Hidden Money Beliefs That Hold You Back in Midlife (Ep. 33)

0:01 money doesn't grow on trees. Do you have sayings in your head like that that create some sort of hidden conflict for you about money? I think most of us do, to be honest. I'll give you some more saying examples in the episode. This idea of a mental relationship with money and potentially self-sabotage around money is, for me, the biggest thing that I have worked on on my own mindset, with mindset coaches and you're going to hear a few clips from one of my coaches today and it's going to be really powerful for you as well.

0:46 So let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success. One thought at a time, unlike most advice out there. We believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and oh my goodness powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind your Midlife podcast. This is the Mind your Midlife Podcast. Money itself doesn't really have any meaning, except as a method of exchanging.

1:36 I give money in order to get something that I value, and money is valued by whoever I'm giving it to, so we're making an exchange and in fact, in the old old old days, money used to actually have intrinsic value. Right, there were gold coins and silver coins. Our money doesn't have any value it's paper. Some countries have really pretty paper money, but it's still paper. Or maybe it's coins, but they're not made out of silver or gold. What happens is we attach meanings to money and it gets very much mixed into whether we're successful, whether we're a good person, whether we're making appropriate decisions and who knows what appropriate means.

2:28 And if we've had experiences in life where money was scarce, then that is definitely going to be mixed in, that there's a feeling of lack or maybe even fear or uncertainty, scarcity around money. And so at the beginning of the episode I said money doesn't grow on trees. Here's a few more Rich people are evil or rich people are greedy. You get money by being greedy. Time is money. A penny saved is a penny earned. Spending is quick, earning is slow. What Earning is slow?

3:09 So you could probably come up with more sayings than that. When I was growing up, I definitely heard the oh yeah, let me just go pick the money off the money tree in the backyard so that we can get that type of thing and most of the stories like that that we have in our minds come from experiences we've had as children. Now, I'm not saying that our parents are to blame. We do it too and sometimes we misinterpret experiences where it's really our fault because we misinterpreted the whole thing. So passing out blame is not the point here. What we want to understand is that you have subconsciously attached meaning to money and typically you fall into one of two groups Either, subconsciously, you believe money's quite easy to come by and you'll always have plenty, or the other side, money is difficult to come by, you never have enough, and that can look all sorts of ways.

4:17 And I'm guessing if you're in the money's difficult to come by group, you're thinking, man, why couldn't I be in? The money is easy to come by group. It's just our experiences that we save into our subconscious minds and we create this meaning, this relationship between ourselves and money, and both of those sides honestly can skew our understanding of money. Those sides honestly can skew our understanding of money. So what I want to help you with today and I'm doing this episode mainly because, as I said at the beginning, this is one of the things that I constantly still work on. I coach myself on this all the time.

5:02 I'm creating a Patreon myself on this. All the time I'm creating a Patreon. It's free right now, in the summer, and it's not going to be free forever. So I have to be envisioning that I'm providing value and people will want this. Any type of business owner that you are for my coaching clients, for your clients of whatever your business is you have to believe that you are providing value that they will want and value paying for. Because if we believe instead that we're kind of taking someone's money and we feel bad about that, we are not going to grow, whatever that business is.

5:45 Very far, are we? That subconscious belief is there. Now here's an interesting one. Money is a means of exchange. But let's take it further. Money is a flow of energy and it's unlimited. The first time, my success coach, karen Mullins, who you're going to hear from a little of energy and it's unlimited. The first time, my success coach, karen Mullins, who you're going to hear from a little bit today, said that to me. I kind of I don't know, I don't know. That seems a bit touchy, feely, woo, woo, I don't know. But if money is a measure of value, a means of exchange, valuing things, then we could imagine that it flows back and forth between people, between businesses, like an energy, and so if we're open to it, it's going to flow to us as well.

6:41 It's also unlimited. There is not a limited amount of money in the world. Being super what is the word I'm looking for? Super concrete about it we can print more money. Any country can. That does affect economics, but it's possible. And then, being a little less concrete about it, there is always a way to make more money. If you are open to it and you allow yourself to come up with ideas, there is always a way. And I think right now, what concerns me about our relationship with money is we're not in the best economic environment.

7:28 Prices are higher and I hear a lot of conversations about it's so expensive to blank. It's so expensive to buy whatever we're wanting to buy. It's so expensive to travel wherever we're wanting to travel. No-transcript.

