#27: BEYOND THE NUMBERS: SHIFTING YOUR MONEY MINDSET

I’m talking all about money mindset in this episode of the Financially Adjusted podcast. We all have unique experiences that have shaped our emotions, beliefs, and behaviors around money. In this episode, I’ll discuss how to shift your mindset and view money as simply a tool or medium that is used to facilitate your greater mission and purpose with your business. It’s essential as an entrepreneur to think on your why and your purpose and how your money mindset influences your business and reaching your goals. Get ready to learn how you can be in the driver’s seat when it comes to your money mindset and your money!

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Transcript

Hello there, my amazing entrepreneurial friend! I am so glad that you're joining me today for the Financially Adjusted podcast. Today's episode is less of a tactical one and more centered around money mindset. I truly think that when it comes to money, we all have a unique experience with it that shaped our behaviors and our opinions around money. Some of those unique experiences are good, some are bad, but no matter what your experience has been around money and where that's led you, what's important is how you think about money and manage it moving forward. 

In order to manage our money in a way that allows us to use it to achieve our purpose, our mission, our goals, our passions, we first have to reflect on and try to understand our mindset around it and our behaviors around it.

This episode is actually a little bit of a spin off from the last episode. I touched a little on understanding your behavior around money and how that pertains to debt. In the last episode, I talked about being financially free and growing your business with cash. So, definitely go back and give that a listen if you haven't yet. I think that every business owner should at least consider growing their business with cash and what that could look like for them.

Today I'm going to encourage you to shift your mindset even further. How do you view money? What emotions come up for you around the topic of money? Naturally when most people think about money they have some sort of emotion around it. If you're in debt you might feel stressed about money. It's possible that you have really a negative emotion that comes up when the topic of money comes up or when it's time to pay bills every month. Or it may be the opposite for you. Maybe you're someone who has had positive feelings around the topic of money because you've done really well with it, you've turned a corner with it after maybe having money issues and money has given you the things that you desire so you're in a good place and you feel positive about money.

Or maybe you're just kind of indifferent about money and you just see it as a means to pay the bills and be comfortable and you don't really have a strong emotion around it one way or another. I'm going to challenge you to adopt a different mindset around money.

Money is simply a tool. It's not good. It's not bad. It's just a tool. So, when we think about money as a tool or a medium that facilitates experiences, growth, impact, rather than just looking at money as the goal itself, it can really reshape your mindset.

If someone thinks they're doing something for the money, they're wrong. They're actually doing it for the result that that money will bring them. There’s nothing wrong with desiring to have more money. When we desire it for the purpose of using it to get us to our why and meet our goals, we're not just desiring money for the stuff. We are desiring it for a bigger purpose.

I do think that if you're just interested in money so that you can get more stuff, you should definitely reevaluate your why and check your spirit around that. Theres’s nothing wrong with having nice things and desiring nice things. I think you should, but I also think that God designs us to give and to think of our bigger purpose and how that purpose can change lives around you.

Is there a purpose that's near and dear to your heart? And a cause that you really believe in? How could you change the lives of others with more money? It's how we make our money count in this way that matters.

Consider how more money would allow you to reach your goals personally and professionally and how this could translate into blessing others around you. How could that impact your family? Could you create generational wealth that didn't exist before? Do you have a cause that you believe in or group people you feel passionate about serving and helping and how could more money help bless them?

Play that through and really think deeply about what that could mean and what could that look like for you and the blessings that you could bestow upon others with a lot more money to make those dreams come true and think bigger. And when we think about money in this way it helps focus on the results and can remove negative emotions we have around money.

In the last episode I talked about financial freedom and how money can allow for peace by being debt free. It can help you create wealth for your family, pursue your passions, create jobs, and impact the community and world around you. Money is simply the medium that can propel us to do bigger and better things and live out your why. That's why it's worth paying attention to it and it's worth putting in the mindset work around it. It's worth it to put the time into learning how to manage your money better so that you can create more and have more to give to others and to put towards all the things you want to see happen with that money.

First, I want to talk about reflecting on your why. So, I talk about having the why the mission the purpose, all of that, but have you really reflected on that lately? 

It's easy when you're in the busyness of life and the day to day to lose sight of that or just get so caught up in to-do list that you don't think about it often but it's helpful to really reflect on your why.

Why did you start your business? What impact do you want to make with your business? Does your business align with your values? I think you should start to dream a little bigger.

And I've been challenging myself to do this as well. I've pivoted from a scarcity mindset to more of an abundance mindset in the last few years and I'm still a work progress with this. It's definitely going to take some time. My husband and I both grew up without a lot of money. We made some poor choices ourselves in our younger years with debt and just not really managing our money or being a good steward of it. We sort of ended up clinging to the money that we had because of this and more so in the past couple of years we've been in a zone of dreaming bigger and realizing there isn't this finite amount of money that we get to bring in so we have to hold on to it really tightly.

And running a business has really been the pivotal point that's shifted our mindset around that and seeing what amazing things other business owners are doing and what's possible with our business and what that could lead to as far as success and what we could do with that money.

It's just really inspiring to look around and see what others have done with their business success, what that's allowed them to do and how they've carried that through to their purpose and their mission and making that happen. I was in a mode one day where I was just kind of researching some different entrepreneurs and what they've done and thinking on stories I've heard. And so I'll just mention a few because they were inspiring it to me and I think they could be for you too.

The founder of Tom's shoes has this ‘one-for-one’ model where for every pair of shoes he sells, he gives a pair of shoes to a child in need.

Another great example is Dolly Pardon. She has an extremely successful business -well, multiple successful businesses. And she started this nonprofit called the Imagination Library. It's an organization that gives free books every month to children ages zero through five. So, I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Obviously, that was a passion of hers and that must have been so cool for her to see that come to fruition. And that didn't happen overnight. You know, these people, I guess they're bigger businesses bigger names but they started at zero too and they built that.

So, I recently heard another story, and this is the last one I'll talk about but it's a pretty great one. If you get the chance, I want you to go back and listen to the podcast where I heard about this lady. Fawn Weaver is an entrepreneur who I listened to an interview with Amy Porterfield and Jasmine Starr. And I had never heard of her but I'm like oh my gosh where has she been. She's amazing.

So, if you have the chance go back and you can just Google that and easily find it but her story is amazing. She is the CEO of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, and my husband and I really like bourbon and whiskey so her story especially stood out to me, but she gives back a ton to the community through foundations she started, through scholarship programs, and for minority-owned businesses. And she is incredible. She lived in a homeless shelter at one point I think when she was like fifteen or sixteen and she's now one of the wealthiest self-made female entrepreneurs who has changed the lives of so many others!

So, she is incredibly inspiring, and her story resonated with me. So go listen to that for sure. You can or just look her up online and there's lots of articles about her.

But all of these entrepreneurs, they started at zero and they used their money as the medium to facilitate all of these amazing that they did for others and you can absolutely do that too.

The next thing I want to talk about is aligning your finances with your mission. In episode twenty-four a few weeks ago I discussed some tactical steps around aligning your money with your goals. And that is going to be really helpful for you to listen to for practical tactical steps to think about how you want to save up for a goal. How do you want to make that happen with actionable steps? So that kind of aligns with this episode as well. But as entrepreneurs I think it's important to define our big why and our mission. I myself haven't spent a ton of time since I started running a business creating my mission statement. So, I'm in the process of thinking through that and doing that more officially. But just thinking about what my why is in my life and what I want my mission to be with running this business and what my husband and I want to do with the success of the business and how we want that to propel us towards our mission, that's something that we are in the process of doing. It’s a fun exercise and it really helps you put into perspective how you want to manage the resources in your business to help you get more intentional. And that can shift over time. It's not like you have to set something in stone now and be like okay this is it. But you'll change and you'll morph as a business owner and your mission will too. Iit's helpful to really think about what could that look like for you with business success. What would you do with all of that money?

