The group that day was no tiny breakout room with a dozen chairs. There were over three hundred attendees there for a three-day event. What’s more, they were people who were experiencing their very first introduction to New Peaks, the company I led. As always, I was obsessed with ensuring that this first experience was one that delivered. We had delivered training programs to over a million people in over a hundred countries, and I knew it was that focus on delivering the highest value to our students that had helped us succeed.I’m no skeptic. I may be a former attorney, but I’m very spiritual, and I lead much of my life and teaching from that perspective. Without a doubt, though, I am also practical. It was this practical side of me that immediately spoke up. Was introducing this mysterious soul healer I’d just met really the right way to begin a three-day immersion experience?

My heart told me, “Go for it.” I knew that everyone who attends one of our sessions is there for a reason. And I also knew from experience, that reason at the deepest level is almost always a desire for healing. Who better to kick off the day, then, than a healer of Master Sha’s background?

But my head—my inner lawyer, you might say—told me, “Hang on. You don’t even really know this guy.” What if this blessing from a stranger made the wrong impression?

Thankfully, I went with my heart. Master Sha delivered a blessing that not only was magnificent on its own, but also created an intensely sacred space for us to work in for the next three days.

That moment of decision was the beginning of my friendship with Master Sha, and it’s also a great example of a duality that is at the heart of this book, and indeed, our world. In trying to make my decision that morning, I was shifting between two states—my rational head and my intuitive heart.

This head/heart division is a duality we’re all familiar with. We’ve all faced moments when, caught between two states, we can’t seem to decide. It’s a common experience, and when you begin to look around, you’ll see this dichotomy everywhere. You’ll discover that, like yin and yang, left and right brain, head and heart, visible and invisible, there are two sides to everything, as inseparable as north and south or right and left.

Nowhere is this duality more evident than in the world of money. Money is charged with head and heart conflict. Do we choose the job that pays better over the one we love? Do we save for the future or enjoy our money in the present? Is it wrong to pursue money? Are we penny-wise or pound-foolish? Money is a morass of conflicting emotions, polar opposites, and contradictions. Even our currency has two inseparable sides—the heads and tails of a coin.

Like metaphorical heads and tails, Master Sha and I began to talk on a regular basis. We exchanged teachings, and I learned more with each conversation about the world of spiritual healing in which he worked.

When I heard that he had a thirteen-part public television special coming out and was looking for a venue for a small preview party, I immediately offered my home. My wife and I hosted the event, a memorable evening that included Master Sha performing several special healings. It was also a great opportunity for more discussion between us.

During that party, Master Sha commented that New Peaks did much work to help people create more financial abundance. He, in turn, did healing work for people and companies, specifically by cleansing negative karma, helping many with challenging physical issues heal and recover. Like yin and yang, head and heart, we realized that our own duality might just hold the key to something special: The two of us, with our different but inseparable approaches of mind and spirit, could help guide people through the ever-challenging world of money.

As a business leader and former attorney, I would teach the “head” side of money—the tools, mind-sets, techniques, and thinking. Master Sha, the spiritual healer and teacher, would delve into the “soul” of money—the invisible realm of karma, spirit, and energy.

The result of that collaboration is this book—a unique way of creating abundance by learning to understand, attract, and manage your finances through the lenses of both the mind and the soul.

The Roots Create the Fruits

In our New Peaks programs, we focus on teaching people that the physical things that show up in their lives—everything from their homes to their health—begin as thoughts.

There’s good reason for this. Thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results in life. It’s what we call the process of manifestation, and it’s why one of the first things we want to help people do is to pivot their thinking; to shift from negative to positive thinking, for example, or from less-empowered thinking to more-empowered thinking.

An easy way to think of this process is “the roots create the fruits”— what’s below the ground, or invisible, creates what is above the ground, or visible. When an apple seed below the ground germinates and sends roots out, it creates an apple tree above the ground and eventually, apples. This idea is one that we take for granted in nature when we see a tree grow, but to truly accept that this is a universal law, one that is at work not just in the woods and fields, but also in our own lives, is often challenging. We accept that apples in the present come from apple tree roots set down in the past, but we can find it surprisingly difficult to see how money (or lack of it) now might be related to roots set down in months or years prior.

The essence of this philosophy, and what matters most for your life, is the idea of cause and effect. Right now, the “fruits” you’re receiving in life, from your income to your health to the quality of your relationships, exist because of seeds you planted in the past. Those seeds began as thoughts—things you were taught about money, for example, or beliefs you had about genetics and health—and eventually flourished into the fruits you see now in your life in the form of money, energy, and good health. Your thoughts were the cause. What you have in your life now is the effect.

From here, it’s not hard to see where we need to go to change our results in life. If you want to see new financial fruits—greater income, a nicer home, more security—then you need to set new roots. You need to start thinking differently so that you feel differently, act differently, and eventually, receive differently.

What Master Sha brings to this equation is something much deeper. From his study of ancient wisdom and teaching, we know that the roots are deeper and further back than just your childhood or your thinking from a few months or years ago. It begins before your thoughts. It begins with your soul.

