“The more you learn, the more you earn” - Warren Buffett
One of the first complaints people have about counselling and psychotherapy is that ‘a therapist costs too much’. While a good therapist can indeed charge a healthy hourly rate, there is another side to money and therapy to consider. Can therapy help you get your life together to the point you are actually earning more money than before? We’d say a solid yes, and here’s our reasons why.
Here are 10 Ways Therapy Can Increase Your Income
1. Your Mind Is Clearer. Is your 'foggy head' preventing you from excelling at work or making you feel too 'brain dead' to plan for the future? Therapy addresses the anxiety, stress, and depression that all cause muddled thinking. Therapy also helps you clear out repressed memories and emotions, also known for causing brain fog.
2. You Gain Self-Confidence. In therapy you learn to recognise your strengths, change negative thinking, understand yourself, and develop self-compassion. When you feel good about yourself, you're less likely to waste money trying to impress other people and more likely to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
3. You Learn How To Set Personal Boundaries. Do you put off your own success by constantly putting the needs of others first? Do you waste money on things you don’t even like? Therapy gives you the confidence to say no without feeling guilty or rude, and it teaches you what you do and don't want to say no to in the first place.
4. You Waste Less Time. Do you procrastinate despite best intentions to organise your finances? Distraction and zoning out are common coping mechanisms for dealing with emotional pain and unprocessed trauma. When you deal with your issues instead of avoiding them, the habits that waste your time tend to drop away easily and you become more present.
5. You Make Better Decisions. Do you tend to always make bad financial decisions and career moves, but you don’t know why? Poor decision-making skills can be the product of a difficult upbringing, low self-confidence, and self-sabotage. Therapy helps on all these fronts, plus gives you someone you can run your decisions by in complete trust.
6. Your Impulsivity Lessens. Are you that person who spends recklessly and quits your job randomly? Impulsivity is a character trait that can be a side effect of childhood trauma, stress, or a symptom of a personality disorder. Therapy helps you get to the root of your rash decision making and learn self-control.
7. You Lose Less Money To Addictive Behaviours. Do unhealthy habits like alcohol, sex, drugs, or food cause you to be unable to control your spending? If you think a therapist costs too much, try an addiction. From shopaholism to drugs, alcohol and overeating, the drain on your finances is heavy. Seeking help to control your addiction can save you money and improve your health, energy, and mental clarity.
8. You Live By Your Values. Do you find work draining and boring? Wish you could understand what drives people like entrepreneurs to do so much with their time? Identifying your own personal values with your therapist, then making choices that align with your values, means you end up in a career where you finally understand what people mean when they say ‘it doesn’t feel like work’.
9. You Understand Your Money Behaviours. The way you think about money, what you do to get it, and what you do with it are all learned behaviours. Therapy that focuses on the past not only helps you identify the causes of such patterns in your life, but it also provides you with the tools and knowledge to break the cycles you are stuck in.
10. You Can Easily Connect With Others. Do you avoid social events that could help your career or are you so lonely that you can't function at work? By improving your social skills in therapy, you may be able to attract and maintain the types of relationships that boost your confidence, well-being, and success in all areas of life, including your financial situation. It can also mean you improve useful business skills like networking and communicating with colleagues.
It’s a common fact that if you invest your money wisely – you’ll become richer. But studies now show, this doesn’t always mean investing in the stock market. Investing in your mental health can make you richer too!