8:14 If I'm telling myself and others all the time that everything is so expensive, what am I going to notice when I'm out in the world or when I'm online? Everything looks expensive. Now, I'm not saying if you just flip and tell yourself, hey, everything's cheap, then suddenly everything will be cheap. No, that's obviously not what I'm saying, but we focus on a certain angle of this based on what is going on inside our money beliefs, our mindset about money. And one more piece of this is kind of interesting. So we're in our 40s, our 50s, our 60s and as you're listening to this, think about the fact that it wasn't until 1975.

9:00 I was alive in 1975, although I was very young. You may have been alive in 1975, although I was very young. You may have been alive in 1975. It wasn't until 1975 that women could open bank accounts on their own without either a husband or a father's signature. I'm talking about adult women. They also couldn't get loans without a husband or a father's signature. 1975, during our lifetime that just blows my mind. So I guess, in that sense, a lot of progress has been made, hasn't it? But if you think about how short a time that has been since women had that bit more independence in terms of managing our own money, then it's quite likely that we would have inherited some limiting money beliefs from previous generations.

9:56 It's quite likely that our parents, our grandparents, had beliefs about money that, just through their day-to-day actions and day-to-day conversation, passed down to us. For me, it's the money tree thing. So what can we do about this? I don't want to leave you with oh, I must have some crazy stuff in my head about money. I'm never going to be able to fix it. Coaching can help a lot on money mindset Absolutely a lot. It takes time and I want to give you some sort of starting points here, and number one is to simply understand what's going on for you with money, to become aware.

10:42 So have a listen to what Karen says. The first step is awareness. Right, like always, it's awareness. It's just being able to see where you currently are and to have a mind open enough, of course, to want to shift and change it. Right? But again, if you're looking for the answer to that question, let's assume that that box has already ticked. That's like, yeah, I do want to improve that, that mindset on my relationship with money. So the first step, for sure, is awareness and, in fact, as I've just said right there, like the first step if you want to improve your relationship with money. Do you know what? One of the best ways that I know and actually it's quite a fun kind of exercise to do, in some respects at least to really become aware of, like, well, where am I currently?

11:30 What is my current relationship with money? Literally, kind of, you can be a bit playful with this, but start to think of money as if it literally was your significant other. Right, so you are in a relationship with money, like we all are. So you're in a relationship with money right now. If you started to see money as your significant other, what kind of a relationship are you in with money? Right, like, do you really love money or is it like well, sometimes I love it and sometimes not so much. And well, I love you, but you're never around enough. Or like you come, but then you leave really quickly. You're never here when I want you, right, can you see. Or you leave really quickly, you're never here when I want you, right, can you see? Or like I kind of want you and like I kind of feel good about wanting you, but this side of you over here, like if we were talking about I don't know like debt or something, now I feel really bad for wanting, like that's not even allowed. Do you know what I mean? And it's just that kind of.

12:10 Do I need to go to counseling? Am I in a dysfunctional relationship with money here? You know, like yeah, or am I avoiding it? Right? Like am I deep in avoidance? Am I not paying money any attention? Right, like there's so many kind of like facets to this that if you look at it through that lens it's really fascinating. Of like, oh my gosh, yeah. I think that helps us to recognize hey, there's something funny going on here. Or maybe it helps us to recognize you know what, I'm in a pretty good position. I'd like to sort of grow my vision for the amount of money. You know what? I'm in a pretty good position. I'd like to sort of grow my vision for the amount of money I could have. But I'm in a pretty good position and, by the way, this is when I know I've hit my issue with money. I still have something inside me and I can feel it in my chest where when I say it's okay to have more money, we can go for more money, you can have more money something in my chest there's still a bit of a feeling of like, maybe that's bad.

13:07 It's still in there and so I'm continuing to work on that. And if that's you when I say things like that, let me just say this as I said at the beginning, money is not good or bad. More money magnifies your personality and anyone else's personality. So if you are a good person, more money. Maybe you can even do better things. More money. If you're not a great person, you might do worse things. It's a magnifier. But I'm just recognizing I'm still a work in progress as well. Okay, so let's say you're in the position where you have some debt you maybe haven't had some financial success recently you're dealing with how am I going to figure that out?

13:57 And it kind of weighs on you, right, and that continues to create this sort of negative thing with regard to money. Okay, well, karen has a comment for you about that as well. This, I think, is like a big catch 22 for so many people when it comes to debt, because then they're thinking, well, how can I feel prosperous if I've got debt, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, the advice that I give is, as with kind of everything I guess that we've been looking at so far, is it's so important to reframe, that it's so important to question some of the beliefs and assumptions you've been making about debt to this point. And so how can you look at it? Okay, sort of in terms of where you are right now, and this isn't a message of saying, oh hey, like it's okay, just go put more money on your credit card, right?

