You and Your Money: Love, Hate, Give, Take (Part 1)

Question I

Answer Yes or No to the following statements:

1. Money doesn’t grow on trees

2. You got to have money to make money

3. No matter how hard I work, there are more bills than money I have to pay them

4. Rich people are arrogant

Please tally up the number of yes’s and no’s.

Question II

Right now without looking in your wallet/purse do you know how much money you have (to within a couple of dollars). No peeking.

Ok now take a look; is the folding stuff neatly stacked and organized according to the denomination. You know, picture of the important historical figure is always face up, starting with George Washington through to Ben Franklin. Or are the one’s, five’s ten and twenty dollar bills crumpled, a bit grubby and just shoved into your pockets.

Why all these questions. Well, this short quiz quickly illustrated how you presently relate to money.

Let me ask this: do you treat your money the way you treat your spouse/partner. Conversely would you treat your partner/spouse the same way you treat your money.

At this juncture, I suspect some people would start to feel a bit uncomfortable and maybe even begin to squirm in their seats.

Let’s be honest. You are on this site primarily to network, to promote and do business with other like-minded women. So, we are talking about money and making money here. You literally cannot afford to shy away from this subject (pun intended).

The point is this: unless you are comfortable with talking about and making money, and keeping the money you’ve made, your blood sweat and tears and physical efforts are going to achieve less than optimal results.

In business we look closely at the ROI (Return On Investment) ie how much profit you make on the amount of seed capital you put into your business. Any sane person would expect a 15-20 % minimum return on their investment. There are neat mathematical formulas that spit out a number that show the percentage profit you would make.

When calculating the ROI your accountant will plug in the cold hard cash investment dollar amount minus the costs and overheads eg rent, stock on order, utilities, wages, state and federal taxes associated with running a business.

However, what your accountant has not included in this ROI equation is the missing X Factor.

And this X Factor sits between your ears.

Now, getting back to the yes/no responses to the opening statements. If you said yes to even one of those statements, I hazard that your business is not growing at the speed and the direction you would like. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that those above statements are old conditioned beliefs. Let me say it again, they are not set in stone facts but conditioned beliefs.

As kids, we had no internal reference point (life experience) with regards to money. We adopted the belief system of the adult authority figures around us, namely our parents and teachers. Conditioned beliefs are what you picked up from these people when you were at your most impressionable. They were subtle messages you absorbed by osmosis (that is science speak for effortlessly picking up the words and actions transmitted by adults who are in your immediate environment and incorporating them into your psychological money profile without being able to discern as to whether these are true or false beliefs).

You grew up observing they way your folks handled, talked about, saved, spent, argued and fought over money and now as an adult you model this belief system.

They had either a scarcity or abundance mentality when it came to money and more importantly wealth (and yes, there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, and it’s not the dollar amount).

The X Factor is principally is how you relate to money on an emotional level that is determined by your current conditioned beliefs. These unspoken systems are so powerful and deeply embedded within your sub conscious that you probably do not realize that you have them!

Ok, now that you are aware, you can make the decision to deal with and change these negative conditioned beliefs that you acquired early on in life.

In doing so you can start to power towards your business goals and hit the mark.

How are you going to do that?

That will be the topic of discussion in Part 2.

Until then, yours in health, wealth and happiness