Marie: Hey it’s Marie Forleo and you are watching MarieTV,
the place to be to create a business and life you love.
I’ve got a question for you.
Do you ever feel like you self sabotage around money?
Ever wonder if you have some limiting beliefs from childhood that are holding you?
Whether you’ve got mountains of debt or you just can't seem to get ahead?
Most of us have a next financial level that we would love to get to.
If that sounds like you, you are in for a treat today because you're going to learn
about four money beliefs that may be holding you back and how to fix them.
Kate Northrup is the bestselling author of Money: A Lost Story, Untangle your Financial
Woes and Create the Life You Really Want.
She created financial freedom for herself at the age of 28 through building a team of
more than 1,000 wellness entrepreneurs in the network marketing industry.
Her philosophy is that if you free yourself financial, you can be fully present to your
purpose on the planet.
She's been featured on the Today Show, the Huffington Post, Glamour and more.
Miss Kate Northrup, thank you so much for being on MarieTV.
Kate: Thank you so much for having me.
Marie: I just got to say once again.
Money: A Love Story, amazing book by Kate.
If you don’t have it, go out and get it ASAP.
Lets talk money because we’ve been friends for years and I love talking about money.
I think it’s an amazing topic, it’s an integral part of our lives and I'm really
passionate about it.
So many people, especially this time in the world, so many people are struggling financially
and a lot of people aren’t, so there's really a possibility for us all to get to that next
level.
I'm curious.
Why are you so passionate about this topic?
Kate: I really see money as a tool for people to be able to show up
in a bigger way.
Money is neither negative nor positive; it just is a tool for us to make change.
If we've got a lot of financial chaos going on, we’re worried about how am I going to
put food on the table, how am I going to pay the rent, where's the mortgage going to come
from.
That takes up a lot of bandwidth, a lot of our creative bandwidth, a lot of our power
bandwidth and we’re not able to show up in the same way as if our financial lives
were in order and taken care so that we could then come over here and do the things that
are higher leveraged that are really of service.
Getting it together financially is really just a vehicle for being able to show up more
fully in your purpose.
Marie: I agree with that 100%.
You know my story where I started off thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in
debt and it sucked; it was really hard to think about how to create everything when
I was “am I going to have enough to pay rent or to eat” or anything like that.
I know for you, you’ve come a very far way in a short couple of years, personally financially.
Can you tell us a little bit about your story and how big of a change you’ve made in these
past couple of years?
Kate: Sure.
I moved to New York when I was 22 and I promptly got myself into about $20,000 worth of credit
card debt, probably a little bit more at some points, and I didn’t even know that that
was the number until several years in because I had my head dipped so deeply in the sand
avoiding looking at it.
I was just like “I’ll just spend and spend” and they were on things that were business
stuff and courses; it’s not like I had a closet full of Jimmy Choos, but it was still
way beyond my means.
I noticed I was so unconscious about money and I was so avoidant and I was so scared
to look at the whole truth.
Marie: I have a question for you.
Would you get bills that they would come in and you just wouldn’t open them and you'd
stick them in a drawer?
Did you pay minimums?
Kate: Yeah.
I knew what my minimum was on every card and I had a lot of them, so it was like this shell
game where I would just pay a little more than the minimum which made me feel like I'm
making a little progress, but I really wasn’t and I was just in this quagmire and I felt
really unauthentic because I was out running a business, I was teaching women about different
streams of income and thinking in new ways about cash flows, but behind the scenes, I
had all this financial chaos and I knew I wasn’t taking responsibility for it.
For the whole thing, it felt really awful and it was that way around the time that you
and I met and I was hiding it.
Marie: Really?
That’s so interesting.
You were hiding it from most of the world publically and so how long did it take for
you to reach that breaking point where you were like, “I've had enough, I got to handle
this, I can't do this anymore, it just hurts too much”?
Kate: It was about four years.
I always was a good earner so it was never like I couldn’t eat or anything.
I could always just keep me little nose above the surface so I could still breathe and it
was about four years that I finally sat myself down and said “You know what?
Enough is enough,” and I realized that I was holding myself back from being able to
be in my full ability to make change in the world by being in financial chaos.
I knew that was a way I was keeping myself small and so I just finally decided to do
something about it.
Marie: Let’s fast forward.
What are the numbers?
How much debt did you get yourself out of and how fast did you do it?
Kate: When I really made some significant changes in my life, I was
in about $20,000 and six months later, I had paid it all off basically in one fell swoop
and doubled my income and doubled my savings and it was amazing what happened when I just
got my rear in gear and made some critical mindset shifts which we’re going to talk
about today and it all worked out.
It’s kind of shocking.
