What story have you been telling yourself?

Lord knows, there’s enough going on in the world to fuel a dozen pot-boilers.

But what’s your particular story?

Is it a story of scarcity? Of not enough? Of doom, and financial setbacks, and what THOSE people are doing with the coming election?

You’re telling your story over and over. You can probably point to any number of things that demonstrate how true your story is. Recent news reports tell us that one trillion (trillion) dollars of wealth vanished.

Wow. That’s a lot of money. But is it really gone, or is the idea of it gone?

Here’s a quote that speaks to this story:

“What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen – paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It’s a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game – and once the confidence goes, there’s no telling when the selling will stop. – Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

The key words to me are “paper losses” and “a confidence game”.

The money is still there. No one took a trillion dollars and burned it. It existed mostly on paper, and it’s still there – although perhaps under another accounting category or line-item.

What did get burned is our confidence in the government and the financial systems that were supposed to protect us.

Here’s the thing. If you can lose confidence, you can gain it, too. Maybe your story reads something like, “I’m broke. My investments are in the toilet. I don’t know how I’ll pay for my retirement. My business will stall. I’ll have to lay people off.”

Tell yourself a different story. “I have more than enough money. Stocks are priced so low; I can buy more and add to my portfolio. I’ll increase my business and plenty of customers will buy what I’m selling.”

Maybe that story doesn’t sound true for you, and I totally understand that. But keep telling it; tell it with all the fervor and emotion you put into telling the “other” story. Keep telling it until it becomes real for you and watch how your life shifts in alignment with your beliefs.

As FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

It isn’t life circumstances that will do you in. It’s the fear.

Lose your fear, and you gain a life of freedom, ease and abundance.

Tell yourself a new story.