As the financial tornadoes continue, thousands are feeling the wrenching shock of an unexpected income loss. No matter how confident you are in your abilities, a forced drop in financial flow can wreak emotional havoc. Doubts and worries you thought you’d long gotten rid of can suddenly take over the microphone in your head and blast fears and insecurities 24/7.

Who controls the internal megaphone?

Just when you most need your self-esteem, it evaporates.

I know as well as anyone that it’s a near Herculean effort at times to cobble together some self-esteem when you’re broke. Why this is so is a long and winding story, but in a nutshell it comes down to pegging our self-esteem to the wrong yardstick. Most of us have been relying heavily on the capricious voice of ego for our self esteem and ego has chosen money as a primary tool of torture. It’s going to take some dedicated inner work to get money out of ego’s grip and to peg our self esteem to the right source.

But the good news is you can wrestle back control of the microphone in your head and start broadcasting correct information. Follow these five steps to start disconnecting your self esteem from your ego, and tune into your real inner worth.

Step 1. Honor your own feelings
No one likes being ignored. To purposefully ignore someone communicates disdain and dismissal — not very pleasant feedback to receive. Being ignored challenges our very existence and sense of worth. In response, we often clamor to be heard.

When we ignore our emotions, they get the same message. They take it personally. Keep slamming the door in their face and they only get louder and louder. The result: stress, illnesses and drama. Tension around emotions comes in great measure from the effort it takes to ignore and suppress what we deem unacceptable.

How much are you judging, resisting or ignoring your own feelings around being broke?

Listening to your own feelings with compassion and acceptance is one of the biggest gifts you can give to yourself. Frustration, fear, feeling out of control, betrayal, anger, hurt, feeling trapped, insignificant and powerless, feeling unloved — these are all feelings common to the experience of being broke. It’s perfectly understandable, and perfectly acceptable, if you have any of these feelings.

Allow them up into your awareness. Let them exist. Bear witness to them. Acknowledge them. When you do, a deep aspect of you feels heard and accepted.

The trick to learn is that you can bear witness to these feelings without feeding them, without having them consume you, throw you into depression, or dictate your actions. Emotions by their nature are in flux. You do need to acknowledge they exist, but you do not need to identify with them. You do not need to construct a story from them that you tell all your friends and repeat over and over. You do not need to hold onto them — this is a key distinction.

Step 2. Let the feelings go
Once you’ve listened to your own feelings — heard yourself out, so to speak — you can let them go. You can do this from a place of being the observer of your feelings, rather than as an involved participant. Simply “hearing” the emotions in itself will begin to shift things. You might imagine yourself being an audience for the play of your emotions, for instance.

Tie your emotions with a bow and send them on their way

When I was first getting accustomed to letting go of my emotions, I imagined each emotion, each upset, being a small gift I gave to the universe — in a little box with a bow. It helped immensely in being able to let them go.

Let them go because you are not your emotions. They pass, they change — you still exist. As you practice letting them go — and it definitely takes practice — you can let them go more and more quickly. You can become a master of this.

Sometimes, the emotions we’re looping on are looping because they’re masking deeper feelings that we’ve decided are more scary or unacceptable, or that make us feel more vulnerable. Anger will commonly mask hurt, for example. Admitting you feel hurt feels more vulnerable than being angry. Letting one emotion go — the anger — can release the other — the hurt — so that it too can go and the whole issue can heal.

Once your anxiety-provoking emotions have exited, give yourself acceptance and approval. It may feel awkward at first — the voice of ego in your head will tell you it’s a stupid thing to do. Do it anyway — give yourself your own approval. With passionate enthusiasm.

Don't have a dog? Borrow your neighbor's

Step 3. Do something you love
Feed that approval you’ve just given yourself by setting regularly scheduled times to do something you love to do. People often scramble when they feel broke, putting a huge amount of pressure on themselves to find the next job, search for the next opening, submit their resume, go to the next networking opportunity. Doing something can feel empowering, but often the activities take on an anxiety-state panic. The panic is counter-productive.

Defuse the panic by doing something you love. You don’t need to spend money to do something wonderful. Walk your dog — just make sure to leave your cell phone and iPod at home. (If you don’t have a dog, borrow a neighbor’s .) Go for a walk in a beautiful part of your town. If you can get out in nature, even better. Surf, hike, bike. Just clear your schedule and do it.

Notice the beauty around you

When you’re out there, take time to stop and simply look at what is beautiful: a delicate bloom, a towering tree, a lone cloud, a breaking wave. Don’t pick the flower, simply appreciate it. Look as an artist might look — carefully, patiently, intently. This exercise shifts your focus away from the voice in your head, toward beauty and into the present moment, which is a most powerful combination. Magic can happen.

Step 4. Dedicate time to pursue your dreams
People in the panic mode of feeling broke often jettison their dreams. They talk themselves into doing only “practical” things and force out any wild notions of being successful doing what they really love to do. Consequently, they often find themselves becoming more and more depressed, complaining, and despairing.

The reason for the depression here is simple — your soul doesn’t like being ignored either. Money is our current favorite “excuse” for not pursuing our soul’s designs for our lifetime. Perhaps our souls are collectively stamping their feet to be heard, and the money is slipping away until we listen to them.

Giving dedicated energy to your dreams allows your soul to feel heard and energizes everything else you do.

Devote a block of several hours in the morning — before you do anything else — to pursuing your true preference. What do you really want to do? What brings a smile to your face when you think of being able to do it full time? What would you do if you didn’t need to worry about “making money”? Pursue or research that dream first, before doing any “practical” tasks.

Do this for two or three weeks, as a routine, and see how your energy and stress level improves and how many things have simply fallen into place with your “practical” life.

This is a contest between ego and soul. It’s soul’s time to win, but ego is going to put up a fight.

Step 5. Appreciate what you already have
Sometimes when we’re down, we can get lost in it. By spending all our energy focused on what we don’t have, soon there’s no room in our head to even notice what we do have. Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve acknowledged the value of friends and family who truly support you? Giving love to others is a sure-fire way of finding the road out of the blues.

Send an email to your good friends telling them how they’ve helped you and how glad you are that they’re in your life.

I did this on the spur of the moment recently after a good friend passed away unexpectedly — it was suddenly urgent for me to tell all my friends, especially those I hadn’t been in touch with in a while, how much they meant to me. I was amazed by all the sincere good wishes and thanks that these friends sent back to me. I realized I helped many people that day and inspired several friends to reconnect with their own lost friends — and I felt wonderful for days.

By doing this simple thing, you are giving people what they really want — what everyone really wants — acknowledgment and love.

Create a flowing fountain of worth

If you take these steps, you will soon realize an important truth: “feeling like a million” has nothing at all to do with money.

People who are broke often assume that their problems can be solved with money or that it must feel great to be a millionaire. The truth is, because of its current ties to ego, money often simply masks existing ongoing problems and can even exacerbate them.

Listening to your emotions, letting go of them once they’re acknowledged, putting time into your dreams and what you love, and appreciating what you already have will connect you to what makes you most alive. Ultimately, feeling most alive and accepting and appreciating yourself is the source of true self-worth, and this kind of self-esteem does not go up and down with economic tides. It is an endless fountain that can sustain you through all challenges.

Feeling like a million is an inside job. That is true whether you’re a billionaire or broke, and you can choose to have that strength no matter how much money happens to be in your wallet at that moment. You can give yourself acknowledgement and love at any minute of the day — and ultimately, when it comes down to it, this is what we’ve been looking for all along.