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Keys to Building a Healthy Money Mindset

Author: Gerhard van Onselen

It's easy to relapse into old habits! People easily fall back into old habits, beliefs and attitudes. Most of us know how it goes; sometimes our best intentions to change are kicked in the teeth by our old habits. And this applies to our beliefs about money too.

Old ways doing, old habits and old beliefs are comfortable, safe, and they often prevent us from changing. For most of us, our current behaviour, beliefs, and attitudes, have gathered enough momentum to keep going the way they are going. That's if we don't take steps top intervene.

If our habits and beliefs are limited, the results they produce in our lives will be limited.

If we think like poor men, we'll probably become poor men. It's our habits of thought, habits of action, and habits of beliefs that produce the results we get in life. Remember Morpheus telling Neo in The Matrix that "the mind makes it real". That is true for us, too.

That's a shocker, but it really is the culmination our habitual behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that produce the exact results we are getting in our lives (I must give much credit to the authors Steven Covey and David P. Hanna for this idea).

It is logical that to be whole financially, we need a combination of the correct money mindset and money habits. Let's now consider some ideas on how to develop a healthy money mindset.

Steps to Building a Healthy Money Mindset

Disclaimer time: the information I am outlining below is provided as suggestions. Please regard it only as that, suggestions. It is necessary to seek the advice of a recognized financial planners, coaches, or professionals before making important decisions about your personal finances.

Step 1: Clarify your personal 'price tag'

What do you think are your efforts worth, in money, per year? 10K, 20K, 100K, 1000K ... Determining your personal worth in monetary terms is often unpleasant and we don't like to attach a price tag to ourselves (I definitely don't like it).

Yet, this personal perception of worth may be acting as an unconscious upper limit, a glass ceiling, to our earnings potential.

If we attach little value to our personal efforts and worth, we may only be pursuing business or career opportunities that make less than we could have earned.

Such poor self-beliefs are limiting our potential by restricting the opportunities we are willing to pursue. A millionaire once told someone that he – the millionaire – is always bidding at business deals in the value of a millions. The millionaire's earnings ceiling was set higher than the average person's and consequently he earned more.

To achieve more you have to aim higher.

I also think that if people start to earn over this unconscious ‘glass ceiling' to their worth, they often start to engage in self-sabotaging behaviors. This is only speculation, but the self destructive actions of many of the wealthy celebrities may add credence to my argument.

Unexpected large amounts of money appear able to drive some of us crazy.

In order to identify our 'earnings glass ceiling', we have to determine the level of earnings that create cognitive dissonance in us. This dissonance, a form or mental discomfort, may be described in our thoughts as 'I cannot make so much for doing that', 'my efforts aren't really worth so much', or a similar mental conflict. We have to grow our mindset past that level to expand our future potential for success.

We must realize that self-imposed earning limits are rooted in self -beliefs and are restricting our potential.

How to fix this? Writing an essay of 200 - 300 words titled "What I believe I am worth and where I learnt it" may help us to identify the elements of this core belief, giving us material to work with on our personal developmental journey. Once we identify those beliefs, we must challenge and change them. This has to be done on a regular basis.

Step 2: Clarify the picture of your desired wealth destination

Writers such as Napoleon Hill and Steven Covey emphasize that all success and achievement begins in the human mind and then flows into our physical reality. It's therefore necessary to visualize our ideal success destinations, describe it in words, and to make plans to get us there.

Creating a specific picture of a tangible outcome motivates us toward achieving our goals. It clarifies where we are going.

Writing down what you want to achieve with your life is essential for success.

How to do this? In your mind picture the outcomes you want to achieve in every major part of your life including your career, finances, marriage, and family (etc).

Write down each goal using positive words and write your goals as if they had already come true. Also mix in positive emotions. Describe how you would feel after achieving your goal. Read these aloud, to yourself, on regular basis.

Step 3: Clarify what you will give in order to get to your destination

It amazes me how often in today's society we lose track of the old law of ‘sowing and reaping', ‘giving and getting', and ‘doing unto others as you would like them to do unto you'.

Perhaps we have become so 'enlightened' that we think these laws no longer apply to us. But life does not reward something for nothing. Yet, this idea is curiously missing from many sources of personal development literature I looked at.

But success comes at price. Achieving the goals we have described in step 2 will cost us something.

We have to determine exactly what we are willing to give in order to attain our goals.

What to do: decide, up front, what you are willing, able, and going to give in order to achieve your goals, and what you will not. Write that down with your previous goal statement, and reflect on that often.

Step 4: Clarify the obstacle in your way and how you will overcome them

Military commanders tell us that it's necessary to know your enemies in order to overcome them. In much the same way we have to know the enemies that are going to prevent us from achieving our goals. And we have to determine how we are going to neutralize them.

At this juncture, write down your major personal enemies to success along with a practical plan on how you are going to neutralize them. Common enemies include laziness, procrastination, poor self-beliefs, poor time management, or lacking skills.

Step 5: Reprogram your mind to expect wealth not scarcity

Most of us have to work at cultivating a true wealth mentality. It is often hard, but fortunately people can learn almost anything.

Why is developing a wealth mentality important? Well, for one, a wealth mentality assumes that there are enough opportunities and possibilities for everyone to go around, while a poverty mentality does not. Which mentality do you think has the greatest possibility to extract your potential?

Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich suggests that most people fear and expect poverty instead of expecting wealth. It is a general law of life that what we expect to get is the thing we get.

If you fear poverty, your focus is on poverty, and poverty may be what you produce in your life.

The way I see it, our thoughts range from wealth thinking on the one side, to poverty thinking on the opposite side. Both produce different results, but they only differ in the mind.

Programming our minds to expect success and opportunities require discipline to continually challenge our thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. All succesful entreprenuers I know are well versed in this discipline.

On this answer the following question: how would my colleagues, friends, and family describe me, as a poverty conscious or wealth conscious person?

Step 6: Keep kicking - Never ever give up

The process outlined above should help us to identify areas for personal growth. It helps identify habits of thought that need changing. It determines the starting point of our growth toward a more positive wealth mentality.

However, achieving a worthwhile goal is rarely easy. It takes dedication, persistence, faith to achieve. Changing deep seated beliefs is a very difficult challenge and takes much persistence. There's a reason why biographies are written about those who overcame difficult challenges on the road to success. These typically are people of great persistence.

It is during the difficult times we have to keep ‘working our plans' to achieve our goals. So, let's keep kicking and never give up.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/wealth-building-articles/keys-to-building-a-healthy-money-mindset-5182857.html

Gerhard van Onselen is a strategic business consultant with experience in recruitment, higher education, and training. His educational background includes psychology, industrial psychology and business. He enjoys research, freelance writing, and blogging about psychological and business related topics. Visit his blog at http://balancedlifesa.blogspot.com .

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