In writing my latest book, “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid,” I discovered a fundamental element of what it means to be wealthy. Wealth is not derived from just increasing the number of dollars coming in the door. Wealth is a positive polarity of existence. The presence of cash is just one manifestation of living in a positive polarity.
I experienced these positive and negative polarities firsthand, because I grew up in a poor community and a poor kid school, and then I was thrust into a rich kid school.
One of the most obvious (well, now it’s obvious, for a long time it wasn’t) differences between poor kids and rich kids has to do with permission. In the poor kid school, we were relentlessly taught that we did not have permission to do much of anything. We had to ask permission for anything and everything, including going to the bathroom. In fact, any deviation from the delineated schedule (that had been created by someone else) required asking permission from someone in authority. And it had to be in writing.
Rich kids, on the other hand, had constant permission. In the rich kids school environment, I didn’t have to ask people in authority for permission to do much of anything. It wasn’t just a slightly different approach. It was a completely opposite polarity.
Now when I talk about positive and negative polarities here, of poverty thinking versus wealth consciousness, when you try to come up with the two opposite elements, you would think that the opposite elements consist of permission versus lack of permission. But now I understand that it’s really about permission versus obedience. Permission is natural, so in order to create a negative version of it, you have to introduce the suppression of it, i.e., obedience.
We hear many different iterations of the concept of overcoming obedience training. “Believing in yourself” comes to mind . . . “Just do it” is another . . . Nothing wrong with them per se, except that if you’re just trying to undo the negative, well, in any equation when you have a negative number, the result is always negative. Instead of fighting your obedience training (and in retrospect, 100% of my poor kid school experience embodied some form of obedience training), embrace the concept… the very pure and simple concept… that you have permission. You always had it, just as Dorothy always had the ruby slippers. Trying to overcome obedience training says you believe it has legitimacy to exist in your life in the first place. Instead, do what the rich kids do: fail to recognize the limitation in the first place.
© Justin Locke