Yes, you can create dramatic results in your life by changing your thinking. You can, in effect, learn to understand and master the idea of “mind over matter.”

But there’s a deeper truth. Your soul is what controls the outcome. It’s the original root of all the results. It’s not mind over matter so much as soul over matter. Deeper roots bring sweeter fruits.

Your Money Roots

If you accept the cause-and-effect equation for your financial life, you might well wonder exactly how your financial roots were planted. If money—the fruit—is a scarce resource in your life today, where and when were the roots set?

While the money you spent on your credit card last month is an easy culprit to point to, your true money roots were planted much deeper and much longer ago. For most people, the seeds of their figurative “money tree” were first sowed in childhood, by their parents and early money experiences.

Like many of us, you likely have some very disempowering opinions and conclusions about money planted in that early, fertile soil. Read the following sentences and see if you can fill in the missing words:

“Money is the root of all _________.”
“Money doesn’t grow on _________.”
“It takes money to _________.”
“The rich just get _________.”

Most of us can fill in these blanks with hardly a thought. They’re expressions—seeds—that landed early in our soil and germinated almost immediately. They were then watered and nourished by our family, peers, teachers, and colleagues for years until they delivered the fruits we see today.

Like everything, however, these early seeds and their fruits have a front and back all their own. For all we’ve learned about the negative influence of money, we’ve also spent much of our time and energy in pursuit of it. We’ve been raised and taught to abhor and fear money, yet we devote much of our lives pursuing it. We’ve been trained to try to attract it and avoid it at the same time!

The result is that most of us have a confusing view of money. Whether you realize it consciously or not, there’s a good chance the money seeds you planted early on in your life are conflicting with your current needs. You have mixed thoughts and emotions about money. On the one hand, money is important, helpful, and desirable. On the other hand, money is for the lucky few or for the extraordinary. You might believe money is for those who have done something wrong to receive it, or only for those who receive it as a family legacy. It’s a confusing message, and the outcome is that although you desire abundance, your trees are bearing scarcity.

When we’re young, the “soil” where we plant our first roots is very fertile. What we plant then tends to grow robustly, and the roots are stubborn. It’s not impossible to change those roots, but they’re well entrenched. The result is that when it comes to money, we’ve got one foot on the gas pedal and one on the brake. We’re pursuing it and running away from it at the same time. We feel proud of our income and ashamed of it in the same instant.

And that leads us to financial trouble, every time.

Planting New Roots: Financial Literacy

Not only are many of us not born into money, none of us were born to do money either—to understand it, attract it, nurture it, and spend it wisely. We’re not taught how to manage money, and we’re rarely even given a healthy view of it. If anything, what we’re taught is counterproductive to financial abundance. We’ve been taught, in large part, by people who either didn’t have any financial abundance or who had been taught their own negative, conflicted money message.

The current state of our financial literacy is one that plants seeds of scarcity. The good news is that we can change this. We can learn to see money differently. We can reinterpret the teachings and the experiences of our parents and grandparents.

When I started my process of creating new roots, I began with reading. I consumed books of all types but, in the financial arena, there were several that jarred my thinking so much that it was as if I could feel new roots spreading their first early tendrils into the soil of my mind.

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker was one of the first books to reveal to me that changing my thinking would change my financial results. I didn’t need to work harder, I needed to change my mental programming.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki taught me how the poor, middle class, and rich think differently and how their finances reflect that different thinking.

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley showed me how the wealthy upper middle class thought and, as a result, acted differently in managing their money.

These books were a revelation to me—I can’t recommend them enough. Moreover, they point to what is likely a gaping hole in your own financial literacy. I found the whole process astonishing. Why was I discovering this information in my thirties and forties? Where was this knowledge when I was an impressionable child and a young man beginning my career and making critical choices about my future?

I realized that not only did I have no respect for money, I had no understanding of it. I didn’t understand compound interest. I didn’t grasp the great things money could bring to my life in the form of freedom, security, and charity.

Slowly but surely, I began to build my financial literacy. I read the Wall Street Journal and books by Peter Lynch. I began to change my thinking and, as a result, my feelings and actions.

Slowly, I began to create something in my life that I’d never experienced before: financial harmony. Where before I only had conflict, I now felt a growing sense of possibility and peace.

There’s an expression: “Where attention goes, energy flows, and results show.”

If you think something is unimportant, you don’t give it attention.

What if, for example, you thought your children were unimportant? You wouldn’t spend time with them. You wouldn’t pay attention to them, try to nurture them, build their character, or teach them. The likely result of that lack of attention and energy would be a lack of “results” in your relationship with your kids. In other words, you wouldn’t have one.

Financial literacy is a way of saying, “Money is important.” It’s a way of directing your attention to money so that you can give it time and energy and, in turn, receive results. It’s the first step on the road to planting new roots and discovering the peace and abundance that can be created from financial harmony.