Season Two of Money Files is all about practical, actionable tips for managing your money and thinking positively about money. So today, I’m walking you through one of my favorite client exercises for building financial awareness and creating a foundation for a positive money mindset.
In this episode, I’m teaching you how to conduct your own “money cleanse.” Before you can improve your money mindset, you have to become aware of where your mindset is now–how you think about money, how money makes you feel, and where those feelings come from. With that awareness, you’ll finally be able to start shifting your mindset and believing you can manage your money well.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
- Why money mindset is the foundation for managing your money well [0:49]
- Why it’s important to check in with your money mindset [2:36]
- How to use a “money cleanse” to address your money mindset blocks [3:30]
- How to conduct your own money cleanse [6:33]
- How to Identify trends in your money mindset blocks [7:39]
- Why it is important to practice gratitude so you can shift your mindset [11:31]
If you’re ready to release your negative thoughts and feelings about money and finally improve your money mindset, join me for this exercise.
Tune in to this episode to learn how to conduct your own money cleanse and build awareness around your money mindset.
In the episode…
There’s tons of messaging online around “improving your money mindset.” But what many people don’t realize is that there’s a vital step before you start shifting your mindset, one that we often skip over.
Long before you knew what a “money mindset” was, maybe even before you had money of your own to manage, you started learning how to think and feel about money. You listened to how your parents did or did not talk about money and saw how the wealthy were portrayed on TV. Even as a kid, you soaked all this information up, and it became the foundation of your money mindset.
Before you can change your money mindset, you first have to become aware of your current thought patterns and where they come from. Once you understand the root of your own money story, you can slowly start shifting your money narrative and create a more healthy, positive relationship with your money.
If you want to understand your feelings about money and improve your money mindset, start with this simple exercise:
Step 1: Write down all your thoughts about money.
Positive, negative, whatever comes up. Maybe you feel you just can’t make progress on your savings goals. Maybe you grew up believing money is inherently bad. Get curious and write down everything that comes up for you when you think about money in your life and your ability to manage your finances.
Step 2: Identify the trends in your thoughts.
Whether you realize it or not, your money mindset is a product of your past, present, and imagined future. You might notice that your negative money thoughts come from the way your parents talked about money when you were growing up. Or maybe they stem from a time in your life when you didn’t feel you had enough money. Revisit the thoughts you wrote down and identify how or when you started to build these beliefs. These patterns are the key to understanding your mindset blocks.
Step 3: Practice gratitude.
Seeing all your money thoughts in one place can seem daunting. The next step, though, is practicing gratitude for the positive thoughts and your newfound awareness of the negative thoughts. This is truly the first step to shifting those negative thoughts and improving your money mindset.
So here are the takeaways I want you to remember from this episode…
- It’s not your fault you have negative thoughts and feelings about money.
- You have the power to change your money mindset regardless of where you’re starting.
- Awareness of your negative thought patterns is the first step to shifting them.
You may not get to control the money thoughts and feelings you grow up with, but you can make positive shifts in your mindset today.
If you’re ready to improve your relationship with money and start making moves towards your financial goals, apply to work with me so we can create a plan to get you there.
The Transcript
Hi and welcome to Money Files, I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Hi, thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Money Files. I think you’ll find that today’s episode is going to be short but impactful. And my goal is to make sure that with each episode, you have something to take away to help you shift your relationship with your finances. And I also want to let you know that in these first couple episodes, I’m actually not going to talk a lot about numbers in terms of how you make a budget because I want you to really focus on doing the foundational work. The reason that my clients are able to pay down debt, stay out of debt, save consistently, hit their highest revenue months in their business is because they’re doing this inner work coupled with what I would call the technical work. My financial coaching is really about both technical and adaptive change. Like, Yes, I want to have a budget, but I also want you to do the adaptive work, which is creating a foundation and undoing your money stories and really being able to change the way that you think about finances. And so, yeah, that’s what we’re going to dive into today.
So I know as a coach that if I can support you in changing your financial behavior and not just like how you spend money, but thinking about how you think about money, I know as a coach that if I can help you address how you both think about money and you manage money, then you’re not going to have to hope that budgeting works for you, like managing your finances will just become something that you do because you’ll understand where you are at. When you think about your thinking and where you are mentally, you’ll have this like financial awareness. But then you also have the technical skill of budgeting that will help you stay on track. It will help you get back on track and you’ll continue to make progress. You’ll just be the person that manages their finances well. That’s my hope.
