You’re often told that you’re supposed to do life a certain way. Finish K-12, graduate with a college degree, then get a full-time job. We’re taught that life progresses in a linear fashion. But life isn’t always linear. And neither are your financial results. Sometimes, you may take one step forward and two steps back. But that doesn’t mean failure. Everything is a learning experience. Everything is progress.
A thought that I share often with my clients is, “You got this.” I want you to believe in yourself. I want you to have your own back. I want you to know how to encourage yourself to keep going. Notice the shifts in your thinking, in your actions, and in your financial results and celebrate how those changes have improved your financial well–being. You don’t have to be perfect with your money; we’re all making progress a day at a time.
In today’s episode, I’m sharing three milestones that I talk about with my clients. Celebrating these milestones will reinforce the mindset shifts you’ve made and allow you to reflect on how far you’ve come on this journey already. Reminding yourself that you’ve made progress and that you understand how to manage your money in a more mature way will continue to build your financial confidence and set you up for long-term success.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
- Why it’s important to have your own back [02:12]
- Why you should document and celebrate your milestones [07:36]
- Why embracing what’s working sets you up for long-term success [12:33]
Tune in to this episode to learn how celebrating your financial results will help you stay confident in the way you manage your money.
In the episode…
When you believe that “you got this,” everything changes. Mindset shifts result in actionable shifts. When you have your own back, you know that you can handle anything that comes your way. You learn how to be prepared yet flexible, and it sets you up for success with your finances.
To remind yourself that you got this, I want you to recognize your milestones. What mindset shifts have you noticed? What actions have you taken that you weren’t able to do last week or last month? What financial results can you pinpoint? Write them down and celebrate them.
When you realize that your financial journey is not linear, you’ll be more prepared for the ebbs and flows that come. When you recognize your milestones, it will help you through the tougher moments. Focusing on the good, on what you have accomplished, gives you momentum to keep going.
You can get started with these three milestones I celebrate with my clients:
Milestone #1: You set and honor a money date.
This is something to celebrate because you are creating a lifetime of results by having regular money dates. Right now, it may look like making sure your grocery budget is accurate or that you’re not overdrafting your account or that you’re sticking to your savings priorities. You’re addressing an immediate need, but you’re also going to reap the benefits of this practice for years to come. Your money date informs future decisions. It’s a habit that will help you reach immediate, short-term, and long-term goals.
Milestone #2: You have a clear plan for paying off your debt.
Simply establishing a payoff plan is worth celebrating. Having a plan to pay off your debt means you’re more likely to actually create the result of paying it off. When you have a plan, you’re less likely to make a rash or split decision that deviates from your plan. If you have a lump sum of money you’ve allocated elsewhere, you won’t be tempted to put it toward your debt because you have a plan in place. This helps you to manage your money with intention.
Milestone #3: You can adjust your spending plan for new life events before they happen.
Whether you’re getting married, moving to a new city, or ready to buy a house, it’s important to be able to shift your budget and your plans. Your budget is a living, breathing document that you will adjust to fit your life and your future plans. Being able to make these adjustments is an invaluable skill on your money journey. Things always come up in life, and you should celebrate your ability to pivot.
Here are the takeaways that I want you to remember from this episode on celebrating financial results:
- Your financial journey is never “over” because you’re always learning and growing
- Notice how your actions and results have changed as you work on your relationship with your money
- Start with the three milestones mentioned to give you inspiration for what to celebrate on your own journey
- Celebrate your wins and milestones because it makes the journey that much easier
Are you ready to celebrate your financial results? Apply to work with me, and let’s change your relationship with money.
Did this episode encourage your to celebrate your financial results? Check out this episode on getting back on track after overspending.
Transcript for “Why Financial Results Don’t Have to Be Linear”:
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.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. I am excited to chat with you today. Before we get started, I want to encourage you if you have been looking for a community where you can talk about finances or you’re curious like, Keina, what does coaching really look like? I want to invite you to come to my Mimosas + Money Matters. It is a live group coaching call. You’ll have an opportunity to be coached if you raise your hand or if you don’t want to be coached and you just want to listen in, you can also listen to other people be coached.
I was exposed to coaching several years ago now I guess it’s probably been 4 to 5 years and coaching is one of the most invaluable tools that I have in my life. It’s allowed me to monitor my thoughts. It’s allowed me to pay attention to my brain and what I’m thinking. And it’s ultimately allowed me to create new results. And so I am a financial coach. And yes, I help my clients budget, but I also help my clients shift their belief. And by shifting their belief, they also create new results. So if you’re looking to create new results in your life, you want to stress less about money. I invite you to come to my Mimosas + Money Matters call. You can sign up for the call using the link in the show notes. And I would love to see you there.
