Start to learn all about your money mindset, what it is, and why you feel the way you do about money.
This is a pretty darn huge Masterclass, and there’s a whole lot of information in here that would be easy to skim over. I highly encourage you to take this Masterclass at your own pace, pause and come back to it if you need, take some time to process things, but keep going.
I have also created a workbook for you for this Masterclass to help you get the most out of it. You can download it here:
Before we get too far into the class, I want you to ask yourself one thing:
Feel free to write or draw your answer out. You can write at length or give just one word as an answer. Whatever works for you.
It’s good to start by asking a question like this because it makes you stop and actually think about your current feelings towards money, instead of just talking about budgets and money saving ideas (which are important, but this just takes our finances one step further).
Our money mindset is a set of beliefs and actions we have about and towards money that are formulated from our experiences and understandings of money and its role in our lives.
Every single person you know has a money mindset, whether they realise it or not. The problem occurs when we don’t realise it, and we don’t realise the impact our words and actions have on our ability to handle our money.
So let’s look at that a little closer…
Your money mindset is formulated from our experiences and understandings of money and its role in our lives.
Our money mindsets begin to form before we even earn our first dollar. Often our mindset starts to form even before our early teen years, when we start to notice money and its role in society, regardless of our understanding of it. We see how our parents treat money, how they speak about it, the comparison between our own situations and those of our friends, who has the brand name items and who has the nicer house…
All of these little pieces add to the complex puzzle of our money mindset, and we are going to start looking deeper into them.
Some of the concepts we have around money are formed by common societal beliefs too. How often have you heard ‘Money is the root of all evil’? That’s crazy. Let’s get something straight, money is neither good nor bad. It is an inanimate object. Without action and intention behind it by those who are in control of it, it cannot do anything. It will literally sit there.
Which means, you can change your actions and intentions to create a more positive outcome with your money than you may have previously had.
YOU are in control of your money and YOU are in control of your financial situation.
How exciting is that?
The biggest part of this Masterclass isn’t about me teaching you any specific formula of success, or you following a step by step process. It’s about getting to know yourself financially – beyond the numbers.
This series of questions is designed to get you thinking about your PAST. How money has played a role in your life up until recently. This will look different for everyone, and remember, being honest with yourself is going to be the best way to incite change.
You can find the questions in your workbook.
Take your time as you go through these questions. Go deep, if you feel you’ve answered a question as much as you can, leave it for a few minutes and then come back and see if you can go any deeper. If you feel life you’ve answered the question completely, try to push a little further.
Often we shut ourselves off right at the point where we really need to go further – this is where the big breakthroughs happen.
This activity is still going to focus on your past – we need to acknowledge our past and make peace with it before we move forward. For this activity, we are going to be using a forgiveness prayer, or ritual. You don’t need to be religious to use this prayer, I don’t particularly like the word ‘prayer’ for this, rather more of a meditation or forgiveness process or ritual.
It is all about forgiveness and is used to clear limiting beliefs and help us move past our money blocks.
Our money block are things that prevent us from living the life we want to live and having the relationship we want to have, and are created by our current beliefs and experiences. Sometimes you’ll have money blocks without even realising it!
There are many ways to move through money blocks but using forgiveness exercises like this one, is a powerful start.
The amazing thing about this is that you don’t even have to understand how it works, you don’t even have to truly believe that it will work, as you go through the process you’ll find yourself feeling better about your money, saying this out loud is incredibly powerful.
Our words are incredibly powerful, hearing yourself say this meditation is going to unlock a new money mindset for you.
But we have to start in the past. Think of it as a mental decluttering. You’re letting go of what has built up to make way for what you want in your life.
In your workbook, you’ll find space for you to write in this activity.
The first thing I want you to do is start thinking about any time money has caused a problem in your life, has made you feel uncomfortable, has made you feel like you’re less… any kind of money ‘junk’ you can think of. I know it feels awkward going straight to the negative, but trust me on this.
For the first part of this activity, focus only on filling in the first column.
Things I have put in this column in the past are things like when I was declined a loan because of a bad credit rating, when I couldn’t buy groceries because I’d spent all of my money, when I had to drive around in my parents car because I couldn’t afford my house payments AND a car loan, when I had to sell the house I had built because I had a relationship break up and I couldn’t pay for it on my own…
Go back as far as you can, if you didn’t get the ‘cool clothes’ as a kid because your parents couldn’t afford it… all of it. Include money problems in relationships, every single thing you can think of.
This is going to feel yuk, but it’s okay, keep going.
When you feel like you’ve done it all, go again. There’s always more. Always. Do give yourself a time limit though – I won’t do this activity for more than an hour because it is seriously mentally draining.
