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In This Episode
Our thoughts control our feelings and behaviors. Debbie Sassen, a money mindset coach, shares her expertise on dissolving money blocks that hinder more money, success, and growth. Our mindset on money has an effect on our marriage. This collaboration with marriage coach, Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman, can help you deepen your relationship with your husband and become more comfortable talking about money.
Highlights
00:48 Everyone has negative beliefs about money, and Debbie Sassen helps female entrepreneurs as a business and money coach dissolve these money blocks.
01:36 Debbie is the author of the book The $1K Investor.
01:55 Working women can sometimes feel that they are holding themselves back because of their beliefs about how much money they are allowed to earn or charge a client.
03:34 A financial thermostat is a person’s earliest money paradigm, and it is based on one’s family of origin. There are different set points for how much income, savings, and debt feels comfortable for you.
07:58 If we have to clear limiting and negative beliefs about money, we can only do it for ourselves and not our partner. Allowing our husbands to own their beliefs about money is very important in marriage.
10:26 Rebbetzin Bat-Chen shares that she recognizes the different money paradigms between her and her husband, and this allowed them to be more of themselves but still connected on a deeper level.
11:31 One of the nice things Rebbetzin Bat-Chen believes when she was not trying to force her beliefs onto her husband is that she was able to listen and enjoy conversations with him more.
12:28 Debbie loves talking about money and helping women grow their businesses because she wants to normalize the conversation, just like how women talk about babies and recipes.
13:45 Money blocks can cause one to self-sabotage and overspend. Debbie shares an example of her client who was worried she would make too much money.
15:53 An issue that Rebbetzin Bat-Chen gets from her clients is that women are scared they will change and look down on their husbands if they become too successful. This belief was also discussed in a previous episode with Jewish Latin Princess, Yael Trusch.
17:03 Money can be an amplifier but it is just a tool. It doesn’t have to be something that ruins a relationship.
19:41 A viewer comments “It hurts me that money is so powerful for so many people.” It is our thoughts that influence our behavior about money.
20:30 When we are young, we hear sayings about money but what do they really mean? Changing our perspective and looking at money as a positive tool in Hashem’s world of abundance.
23:45 You can extend your unconditional love to those who have money because it’s the thoughts in the mind that create the jealousy.
26:16 There is also the fear of other people being jealous of you when you have money, but it’s the thoughts about money and feelings of scarcity around money.
27:36 Hashem gives us everything that we need and so much of what we want.
30:00 In marriage, we think that we don’t deserve that much or that we’re not worthy. What we receive has nothing to do with deserving. Hashem gives us everything for free because He loves us, so we have to keep going and thinking big.
32:31 We can turn around from our belief systems about money in life by looking at your earliest money paradigm and letting go of the thoughts that no longer serve you through actions and affirmations.
36:56 In order to start excavating and digging deep into your thoughts about money,Debbie advises to look at where you are now and where you want to go.
Links
Debbie Sassen: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook
5 Surprising Ways to Improve Your Marriage
Marriage Breakthrough Retreat
Connected for Real Podcast Episode 10. Money & Marriage with Yael Trusch
Books Mentioned
The $1K Investor by Debbie Sassen
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For more information about Connected for Real, visit the website!
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REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Welcome to the Connected For Real Podcast! I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman, a marriage coach for women in business, and my mission is to bring God’s presence into your life, into your marriage, and into your business. Let’s get started. The following is one of the many conversations I had with experts and professionals about real life and how it affects marriage. Let me know your takeaways on Instagram or Facebook, @connectedforreal. Enjoy. And we are live. Woo! With Debbie Sassen, the one and only. How are you, Debbie? Tell us what you do, introduce yourself—of course, everybody knows you but it’s just nice.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Hello. I’m Debbie Sassen. I am a business and money coach for female entrepreneurs, and I help them to dissolve their money blocks, which we’re going to be talking about today. So, we all have limiting beliefs, negative beliefs about money, how much money we can earn, how much money we can save, keep, and invest, the prices that we can charge our clients—of course, we come into a marriage, and we have a partner who grew up in a completely different money paradigm than we do and that’s going to affect our relationship. Anyway, I help women to make more money, keep more money, give more money, and really take care of their current financial selves and their future financial selves by investing more money for their future.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
And you also have a book about that, right?
DEBBIE SASSEN
There she is. The $1K Investor.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
That’s pretty cool. Okay, so because I am a specialist or an expert at money, especially for working women—the successful ones. Those are my people, and so I want you to talk to them. What is holding them back from more? What are the real issues that you see all the time?
DEBBIE SASSEN
We have beliefs about how much money we are “allowed” to earn—allowed to charge if you’re a woman in business, allowed to receive, and when I say allowed, it’s not like you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m not allowed to charge that much,” but we have beliefs of nobody’s going to pay that price, right? “If I charge that nobody’s going to work with me,” and I’ve seen people who have businesses and they’ll pay everybody else and they’ll leave themselves last, and they won’t have they won’t even have enough money to take care of themselves so they’ll be taking care of everybody else but they’ll be left high and dry. We have these beliefs about how much money we’re allowed to charge or allowed to earn if you have a salary position, like if I’m working as a social worker and I’m working for the health fund, for example and everybody charges this price, it might even result in not negotiating your salary and it really depends on where you live and what the situation is. Israel, where you and I both live, we have a very defined system, so if you come in with X number of years of education and wide number of years work experience, then there’s little boxes that are like X plus Y equals Z and that might be the salary that you get and there might not be a tremendous amount of room for negotiation but sometimes there is and we don’t challenge it or challenge it enough in order to increase our income.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I agree. So, one of the things that I love that you say is that we have a thermostat that is sort of our comfort zone. This is what used to, this is what I grew up with, or this is what I was told is okay, and then beyond that is almost like even if you would pass it, you’d make sure to go back down. So, could you talk about that a little bit?
DEBBIE SASSEN
Yeah, and most frequently our money or what I call our financial thermostat is set based on our family of origin and what I call your earliest money paradigm, but it works really, really similarly to the air conditioner in your house and considering that it’s in the 30s now in Israel and if you didn’t have an air conditioner in your house you’d be hot, sweaty, really feeling uncomfortable and so you take your air conditioner you set it on 23, 24, 26, 27, whatever feels comfortable to you and when the temperature in the room gets too hot, the air conditioner blasts on and cools down the room to that comfortable temperature that you set it at, and then the thermostat for the air conditioner will turn off and then the temperature will creep up again and the air conditioner will go back on again. So, the same thing happens with money. We have what we call set points on your financial thermostat for how much income you can have, how much savings you can have, how much debt feels comfortable–there are people who feel comfortable being in debt. Their financial identity is as someone who is a debtor and when they get out of debt or they’re starting to creep up to having zero debt something happens. That air conditioner blasts on to cool off their financial reality and they go back into debt. We have different types of money and each type of money has a different set point. Income, savings, debt—your income goals. There are people who will set an income goal at $500,000 and they’ll believe that they can get—just having that goal so far out means you were telling your mind that it can take steps to get there, and somebody else will be like, “Five hundred thousand dollars? There’s no way. It’s not going to happen,” and so they’ll set their financial thermostat for their income goals at a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, whatever it is. They’ll set it at a lower place.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Right, so that’s why I wanna bring us to marriage and really talk about that reality where you have two people with two different thermostats, two people who come from different stories about money, about what it is to have money, those people with money, and all these different things, and now we suddenly have to start working out there’s always that issue with she’s always cold and he’s always hot and then they’re fighting over the air conditioner or the window open and closed. So, it has the same effect on money also. So, tell us what you think is the best way to deal with that.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Right. So, there is this concept that opposites attract, right? And if opposites attract with each—hot and cold, someone’s talkative, someone’s quiet, it’s going to happen. The same thing with money, right? Someone is feeling very abundant, or I mean, I think it comes up mostly with spenders and savers. One person tends to be a spender and the other person tends to be a saver, or when it comes to investing somebody’s very conservative, somebody’s very risk-averse, one partner will challenge the upper limits of what they believe you can make, receive, or charge, and the other will be maybe more modest—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, that is the issue because a lot of times the women that I work with—they’re the ones who are the ones who will say, “I think we could do it,” and they’re gonna go for their goals and they’re going to work on themselves and be all into growth and all this great stuff that are working towards success, and then their husband’s is very comfortable and not really the type to break that ceiling, so it starts creating a very big gap and then it creates sort of like a look down. She looks down at him for not wanting to get more and not wanting to grow and not wanting to get out of his comfort zone. Meanwhile, he’s really happy there. He doesn’t want to change. So, what do you think?
DEBBIE SASSEN
We can only do our own work in the world. I can’t do the work for somebody else, and so I can do my personal work on clearing my limiting beliefs around money, my negative beliefs, my money blocks, and making more money, and sometimes it happens in a partnership and it even comes to like if your money is a mess in your family. Someone decides that she wants to be the one to start tracking, to start making order out of the money, and he’s like, “No, it’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry about it. We’re just so far. We’ve already figured it out,” but she’s like, “No, I think it’s really important that we start adulting our money, we start being responsible. I’m gonna start tracking. I’m gonna make a budget for how much to spend at the supermarket,” or whatever You can only do your work in the world, and you do your work and be very welcoming, be very open to what your partner is saying and sometimes he’ll be able to look over your shoulder notice what’s going on and he’ll be able to dissolve his own limiting beliefs around money, but I also believe that we have to extend unconditional love to really everybody, right? Part of that is allowing our partners to own their beliefs about money and not rushing or not believing that we have to change their beliefs about money, right? They can own their financial paradigm and we can own our financial paradigm. I’m a night owl and my husband is an early bird. He goes to sleep and I’m still up, and he gets up and I’m still asleep. There are times that we actually cross but we’re not going to change each other. So, just I can’t change or I don’t want to change my biological clock for going to sleep and waking up, and he doesn’t want to change his either, so we can allow our spouses, our partners, our husbands to have their beliefs around money, and yeah it makes for a happier relationship that way because we can work on ourselves and what we can accomplish in the world and just give them grace and unconditional love to own their situation. We can’t change it anyway so you’re beating your head against the wall. Spend all of that energy that you are and all that effort that you’re focusing on him—we can never change anybody else’s thoughts. They have control over their thoughts. We can change ours. So, spend your time focusing on what your beliefs are around money and working hard to change your financial reality.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, so I know that with us it was really fun because the more I did my work and I sort of let him be himself, the more I was able to have real nice conversations about money. We went on long walks, and then because my husband is a rabbi and has a lot of knowledge and is able to give me evidence for things that I didn’t know, so we started talking about all the evidence I always heard was all the poor people all the poor rabbis who always really stuck it out and made it work and whatever, and I said, “Can you give me evidence from what you know?” and of course, he knows everything so he just started like boom, boom, boom. Everybody who was very, very, very successful and was the most influential was always very, very rich so I’m like, “Why did I not grow up with that?”
DEBBIE SASSEN
The [HEBREW] were incredibly wealthy [HEBREW] was incredibly wealthy and your husband probably has the long list. There is a role model for wealth in Judaism.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I think one of the nice things was that when I was not trying to change him, force him, or fix him to try and think like me, learning new things, or whatever, I was totally in myself, in my own bubble, doing my thing that I was actually able to have a nice, normal conversation where I really felt a connection through listening to his knowledge and really enjoying it without trying to change anything. So, I think that is really one of the nice side effects of focusing on what you can control, always bringing it back to what is in my power. My words, my thoughts, my beliefs, my actions but not changing other people and not controlling other things and not anything that has to do with other people. I love that. Tell me more about what you do and how you help women. I want people to know.
DEBBIE SASSEN
As I said before, I work with women who have their own businesses and who want to grow their businesses so really to see where you are now, what your goals are, and what’s getting in your way from achieving your goals. Usually, when it comes to business, it’s the marketing, it’s the sales, it’s a lot of procrastination, and a lot of money, beliefs and limiting beliefs around money. It could be that you can go on and you can get some clients. You can roll some clients at lower prices, but you want to be able to enroll clients at higher prices and your money beliefs will stop you or talking about money. I love to talk about money because I want to normalize the conversation, like when we could talk about babies and we could talk about recipes and we can talk about our husbands, which maybe we shouldn’t be doing right?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Even if we talk about your husband, at the end of the day, it really just turns around and comes back to what it is that you can do. So, a lot of it is just getting it out of your system and solving the problems but not so much going blaming and complaining and just wasting time so that’s what I like about it.
DEBBIE SASSEN
So, I’ll give you also an example of one of my former clients. We worked together last year, and into the beginning of 2020, and then we finished our work together. One of her beliefs was if she was gonna make “too much money” whatever that means is that her old high school friends were just gonna think that she was a sellout because she didn’t want to be very visible on social media with what she was making because she had grown up with this sort of hippie-ish kind of group of friends, they were very anti-capitalistic, and not making money and they were all going to go I don’t know live in India and do meditation or whatever they were going to do, and now she had this beautiful business that she was growing and she really had a lot of blocks around being visible because she didn’t want people seeing her in her new, more wealthy, more abundant state. Even those sort of blocks will cause you to self-sabotage and to overspend. We talked about that financial set point—overspend your savings down. So sometimes people can earn abundantly. They can earn a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand or a million dollars, but you would be surprised. So many people that are out there on social media talking about, “Oh, I just had a six-figure launch,” and “Oh, I just made a million dollars,” If you look down into what’s really going on, they’re in debt. They’re not paying themselves a salary. They’re paying everybody else more and this particular woman, she was paying her VA more than she was getting herself, right? Because of all of these blocks and when we were able to clear her money blocks, she was able to restructure her business to reduce her expenses significantly. There was a lot of extraneous expenses in her business model but totally to simplify down what she was spending and to then pay herself a lot more money, and there was debt in there and we worked together a payment plan so she could pay off her money her debt in a very systematic way so yeah not everything—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I was thinking of the other issue that I come up with which is, “If I get too successful, then it will ruin my marriage,” because of that exact point where if I leave my husband “behind” and get successful, successful, climb the ladder—I’m going to start looking down at him. I’m going to change. I’m going to become a different person—and by the way that’s what we talked about with Yael, Jewish Latin Princess, we were talking about all those beliefs about money that they’re going to change me as opposed to the amplification. She was saying money is an amplifier. If you’re a nice person, you’re going to be a nicer person. If you give to [HEBREW] you’re going to be able to give more to [HEBREW]. If you do [HEBREW], you’re going to be able to do more [HEBREW]. So don’t hold yourself back. The other thing is don’t worry. You can keep a connected marriage and improve it all the time. Nothing on the outside can affect that. So, I really want to talk about that. I want to hear from you—what do you do when that’s the reason where they worry so much that they’re going to break their marriage by getting too ahead?
DEBBIE SASSEN
It was very interesting that we can project something that’s so far in the future. I mean, it doesn’t have to be so far into the future, but your brain is designed to maintain status quo, okay? Your brain is your primitive brain is designed to avoid pain, increase pleasure and to be very, very efficient, and it’s very efficient to keep status quo. So, it’s always going to offer up to your thoughts that are often pretty useless because they’re designed to keep you where you are. So you’re worried about where you’re going to be in a year, two, five years from now then all of a sudden your marriage is going to be broken because you because you are going to have a different relationship with your husband, and as you as you correctly pointed out from your discussion with Yael, yeah, money can amplify the amazing good things that you’re already doing and it can make things even better. Right—it doesn’t have to be this thing that that ruins or destroys a relationship. I like to say money is just a tool, right? Money doesn’t hurt anybody. Sometimes I even have my wallet here. Sometimes, I keep it in my room. Sometimes it’s in my office but here’s a bunch of money. Aren’t these beautiful blue bills that match my shirt today? These 200 Shekel notes are not going to do anything. This is paper. This is colored paper. It’s kind of flimsy. It’s not going to be beat anybody over the head. It’s not going to pull out a gun and shoot anybody. What trouble are these pieces of paper doing? If I try and poke it into the camera—how much damage can these things do? It’s completely an inanimate object. It’s only our thoughts about money, our thoughts about what money might do to the relationship, our thoughts about what money might do to us that can be affected but money can’t do anything. Just like this glass that I’m drinking water. This glass cannot make a relationship good or bad, right? It’s just a glass. It’s an inanimate object.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It’s all in our minds. The beliefs that we have about the money, about the success or about whatever else that come up in the conversations. It really is all the thoughts. One of my favorite sayings about Debbie, if any of you don’t know, she was my coach and I still love her even though I don’t have you anymore—
DEBBIE SASSEN
We’ll get there again.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Of course. So, my favorite saying is “Think on purpose,” and I say this all the time ever since you said it first to me that you are allowed to choose your thoughts you don’t have to buy everything that comes. Let’s see this comment. “It hurts me that the tool called money is so powerful for so many people.” What do you think about that comment?
DEBBIE SASSEN
Judith, why don’t you give us a little bit more—when you say the tool called money is so powerful for so many people. Again, I’ll go back to my wallet and I’m gonna pull this money out. This is not powerful this is. This is flimsy. Why is this powerful? This doesn’t do anything. If I leave this in the middle of the street, somebody’ll pick it up but it’s not gonna kill anybody.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
You can’t even trip on it.
DEBBIE SASSEN
People’s thoughts about money. It’s your thoughts that influence your behavior, right? The money itself doesn’t do anything. It can’t do your laundry for you, can’t make dinner for you, right? It won’t put your kids to bed—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
We have so many sayings in Hebrew [HEBREW] not the problems and not the money. We have them so bound together that more money you have, the more problems you’ll have, or money doesn’t grow on trees All these real things that are going around, and they seep in.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Yeah, because we’re all born blank slates. Just for the for the purpose of our conversation, we’re going to keep it very simple. You’re brought into the world. You’re a blank slate, right? We hear messages from our parents and we’re young. We don’t have the filters to say, “Oh, I like that thought. I don’t like that thought.” Right? “Oh, money doesn’t grow on trees,” what does that mean? Really? Think about that. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” What does that mean? Does that mean it’s hard to earn money? I can’t just go and pick it off like I can pick an apple? But really the world is abundant. God—Hashem is abundant. There’s so much abundance available to us in the world that if we let our minds expand, then—and this is really the way it works—is if you have expenses, you can chop, chop, chop, chop, chop and pair your expenses down to a certain basic level. You could be like welfare or whatever and below that you’re going to really, really being living on nothing and you’ll get government or whatever but, on the upside, there’s no upper limit to how much money you can make, right? Jeff Bezos, who owns who owns Amazon, his net worth is 138 billion Dollars the last I checked, which was a month ago. Not that I check it every day. It just happened to be for a class I was giving. I checked it. One billion’s fine. I’ll be good with one billion, right?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Why? Why would you give yourself such a limit, Debbie? Come on. [Laughs]
DEBBIE SASSEN
There’s no limit to the amount of money that you can create by putting value into the world. “Money represents power,” and what does that mean when you say money represents power, and is it power that you want? Is it power that you don’t want? I think that has a lot of negative connotations to it. I think that money represents possibility, right? Money speeds things up, so for example, if I want to keep my house clean, right? Now, I can either do it myself or I can hire someone to do that for me, and so many of us do have cleaning ladies, and it speeds up what’s going on. I can be doing my work in the world, and she could be cleaning my house, and I can be taking the money and I can be passing it along to someone and I can keep money in circulation. I can be gracious to other people through the money that I have, or you want to get from A to B, right? I live in Beit Shemesh. If I want to get to Jerusalem, I can use money to buy a car so I can get there faster rather than taking a bus, or I can take a taxi, right? I can use money to get things more quickly than I might otherwise not have been able to do. If I have a dress and I want it sewn to be exactly my size right I can either do it myself—that’s going to take a very long time or I can take it to a seamstress, right?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
So, Judith is giving us a little bit of an insight into what she meant, and that’s really beautiful because she’s also telling us the beliefs that she is believing. These are things that are normal and people are believing them all around us. So, what here can you change or think on purpose? What do you think about this?
DEBBIE SASSEN
So, this thing here, right? This cannot create jealousy between friends. It can’t do that. It’s an inanimate object, just like a hammer cannot create jealousy between friends. My son, last year, to build his sukkah, he bought a beautiful Makita drill. From what I understand—I don’t understand too much about drills but it’s like an excellent drill and maybe someone else has a different model drill—people are going to be jealous and it’s going to cause problems because he bought a Makita and they’re only having a generic brand drill. I don’t know. Maybe. It’s only your thoughts about people like, “Oh, them. Right. Oh, they have a lot of money. Oh, look at their car. Oh, wow. I wonder how much money they make. They have a fancy car. Did you see their house? Did you look how big their house is, and that furniture—oh my gosh. They didn’t shop at Ikea. They went to that fancy store in Tel Aviv.” Guys, money doesn’t do anything. It’s the thoughts you have in your mind that create the jealousy and you can say, “Wow. Look at their car—I’m so happy for them that they’re driving a Lexus. Look at that beautiful house that they have, and it’s decorated so tastefully. I’m so happy for them that they get to live there.” You can choose whatever you want to think and as Bat-Chen said, you could think on purpose about how amazing it is that they use their money, that they give it to [HEBREW], that they open up their house—my son got married in May, and somebody in our neighborhood with a beautiful house and a gorgeous garden opened up their house to us and their garden so we can make a wedding because we couldn’t make it in a wedding hall. You can do so many mitzvahs when you open your eyes. Am I jealous of the fact that they have their garden that’s 10 times bigger than mine or their house’s decorated with by beautiful designers? You can see behind me. I have these beautiful standard kablan floors in my house and I don’t have fancy tiles. No, I’m not jealous. I’m so grateful that they opened up their house and allowed us to have our wedding there.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
That’s one thing when you can control your jealousy, but I think that Judith is talking about the fear that other people are going to be jealous of you, and that’s where you can’t control other people, where you can’t control what other people are going to think about you. It might be that somebody has zero money but they’re so happy people are jealous of them, so what they should stop being happy? It has nothing to do with the money as much as it has to do with other people and how you can’t control them, and all you can control is you.
DEBBIE SASSEN
As I said, you can extend your unconditional love to them, and you can allow them to own their own feelings because that’s the only thing we can do.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Here’s the backstory. Ready? Her mother and her sister are not talking, and that’s what’s painful. One has nothing to do with money and one of your posts said something about, “It’s all about money but it’s never about money.”
DEBBIE SASSEN
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and it’s not because of the money. Again, it’s not this thing. This thing did nothing. It’s their thoughts about the money. “She got and I didn’t get,” and wow. People will do strange things. It’s because of their feelings of scarcity around money. There isn’t enough. They think that like, “If I don’t get mine, then then there’s not going to be enough left in the world,” but again, Hashem is abundant. God is abundant. He can give us everything. He gives us everything that we need, and He gives us so much of what we want as well.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, yes. I don’t remember who said this we learned about it a couple years ago if something like, when you pray for things—so if you pray for things that are money or [HEBREW], then you will get what you need. Hashem will give you whatever is good for you. He’s not going to give you something that’s not good for you. That’s something that’s going to make you trip but if you pray for spiritual things, you will actually get whatever you ask for because it’s all about the want, your will—”I want to grow. I want to get higher and better.“ You will get there, so I think that’s also something really beautiful that Hashem is really in control. You can grow, be open, and accept Hashem’s blessings but jealousy has no room because everybody has their own bone, their own accounting with what is good for them and what they need right now. If we’re saying it’s a tool, then it’s just like any other tool. You get tools in your toolbox and there’s certain things you just don’t need because that’s not part of your mission.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Right, and I would also add when you say we get what we need, and we say we Daven every morning right—and I’m going to say this now for the third time today. It seems to be coming up. It seems to be the theme that we say our [HEBREW] in the morning, right? There are certain [HEBREW] that we say in the present tense, right? [HEBREW] Those we say in the present tense but when we say [HEBREW], right? It’s already created out. He already made for me everything that I need. He’s giving me everything that I need. Now, we might have wants on top of that and really, He gives us so much of what we want—I don’t need to have a house maybe as big as I have, especially since five of my children are married and they’re out of the house, but they come back with the grandkids. Baruch Hashem. But Hashem gives us what we need and usually, so much more than what we need if we went really down to the bare, bare minimum of what we need just in terms of food. We have so much abundance in terms of the different types of food that we eat. We can survive on bread and water, bread and salt, right? [HEBREW] and we have way more than that.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
One of the things that comes up a lot is, “I don’t deserve that much,” or “I’m not worthy,” or [HEBREW]. It comes up a lot in marriage. One of the things is really seeing the vision of where am I going, where do I want my marriage to be, and the first thing that came up—because I did this for my group, my Hebrew group on Shabbat—they couldn’t. “Uh-uh. That’s too good to be true. I can’t get there. That will never happen. It was such an automatic reaction that I don’t deserve such a good such a good picture. It’s too, too good,” and I turn around and I say, “By saying that, what you’re saying is everything I have, I deserve,” because if I didn’t deserve it, obviously I wouldn’t have it but you don’t deserve anything. Hashem is giving you everything for free. Everything is [HEBREW]. From the day you were born until now, He’s just showering and sharing with all the goodness, and you deserved nothing and you deserved everything because it has nothing to do with deserving. It has to do with how much Hashem loves you, so just keep going. Just think big. Just allow it into your life.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Sounds good. Sounds good—to really ask the question of why people would believe that they’re not deserving, and really to uncover and excavate what are the thoughts that are coming up that cause them to believe that they’re not deserving of more love and more abundance and more [HEBREW] and more [HEBREW] in their life. Why?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, well, that’s what we do when we do the coaching. That’s what we do. We go deep down into the roots because a lot of things are up here and at surface, and we’re able to pick them up and deal with them but then when we go deeper and deeper and deeper and find the roots, then all you need to do is shake up those roots and everything will come tumbling down. That’s what I love.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Exactly.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Okay, first of all, I want to thank Judith for being so open and so beautiful because your questions really were so inspirational. It’s beautiful to see that exact thing we’re talking about in the beginning, where the story affects so much the story that you have—your mother’s story and her sister and whatever the way that that is then projected in your mind onto your life is just an amazing thing. Here, she wrote another thing let’s see. “Belief systems built from the past experiences and not believe anymore this can turn around.” Ooh. What do you think?
DEBBIE SASSEN
We can definitely turn around. I mean, part of the work that I do is looking at your earliest money paradigm, where you’ve come from what happened and letting go the beliefs that are no longer serving you, and really rewriting your money story so that you can clear the blocks for the beliefs that money causes problems, clear the belief that money ruins relationships, clear the beliefs that–if you really dig down into what your thoughts are about money and wealthy people—that they’re greedy, that they’re snobby, that they’re sleazy. We have that—you think of what’s that?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Shallow. I know a lot of deep thinkers that are very worried about becoming shallow. It’s a real fear, but it doesn’t actually change who you are. It’s just another thing in your life. To Judith, I want to say you are here in this world. If you’re still alive, you can change. You can change your beliefs, you could change your truths, and there is no such thing as even if you think it over and over and over again—so that’s the power of affirmations. You had a post about Louise Hay. That’s her whole thing—is the more you say something, the more you’ll believe it, the more you’ll actually let it take over your direction or give you the direction to your life, when you hear over and over again, “Oh, you’re so this,” or, “Money is that.” It becomes facts. You don’t even know that it’s a belief anymore. At a certain point it just becomes part of your life, and so I think that it’s really beautiful that it’s coming up here, coming up to the surface and you can now decide what you want to do with that.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Yeah, I will say one thing is that I don’t believe in affirmations and mantras. I think that we do have to excavate and figure out where the negative and limiting beliefs are inside of us when I wrote the post that was quoting Louise Hay was like releasing all of the negative stuff that’s impacting our life, and I don’t believe that you can just start thinking, “Oh, I can manifest money and money flows to me easily,” and, “I’m a million dollar money manager,” and all of a sudden the money’s going to start to flow because you can have this dissonance between what you want to train your mind to think and what your nervous system is telling you.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
If you don’t believe it, that’s not gonna do anything. If you don’t really believe that you’re beautiful, saying it a million times will never make you feel any more beautiful. It’s really important to do both parts. When you excavate and find the truth and then find turnarounds and things, and are able to change it then sometimes an affirmation is just a reminder that that you already did the work. You already know this is true, so then it’s just reaffirming and finding evidence for that new truth. I agree with you that just saying is just like saying, “Oh just ignore it or just hold your tongue,” That’s not going to work in a marriage when you feel you’re going to explode and your job is to hold your tongue or to hold yourself back or to just ignore your husband doing that. It’s never going to work. It’s actually going to irritate you more because it’s just from actions out and not from the beliefs, thoughts, feelings.
DEBBIE SASSEN
I was just gonna say when those thoughts come up and they fuel feelings that are negative, would you say you want to explode—it’s really just learning to allow those feelings to be there, which is a process learning to recognize them and allow them to be there and that first step is just allowing them to be there without needing to change things right away. So, that’s the first step, really.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, I love that thank you for joining us today. Any last words of a practical short thing that people could do right now if they want to start excavating and see what is coming up for them? Would you say it’s like filling in the sentence money is or money should—what would you say?
DEBBIE SASSEN
I would look at where you are now and where you want to go. So, let’s give a practical example. Let’s say for example that you are earning 10,000 Shekels a month, all right? And let’s say you want to earn 50,000 Shekels a month right so it’s not very helpful to go from 10 to 50 and say, “Oh, I’m earning 50,000 shekels a month. Money flows to me easily,” but in little step-by-step-by-step, it’s possible for me to earn 50,000 Shekels a month. Just take the little next step. I call it a thought ladder, where you’re just going up one thought at a time, right? Today, whatever your financial reality is—you’re 10,000 Shekels in debt, right? It’s possible for me to get out of debt. It’s possible for me to have 10,000 Shekels in savings. Work on the basis of possibility and notice what comes up when you are thinking those thoughts. It could be your mind is going off you’re like, “No way. That’s never going to happen. Who are you even to think that?” but it’s when you start entertaining possibility, then you really start the process of excavating and noticing what your brain is offering you unintentionally, and that’s when you can start changing what’s going on.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
That’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s one of the things that I started doing when I started working with you was journaling, and yesterday I finished that journal and now I’m starting a new one. So it brings it all together in this beautiful bow. I’m sure that we could go back and really learn a lot out of the process, which is really, really fun but journaling is one of the things that’s really powerful because you allow your thoughts to come out and be able to just see them, not with any judgment or whatever. It’s just so nice.
DEBBIE SASSEN
We can be the watcher or the witness of your thoughts.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, yeah so thank you so much everybody. Thank you, Debbie. Thank you so much everyone, and we will see you next time.
DEBBIE SASSEN
Thank you so much.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
And that’s it! Thank you for listening to the very end. I would love if you can leave a review and subscribe to the podcast. Those are things that tell the algorithm, this is a good podcast and make sure to suggest it to others. Wouldn’t it be amazing if more people became more connected for real? And now, take a moment and think of someone who might benefit from this episode. Can you share it with them? I am Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman from connectedforreal.com. Thank you so much for listening, and don’t forget, you can be connected for real.