But let’s get into this week’s episode. So I actually as I’m recording this, I am with my business coach and last night I actually got an award for earning over $200,000 in my business. And so one of the things that my coach does is she asks us to share. She asks everyone to share a thought that helped them create $200,000 or more. And the thought that I shared was actually one that my mother had shared with me just earlier in the week. And the thought was, you got this. And that thought is a thought that I think I actually probably gave to my mother when I decided to go full time in business for myself. It’s a thought that I’ve used to create clients. I mean, you’re here because I thought, Hey, I got this.
And it’s also a thought that I love to give to my clients because when I’m working with clients, it’s not just about putting a Band-Aid on a problem. I recognize that where you are right now, like your finances, is something that you thought about year after year. You think about it night after night, like you’re at brunch with your friends and you’re looking at your banking app underneath the table. You have started a budget and you can’t seem to maintain the budget or you just started to save and yet another thing goes wrong. And so with the thought you got this, that’s the thought that’s going to make sure that you have your own back. And that’s one of the results. Like when I’m looking at my clients and one of the results that I’m most proud of is that my clients realize that they’ve got this and they’ve learned to have their own back. And nowhere in the statement of You’ve got this or you’re learning to have your back, your own back, do you have to be perfect. And that’s what I love, because when you have your own back, you go and you start to look for, okay, what’s working? What do I know to be true? What do I want to shift? What’s worked for me in the past? How do I if you’re a client, you’re thinking about like, how do I engage Keina in like maybe a mental block that I’m having right now so I know how to overcome something like this in the future.
So one thought that I want to offer you today is you’ve got this. And I was thinking about you, as I always do, and I was like, What do I want to talk about today? And I originally wasn’t even going to talk about or tell you where I am or what I’m doing. But I think that thought is so important and you probably have never heard anyone when they’re talking about money, really talk about thoughts and talk about mindset. But mindset is so important because if you can understand that the way that you’re thinking is keeping you from gaining the results that you desire, everything will shift for you.
So how that leads into what this podcast is about, it’s about realizing that your financial results don’t have to be linear. And it’s a belief that I want to instill in you and input into your life, because I think that the way that we’ve grown up, like things are supposed to go, one, two, three, four, five, right? Like there’s a chronological order. You’re supposed to go to elementary school, you go to middle school, you go to high school, you’re supposed to go to college and get a job right there. We think that there’s a sequence to things. And when my clients come to me and they’ve been working towards different financial goals in their life and they failed, they feel like they failed because they haven’t gone in like a chronological order. So let’s say, for instance, that we’re talking about credit card debt and you’re $10,000 in credit card debt and maybe you’ve paid off some of the debt, but then the debt creeps back up. You start to feel defeated because the chronological order says, like, I should be able to pay down the debt. The debt should go away. It should never come back. And because the debt is back, like I am a failure.
And I was a teacher before I was a financial coach. And one of the things I actually taught math and one of the things that I loved and was introduced to was like this learning landscape for how I could think about what my kids were learning in class and where they were on this continuum in terms of like being a mathematician. And it’s the same thing that I think about. I turn I’ve taken that visual. So the visual was a whole bunch of little lily pads. And I think about like this, like frog hopping from lily pad to lily pad and that you can get to the end result in a lot of different ways by hopping on different lily pads. And we’re not all going to be on the same lily pad at the same time.
And so as a teacher, I would look for different achievements and milestones that my kids have, and I do the same thing for my clients. I like to help them look for the same things in their financial journey. And it’s very important to reorient how we look at results because it’s going to help you see where you are winning. It’s going to help you see your shifts. It’s going to help you pause and think about like, these are the things that I want to celebrate because these are the things going well. And maybe right now it doesn’t look like me saving $10,000 in my bank account. It doesn’t look like me paying off $20,000 on my credit card. But if those are the ultimate goals to save more money or to pay down your debt for the last time, there’s going to be milestones that get you there. And it doesn’t have to look like one, two, three, four, five. We’re going to be looking at the milestones along the way.
So if you are listening to me right now, I want you to really think about like maybe you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, like I want you to stop and think, okay, what are some things from listening to Keina or listening to those clients? Like, What have I? What shifts have I noticed in my own thinking? What shifts have I noticed in my actions? Which shift have I noticed in my beliefs? What shifts have I noticed in my results? And those shifts that you would write down, Like those are what I would call milestones. Those are the things that I want you to celebrate because they’re going to be the thing that keeps you making like aligned and intentional action.