Also, be sure to take deep breaths as you do this, and if you feel your jaw clenching (it happens), try to relax your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a few deep breaths, then go again.
How are you feeling after that? It can be messy and make you feel drained, but I promise the worst of it is over now. (If you need more pages, just print more, there’s no limit to what you can work through here – it’s entirely up to you.)
Our next step is to actually work through the forgiveness ritual.
To do this, we use the following prayer/meditation:
“Even though (insert past money issue) I completely forgive, and deeply love myself”
Going through your list of past money issues, read each one to yourself, then say the prayer/meditation out loud, and then write it in the ‘Forgive’ column. When I first did this exercise I felt a little gawky, so I made it a little more personalised.
For example, I would say:
“Even though (insert past money issue), and it made me feel like (insert feels here) I completely forgive myself for (if the issue was my fault, I would say for the issue, if it wasn’t my fault, I would say ‘for feeling x about it’), and I deeply and truly love myself.”
ie:
Even though I was declined for a loan because of bad credit, and it made me feel like I was so poor and unable to manage my money, I completely forgive myself for not knowing more about how to handle money, and I deeply and truly love myself.”
There are no set rules when it comes to this forgiveness exercise, the key points are to acknowledge the past, and acknowledge your forgiveness and love for yourself.
One of the amazing things about this is that when you go to repeat this process at a later stage, or when you think about some of these money issues you’ve had in the past, you’ll find that thinking about them doesn’t make you feel anything anymore – which is amazing! You don’t feel angry, you just feel nothing. Sometimes I find I’ve even forgotten about issues as I have let them go from my past.
IT’S OKAY TO FEEL ANGRY ABOUT THE PAST, IT’S OKAY TO WANT TO BE ANGRY ABOUT THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, BUT TO MOVE FORWARD, YOU NEED TO FORGIVE AND PRACTICE SELF CARE…
Because this is a really emotionally heavy activity, I highly, highly recommend not trying to skip ahead on the activities, or read ahead for what is to come, and if it’s starting to feel like it’s too much, put this aside and come back to it tomorrow. I usually find I have a really big sleep the night after doing this as I feel like I’ve cleared so much negative energy and it’s exhausting.
I also want you to do something for yourself, something self care. If it’s going for a walk, or taking a long bath or shower, or drinking out of the fancy tea cups… whatever it is make sure it brightens you up and makes you feel good.
Up until now we have focused a lot on your past. Understanding your past is what is going to help us understand where you are now and help us move forward to the future we want to have.
I want to make it abundantly clear – YOUR PAST DOES NOT DICTATE YOUR FUTURE.
It does not matter what your past financial habits have been, because right now we are going to shift our focus to the future, and your future habits are the ones we have control over.
Which brings us to our next activity for the Masterclass – I’m calling it Your Life Line. You are going to literally draw a line in your life right now of where you are. We are going to leave the past in the past and we are going to focus on the future.
In the middle of the Life Line page in the workbook, I want you to add todays date to the line in the middle of the page. This is the line between your past habits and your future ones.
As a final act of letting your past habits go, on one side of the line I want you to write out the past financial habits, mindsets, thoughts, feelings you are letting go, the ones that don’t serve you and don’t make you happy.
On the opposite side of the line I want you to write out the future habits you want to create, the thoughts and feelings you want to embrace, how you want to feel about money. Make this an intentional process – this is your financial future.
We all know that gratitude is important. When we fill out the little ‘daily gratitude’ sections of our daily planners we often write things like ‘I’m grateful for my family’ or ‘I’m grateful for my husband’ or if you’re like me ‘I’m grateful for my coffee’.
We practice gratitude without thinking too deeply about why we do it.
You have to truly believe that there is an abundance in the universe and that you deserve to live and abundant life. This can mean different things for different people, but the abundant life you want to live is one you deserve.
You deserve nothing less than an amazing life, and you deserve to be able to create that for yourself.
But abundance starts with appreciating what you ALREADY HAVE.
There’s an amazing quote from Oprah that sums it all up nicely:
‘Be thankful for what you have and you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.’
– OPRAH
There are variations of this quote, but essentially they all mean the same thing. What we focus on flows more to us.
If you are focusing only on negative things, or what you don’t have, then this is what is going to be created for you in your life.
Have you ever noticed that when you start complaining about all the bills that are coming in, that you’re swamped and every time you go to the mailbox you expect to see yet another bill… and then you check, and there’s one there? This is a perfect example. You focus so much on the negative aspects, you draw more of this to yourself.