So my mission as an entrepreneur is to bring simplified foundational financial education to as many small business entrepreneurs as possible. I see how much is possible through owning a business and how the sky can be the limit for the money that you can make. And what kind of possibilities that opens up for your life and the life of people around you or the lives of people around you.

So, it's been really fun to see what entrepreneurship can do. And I want to empower other people who are thinking of being entrepreneurs and starting a business, or they’re currently running a business, I want to empower people to think bigger. And figure out how they can align their money with bigger mission.

Thinking about the big picture definitely inspires me to more carefully and intentionally manage my money and honestly, it makes it more fun and less boring. If you're somebody that gets bored with money talk and you sort of tune out this is going to bring such a fun exciting spin to it that I think you can actually learn to enjoy managing your money if you reframe your mind in this way and think about how your money can align with your bigger mission.

So, I challenge you to consider your big why and your big mission. Think on that. And how do you want to align your money with that mission? What can that look like for you in the next five years, in the next ten years, the next twenty years? 

If you have negative feelings around money and you tend to avoid money management, this is definitely an exercise that will help you start to shift that mindset and give you the motivation to start plugging in and learning about your finances a little more. Use that why, that purpose, and that mission you have to drive you towards making better healthier moves with your money and help you get out of that negative mindset and into a positive one.

I won't get into too much tactical advice in this episode, but I will remind you of an acronym that I made up around gaining control of your money. I laid out that more extensively in episode sixteen but it's about being the boss of your own money.

The acronym ‘BOSS’ stands for budgeting, organization, spending carefully, and saving intentionally. Every single one of these actions you can take over your money represents a proactive approach and a way you can gain control over your money management. So, dive into that episode write down that acronym on a post it note if you feel inspired to do that. It could help you have a reminder of how much you are in control of your money and the things that you can do to be proactive and to manage it and get you towards your end goals.

It can really act as a good reminder of some basic things we can do to be the one that's in the driver's seat with this big tool that we have, this main tool that we have, and allow it to work for us.

Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about around money mindset is reframing negative thoughts. We all have them, especially around money. And I want to end today's episode with some money mindset reframing around some of the common fears and mindset barriers that people have.

One common thing I hear entrepreneurs say is “I'm not really a numbers person”. I think you should reframe that to being, “I'm not great with numbers now, but I can be and I'm willing to learn and seek the help I need”. Nobody starts out necessarily being great with numbers. Yeah, some of us are definitely more inclined to be good with finances and to enjoy it. But I think if you stay stuck in that mindset of “I'm really not a numbers person”, you'll really put a wall up and you'll keep believing that and your actions will align with that. So, if you tell yourself, “I'm not great with them now, but I can learn, and I'm willing to learn and seek the help I need”, that's an intentional statement. It's a positive statement.

Another common thing I hear is “I don't like dealing with finances”. I think this mindset can stem from having negative circumstances around money growing up and maybe being in difficult situations in pass with money like debt or just struggling growing to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. And a great reframe for this is “I get to handle the money I've been blessed with”. When you shift to an attitude of gratitude, there isn't a whole lot of space for negativity.

A big fear and negative mindset that many people deal with if they're in debt is thinking “I'm never going to dig myself out of this hole”. When you have that mindset, it leads to feelings of hopelessness, and that is no good. I don't want that for you. No matter what situation you're in, there is absolutely hope for you. You can get out of debt and you can get on the other side of it. So, try reframing this thought in a hopeful way and say to yourself, “I have a mountain to climb but I won't give up and step by step I will get to the top”. It might sound a little cheesy and make you feel a little bit like Stuart Smalley from SNL.

Definitely look that one up if you haven't watched that Saturday Night Live before. It's an older one.

But sometimes we need a little cheesy and we need gratitude, and we need hope. So, encourage yourself like you would encourage a friend.

Let your why and your mission drive you through the tough times. Celebrate your small wins along the way and keep striving. If you stumble, recognize that you're human and learn from your mistakes moving forward. You've got this my friend.

As always, remember that action brings clarity and imperfect action is better than no action at all.

Have a fantastic day!