Not In That Bracket

By Disha Daryani

We are often taught  how to put limitations on our achievements, almost to set a boundary on how far our minds with our current level of consciousness can fathom what success can look like. These limitations are projections of generational patterns and hence hold little to no truth to what the future can look like.We believe them because people closest to us tend to dictate the length of what is possible either intentionally or unintentionally.

Simran, who had recently turned thirty looked at her diminishing savings account and reiterated to herself “not in that bracket”, a phrase she had grown up listening to from her family. She thought to herself that as one more year passed, she had failed to give herself her two big wishes- a financially independent life without any further jobs to do and a trip to South America which she had been trying to save for over four  years.

After working for over seven years, Simran had not managed to fulfill her fantasies and this would affect her immensely. She felt burnt out with the hard work she would put in at her corporate job, but her monthly expenses coupled with her fears would barely cover her credit card payments for the month. She would often wonder if there was something wrong with her, if wealth didn’t suit her or the heaven’s had decided that abundance wasn’t for her as she toiled away at work. 

She would enjoy working but didn’t like the corporate life and strived to ensure an exit from the same time and again. The constant demands of working overtime, even spending weekends on work felt draining mentally, emotionally and physically leaving Simran single at thirty. Being single was not the problem, but being unable to have any time or money left to pursue her passions haunted her daily.She had a more cheerful personality and loved to engage and celebrate life with people; but having focused solely on building her career had left her no energy to invest in new relationships or retain old friendships making  her often feeling isolated. This really affected her health and instilled many issues of self-worth and self confidence in her which she could never express to anyone.

Outside of a corporate life Simran had always been a very creative and artistically inclined girl. She had many passions from traveling to writing , doing wildlife photography to pottery and embroidery. She loved to learn and often took her worldly learnings to her corporate jobs as examples of cultural nuances to make her projects more interesting.  

However Simran had not found her purpose and while her passions were one too many, choosing one was a herculean task and left her dabbling in the dark. She wished and prayed if there was a job that existed where she could combine all her passions, be self employed and build generational wealth through the same - her life would become the epitome of sheer bliss. Yet, she knew those were lofty dreams because her purpose had not found her and taking a risk to explore would not be welcomed by her family who preached hard work and job consistency. 

Simran’s father Vishesh had achieved a quintessential level of success based on these principles, Vishesh’s father who moved from Pakistan to India before the partition had seen many struggles but had managed to raise a well educated family of six children. Vishesh’s beliefs stemmed from the days of struggle he had watched his father go through being the youngest in the family. He didn’t believe in excessive spending or luxury in any form as he felt it as a wasteful expense even if today he had the means to splurge. Simran’s mother having never had a career of her own, cradled in the lap of luxury provided by her middle class parents had different beliefs and unfulfilled dreams of being financially independent which she would often project onto Simran-striving to ensure that Simran would always prioritize her work first and her life depended on it. Also making her boss happy should always be her first priority because somehow her mother believed if her boss was happy Simran could take over the world without realizing that making your boss happy only meant slaving away for more hours. Simran had learnt early on in her career that bosses were impossible to please and depending on how they were as people some would show occasional encouragement but there was no real reward to ensuring a work superior’s approval other than self sacrifice. They would always be ready to throw more work at you and take away any sense of personal space. The lack of boundaries would have them take over all twenty-four hours of the day if possible. While this may not be true for everyone, but so far this had been her predicament and so it shaped her beliefs differently on boss pleasing. Some people receive great rewards like a good promotion, extra bonus, opportunities to travel  or at times develop an exciting  professional network but Simran’s journey had no such benefits. Her hard work would give her work privileges like coming an hour late to work because her boss knew she would work on the weekend if required to spend another sleepless night to cover up.

 Simran’s younger and wiser brother was already a founder of a startup at a tender age of twenty-three and having discovered his purpose early on in life worked towards it everyday trying to reach his next funding round and increasing his company’s valuation. He was already in the big league and worked even harder everyday to ensure he was building the life he desired despite the harshness of leading an imbalanced work life. Simran’s brother Karan aspired to shape his life in the ways global business tycoons like Mark Zucherbeg or Bill Gates did and worked with the same passion. He had little to no social life, barely had  time to care for his well being or even spend quality time with his family.  Simran despised that life, she believed wealth was a tool to ensure we live our best life and support the world to build a future but not at the cost of your own wellbeing. Yet inorder to maintain the peace in her family, she would strive for wealth everyday only to be further away from it.

