Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
The environment that you grew up in has a strong influence on who you are today.
It even influences who you think you should be.
When you were a child, the people around you influenced you: family members, teachers,
and others whom you admired.
This includes celebrities and even fictional characters from movies, series, books, and
cartoons.
You have this influence stored in your subconscious.
To this day, it probably guides some of your decisions, especially related to money and
professional career.
Often, this influence turns into a prison that limits you, even into adulthood.
To live a better life, you need to focus on the things that you really want.
You have to get out of your prison and become independent of the outside influences that
shaped you in childhood.
In other words, you need to stop being a child.
Modify your childhood beliefs so they are more consistent with the life you want to
have as an adult.
Imagine a boy who grew up in a family of doctors.
The father was a famous cardiologist.
The mother was a renowned neurologist.
The grandparents owned famous offices.
Even great-grandparents were pioneers in going to medical school.
All conversation in this child's home revolved around medicine.
The trips were related to medical congresses.
The parents' absence from school events was due to medical shifts.
Wherever he looked, the boy saw lab coats, medicines, and hospitals.
Naturally, this boy grew up feeling pressure to pursue a career in medicine.
His parents never gave an order saying: you HAVE to do medicine.
But that was kind of implied.
In examples like these, two situations are common.
The first situation is for the boy to follow the family's influence and study medicine,
even if he is not sure that he wants to become a doctor.
The second situation is that the child chooses a career opposite to that of a doctor, as
an act of rebellion.
Neither of these options is the best way.
In both cases, the boy is deciding his career based on the influence of family members.
If he does, he may regret it as an adult and be stuck with a decision that, in practice,
he didn't even make.
The child has always been trapped in beliefs that were not his.
The worst thing is that many adults are not aware of what these limiting beliefs are.
In the example of an entire family of doctors, this is very clear.
But the binding influence is almost never so overt.
In the financial education work of Truly Wealthy [https://arata.se/moneytaboo], we mapped what
beliefs and interpretations we have in our mind, as these beliefs have a huge impact
on the implementation of our actions.
The beliefs that limit your adult life are instilled from your interpretation of the
past.
We all have a constant internal dialogue that influences our decisions and actions.
Your self-talk reflects beliefs from your adult life that were instilled from your interpretation
of strong events in the past.
The important point here is that the facts of the past DO NOT influence our formation
of beliefs.
In fact, the influence comes from our INTERPRETATION of these facts.
The same event can have a completely different influence on two people.
Imagine two kids growing up in New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
These boys dream of being firefighters.
Suddenly, the September 11, 2001 attack takes place.
A tragedy in the city.
More than three hundred firefighters die trying to save the victims of the attack.
After that, one of the boys is traumatized and gives up on his dream of becoming a firefighter.
The other kid is inspired by the act of heroism, even more certain that he wants to become
a firefighter when he grows up.
You see, the fact of 9/11 was the same.
But the interpretation of the fact was different for each child.
It is this interpretation that forms the beliefs, the rules that guide our minds to make decisions.
But here comes the good news.
While it is impossible to change the facts of the past, you can change your interpretation
of those facts.
In the same way that your mind has been imprisoned by limiting beliefs, it also has the flexibility
to break free.
Your financial decisions are heavily influenced by the beliefs you hold in your mind.
In addition to your career choice, your financial decisions are heavily impacted by the environment
in which you grew up.
Financial decisions will be very different if we compare a child raised in an entrepreneurial
environment to another child who grew up in a scarcity-minded environment.
Some people prefer higher risk investments.
Others prefer to spend everything they earn.
Others find it normal to pay credit card interests (which is unthinkable for a person who is
financially educated).
Think about when the pandemic broke out in 2020.
Stock markets around the world plummeted overnight.
Those who grew up influenced to take advantage of opportunities had no doubts: they bought
as many shares of good companies and bitcoin as they could, taking advantage of the low
prices to profit in the future.
Someone who grew up with rules to avoid risk did the opposite: they sold the few assets
they had before the price dropped further.
The best way to free your financial and professional decision-making process from past beliefs
is through self-knowledge work.
Changing beliefs ingrained in your mind since you were a child is not easy.
But it is possible!
As long as you are willing to study on your own or accept help from specialized professionals.
A good financial education job needs to include self-knowledge.
Part of self-knowledge is respecting existing beliefs, understanding that they had a purpose
at a certain point in our lives.
A good therapist can help you better understand your interpretations of the past.
And you can also increase your self-knowledge.
For example, imagine that you have the belief that it is more important to give than to
receive.
As a child, this belief helped you to be happier, without asking for things in an exaggerated
way.
This belief fueled your generosity.
However, in adulthood, this belief may not be so positive.
Imagine that this belief pushes you to always offer rides to others, always pay for a taxi,
and never accept rides from your friends.
With this belief, you feel like you need to dedicate your time toward helping your colleagues
at work, but you never ask for help in return.
Intead, you stay up until dawn working alone.
Now imagine your trajectory of self-knowledge, in which you gain maturity to re-evaluate
this belief.
After all, it is not possible to give without receiving.
You then reframe the belief, understanding that giving and receiving are equally important.
Upon receiving, you allow your friend to give gifts.
This belief reform can be carried out in different dimensions that delay our professional growth
and the good management of our money.
If you want to review your beliefs about career and finances, get to know yourself better.
Grab a pen and paper and start completing sentences related to the rules you have in
mind about work and money.
Phrases like these:
- Rich people are...
- Wealth is...
- The best uses for money are...
- If I won the lottery today, I would...
- The downside of being rich is...
- What prevents me from becoming extremely rich is...
This is a first step.
To go further, study taboos related to money.
Try to remember facts from your childhood that influenced your upbringing.
If you need to, look for therapy, meditation, or other tools that help you think more clearly
about your formation as a person.
With time, patience, and hard work, you will be able to break free from the prisons that
exist in your mind, benefitting your decisions surrounding work and money.
Beliefs instilled in your mind during your childhood can affect decisions about work
and money in your adult life.
To free yourself from limiting beliefs, you must have more self-knowledge about the facts
that impacted your belief formation.
Mainly, pay attention to your interpretation of these facts.
You can never change the facts of the past.
But you can change your interpretation of these facts.
Some interpretations are so ingrained in our culture that they are called taboos.
There are many financial taboos.
To demystify these taboos, I recorded a special class from the Truly Wealthy course.
You can see this special class right now, using the link that is in the description
or accessing the address https://arata.se/moneytaboo.