Transcriber: Clary Chow Reviewer: Emma Gon
I'm going to start with a quick activity that a mentor of mine once showed me.
So if you would, take your right hand and raise it in the air.
And with your right index finger,
I want you to look up at the ceiling
and all you’re gonna do, it’s very simple,
is make a clockwise motion on the ceiling.
Now, I know we’re in a digital age, so maybe just flash back to remembering
that hand moving around. 12, 1, 2, 3, right, okay, we’ve got it down. Great.
And all you’re going to do is slowly put a bend in your elbow.
You can look at me for reference. I've done it many times.
And slowly make sure that your fingers come down to about for head level,
then nose level, chin level, chest level. Now look down at your finger.
You go in anti-clockwise.
I can tell you what’s happened.
All that’s changed is your perspective.
But with a change in perspective,
it can lead to a profoundly different outcome.
In any journey of healing,
restoration or the creation of a more resilient you,
the starting point is understanding your story to this point.
Take therapy, for example.
We don't dive straight into reprocessing, reframing, coping mechanisms.
We start with your story and the narrative
that has made you you to this day.
My posit to you is that we’re doing ourselves
a great disservice by not following that same methodology
and strategy in our wealth building.
Here’s a few questions for you.
What was the conversation like around money growing up for you?
Was it positive? Was it negative?
Was it non existent?
Have you ever struggled with any of these limiting beliefs?
Worrying that you don't have enough money or that it's all going to run out?
Debt is bad! Money is the root of all evil!
Have you ever been guilty of any of the following actions?
Spending all your money or more?
Because you worked really hard and you deserve it.
Taking a job that you didn’t really want because of money.
Stopped living life and doing the things
that truly bring you joy because of money.
If you have, you’re not alone.
Studies indicate that Americans in general lack clarity,
confidence and direction around their finances.
A study of over 2000 adults revealed that more than 50% said
that talking with anyone else about money was taboo.
I’ve found for my own industry experience that there’s a lot of people out there
that were just not taught much about personal finances,
regardless of their level of wealth and their background.
Now, this is all in a time where, thanks to technology,
we have more access to good financial planning
and wise money management than ever before.
Not to mention the set up of investment accounts
or savings automation can be done at just the click of a few buttons,
but we still have these issues around our personal finances.
Only 1 in 3 Americans have a plan for their money.
A FINRA study found that only 40% of the people polled
could answer four out of six basic financial literacy questions.
Here’s one.
77% of Americans have anxiety about their money.
So what’s the deal?
Where's the disconnect? We have more access than ever before,
but maybe we're as anxious as ever.
Could it be that we’re actually starting in the wrong place
when it comes to financial planning?
We’re attempting to build and create with no real understanding
of where it is we’re trying to go
and truly no understanding of the foundation
that we’re trying to build upon.
Let’s say someone pulled out an IKEA box of contents on the floor
and gave you no instructions, no parts list,
no picture of what it's supposed to look like in the end.
Who in their right mind is taking on that challenge? I'm not.
But it's often what we see happening with people's personal finances,
and it's inefficient, to say the least.
The solution to the conundrum we face with our personal wealth
doesn’t lie in more hacks, tips, social media guru Insights.
The real solution comes from understanding
our current relationship with money
and then developing a true purpose for our wealth.
Now, that may sound simple,
but those components truly become
the corners and the edges of the jigsaw puzzle.
All the other strategies, solutions and products
are simply pieces that fit within that framework.
So let's talk about those two things.
Let's start with the current relationship with money.
Now, we don’t have time, unfortunately, to unpack all of the things
that could be informing your current financial narrative.
But I want to identify one thing that typically causes more problems
than most with people's personal finances.
This is the thing that clashes with the idea of financial freedom
and causes stress and unnecessary concern
across all the major important areas of life.
We may have goals of affluence, abundance,
maybe even the creation of generational wealth.
But the hidden killer of financial dreams is a scarcity mindset.
Now a scarcity mindset brings with it an overall survival methodology.
Essentially what it says is there’s not enough pie to go round.
If these five people are doing well, I must be the one to suffer.
Now, a scarcity mindset generally causes some fear and some anxiety,
which statistics have proven, but also leads to short term, focused,
hasty decisions around money.