So to give you some concrete things that I celebrate with my clients and to help them see, oh, wow, I am making progress. I’m going to read to you a couple of things on the list that I have inside of my clients like Trello board. So they can go to this list and they can say like, Ooh, these are some of the milestones I can check off. One of the milestones I have is that my client sets and honors a money date. So imagine that you’re my client and you have adopted money dates, right? You have a set time that you sit down and you want to look at your money like that, right there is a result that you want to celebrate because I want you to think about if I am honoring my money date and I’m setting a money date, what am I going to create when I think about the lifetime of results that I’m looking to create in my life? Because yes, right now it may be that you’re like, I’m trying to make sure that I’m not over drafting. I want to make sure that I can save money. Right? There’s an immediate pain that you’re trying to fix, but if you become someone who sets and honors money dates, that’s going to pay off like year after year after year. As you make more money, you’re going to know where your money’s going. As you think about making money, you’re also going to know, like, how much money do I want to make? Because your money date can inform some of your future decisions that you actually want to make. So that’s why, like when I think about this milestone, it’s a milestone to celebrate because it’s a habit and an action that is going to help you not only reach your immediate goal right now that you have, but it’s going to help you reach your short term goal. It’s going to help you reach a long term goal, but it’s also going to help you be the person that influences someone else in your sphere of influence to help them think about like, Oh, I could talk to them about this tool that I’ve learned, right? So there’s just like so many different levels of impact when I think about a client setting and honoring a money date.
Another milestone that I have is that my client has a clear plan for paying off debt. Notice that I’m not talking about that they have paid down the debt, that the debt hasn’t been paid off or any of those things. But being able to establish a plan is something worth celebrating. So if you have a plan to pay off your debt, that’s going to help you create the result of paying off the debt. It’s also going to help you manage your feelings when maybe you want to take a lump sum of money and pay it off towards the debt. Right. But you already said that this lump sum of money is for something else. It helps clients manage different things that also come up when you’re thinking about managing your finances more intentionally, but being able to recognize that if I’m in this situation again, or if I need to take on some intentional debt, I’m going to have a clear plan for paying off that debt.
Another milestone that I have on here is that my client can adjust their spending plan for new life events before they happen. So oftentimes when people are working with me during the five month coaching partnership, there’s things that come up. I have worked with people that are getting married. I’ve worked with people that are moving. I’ve worked with people that have gotten pregnant. And so we are able to work together as a team in this partnership and help them see, like the budget that we started with when we first started coaching together maybe doesn’t work right now because there’s some different things happening in my life, and so now I can take the plan that worked for me, the plan I understand and start to plan ahead for this next life event that’s happening. Like that skill is invaluable and is going to help my client year after year after year.
But notice even these three milestones that I talked about, they don’t have to come in any specific order. Having a plan to pay off your debt, being able to adjust your spending plan, or like being able to set and honor or money date—like there is no order. These are just things that we want to look for or things we can look for on our journey that tell us like we’re going in the right direction, we’re doing the right thing. And the purpose of me talking about this today is really going back to that original thought of like, you’ve got this, I want you to believe in yourself. I want you to understand that if you’ve been beating yourself up and like, I need to do this and then I’ve got to do this and I got to do that and I got to do this, whatever your this’s and that’s are that if you allow yourself to think about. I can think about the number of different things I am achieving. What’s changing with my habits? What’s changing with my thoughts? What’s changing with my results? like those are the things that I want you to celebrate because those are the things like when you think about, okay, in the last 30 days, these are the things that I have to celebrate. It’s going to help you build.
And I want you to see this journey as something that there is no there’s no end. And I don’t say that in a negative way, but I want you to be able to see yourself as someone who manages money well. And that when you manage money well, that’s just the person you become. You’re going to show up for you and your money at every single turn because it’s the thing that you desire to do. So you’re not going to stop doing it when you pay off your debt. You’re not going to stop doing it when you save the $10,000 and the reason you’re not going to stop doing it is because you’re going to realize that by the time you pay off the debt, by the time you save the money, there’s going to be new results that you desire to achieve. So I want you to pause along the journey and really reflect on what are the things that are working, what are the milestones, encouraging yourself, telling yourself you’ve got this and looking for the things that are working. What can you do today that maybe you couldn’t do 30 days ago? What can you do today that maybe you couldn’t do last week? What are you thinking this week that you weren’t thinking last week? Those things count.
All right. Well, thank you. This is a short, brief episode, but I really just wanted to take some time to encourage you, because I think that’s so important along this journey, because you want to know “I’ve got this” and you want to be in and be able to encourage yourself in that way. So you keep on going. And if you want to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. You’re like, Keina, I’m making good money. I don’t know where it’s going. And I want to be someone who doesn’t stress about my finances. I would invite you to apply to work with me. You can go to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and we will have a consult. On that consult, I will hear your challenges, what you’re going through and we will talk about a plan that will actually help you create the results that you desire to create in your life. So, look forward to hearing from you. Have a good one. Bye.
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.
