do you start to sign a client and then run into a snag?

Or maybe your lead pool is plum dry.

I know what you are thinking… “It’s easy for you Angela, but I don’t have an extra $500 for socks. And if I did have $500 laying around it would not go to socks!”

I know. I get it. This way of living seems so counter-intuitive, so improbable, that trying it feels reckless.

That’s what I love about the wildly soulful Liz Dialto. If you don’t know her work, check it out. I love the way she takes things that could easily seem reckless and irresponsible and makes them practical and digestible. She wrote about how my “Live Like You Make $100K/month” spontaneous and informal challenge inspired her here – http://wildsoulmovement.com/get-what-you-want and she includes some super doable advice for the faint of heart.

The truth is, one of the main reasons why all of our authors finish their books is because they make an investment (and a pretty sizable one) that lets their inner author know at a soul-level – “I’m serious about making a difference with my book. I am putting away my childish notions and I’m making an investment that is equal to my commitment.”

If find yourself looking for the cheapest way to write a book, just remember your results will match your investment. Looking for the cheapest solution or waiting for things to break is like sending a wish for less success in the future. When you invest in yourself the way your future, more successful self would invest – KNOWING in your gut the payoff of the investment, I guarantee you’ll be seeing the sorts of 800% returns that I’m seeing.