It makes it really hard to plan too far ahead
or look too far out into the future,
which is exactly what we need to do
if we value things like wealth, legacy, community and familial impact.
The other thing about a scarcity mindset is it’s subtle,
because it intertwines itself with your beliefs,
your logic and your habits in your subconscious mind,
and it can do that regardless of your level of wealth.
It doesn’t allow a sense of clarity, peace and direction to coexist with it.
Now, this is a major issue because that could mean for you
the very thing that you’re trying to create with money
isn’t capable of growing and thriving in the current environment.
Now, when we're young, our brains job is to adapt to our immediate surroundings
by creating modes of operation that help us be successful, to exist,
to do well in our current context.
As we grow, those adaptive strategies in adulthood can become, well, maladaptive.
If you’re in a situation growing up where money was tight
and there was the need to hoard, well, now in adulthood,
it’s hard to do things like invest in yourself or in external assets,
which is exactly what needs to happen if we're ever going to have
the opportunity to experience compounded or exponential growth.
On the other hand, if you saw frivolous spending growing up,
it may be hard to get that under control in your adult life
and prioritize something as crucial as saving.
Now, I want to give you a little bit of grace, because when we're young,
our conscious mind isn't fully formed.
So a lot of the input on the big things of life, finance is included,
go straight into what becomes logic, belief and habit for us as we grow.
So how do we know if we're dealing with
a little bit of scarcity mindset in our world?
Again, we don’t have the time to unpack it all,
but here’s a few things to consider to evaluate
the financial foundation that you may have right now.
The first is to write down
all of your experiences and childhood around money.
Then I want you to write down how you feel about major financial terms
investing, saving, insurance, debt.
Then identify any major experiences you had around money in adulthood.
Then what you’re going to do with your likely extensive list at this point
is go back through and put a positive or a negative sign next to each one of those,
depending on whether your interpretation
of those experiences was positive or negative.
Hint: if it’s mostly negative, there’s probably a little bit of scarcity mindset
we’ve got to deal with.
But that activity in and of itself is going to reveal
so much about that foundation
that we’re going to start to try and build from.
Now, once we have the foundation identified,
it's time to move to creating a vision and a purpose for our money.
Andy Stanley says it best, everyone gets somewhere in life.
A few people get their own purpose. Those are the ones with vision.
I hear people with goals of affluence and abundance
and they say numerical objective financial goals like Mikey,
I want to make six figures. Mikey, I want to make seven figures.
I want to have three, four, five, six, seven streams of passive income.
I want to have this many thousands or millions tucked away in savings.
We can tell you a secret.
If that’s where you stop, you just stop short.
You’re 1 or 2 steps away from really creating consistency
in whatever your financial plan is.
You’re 1 or 2 steps away from the freedom
of not having to look around and seeing
what everyone else is doing with their money.
When you can clearly articulate a purpose and a goal for your wealth
and emotionally engage with what that means for you,
now you have something meaningful
and concrete that will hold you accountable,
even when the instant gratification version of ourselves doesn’t feel like it.
And I want to bring that to life
a little bit in terms of what that looked like for me,
because this all sounds well and good and it all sounds simple,
but what does it look like to really understand the narrative
and then to build a purpose and a vision?
In summer of 2020, I came home to my now six month old, oldest son.
And if, you know, six months old,
start to smile and engage and giggle at you and make you feel really good.
And I realized holding him in a studio apartment
that there was no business having three people in.
That now my why was deeper. I’ve always had goals.
Numerical objective financial goals of what I wanted to achieve.
But in that moment, I realized that the inputs that I gave to him,
they’re going to impact his logic,
his belief in his habits. across all the major areas of life,
but definitely with finances, too.
And now my goals were tied to a deeper purpose
because I wanted to be able to have the time, freedom to see that smile,
that giggle and that response any time I could.
I didn’t want to miss a game, a performance, a recital, any of that.
And the moment I connected with a deeper why
the solutions, the strategies and the products that were needed
for my financial journey started to reveal themselves,
We each have an opportunity to repair the financial wounds in our money mindset
and build something that we can truly take pride in.
Let’s do the work of cultivating the soil in our money mindset
so that as we are sowing financial seed,
we’ve already created an environment that is vital for growth and for wealth.
That I believe it’s not only how we live,
but truly get to live our financial legacy.
Thank you. (Applause)