14:43 No, you want to be responsible about that. Okay, like that's. Another key part of this is being responsible with the money that you've got. But you are where you are and I think it's so important not to judge yourself and, in fact, you can reframe it. I actually say to my clients like actually, how can you be grateful for the balance that's on your credit card statement? Like you might even want to like stop using the word debt, because there's such a lot of like negative connotation that we just have programmed in, so it could be like oh, I have financing on. You know, I have a balance on a credit card statement, just in the way that I said it. Then, okay, how can you feel grateful for it and recognize that that actually is still money that has supported you, right? Like, if you can see it like that because by definition, it has, that's you've had money that you have been able to use and really it's you're paying for that service, it's still a service that you're receiving from, let's say, your credit card provider.

15:37 If we're talking about credit card debt, I mean and also with debt, there's all different types, right? Like, very few people feel shame, judgment or bad about a mortgage. It's so. It's kind of like, oh, like, a mortgage that's hundreds of thousands is actually completely fine, but, oh, my goodness, if I've got some money over here on a credit card statement, well, shame on me, right, right. So I really think that it's so important for us as individuals, like this is also part of you taking ownership of your money story, your relationship with money. Where, what if I just change the way I felt about that, because I'm telling you that will clean up your energy? Where you can see that like, do you know what? Like, it supported me at that point. Right like, or it supported me, and it might be. I mean, gosh, I've done this. Right like, I wouldn't be here today on this episode.

16:19 Cheryl, you and me wouldn't be here today on this episode. Cheryl, you and me wouldn't even know each other because if it wasn't for being able to, you know, invest in myself and put some money on my American Express card, I wouldn't have invested in coaching for myself or invested in getting trained and being mentored by Bob Proctor. Right Like, I didn't have that money, just sat in savings, and so I made a decision. Great like, that's something I'm so grateful for because it enabled me to do something that was an investment in myself, you know. So, again, no shame on that I was so grateful and happy to pay for the service of being able to do that, which is really obviously, then, what you're paying for in interest. So, just even breaking it down like that, and let's talk about spending and investing.

17:07 What's really powerful about the decisions that you make about money that I make, about money any of us make is the energy behind the decision. Are we doing something out of desperation? Are we doing something because we're trying to keep up with the neighbors or whoever? Are we doing something from fear that we're going to miss out? Or are we spending or doing some type of investment from a place of really a lot of confidence that this feels good and is the right decision? Are we feeling really aligned, that we looked into all the information and we figured out the best option and this is something that is really valuable that we're spending the money on that feels different and I'm guessing even when you hear me talk about that you might realize it feels different.

18:04 So know what the energy is behind that decision and if you've never had a look at the story cycle or heard me talk about that, the thoughts going on in our heads create our emotions, which then, of course, affect our actions. So, identifying the emotion you're feeling when you're taking some of these actions, making these money decisions or even listening to me talk about it, you can then kind of dig in and figure out what thoughts are creating that and again, it's awareness. So go to CherylPFishercom slash story cycle and grab that resource if you haven't already.

18:47 Now here's where I usually get the question well, what if I just kind of act as if and I decide I'm going to act as if and I decide I'm going to recreate myself as a financially successful person and I'm going to go and make investments and do that with confidence? Again, that actually might be a really good thing, as long as the energy, the emotion related to that is helpful and positive and confident and aligned and it doesn't trigger scarcity or stress for you.

19:31 And that's not a judgment. Everybody has a different trigger, for when we've spent enough that now we're in scarcity, or we've made some sort of job change and now we're in scarcity. When we trigger that, then we kind of fall back into the old vision of money. So I want to give you some small act as if actions and I want you to just make sure that you try these, but only the ones you're really comfortable with and they can be fun. So the idea is to believe that money is always available and money is always coming and you're always going to be able to figure out a way to have plenty of income, and so if we start to feel that luxury can be in our lives and we start to feel that we can give money away and help others, it shifts that energy.

