The Biggest Shift in My Relationship with Money

Amongst the most significant shifts that occurred in my life after I started coaching was my shift around income and money.

I had numerous long-held beliefs around money that were unconscious to me (and unhelpful). These included things like:

• “Earning more than X amount of money is greedy and anyone that actively pursues earning money above a certain number is greedy and wrong somehow.”
• “Earning above a certain amount of money leads to stress and therefore a lower quality of life.”
• “More income means more hard work.”
•  “There’s a direct trade-off between work, quality of life and income. I need to sacrifice a certain quality of life to increase my income.”

I also had other thoughts around money and happiness, where I would trade money for what looked like happiness – I thought I needed to spend money on stuff (such as a fast car or new computer) as my reward for working hard and that these things would make me happy, although invariably they didn’t.

A lot of these beliefs, as you might imagine, were not very conducive or helpful for me in earning a lot of money.

As I got into coaching – which I didn’t get into for the money, but because I really felt like it was something I was called to do and what I wanted to spend my life doing as opposed to my corporate job – I started to uncover some of these beliefs that weren’t true and in doing so my bank balance remained healthy, even though I went through a career change where for a number of years, my income dropped substantially.

Being aware of the thoughts I was holding about money helped me earn more in my coaching practice. It allowed me to help other people drop their own money thinking and also it allowed me to save more money because I wasn’t spending it on stuff that I didn’t need under the false assumption it would make me happy.

I recently coached someone on this topic for my Men’s Immersion where I took an exercise from a wonderful book called Overcoming Underearning by Barbara Stanny, which you may want to check out. I also assigned this video to watch that I recorded some time ago for The Three Principles Global Community around money. Let me know what you think of it: