Giving someone else full permission to share – and publish! – their perspective on the work you do can be nerve-wracking, but I’m all for shaking things up a bit, as you know! Plus, I love the honesty and rawness that it demands…
My friend and colleague Ann offered to write a blog to share her reflections on some of my work… here is an introductory post by Ann. In future blogs she is going to be reflecting on some of the true stories in my book, I hope you enjoy!
Olivia x
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Choosing support from the myriad coaches, consultants, therapists and healers out there can be overwhelming at best… and never more so than in the area of our finances. Who to trust, and how to recognise the ‘real deal’ is so tricky when clever personal branding can do wonders to make even the worst charlatan seem legitimate.
Olivia’s work has categorically changed my life, and I truly believe she is the real deal. So much so, that I suggested to her that I write this blog – to be hosted here on her website. The aim is to share my experiences of – and perspectives on – her work.
Olivia said ‘YES!’ to my offer… and so here we are.
But first, who the hell am I and how did I come to be such an advocate for Olivia?
Hello, it’s lovely to meet you…
Hello, I’m Ann, and I’m genuinely happy you’ve found this blog. I’m a friend and colleague of Olivia’s and have worked as a ghostwriter for the last decade.
Because of my work, I rarely put myself into public view – it’s my ‘calling’ to stay behind the scenes so I can bring the words, ideas and stories of the people I write for to life. Until now, that is…
Such is my belief that everyone can benefit from Olivia’s transformational work; I’m ‘giving up the ghost’ for this one gig each month and instead showing up as ‘me’…
It feels a little strange, but these words are asking to be written…
How did I get to know Olivia?
Olivia and I were having conversations in my head (!) long before we actually connected or met in-person. Weird, I know, but also 100% true. A friend of mine had suggested I subscribe to Olivia’s ‘Messages from Money’ after I let her know about my turbulent financial history (more on that shortly).
Olivia’s small-yet-mighty one-line ‘Messages from Money’ emails landed in my inbox each morning for a full two years before we ever spoke a single word out loud to one another. And, by this point her work had already changed my relationship with money in unimaginable ways.
I get that this possibly all sounds like a bit of an embarrassing fan-girl moment, honestly I do. I’m an intense introvert and as I’ve already said, my life is happily spent behind the scenes, so to come forward as ‘me’ is a big step and speaks volumes about how much I want to help more people benefit from Olivia’s offering. It’s also worth saying that not every blog is going to be jam-packed with cringe-inducing, gushing praise. Olivia was keen for me to bring an honest and critical eye if needed!
What’s my story?
It would be fair to say that I am Olivia’s ‘typical client’ – I love running my own business, and I get excited about what my clients are up to and how I can help them. But on top of this, I think Olivia’s work spoke to me so deeply because I haven’t followed the ’traditional path’ of setting a little money aside each month to build a retirement nest egg… and because of my historical struggle with money.
Through Olivia’s writing and working with her directly, I have learned that there is an ‘alternative way to be in the world’ and that we can use our innate gifts and talents not only to give ourselves the best life now, but also to fund our ‘future selves’ too.
It wasn’t always this way…
In the 2008 financial crisis, my partner’s recruitment business went into administration. I had not long gone part-time to study a counselling qualification, and so things quickly became very difficult. The debts mounted up, debt collectors showed up at the door demanding money, my phone rang constantly with people chasing money for unpaid bills while I was at work and I stopped sleeping. Ultimately we lost our house and not long after, our marriage.
What I didn’t realise back then – but what is wildly apparent now – is my difficulties with money were actually paving the way for another reality to be born… The healing lay in the ‘problem’ itself.
You may know this already, but in indigenous tribes, someone experiencing a crisis – whether that be with their mental or physical health – is seen to be on the cusp of transformation. The tribe will support and nurture this person, with the hope that a new healer is born. I feel the same about what happened in 2008. That crisis gave me the chance to step out of my dominant narrative about money and into something new and healthy, and Olivia’s support was the sunshine that helped the seed to grow.
Discovering Olivia’s ‘Money Types’ was definitely instrumental to all of this: to my horror – I realised I was living out the Prisoner archetype with firm narratives and stories of ‘lack’ and ‘not enough’ dominating my psyche daily (I plan to share more about this in my next blog).
Fast-forward to the present day, and there has been a genuine shift for me, and not in a ‘positive-thinking, pop psychology, positive affirmation’ type of way, but at a being/essence level. I no longer have ‘money problems’ – in fact, money finds me in unimaginable ways and I have learned, in fact I know, it is OK to receive.
I feel truly at home in this new belief, in heart, mind and most importantly, body.
If you haven’t already taken Olivia’s “Money Types” quiz then I urge you to do so, it’s an important first step in understanding your relationship with money.
I think I’d also like to say: be ready for genuine change. Olivia’s work can’t be summed up into a neat ’10 step process’ or a simple ‘do X and you’ll get Y’. Putting these words down on a page can perhaps make my transformation sound easy: it wasn’t. It was hard won; it required some deep inner work. But it did ‘work’ and I know it can work for you too.
No longer a Prisoner
A few years after taking Olivia’s quiz, and reading her book, I re-took the quiz. The results really surprised me. I was no longer a Prisoner and was, in fact, a high Angel and Magician. This could have just been an abstract exercise, but the results showed up in my physical reality too. Prisoners can tend to seek a career in the helping professions, and this rang true in my desire to be a counsellor, whereas Magicians and Angels are more likely to land themselves work in the creative fields. It’s worth saying here that Angels also seek careers in the healing professions… What I learned was that the place I was coming from in my Prisoner role was not healthy – for me or the people who I would be trying to help. I would need to do some deep inner work before I was ready for this huge and important role.
I noticed the shift already in not wanting to work as a counsellor at that particular time (who knows in the future, if the desire comes from a different place), even though I had invested so much time and energy in training… I found the courage and followed my calling to work as a ghostwriter, where the only ‘lack’ I now experience is not enough time to work with all of the amazing people who want my support!
A groundswell of change
As I deepen into this work, I realise that so many of us have narrated ourselves into a reality about money and what this means for our lives, future, and even our worthiness as human beings. And the more I see that there are so many people fed up with the hollowed-out reality of the current financial system and who are hungry for this kind of transformation… In particular, there are more and more WOMEN out there who are waking up to the idea that our current financial system was not built with women in mind.
Olivia is offering an invitation into a different reality where we don’t have to believe the old stories anymore. In this new reality, we have allies (the ‘Money Types’ themselves) and a profoundly different relationship between ourselves and money… which are it turns out, one and the same.
In this new reality, we aren’t onlookers trying to fit ourselves into a tight financial mould that only works for a certain subset of society, but instead, we are active participants in bringing about much-needed, organic change, bit by bit.
As we change our relationship with money, we change the world along the way. We actively dismantle the old, tired paradigm. We are airlifted into a reality where money isn’t a hollow ‘thing’ but instead an energy that wants to support us. In this reality, we can have a conversation with money, and we can trust in its inherent goodness.
My personal mission through this blog is to nurture and support this groundswell of change as much as it is to help Olivia bring her work to a wider audience.
I hope you’ll join me on the journey.
With love, and until next time,
Ann Lowe
Former Ghost 🙂
Read my next blog in this series – Letting go of resentment: the true price of freedom – here.
What are YOUR thoughts? Drop a comment below 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
