3 Money Mindset Shifts That Will Change Your Life
One of the things I discovered very early on in my money journey is that being good with our money isn’t just about the numbers. Yes, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my money but even once I did learn and decide what would work best for me, I wasn’t taking action that aligned with that plan. And it’s not like it was too complicated or confusing.
I wanted to spend less money than I was earning (and at the time I had a steady paycheck) and have some money leftover to save. That’s it.
Why didn’t it work? How we interact and behave with money (aka our relationship with money) has a lot to do with our emotions and beliefs.
Through my own money journey, I had some key mindset shifts that made a huge difference in my results in my financial goals. I’ve seen these same shifts happen over and over again in the people in my community through working with me, taking my courses, or even reading my book.
Here are the three that make the biggest difference in our success and happiness.
Dealing with our money (rather than avoiding it), is a huge gift to ourselves.
I’d even venture to say it’s a radical act of self love. We often equate taking the “smart” or “responsible” financial action with our money as restrictive or limiting our fun. We know what we should do but we rebel against it. But when we spend and save in the ways we want, we get to reach our goals by when we want. That’s a huge gift!
We get to protect ourselves from additional stress in case of an emergency. We set ourselves up to have the power to leave people and positions because we want and to invest in the causes and organizations that matter to us. When we realize we’re getting what we want most, it no longer feels restricting.
We can grow and improve in our money lives.
One of the reasons the mistakes we make in our financial lives feel so devastating is that we allow them to define who we are with money. We think, “I’ll never be able to handle my own money responsibly” or “I’m terrible with money.”
But the truth is, we can improve in our money lives and learn from our mistakes. It’s a skill just like any other skill we struggled with but then mastered (hello walking!). When we know we can get better, it’s easier to recover from and learn from setbacks because we don’t view them as fatal flaws.
We can only use or spend each dollar we have once (unfortunately).
So, we might as well use them in ways that will maximize our joy per dollar. This is an unfortunate reality no matter how much or how little we earn - no one is immune.
When we realize there is an opportunity cost to each dollar we spend (i.e. we give up the opportunity to spend that dollar on something else), it reframes our decisions in a very powerful way. We start to decide very consciously and intentionally about where each dollar will truly treat us, and it becomes easy to let go of expenses that aren’t adding value to our lives.