Listen Emotion Matters with Joan Sotkin

Today we interview Joan Sotkin of Prosperity Place, who approaches money in a holistic way. Because listen, emotion matters when it comes to money. Joan’s Story Joan comes from a family of compulsive debtors. She was born in 1940, a time when women’s roles were pretty prescribed. Joan got married and started on the prescribed path. She became a teacher but didn’t like teaching any more than she liked being married. She felt out of place. Looking for something else, she started studying what she terms, “woo woo stuff,” like astrology and healing crystals. In the 1980’s she began selling crystals and minerals for healing and meditation and was making great money. In 2015 money, she was bringing in $50,000 a month! And then she went bankrupt. Joan didn’t know how to manage cash flow. Her father died and she has since learned that people often deal with a big trauma by overspending. Her field started to grow and she didn’t know how to compete. Eventually, the business closed. Early Adopter In 1995 Joan discovered online business and taught herself how to build websites. A year later she moved to Santa Fe with $200 and whatever possessions fit in her car. In 1997 she started Prosperity Place. It’s a place for her to teach people what she learned from her mistakes and successes. Joan was an early podcaster too. She started podcasting in 2005. When Word Press came out she started building websites for other people. Insanity Defined Joan found that old saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” to be true. She sees people acting out emotions through business and financial decisions over and over. You have to get in touch with your emotions in order to sustain success. We can know intellectually what to do but it still has to be done by a person (us) and a person can get in the way of doing it. Money And Emotion Our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions are what form our decisions. If you’ve had emotional issues in childhood, they sometimes manifest themselves in the dec