20:24 So try small things. When you're at the grocery store and you're buying a few items, don't look at the prices. Just buy what you need. Buy the ones you actually want, because you're not likely to break your budget. Or, please, make sure you're not breaking your budget but you're not likely to when you're buying grocery items. Karen's idea, which I love, was go to a restaurant, order what you want, what you really feel like drinking and eating, and do not look at the cost. Now, the way to make sure that you're not breaking your budget on this is just pick a restaurant where you know the approximate range of what the food and drink is and you know that, whatever choice you make, you're not going to cause yourself some life problems.

21:11 And don't look at the prices. Order what you want and enjoy it, feeling that feeling of I can absolutely do this, I don't have to worry. I'm so thankful that I have money that is giving me this opportunity to enjoy these things in my life with my friends, with my family, and I also love, love, love. It makes me feel so great when I do this Giving away money a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, or hey, a lot if you have a lot and that is paying for the person behind you in the drive through anonymously. You're going to have left by the time they realize somebody paid for them.

21:53 Or I've heard of people going into stores and leaving some cash, like in the diaper box or underneath something on the shelf so somebody finds it. I've heard of people sticking cash in an envelope and putting it on the windshield of a car. I've heard of people anonymously sending some pizzas to the front office of a school or to the fire station or whatever Something to make someone's day, and it doesn't even have to be much. And when you do that and you don't take credit, the rush of positive feeling number one, that you were able to make someone happy and number two, that money allowed you to do that is really, really impactful in terms of the mental relationship we have with money.

22:43 And I have one more for you, and this is from Karen, and really I don't think I ever would have thought of doing this on my own. Let's talk about bills. Another great tip, actually, just again, to give people things that they can take away and act on. And it comes back to gratitude. But like if you can really understand that whenever you are paying for anything and I really do mean anything you are receiving a service, right, like if you can join the dots on that, like when you're paying for something, you're receiving a service. So how can you get into gratitude? Because a lot of the time, especially now. So just to come back to the point you made, cheryl, of rising inflation, and I know in the UK media maybe similar where you are, but in the UK media for months and months it's like the cost of living crisis.

23:27 It's literally like the cost of living crisis. So again, it's like it's heightening, causing people to live in a state of fear and lack because it's bringing their attention to it. A great remedy is like, yeah, how can you get into gratitude when you're circulating money? So, even when you're paying for a bill, how can you be grateful? So, even if it's like the electricity bill, you know, the car tax, whatever it might be like, really acknowledge, well, I'm pretty glad that I've got electricity. Actually, I mean, if the fridge didn't turn on, all my food would go off and you know, you know I can eat food and I'm not gonna get food poisoning because I can cook it right through and like, really, we take so much for granted so we forget when we're paying bills sometimes that we did actually receive something for the thing that we're paying for.

24:08 Right, this and this is so powerful and again now you start to get into the energy of, like, all that you have. So now you're feeling more abundant and prosperous, rather than the lack and the not enoughness. Oh my goodness, amazing, right. So as we wrap this up, midlife is a time where you most likely are more well off than you were in your early 20s. Most likely you are more well off now than you were then. So I say appreciate that first of all, right, realize how far you've come. And it's also a time where maybe we've got college payments, we're helping with aging parents, we're looking towards retirement, we're thinking do I have enough money to retire?

24:53 At what point will I have enough money to retire? That becomes a little bit of a scarcity thing and it creeps in in midlife. So reach out on CherylPFishercom and let's set up a call if you'd like to have coaching about that. For sure, and in general, watch your language. So when you catch yourself saying everything's so expensive I wish I had more money, I'll never be able to retire. Watch the always and the never. Watch the everything and just notice and see if you can. At first maybe just minimize how much you're saying that, but also maybe just shift it and say I'm excited to figure out when I can retire and I know I'll find something that works out well and I'm so happy I've come this far.

25:41 Whatever it is that works for you. Your brain is always listening to you and is shaping what you notice in your world based on all of these cues and all of these subconscious beliefs. So I would love to hear from you. Find me on social media, cheryl P Fisher on most socials. Tell me if you tried any of these tips. Tell me what you've learned about your money mindset and let's see if we can learn from each other. And make sure that you're hanging out with me in the Patreon community, because we're going to talk a little bit more this week about money mindset and I'm going to give you a little bit more of my story as well. So that's patreoncom.

26:23 Slash mind your midlife. Click join for free, easy peasy, and make sure you've hit the follow button Because, along this same theme, next week's episode we're going to talk about the idea of having more streams of income in midlife as you're planning towards retirement, and I have a guest who's going to give us some great advice and ideas. So I'll see you then. And, in the meantime, make sure you're slowing down, noticing what's around you, what's going on in your head, and let's create something amazing.