One of the breathing benefits we talk about that raises a lot of eyebrows is an improved financial situation.

A connection between breathing and money may seem like a bit of a stretch, but today we’re going to share a real life situation where breathing helped us on a financial journey that many would have struggled with. We’re not saying it was easy by any means, but without the breathing skills we have, we seriously doubt that we could have pulled it off.

It started with us using $100,000 of other people’s money to secure a 5 million dollar commercial property that we renovated and resold for roughly 7 million dollars. It’s the boldest investment transaction we’ve initiated so the story is more about the energy and emotion of the transaction rather than the value of it.

You’re welcome to read about the adventure below but we’d recommend either listening to the podcast or watching the video lower down the page. You’ll get a better sense of the energy involved if you hear us tell the story directly.

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It’s All Energy

You will have heard many times that money is just energy.

Money itself is pretty benign, whether it’s in physical form or floating around in a computer at a bank and showing up in your account as a balance.

But it’s what it represents that matters. It represents a holding or a transfer of value. If we give you a dollar for a loaf of bread, we’re exchanging energy – your effort in baking the bread, and our effort in earning the money.

We know from physics that everything is energy anyway so no matter how you look at it, money is energy.

As is the breath. The breath is a transfer or transformation of energy and through this common quality we can link the two – money and breath.

So guess what? Your money skills are linked to your breathing whether you like it or not. In particular, the quality of the financial decisions you make are directly linked to your state of mind which is directly linked to the quality of your breathing.

The Shopping Centre

So for this particular money adventure, we purchased a small nine store shopping centre in Warrnambool, a coastal town in Victoria, Australia.

As stated earlier, we used other people’s money (other people’s energy!) to come up with $100,000 to secure us the right to renovate and sell the property at a future date. The previous owner thus retained an interest in the property until we were able to pay them in full.

So essentially, we used other people’s money to secure the right to improve someone else’s property so we could reap the rewards of our effort (more energy!) in the form of a profit.

From start to finish the project took as about 4 years to complete (in fact as we recorded this episode, we were still to complete the sale on the last parts of the deal).

We should also add that we have two young children, 8 and 5 years old currently but 4 and 1 when the fun began. And shortly after the project started we decided to move interstate, which took us 2,000 kilometres further away from the project site.

Luckily for us, the process coincided with our interest in breathing, because this was a high pressure situation for us that has delivered some life changing money and experiences to match.

And while you might expect there’d be lots of champagne corks popping at the end of such a transaction, that’s not how it’s panned out. Having all this money arrive at once was a transfer of energy that took us a little off balance, shall we say.

It came with responsibility, obligations to our investors, and some tricky calculations that we did not want to get wrong. By the time we managed all that, and our reactions to each other, which weren’t always pleasant, there was little inclination to pop champagne.

The bottom line – Money wigs people out. Sex, money and powerlessness are three things that really make people wig out, and on this occasion it wigged us out big time.

Breathe and Relax

Our breathing skills have allowed us to manage our energy and get through the end game but we’ve had to call on these skills throughout the whole process.

You’ve probably had some experience with renovations or seen enough TV shows to know that it’s not an easy process. But when you’re doing it with someone else’s money, on someone else’s property, a commercial property with tenants, in a rural city in another State, and dealing with builders, consultants, and the local Council, everything gets magnified. Everything. There is a lot more energy at play so to speak.

But things got a little bit more complicated than we expected.

Firstly, the land title documents were incorrect so we had to reconfigure our plans based on the real land available rather than what we’d been led to believe was part of the purchase.

Then the neighbours affected by the title errors got cranky. More than just cranky, they got nasty, despite the fact that they didn’t even know us.

Lucking our breathing skills allowed us to not just manage our own energy, but also to shepherd the energy of the other parties. We often found ourselves mediating stakeholders rather than managing situations. This included the cranky neighbours but also the builders who would sometimes extend the scope without consulting with us then expect to be paid for their efforts.

Breathe and relax. Breathe and relax…

Heeeey, Let’s Write And Self Publish A Book!!

So despite all our challenges, when we realised how well we were coping with them, we decided to add another one, writing and self-publishing a book. And what better subject could there be than stress?

Hence, Three Lessons on How to Lower Stress Naturally was conceived and born. (You can get a free copy of it here).

Writing and self-publishing a book isn’t something we’d given much thought to, but when we realised the benefits of breathing and the other habits we mentioned in the book, we pretty much felt compelled to share the techniques with others.

It turned out to be a good move. We’ve won three awards for the book and continue to get feedback today from people who benefit from it.

Three Minutes + Breathing + Circle =

The success of this project, and our ability to manage ourselves through it, really comes down to our ability to breathe through it.

We used a wide range of techniques throughout the journey but one technique that we can always use, anywhere and at any time, is three minutes of circular breathing.

No matter what you’ve got going on, no matter how much energy or how many challenges you have, you can always find three minutes and you can always breathe your way through them.

Giving yourself some breathing space gives you some literal space for you to tackle the challenges. (If you’re not familiar with the circular breathing technique take our free Quick Start Breathing Program over here).

Closing The Deal

So how does breathing affect finances and money? Well, if you’re making decisions from low energy, you’re going to make stupid decisions. If you know how to manage yourself and manage your own personal energy and wellbeing, and for us the breathing has been the fastest way of doing that, then you’ll make very, very different decisions or choices.

Even now that the deal is done and the money is in the bank (almost), our ability to create space through breathing is helping us make decisions that serve us better.

This is true for us, and we firmly believe that given the space that breathing provides, when it comes to finances, you will make much better decisions with your money.