Her family would laugh when she would mention her fantasies of her ideal life and her mother would simply chuckle and say, “Why don’t you ask Aarti (her boss) what she thinks about your travel plans”, as if her boss’ opinion in this matter actually was necessary. Her father would usually ignore it and every once in a while when he felt compelled to he would aggressively tell her “How do you think people make money in life, how do you think you are living this standard of life if I didn’t work hard, you can’t run away from every job and you should think about saving more for the future, look at your credit card bills these days.” Her brother would tell her, “You’ve finally found a good job, now you want to leave this also- you should focus on learning now in life and stop blaming the world for your problems.” She would walk away feeling unheard and disappointed and when it got to a point where she felt extremely burdened she would cry endlessly, alone in her room, on the way to work, in the shower or sometimes even in the office between work  wondering if this is all that life had in store for her and if she would ever get a break from this daily rut.

She didn’t blame her family and after having spent several years blaming external circumstances, she knew it was not about other people or her family. In fact, they had always been supportive of her career choices and supported her through the ups and downs and job changes. When Simran chose to switch careers as well, family had stood by her and she knew she couldn’t blame them, because out of their level of understanding and their own life experiences her family tried their best to give her stable advice as well as constant support and motivation.

Last year when Simran turned twenty nine, she wanted to gift herself an expensive designer bag because she knew her father wouldn’t ever get that for her.He would bring out his statement phrase, “We are not in that bracket” which meant we are not at the stage of financial wealth even if we do have wealth to indulge in such things and because my(her father) personal beliefs don’t support a lifestyle of luxury so I will not get this for you or approve you spending your wealth on this either because I want to teach you to save your money for a rainy day. However her twenty ninth birthday went bag free just like her other birthdays. She really wanted to have one because she had looked at them since she was thirteen years old and as her friends and she reached adulthood, her friends would now come out dressed in diamonds carrying the best bags. Simran could never relate even though she came from a similar financial background as them. Her family would only tell her how people got these things to show off their status in society. Her mother liked them but over the years of not receiving it from her father had reached a zen stage that also preached a no to luxury. 

It was never about the bag alone, it was about a choice to refrain from giving the best to yourself. Her father always liked to compromise and settle in every situation and Simran would often wonder if she would ever be in that bracket where she could without judgment give herself the best. While her desires came from a place of social acceptability, she believed that she didn’t want to settle in life and never perceived luxury as something that was for a show off purpose. She understood what saving for a rainy day meant and its significance, but for her luxury meant giving yourself the best that life has to offer and when you have the means to provide yourself the best- you should not give yourself second best be it for yourself or your loved ones. 

Beliefs play a very strong role in the exchange and circulation of wealth in our lives. It helps us attract what we truly desire but accept and receive only how much we think we deserve. Simran was not averse with this theory until one day she stumbled across a ‘divine femininity  and life coach’ named Priya.  Simran met Priya at a conference she attended for her work purpose. Priya’s company had commissioned Simran’s place of work to develop a new brand outreach strategic plan and as a part of that project- Simran was sent to attend one of Priya’s workshops to understand how Priya offered her services. 

Initially Simran did not want to go and dreaded the idea of having to spend her day filled with a thousand tasks to be spent on a workshop with a life coach who she imagined would be preaching meditation and waking up at five o’clock in the morning to lead a holistic life yet upon attending her life had been transformed in one workshop alone. Priya was teaching her audience that day about wealth and abundance being a spiritual concept more than how we imagine it in our day to day life as being money in the bank. Priya’s workshop focussed on the development of beliefs and the statements we often say to ourselves daily that affirm what level of wealth we are able to achieve. This does not mean we don’t need to work hard or sit in bed and imagine wealth, but breaking the barriers that our minds and surroundings tend to create about wealth.

