The Idealist places great value on creativity, compassion, social justice, or spiritual growth. On bad days, you experience mistrust, skepticism, or rebelliousness around money, but you’re also often able to express great vision and compassion in your use of money. Today, see if it’s true for you that self-sufficiency is empowering and supports your ideals, or alternatively, find just one way to use money to further your ideals.

You’re probably an Idealist if:
• Your primary vocation is artist, musician, or entertainer, or you work for a nonprofit.
• You don’t earn enough money to file a tax return, or you do earn enough but choose not to file.
• You rely on others (from your past or present) for much of your financial support.
• Your investments are primarily in small businesses, individual pieces of real estate, or an art or music collection, because you distrust big business.
• If you invest in stocks, they have been socially screened to eliminate some combination of tobacco companies, environmental polluters, weapons manufacturers, nuclear power, alcohol manufacturers, and companies deemed to have unfair labor practices (some percentage of people from the other archetypes also use screening, but virtually all Idealists do, or would if they owned stocks).
• You are more likely to give five dollars to a person on the street than to give to organized charity.

Painful Emotional States
Weary
Skeptical
Distrustful
Fantasy-Based
Rebellious
Angry
Naïve

Common Distorted Thoughts (Conditioned Beliefs from the Past)
A lot of suffering and sacrifice is necessary to be creative or spiritual.
It’s better to feel pain than to be financially free.

Liberating Wisdom or Ways to Focus
Self-sufficiency is empowering and will support my ideals.
Money is good if it’s used to create balance.
I love not having to rely on other people or the system.
Compassion comes more easily when I’m not in a state of financial need or dependence.

Archetype(s) You Most Need to Emphasize to Create Balance
Saver: self-sufficiency, abundance
Innocent: simplicity, adaptability
Star: leadership, elegance

A practice

THE SKEPTIC’S LENS
Artists, activists, and spiritual seekers who operate under the Idealist archetype have a nose for hypocrisy and often see very clearly and accurately
the limitations of “the system” or ideologies in general. If you have the kind of well-honed critical mind that is adept at debunking popular
myths, I challenge you to take that same skeptic’s lens and use it to look at the following:
• Leaving aside for just a moment the ways in which you believe “the system” to be corrupt, turn your attention to yourself. What is it that you might not be seeing about your relationship to money? In what way is your relationship to money contradictory or even hypocritical?
• If you’re an Idealist with a substantial amount of money that you didn’t earn, how would your life be different if you had earned the money yourself? Would your beliefs about money, or the way you treat it, be different? How so?
• Is your lack of attention to what it would take to be self-sufficient truly serving your art or cause?
• If you had more money, imagine for a moment all the good you might do with it. List the ways money could serve your ideals.

To do more specific practices related to the Idealist, buy my book or attend a workshop.