So today, what I want to talk to you about is money mindset, and I actually want to introduce you to something that I’ve asked my clients to do. But I also want you to bring it in as just a practice for checking in with yourself and checking in with your thoughts about money. Because if you can know where you are in terms of how you think about money, then you can celebrate your shifts. You can also identify like, OK, here are some things that I wish to change like here’s my next area of growth when it comes to my thoughts about money. So if you’re one of those people, that’s a keynote. I’ve never been good at math. This is really going to help you out. And for those of you who don’t know, I used to be a math teacher and you’re not allowed to say you’re not good at math because budgeting is not about being good at math, it all comes back to your thoughts.
So the financial concept I want to introduce you to today, I’m calling a “money cleanse”, and a money cleanse is really about checking in with yourself so you can identify your thoughts about money and you can do this every month. You could do this every quarter. But like I said earlier, it’s a way for you to monitor your growth and identify where you want to be next in terms of your financial journey. So we would engage in this money cleanse because we all have money blocks. So if you’re just aware of that in general, that’ll make this journey a lot easier. That there can always be something there that we need to shift. And if we understand that there are going to be things in our minds that we need to shift, then it’s like, Oh yeah, this is natural that this happens and it just normalizes that practice. So the money blocks that you have in your head are going to be the things that keep you from moving forward financially, OK? And I should also say that you’re going to have money breakthroughs as well with your thoughts. And so we want to capture those things for sure, because those are the things that you’re also going to use to advance your financial practices. But just think about it like one of the things or the block that you may have, and this is probably a different way that you’ve heard about money blocks. But when I think about my clients or you thinking about money in their lives, something that might come up is like, Oh, like, I’m constantly starting over with my savings. I’m always having to tap into different accounts. I can’t save consistently. And like, that is a heavy weight. If you’re walking around and that’s just something that you’re thinking about, it may not even be something that you’re saying out loud all the time. But it is a thought that you’re having about money. Another one might be like, Oh, I’m always in debt. Oh, Dennis, overwhelming, I’m in the cycle, I’m in and out of debt. And so it’s something that you’re talking to yourself about. Once again, it’s putting a weight on your shoulders when it comes to thinking about advancing and moving forward. Or you might even be thinking about pricing in your business and you’re thinking about how you can’t charge people this other rate because other people don’t do that and who does. I think I am if I charge that amount. And so that’s another narrative that’s going behind the scenes as you’re trying to actually shift your relationship with your money. And the same can be true for someone who’s in a nine to five and you’re thinking about asking your boss for a raise and are applying to a different job that you know has a completely different salary band than the one that you’re currently in. But if we don’t take the time to actually investigate the thoughts that we have about money or the feelings that we have about money, then it can take us longer to actually create the financial results that we desire.
So this is the exercise that I want to walk you through today and why I said this might be a short but impactful podcast for you. But I want you to engage in a money cleanse. I want you to grab a notebook, but not if you’re driving, if you’re driving. You can just listen. But I would suggest that, like, actually sit with this work. Don’t just think about it because there’s a difference between thinking and actually writing things down. When we’re writing things out, our brain is made to look at what actually is in the brain, and it’s going to trigger other things for you where you’re like, Oh, I see that and then this and then that and just really being able to have this nice brain dump for yourself.
So grab a notebook like I said, and I want you to write down all the thoughts and feelings that surface when you talk or think about money, like be really, truly honest with yourself, what comes up? And also know that it doesn’t have to be all negative thoughts or all negative feelings. Some things could be positive, and I want to encourage you to write down both. So if you’re listening right now and you’re at home, you can just pause this episode and write down everything and then you can press play again. But please, please, please take the time to write these things down.