The initiation of the workshop posed a question to the audience about how much freedom did our level of wealth provide for us. This instantly drew Simran in and she thought it would be interesting to learn something new while she was there. As she listened, Priya walked her audience through examples of how we speak to ourselves everyday and the impact that it has on our acting brain. She spoke of her own journey when she started doing life training sessions how only a few people would sign up and would never engage in programs that required any kind of remuneration. This would leave Priya feeling dejected because she truly believed she was trying to help people and in order to reach more people she would require more financial support. Through her disappointment she would constantly tell herself, “Nobody is going to come to the next level with me, I’m never going to be able to make a significant impact”. In other times, when her repeated efforts would lead to a depleted bank account, she would tell herself, “I can never make money, I am always going to have to depend on Praveen(her husband) if these workshops don’t work. I’ll just be a working Mom for namesake and my workshops will never go beyond this” and sigh in disappointment. The workshops continued and she ended up spending a lot of her money which she got through selling her jewelry without seeing any returns. Priya started the workshops by selling her jewelry because she wanted to be independent and didn’t want Praveen to support this venture financially. She wanted this to be completely her own venture and to build a legacy she could be proud of. Simran instantly resonated with her sentiment and eagerly waited for the solution Priya had implemented in her life to bring about this transformation where this workshop alone had a thousand people attending. Also the workshop for Simran was complimentary,  but the nine hundred and ninety-nine other attendees had invested one lac fifty thousand rupees each  (almost one thousand eight hundred dollars) for one day’s workshop. On doing the math, Simran concluded that Priya would receive at least one crore Indian rupees after expenses (twelve thousand dollars). This number felt unheard of for Simran, her father after thirty years of hard work had managed to accumulate a wealth of ten to twelve crore rupees (fourteen hundred thousand dollars) which she figured Priya would receive in less than a year. Priya went on to explain how she garnered this wealth and mentioned how her own workshops reached a level of transformation when she met Sunny. Sunny very quickly became her mentor as he taught her about her own limiting beliefs and how her intentions would make the difference. Sunny explained to her that if our intentions towards building wealth are noble even if they are personal, they are more likely to convert to reality. He advised Priya to simply focus on her core vision which was to support people in their life journey, share her life experiences and help them elevate their lives. Priya realized she spent a lot of her energy focusing on the “lack” instead of finding ways to reach more people. She focused on how things seemed to not work out for her, how her bank account was depleted and how she would never be independent.Sunny taught her to change her personal narrative before helping other people to change their lives. Changing the narrative meant how she could conduct her workshops without using a lot of her savings and reach more people beyond her city. Sunny also taught her to look at her bank account in awe every couple of days and reaffirm the idea to herself of how she had made so much money, how she had saved a lot of unnecessary expenses and how her business was flourishing. He paved the way for her to demonstrate embodiment of her desires and explained to her about the inner work required to understand why she felt she could never be independent.

Priya understood through many exercises she practiced on herself about her limiting beliefs around earning personal wealth and standing out on her own. Working through her fears she learnt that she had internalized and reaffirmed the idea to herself that she cannot ever be independent which actually stemmed from the fact that she was merely afraid of standing on her own as she had never done it before and it was always her family who supported her financially or her husband. She also realized that while she wanted her workshops to be physical experiences, if she wanted to create outreach in a swift manner investing in an integrated digital space would be a gamechanger. She worked with Sunny and some of her friends who were experts in digital marketing to develop a funneled approach. She created videos and put them out on youtube. This drove a lot of value addition to people’s lives who consumed her content and many started signing up for the lower budget funnel programs. In 3 years she kept improving her funnels to have even more people join the programs and today people who go through her entire tiered program not only find improvement in different areas of their lives but also some of them have become life coaches themselves to share this knowledge. Today Priya is doing three to five events a month physically across the country and multiple virtual sessions. The growth that is achieved is unimaginable. 

Priya’s story really inspired Simran to try to create a different narrative about her life and to break the cycle of these limited beliefs around wealth. After returning from the workshop she invested her time into finding more youtube channels and coaches that taught her how to do the inner work and change the dialogue. She never allowed herself to use the phrase “Not in that bracket” anymore and everytime her family said it, she would not let it sink in. She broke the cycle and every morning after waking up she started a new ritual, she would speak to herself that she was extremely close to becoming financially independent and was on the verge of becoming self employed. 

In a few months, she found inspiration through her struggles and began to write about her journey around her limiting beliefs and created a blog about it. She was still slaving away at her job, but her new found inspiration would push her to create some time and pursue her passion for writing. She began to write about everything from her travels, to embroidery and pottery and before she knew it more doors began to open up for her. A platform that promoted travel led entrepreneurs launched on the internet and she was one of the first to sign up writing recommendations of places to visit. A few different initiatives and a whole lot of hard work later right before it was time for her thirty- first birthday, Simran sent in her resignation letter and had moved on from unfulfilled dreams to becoming a self employed and independent woman. She knew it was only onwards and upwards from there for her. She also made her family swear to never use the phrase again and changed it to “Becoming in that bracket”.

By Disha Daryani