What’s your money mindset?

They say that money makes the world go round and we certainly all need it. Some are great at saving it, others spending it and in the current climate your relationship to money is something important to consider.

So let’s explore how you view money in your life.

How much money do you earn, save, spend and invest daily, weekly, monthly and annually, and how do you feel about it? You may wonder if you need more than the advice of business coaches and experts in financial areas to be enough for you to change. However, it is your internal dialogue that matters in resetting your money mindset. Check-in with yourself. What is your resistance to change? Is it a physical impossibility or a fear-based response? Are you fearful of making it worse, not better? Are you scared to leave a comfortable job, uncertain about spending or investing money in case you need it in the future? As yourself, what is stopping you from making changes to your money behaviours.

Has this money mindset stayed the same or changed over the years, and what do you think has created your reality? Do you blame specific people, times and circumstances in your life for where you are now and whom you have become financially? People can blame redundancy or a relationship break-up for their ‘financial demise’. However, is the situation with unexplored and unreleased emotions the real problem? Many wealthy and famous talk of their back story and their financial breakdown being their breakthrough. What is the difference between them and everyone considering these life changes and setbacks? Their beliefs are different! In the modern world, we call this mindset.

How heavily linked is your sense of self-worth and value to the amount of money you do or do not have? What is the primary success marker in your life? Is it money in the bank that matters? Conversely, when your money has dwindled, is the inability to provide for yourself or your family considered a failure to you? It can often feel that way. Society can measure success through wealth. What if you had no money but had the most beautiful life, love, family, freedom and joy every day – would that still be a failure? With that in mind, could you measure your success in life in a non-monetary way? Remember that your personal worth is more than money.

Notice all the things you say to yourself about money; investing, spending, earning, saving and writing them down; this shows some of your most prevalent current-day beliefs! 80% of the things you say to yourself daily are the same. Most are instructional, but some of it is demotivating and based on your fears, beliefs and past experiences in life. Get a better understanding of what your self-talk is doing. Recall all the things you say to yourself about money. Your most profound thoughts are instructing yourself daily! “I can’t afford it”, “We need to save for a rainy day”, “I’ll always have to struggle”. We tend to make our beliefs true. If you believe you could never earn a £100k salary, you will ensure you don’t.

Get curious about where or whom those sayings (old beliefs) came from; maybe your parents, their parents, friends, or partners? Many of your beliefs are not initially yours or even valid. Without evidence, you made them up, heard them, or learned them from a higher power of authority (e.g. parents, teachers or peers at school whom you believed more than yourself). You did this to feel safe and have a strategy around unknown things and situations. To be accepted, many people run a safety loop of staying the same as their family and friends – this is natural conditioning. Take the sibling that earns more – the perception of them in the unit changes, and so does how they get treated.

Reflect on how money has been for you in your childhood, teens, and adulthood – is there a pattern? Take a moment to reflect on your life. Ask yourself some questions to get an idea of any repeating patterns in the past to create your now. Has your current financial reality always been your reality? When did it feel better? When did it feel worse? We often have ‘rose-tinted glasses’ about the past, our childhood, how we were raised around money and the beliefs of the higher powers of learning that we model or take to be our own. What we learn becomes our rule book and belief system.

How has this belief-based pattern affected your standard of life to date? Take a moment to dream. What have you got to lose? Imagine a world where you don’t have some of your disempowering and disabling beliefs around your financial standing and destiny. Imagine you had no beliefs at all. You would not have negative self-talk and behave very differently in your career; think how worthy of a higher income you are. You would then feel differently about exchanging money for things you knew you liked and wanted. You would have no point of reference around needing a just-in-case emergency fund. You would be a financial blank canvas!

What would you like to believe about money right now? With your blank canvas, you would start from scratch, having scrapped your money mindset rule book. What would you like to believe would enhance your life? You may be limitless, abundant, and able to earn as and when you wish. Your time, personality and skills in life are as valuable as millionaires. Imagine all the money you ever needed and wanted is waiting for you to collect. We call it manifesting, setting your internal guidance system with what you truly want, not through what you fear.

What difference would different beliefs and self-talk around money make to your everyday behaviours? What if you could remove your programmed inner critic of negative self-talk dialogue and insert or load a new one? If you could be your own cheerleader, what things would you spend most of your time saying to yourself so that you are smiling inside? Would you feel differently about yourself and all the people around you? That resentment you feel when people do well would be gone. Instead, you would be as happy for them as yourself. Everything that happens to you happens twice: Once in your imagination and then in real life. Spend time focused on this.

How could your life feel different with new earnings, spending, investing and saving beliefs, self-talk and behaviours?

Imagine your life with new empowering and enabling beliefs and self-talk around money. Where would you be waking up each morning? Who would be with you? What would you be looking for? How would you dress, and what would you think of yourself? What would your attitude to every day be like? Think about where you would live. What would you do as a career? Would joy and fulfilment become a priority now that money isn’t? Is this a life you prefer? How can you start to change to bring this to your reality? Remember, real change starts from within.