5 ways to transform your money mindset

Don't forget the money masterclass tonight at 7pm

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Tonight at 7pm we’re going to have our monthly Heart Leap masterclass and this month we’re talking about money! I have invited the wonderful Keris Stainton, author and founder of The Lady Bird Purse to lead an honest conversation about money at 7pm for all paid subscribers. Keris has been interviewing experts, creatives, freelancers and writers about money for two years now so in this masterclass she’s going to discuss what she’s learned and the best advice she can pass on.

If you just want a little inspiration, I wanted to share some ideas about changing your relationship with money, which I gleaned from interviewing Denise Duffield Thomas, Money Mindset coach and self-made millionaire when I spoke to her early this month for a national newspaper. (You can read the full interview here.)

Denise Duffield Thomas, 43, just launched her new book Chill And Prosper: The New Way To Grow Your Business (Hay House, £12.99) and Denise is passionate about working on our money mindset.

“Constantly working on your mindset is honestly the most important – if not the only – thing you have to master. I have created a multi-million-dollar business without taking outside investment or working my guts out (while raising young kids) and I believe it’s all about my mindset. When I was a kid, I grew up on welfare and my family dreamed about winning the lottery, but I remember saying to myself: I am my own lottery ticket.”  

Denise is 43 and from Newcastle, ‘a working-class town in Australia’ and does not hail from a wealthy background. She was brought up by her mother Vicki, a single parent. Duffield came to London in her twenties and in 2010 left the the corporate world in consultancy and event management to start her own life coaching business. She got married to her Mancunian husband Mark, and in the next few years had three children, while also setting the goal to make a million dollars in revenue by the time she was 35. “I did it a few weeks before my 36th birthday and now make millions every year,” she said. “One of my proudest moments is meeting Oprah and telling her that I’ve broken the cycle of poverty and dysfunction in my family. When you change your money mindset, your thoughts of scarcity and lack are replaced with deep peace and trust. You feel safe and supported and abundant. You’ll feel a deep shift in your body: an expansive feeling of more ease and core stability in your nervous system.”

Here are some top tips from Denise to get us in the mood for our money talk tonight:

1.     Regulate your nervous system. When you feel broke, you can get into a negative spiral and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and you start to see yourself as unlucky. You need to get yourself to a place where you feel calmer and more centred so you can take positive action rather than being paralysed by anxiety. Start by focussing on the knowns and create some certainty for yourself. No one knows if the interest rates are going to rise. Our governments and corporations are not giving us any reassurance and in the last few years with Covid, we’ve had no certainty. You can’t control what’s going on externally, but you can control what you focus on – what decisions do you have control over that feel more certain? Where do you have the most agency about your money situation? Start there.

2.     Identify your money blocks. Explore ways of starting a ‘side hustle’ and then notice what money blocks pop up. Money blocks are our beliefs about money which stop us from earning what we want. The most popular one is that you have to work hard to make money. We know this makes no sense because people who work very hard don’t necessarily make the most amount of money. For those of us who grew up in a world pre-internet, we have a very particular view of what work can be. You go to a job, you put in your hours and you get paid for those hours. But post internet, we have lots of different ways that people can earn money, but our minds still haven’t quite caught up with that. I see people who make money from being able to self-publish books or create their own courses and it breaks our brain a little bit to think that you can make money out of doing something that you love. Start exploring enjoyable ways to earn money on the side and start challenging the money blocks that might arise.

3.     Curate an inspiring social media feed. Find examples of people on your social media feed who look like you who are making money or creating successful businesses. Immerse yourself in those spaces. It’s really important to find people who are like you – don’t just look at the straight, white guys (unless you are one), find your people. This is really important if you're a woman or a person of colour or if you've got a disability because that will help you believe that it’s possible for you and people who look and sound like you to have more than enough money. Create a daily drip of inspiration.

4.     Explore your origin story - identify what you believe about money and the ‘origin story’ of those beliefs. If your belief is – ‘I’m no good with money’ – examine childhood memories and get curious about where that belief came from. What did people say about you and money when you were a child? E.g. Suzy spent all the money on sweets when she was six years old/ Suzy money burns a hole in your pocket. Identifying and then challenging some of those outdated assumptions you have about yourself and money is the first step to creating a new more empowering belief.

5.     Create ‘positive money anchors’. Engage all the senses. Create visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and olfactory triggers that are linked to feeling calm and happy about money. What would feeling financially stable look like/smell like/sound like/feel like? Create pictures on your phone and computer screen, buy an Eiffel Tower key ring if your goal is to go to Paris, burn your best candles, listen to uplifting podcasts in the car versus the news. We are bombarded with negative messages about money, crowd them out with your own daily positive money anchors instead.

Denise Duffield Thomas is appearing in Bristol City Hall on 11 and 12^th November 2023

https://denisedt.com/uklive