So after you had time to write and really get your thoughts on paper, I want you to look at like, what trends do you notice? What’s coming up for you? Maybe you have something on your paper like, I’m bad with money that came up for you. I want you to question, when did this thought develop for you? Was it something that you’ve always been told? Like, who gave you that thought or what experience created that thought? It’s important to ask these things because what I’m getting you to do is ask yourself, like, Is this actually true? Are you bad with money? Or the thing that I actually find with a lot of clients is people in their lives, people that love them have told them that they’re bad with money. They’ve had. Like, I’m thinking about my client, April, who her family has always told her that she was bad with money. So that’s the identity she took on as being somebody who is bad with money. And through our work, we were able to challenge that identity and create new evidence that she’s not bad with money. Right? But we first had to understand this is a thought that she has. Here’s where the thought came from. Oh, great. Now we know how to challenge it. Another thought that comes up for a lot of people is that money is evil. If this was something that resonated with you or any thought that you have on your paper, it’s the same thing I want you to question. Like, when did this start to develop? Have I been told this? Like, did I pick it up from other people’s actions? Like, who gave you this thought? I know for myself, I had this money is evil thought being raised in a Christian household. And it wasn’t that my parents ever explicitly said money is evil, but it was the things that I heard them talk about. When we’d be watching someone on TV that had a lot of money, like nobody in the world should have that much money. You know, you could be helping so many people. And so for me, over the years, what that developed into was this “money is evil” narrative. And the work that I’ve done with myself is to replace money is evil with the fact that money allows me to create good in the world. But had I not done the work to realize where that was coming from, I wouldn’t be able to shift that narrative for myself. And today, I don’t need you to focus on really shifting the narrative as much as I want you to just build this financial awareness that there are thoughts and feelings that you have about money that are keeping you in the financial position that you’re in and what we want. And I know you really, really want to change how you relate to money. And you heard me say that like one of the thoughts I shifted was money is evil to money helps me create good in the world. That might be an example, like if I were doing this for myself today, that money helps me create good in the world that would be in this money cleanse. That would be me realizing that that’s now a belief or a thought that I have about money because something has shifted within me. So that’s why I’m when I tell you that all of your thoughts may not be negative, just depending on where you are in this process. And I don’t want you to think that everything in this exercise has to be negative when you have positive things. I want you to celebrate that. And when you do this, whether it’s every month, every quarter, every other month, whatever that routine looks like for you, you’ll start to see like, Oh, I’m shifting my thoughts about money, which means things are changing for you. That’s a positive thing. So go back to all the thoughts that you wrote down, all the feelings you wrote down. Maybe you identify that you’re fearful or overwhelmed. See if you can kind of tag some of the thoughts to feelings. Once again, I want you to build awareness here. So when you look at all the thoughts and feelings that you wrote down, when I challenge you to do something because I want you to get into a space where, what I don’t want is that you start to feel like really negative about having these thoughts. I want you to be grateful that you see that you have these thoughts, whatever they are.
So look at your paper and circle all the feelings and thoughts that really serve you. And think about being grateful for the feelings and the thoughts that serve you. If you are looking at your paper and you’re like, Keina, none of these things work for me, which may be your reality. It’s OK to give yourself a clean sheet and just write down five thoughts or feelings that you desire to have when you talk or think about money. Just because you have the thoughts and feelings that you have right now doesn’t mean that they can’t shift. Remember, I told you I had a thought that money is evil and shifted. That thought to like money allows me to do good in the world, and this can be true that you can think about like, what’s the opposite of this thought that I have? So just write and fight for yourself.
So this week, I want you to keep this somewhere handy. Keep this episode somewhere handy. This work that you did. And I want you just to continually look for shifts in your thoughts this week. I want you to think about it like, Oh wow, I see where that thought came from. Here’s a shift that I desire to make around that thought. Consider this like an additional layer in building that financial trust with yourself, because right now what we’re doing is we’re building awareness. And now, you know, like, Oh, I have these thoughts about my finances and they’re completely OK because I can shift any thought that I have, and that is going to help me reach the financial goals that I’ve set for myself. So thank you so much for tuning in. I know this episode is a little bit different than my first, but I really want you to sit down and do this work because what I say that this work is not just about creating a spending plan or like whether or not you can add it is not about your financial ability. It is really about your financial belief. It’s about how we talk to ourselves, about money, whether their thoughts that we recognize, whether it’s things that we’re aware or unaware of, like this is the work when I talk about changing your relationship with money.
Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.WealthOverNow.com/Appointment and let’s get started.
