What If Your “Money Blocks” Aren’t Real?
Over the years, many clients have said something like this to me:
“It must be my subconscious money blocks that are keeping my business from thriving…”
“I just need to BELIEVE that I’m worth charging more.”
“Once I finally clear my limiting beliefs, I’ll have my breakthrough!”
If I believed there was something buried in me that was cancelling out all my efforts, I’d want it gone too! What a negative cloud to have over one’s work and dreams.
I’ve watched a lot of soulpreneurs go looking for these blocks. And what I’ve seen, over and over, is that the looking becomes the project… and the power of those blocks only grows.
So I’d like to offer you another possibility, one that might even save you a few thousand dollars, and a few years!
First, what people mean by a “money block”
To be fair to the idea, this is the version most teachers would recognize:
A “money block” is a belief about money that you absorbed early — from your family, your culture, your religion — that now runs beneath your awareness and limits what you’re able to earn. You can’t simply decide your way out of it, because you didn’t decide your way into it. It has to be surfaced, and then “cleared.”
The ones you’ll most often see named:
- Money is scarce.
- Rich people are greedy or corrupt.
- I’m just bad with money.
- It’s selfish to want more.
- If I have more, someone else has less.
- Money has to be hard to earn.
- I’m not the kind of person who has money.
- I’m not worthy of receiving it.
If a few of those felt familiar, that’s not a diagnosis. It’s more a description of being a human who needs to eat! Everyone nods at that list… including the people who teach the clearing.
The lists only get longer…
One popular guide names eight money blocks.
Another names thirteen.
And if you search limiting beliefs about money you’ll eventually come across “the 100 most common limiting beliefs about money.”
Nobody has ever published a list that got shorter!
That’s more telling than whether any single belief on the list is true of you — some of them probably are. But here’s the problem: looking always finds more.
“So… do I have money blocks?”
Sort of. You have fears about money, and so does everyone I’ve ever coached, and so do I.
I invite you to gently swap the question. Instead of what’s blocking me?, try:
What have I actually offered to real people in the last 90 days, and what did I learn from what happened?
That gives you an answer that you can do something with! The “what’s blocking me” question only generates more doubt, more issues… more blocks.
Is the clearing working, though?
I’m not making a scientific claim here.
Many friends and clients of mine have spent thousands of dollars — and years of effort — healing their money story, clearing their blocks, dissolving their limiting beliefs.
I follow up with them. One year later, two years, three.
Most of them are in the same financial situation they were in before.
Scripture has a test for exactly this sort of thing: you shall know them by their fruits. (In this case, I am referring to “them” as the money-block-clearing-methods.) My friends keep applying them, and the fruits keep looking about the same.
I noticed this pattern a long time ago: the people most fluent in money-block language, are often the ones struggling most with money.
Now, my own situation, since you have every right to ask what I’m basing this on.
I grew up with a father who taught me that money is a struggle, that money doesn’t grow on trees. I went to a church that taught me money is evil and rich people are corrupt. By the standard framework, I should be a case study.
My father came out of a very poor childhood, never worked on a single money block in his life (he would’ve mocked the idea), and built a thriving business.
I started my own business in 2009, began making a full-time living from it in 2010, and it has supported me well ever since.
I have never once worked on my money mindset.
Why I think the clearing doesn’t work
Let me make up an inner demon, right now, in front of you.
You have a demon called Rorschach. Rorschach is subconscious, so naturally you can’t see it. Until you clear Rorschach, your business will never thrive — and everyone who succeeds has cleared theirs.
I can sell you a program that clears it.
Notice that I didn’t need to know a single thing about you. The structure does the work on its own:
The method name something invisible…
then makes your success conditional on it…
...then it sells you the removal.
You can’t disprove any of it, because the whole apparatus lives somewhere you’re not able to look.
What actually convinced me, though, was thinking about it outside of money altogether.
Imagine that I decide I’m socially awkward. I set out to clear that block. Now I walk into a room, and where is my attention? On me. On my awkwardness, and on whether it’s showing. I’ve just made the entire room about my awkwardness, so of course it grows.
But if I walk into that same room genuinely curious about the people in it — what they’re working on, what they need, where the conversation wants to go — my awkwardness has nothing left to feed on. It doesn’t get cleared. It just stops being the focus.
That’s what I think happens with money scarcity.
