Sheryl Kosovski
Certified Money and Business Coach
I think of myself more as a self-love coach than as a money coach. I help my clients see their value, so they come to believe they are worthy of more. Sure, I also teach them to make spending plans and how to get out of debt and save. More importantly, I help them to see that by taking care of their money they can better take care of themselves and the people they love.
Self-love? What does that have to do with managing money and financial success, you may ask?
Well, everything.
Everything stems from and gets created from the way we love and accept ourselves. My own personal journey has been to accept who I am no matter how fat, thin, in debt or prosperous I am. To be able to look at myself in the mirror and see myself flaws and all and be able to say that I love who I am. No matter what others might say. It has been a fulfilling although challenging and difficult road to travel at times, but definitely worth it.
When we love ourselves, we believe we deserve to have the best. We aren’t as willing to compromise in our jobs and lives. We aren’t afraid to ask for what we want, and we experience a level of self-confidence that allows us to demand to be well paid and treated with respect and kindness. That also influences the way we take care of our money. When we manage our money well, we feel worthy of having more of it. We trust ourselves not to squander it.
When I began my journey as a business coach and professor of entrepreneurship fourteen years ago, I was excited about the idea of helping fellow creatives learn the skills they would need to help them prosper doing what they loved. Being that I’ve had a gift for marketing and had been able to prosper in my own business it was a natural next step for me to take after having made my living as an artist for over 20 years.
What I quickly discovered was that most of the business challenges that people were having had more to do with whether or not they felt they were worthy of success than it did with knowing how to market themselves. It wasn’t that people didn’t know what to do. Many of my clients had taken many business classes over time. What was present with everyone I was coaching was fear that they weren’t worthy of making what they really deserved. They could only imagine making a little more than they needed. They also were afraid to look at their finances and really evaluate if the choices they were making were profitable. Fear was leading their lives and the choices they were making were not aligned with what they really valued. They often felt that they had to give their clients everything they asked for even if the requests were absurd or more than the client was paying for.
I wasn’t sure how to help my clients overcome this at first, but it was clear that if I couldn’t help them with this I could teach them everything I knew about marketing and business management and they still wouldn’t be able to increase their income or achieve the success they wanted. So, I got certified as a Financial Recovery Counselor which gave me the skills to help them learn to love themselves and allow themselves to be well compensated. It taught me that the way we think affects the actions we take. It also gave me the tools needed to manage money well and to teach those skills to others.
Teaching people how to better love and accept themselves has become a core theme in my coaching work. This is the hardest work for people to do. Doing self-love work means that we are required to face our past mistakes and heal our wounds. It means accepting that we are responsible for the life we have created and what we will create tomorrow. That’s a scary space for most of us. But it’s work that can change everything, allowing us to be in control of our own destiny including our financial wellbeing.