Marie: Isn’t it amazing when that happens and when you
actually tell the truth and stop lying?
It is so huge.
I know it can feel so scary.
It’s not about money but back in my early 20s when I was engaged to be married to someone
that I knew I wasn’t going to married, but I was terrified of breaking it off because
our finances were co-mingled and I was just so scared.
I only lasted about six months in a lie but living that lie, I think we've all experienced
that on some level where you know something is not right, you're hiding something big
but you don’t have the courage quite yet to break through.
I love this topic because we’re going to dive into these money beliefs; they're almost
like money lies that we’re telling ourselves, and if you could just tell yourself the truth,
there's this incredible opening that can happen and literally your whole life really can change
just by changing something on the inside.
Kate: And fast.
It doesn’t have to take a long time.
Marie: I've had some stories from clients, from friends
and people that we've had some tough money conversations, not tough between us personally,
but just being there and supporting them through it and watching how quickly things can turn
around.
I've had some people that have been in $100,000 or $200,000 in debt, even if that number doesn’t
go away as quickly as yours did, it goes down really fast but more importantly who they
are in the world changes significantly.
Kate: That’s the whole point; it’s not about the money.
Marie: It’s not about the money and it is about the money.
Let’s get into it.
You say we’re going to focus on four beliefs today and the first one that hold us back
is someone else should or will do this for me.
Kate: We take our financial power and we just give it to somebody else.
It’s so much easier to just say “will you just do this for me” or “hey boss,
can you just do this for me” or “hey prince charming, future husband who hasn’t showed
up yet, he’ll probably take care of it for me,” so I’ll just bide my time and keep
being irresponsible until that point.
For me it was that I hoped that my mom would just take care of it for me someday.
It’s so embarrassing to even just say that right now but it’s true; I wrote about it
in my book so it’s out there.
That is symptomatic of us really feeling like we’re not enough to do it and it’s just
saying “this is too scary, I don’t have what it takes, I'm not smart enough,” and
so we wait and we never turn on our full potential because we’re hoping somebody else will
swoop in at some point and save us.
Marie: It’s a big one.
There's certainly been areas in my life where I was thinking that someone else was going
to handle it for me and I'm pretty sure money was it back in the day and now it almost feels
like a different human being that used to think that way, but it is a big one.
Belief number two: I'm not good with money.
This is a big one.
Kate: This is a really big one.
Have you ever seen a baby be born and be able to talk and walk?
Marie: No.
On YouTube sometimes.
Kate: But that pretty much never happens.
We've all learned the skills we have and so to think like you're just not good with money
is holding you back.
Our beliefs become our actions, we act in accordance with what our beliefs are and then
our actions obviously create our results.
That’s just kind of a basic equation for life and when we think I'm not good with money,
we’re setting ourselves up for failure and we actually avoid taking financial steps because
we have that thought.
Instead you can take really small actions to start to build your confidence, and the
one that I did, again I was really pretty remedial with this, so when I started off,
I was like “I just am going to check my bank account balance everyday,” and when
I do that, I'm going to give some gratitude for the ways my life is abundant.
I knew if I could just check in with money daily and start being in that relationship
and paying attention to it, it would be powerful.
When I started doing that every day I set a little Google calendar alarm, 8:30 am, ‘check
your bank account balance.’
My income increased and I stopped spending more than I made.
It was just like paying attention pays off and I started to be better and better with
money because I was paying attention to it.
Marie: I love that.
Also, the things that we tell ourselves, we joke around a lot about it here on MarieTV.
There are some times where we’re shooting an episode and literally I'm flubbing this
line that I really want to get across again and again and we’re all joking and every
explicative comes out, and I say “I got this.”
I tell myself “I got this,” and wouldn’t you know nine times out of ten, I'm like “bam”
and I get it and I deliver that line.
It’s the same thing with “I'm not good with money.”
If you tell yourself you're not good with money, you're never going to take the steps
to do anything about it and it’s almost like you just got blinders on and you're never
going to take them off.
I love that simple step of just checking in daily and the other thing I like about it
is it can remove the fear.
I know for me there was a time when opening my checkbook was really scary and it actually
produced physical sensations of wanting to throw up because there wasn’t enough in
there, at least that’s the story I told myself.
There was actually enough in there because here I am, I didn’t disintegrate and I wasn’t
getting taken off to jail or something, but that was the feeling.
Kate: We can train ourselves like Pavlov’s dog to spend that time with
our bank account and look at it and then automatically say, “I'm going to name three things in
my life that I'm grateful for that feel abundant.”
You're training and rewiring your brain so that you're associating looking at your money
with feeling good.
Marie: I love that.