The more energy we give our inner demons, the more of them we turn up. First it’s one belief. Then it’s a category of beliefs. Then it’s a whole area of your life, and then another area you hadn’t thought to check.
Richard Bach put it better than I can: “Argue for your limitations, and surely they’re yours.”
(One version of this hunt is worth doing, by the way. Instead of searching for beliefs, look at the limiting structures of your days — an unstable schedule, saying yes to too many requests, avoiding the discomfort of creating. Those you can see. And those you can change.)
And I would have written all of this off as my own bias, except for one thing. Ask the teachers themselves when the block-clearing work ends… and many will tell you outright: it doesn’t. New level, new blocks! Every time you grow, more blocks will surface!
They are describing the very multiplication I’m warning you about… and offering it as the reason to continue buying.
I don’t blame you for believing it
The belief seems to make sense.
Building a business of your own asks you to act outside your comfort zone, constantly. Of course you feel fear. Of course you procrastinate. That’s not a malfunction. That’s what doing work you care about feels like.
So when a caring, credible teacher gives that fear a name — your money block — it fits. It explains what you’ve been living with. I totally understand why people say yes.
And then comes the program you need to buy.
I have nothing to sell you on this subject, which I hope makes me a little easier to trust than someone who does.
If you’d rather check that than take my word for it: search “how to clear money blocks” and read the last section of each of the top five results. See what you find at the bottom of every one: a product/program to help you clear those blocks.
Where I’d draw the line, though…
None of this is me saying your pain isn’t real. It is real, and I’ve felt it.
If money brings up genuine grief for you — from how you grew up, from a bankruptcy, from a marriage, from something you’d rather not say out loud — that really deserves care. Please find a good practitioner and work on it.
What I’m questioning is much narrower: the promise that tending those feelings is what will produce more income for you.
Those are two different purchases, though — one is healing, the other is a business strategy — and an entire industry now makes its living in the blur between them. That’s where soulpreneurs get hurt, and waste time and money, because you can work on yourself and heal deeply, yet still have not enough clients.
Tend to the feelings because they’re yours and they hurt. But when it comes to your business, use good strategy and practices.
So what does help?
Two truths I often remind my clients (and myself) —
- Money comes from other people. You must sell what they want, not what you want to sell.
- The more money you save and invest, the more you’ll have.
For the first: people give you money when they trust you, and when what you’re selling is something they genuinely want. So you grow trust through consistent, generous content over time… you learn what people want by talking with them rather than guessing… and you keep experimenting with your offers, staying curious about the results.
For the second: save something every month, whatever the amount. I’ve been a consistent saver for a long time, and I’d call it one of the more underrated business skills there is. Invest much of what you save.
And if your relationship with money currently feels like a problem to be solved, this reframe may help more than anything above.
A few questions I get
“Are you saying money trauma isn’t real?”
Not at all. It’s real, and it deserves proper care. I’m saying that tending it is healing work rather than a marketing plan, and that conflating the two is what leaves people broke and disappointed in themselves.
“I did one of those programs and it genuinely helped me. Was I wrong?”
No, and I’m glad. Good things do happen when you spend a weekend among people taking their work seriously. I’d only wonder whether the active ingredient was the clearing… or the deciding, and the smart strategies you applied.
“Isn’t this just telling me to hustle harder?”
It’s the opposite, and I feel strongly about this one. Hustle culture and belief-clearing both start from the same instruction — fix yourself first — and both leave you exhausted. What I practice is the middle way: gentle, consistent, sustainable action toward other people, for years. Not grinding. Not waiting until you’re ready.
“I have almost no money right now. Where do I start?”
Save something, however small. Talk with a few people about what they’re struggling with. Offer something, however modest. In that order.
Where your energy goes
You can spend the coming year taking inventory of your inner demons, finding more of them, clearing those, and finding more still…
Or you can spend it going toward the people you’re able to genuinely help, hearing about their needs and wants (thereby developing even more empathy for them), offering what they want, saving a little each month, and getting better at all of it.
One of those directions has a beautiful result. I’ve been walking it since 2009, and I can tell you where it goes.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments: have you spent money on this kind of program? What actually changed afterward, if anything? I ask with real curiosity, and no judgment at all, since I’ve bought my own share of these things 😅
May your energy go toward the people you’re here to serve. 🙏🏼🧡
This post was originally written in 2018, refreshed in 2026.
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