And have you ever noticed that when you’re on a roll and things just seem to be going your way, and you’re happy and laughing and excited that everything is just falling into place, it keeps on going? This again is because you’re focusing your energy on all the good.
There is a lot more we could do on this, but for the purpose of this Masterclass we are going to focus on intentional gratitude.
This activity is all about paying attention to ALL of the amazing things in your life. There is no limit to your gratitude, be thankful for the beautiful home you have, for the flowers in your garden, for the coins in your purse, for the fact that when you get an electricity bill it’s because you have electricity.
Using the gratitude pages in your workbook, write out everything you are grateful for at this point in your life.
The words you use in your day to day life are incredibly powerful. Chances are, up until now, the words you have used to describe your finances and the money in your life hasn’t exactly been the most positive or uplifting.
Everything in the universe has energy. It’s not a woo woo belief, it’s a reality. Energy isn’t created, it’s transferred (high school physics anyone??). Which means everything we have in our lives has energy.
The way we talk about money and treat money has an energetic value. Negative words attract negative actions and we continue to repeat the cycle by complaining about the negative actions with negative words.
Saying ‘I spend too much money’ is only going to reiterate to yourself that you do, and will always spend too much money. At times it’s almost like by saying that you always spend too much money, you’re subconsciously giving yourself permission for the money you are spending, and then you continue to overspend in order to live up to the status you’ve given yourself of spending too much money.
See how these cycles continue?
The best way to break this cycle is to change the way you speak.
Phrases that start with ‘I can’t’, ‘I won’t’ and ‘I don’t’ are all negative. Rather than saying ‘I can’t afford that’ you can replace it with ‘I choose not to spend my money on that’. Can you see how you can shift the power in this? You’ve taken control of the situation, and you’ve taken something that is completely negative, and turned it into a positive choice you’ve made.
One of the most common ways we fall in our money mindset, especially for those who love to shop, is by getting stuck in the ‘on sale’ mindset. This is the mindset whereby you only ever purchase something when it’s on sale. This usually leads to you buying things just because they’re on sale, and not necessarily because you want/need them.
Treat money with respect. Not paying attention to it, being frivolous, and being negative towards money is going to ensure a negative money mindset sticks around. Only buying things when they are on sale means you are saying you a) don’t value the item the value it holds, b) you don’t acknowledge that it’s okay to purchase something full price, and most importantly c) you don’t value yourself enough to purchase an item that isn’t on sale.
It’s also been shown that people who purchase only ‘on sale’ items, actually end up spending more money in the long run, and I can completely attest to that. I had far too many clothes, far too many items in my home, all because I thought the purchase was a ‘bargain’.
As soon as I started buying what I needed, and quality versions of it, I found I took better care of the things in my home and felt more confident in myself.
This energy work is real. I know to some it can be a lot to wrap your head around, but just try it and see what difference it can make.
So far we have looked at our own words and the phrases we use, but I want to take a moment to think about the people we surround ourselves with.
There’s a belief that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most amount of time with.
Who do you surround yourself with?
How do you feel about the idea of being the average of these five people?
I’m not saying you need to ditch your friends, not at all. But having an understanding of who they are and the impact they can have on you and your money mindset is incredibly beneficial.
Do you friends always say ‘I’m always broke? or ‘I can’t afford it’.
Do you have friends who are exhausting to be around? Who make everything into a big drama and you feel incredibly drained after being around them?
Remember how we said everything in the universe has energy? What kind of energy are these friends of yours transferring to you?
As I said, I don’t mean for you to distance yourself from your friends. I just want you to be aware and this way you can avoid taking on their energy and going down the same spiral of focusing on the negative things in life.
Okay, back to the powerful words we use. For this exercise, I want you to think about the common phrases you use when talking about money, and I want you to write a more positive spin on it, incorporating gratitude.
You can do this for any aspect of your life. Instead of saying ‘I have to do the laundry’ you can say ‘I get to do the laundry’. I mean, it’s hard to get excited about laundry, but it reiterates a mindset of gratitude.
Likewise, rather than saying ‘I have to pay my mortgage’ you can say ‘I get to pay my mortgage, for a home that is comfortable and my safe place’.
Fill out the page in your workbook with your old and new phrases. If you’d like to make note of more, you can just print the page a few more times. Also, if you’d like to extend it to other areas of your life in order to really practice your gratitude then go ahead.
There’s always room for more gratitude.
While this brings our Masterclass here to a close, I want to remind you that this isn’t the end.
Understanding and working on your money mindset is a lifelong practice, and one I genuinely enjoy working on each day.
Keep repeating these tasks, learn more about your mindset and how it applies to your life, and be curious about the power of our minds – they really are quite amazing.
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