Money belief number three: people with money are greedy or it’s not spiritual to have
money.
Kate: I know that this is one you actually covered with Marianne
Williams in your audio, which was so fantastic.
When we have a judgment against somebody for having something and it’s very common with
money, there's this whole lack mentality of rich people are greedy, they’ve stepped
on other people to get there or something.
First of all that’s assumption.
We never know really how people got where they're at and chances are pretty good that
they worked hard to get there and they deserve it because of the time they’ve put in.
When we judge them, automatically our subconscious mind will never allow us to have the abundance
or prosperity that we want if we’re judging other people for having it.
Why would it let us be the evil person that we’re saying they're bad because they have
money or they're selfish or they're dishonest?
Anytime that comes up, and also, anytime it comes up “it’s not spiritual to be rich
or to have money,” money is a stand in for what we value.
If somebody wants something that you offer, like B-School for example, and they value
it according to the amount that it costs, that’s a service.
That’s an exchange of value for value that’s tremendous and the value they're receiving
in their life is huge and then you get to receive that in exchange.
That’s all that money is; just trading value for value.
When we add value to somebody else’s life, to me that’s a spiritual act to say, “I
see that you have a need and I have something I can help you with” then to receive an
exchange for that is how it should be.
That is the flow, so if we start to see money as a means of value exchange and as a means
of how can I look at the world and say where can I add value, where can I help somebody,
then the whole thing begins to be rewired and we realize, “I will become more prosperous
to the degree that I am able to add value to somebody’s life.”
Marie: I love that.
That’s beautiful and I get really up in arms about that whole judging people not spiritual
to have money.
Money belief number four: I'm not ___ enough.”
Kate: I'm not ____ enough; it could be “I'm not smart enough, I'm not
talented enough, I didn’t come from the right background.”
Whatever it is, it’s immediately taking you out of the game.
Anytime we don’t value ourselves, what ends up happening is when we’re out in the world,
even if we’re providing really good value, if we’re not seeing our worth, we’re not
going to get the value and exchange for that.
No one will value you more than you value yourself.
We need to learn to value ourselves and you can really practically, the whole self love
thing, when I hear about it-
Marie: Do you roll your eyes?
Kate: I do and I teach it at the same time because it’s really
important and pretty much I think the solution to anything is loving yourself more but “how
do I do that and what does that even mean.”
Really practically what you can do is get out a journal and every night for at least
21 days because that’s what studies show it takes to form a new habit, write in there
three things you value about yourself or three ways that you added value to somebody’s
life that day.
You could be like “I was so funny today on MarieTV” or I could say “I did a Skype
interview today and I know I added value to whoever’s going to watch that one.”
Whatever it is, what we’re doing is we’re building that muscle and training ourselves
to notice things that we value about ourselves and things that are valuable about us, and
ways that we've added value to somebody else’s life which will tune our radar in so that
during the day, we’re seeing more opportunities and we saying “I could add a little value
over there, there's an opportunity there,” and it makes us better business people and
it makes us better humans.
That’s a great way to train yourself and write those three things down every day and
it'll make you feel the next day “I did something.”
It’s a fabulous way to celebrate yourself and to increase your value.
Marie: I have to say I love this one.
Not so long ago, we did an episode about valuing your worth and we were aiming that at artists
and creatives, and it was shocking and beautiful to me and heartbreaking at the same time to
see how many of us struggling with that.
It doesn’t matter what level you're at.
You could feel like you're just starting out on your financial journey or your career journey,
or you can be further along and there's times for me where the little fear comes up.
I love that suggestion also because adding value to someone’s life could mean smiling.
It could be an act of kindness.
It can be taking a pause and making a phone call and letting someone know that you love
them.
It doesn’t have to necessarily be a business transaction; it can actually be really a beautiful
act of kindness and love and compassion that you put out into the world.
Kate: And the value we receive back, the abundance we receive back
might be financial and it might be something else.
You and I both know that abundance is a lot of different things; it’s our health, it's
our relationships, it's our peace of mind.
A life that’s rich and wealthy is a lot of different things beyond your bank account.
Marie: Kate, this was awesome.
Thank you so much for coming.
What a rich discussion and hopefully we’ll keep talking about this and we’re going
to keep talking about this in the comments right now.
Now Kate and I have a challenge for you.
What is one money belief that’s been holding you back?
It doesn’t matter where you're at on your financial journey; we've all got one.
What we want to hear about also besides the money belief that’s holding you back, what's
one action you could take that demonstrates you are ready for a new level of abundance
in your life?
Tell us about it in the comments below.
As always the best discussions happen after the episode over at MarieForleo.com so go
there and leave a comment now.
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