Chapter 3
“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always.”
– Oprah Winfrey
Some women have a list of reasons why they have not succeeded. They blame their bosses, their spouses, their kids – anyone else but themselves for their predicament. When they don’t get the results that they want, they spend their time being angry and feeling like they don’t have any control over their life.
Tell me if any of these sound familiar to you:
- “My boss is such a jerk. He won’t give me a raise.”
- “They really don’t ‘get me’ at my job. I should be working in a much higher position.”
- “My colleagues waste so much time that I can’t get my job done.”
- “If my parents had paid for my graduate degree, then I wouldn’t be in all of this debt. ”
- “I can’t work full time because my children need me at home. ”
- “I can’t get promoted to top management because our company has such a male-dominated culture.”
- “My clients don’t appreciate me.”
- “If only my suppliers hadn’t charged me so much, I would have more of a profit margin.”
- The list goes on …
It’s true that forces beyond our control can dictate the circumstances of our life – however, we have much more control over our personal success than we realize. Have you ever heard the expression, “It is not about the event that happens, it’s about how we respond to it”? Let’s have a closer look at this.
Creating Success.
A long time ago I found in one of the success books that I was reading the following formula that helped me understand how to create success. The formula was:
E + R = O
(Event + Response = Outcome)
This formula comes from Jack Canfield in his famous book, The Success Principles, and clarifies the issue of why it’s so important to take 100 percent responsibility for your life.
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or poverty, health or illness, intimacy or separation, joy or frustration) is the result of how you have responded to an earlier event(s) or in your life. He says that if you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two basic choices you can make.
- You can blame the event (E) for a lack of results (O). In other words, you can blame the economy, the weather, your lack of money, your lack of education, racism, gender bias, the current administration, your husband, your boss’s attitude, the lack of support, the political climate, the system or lack of systems and so No doubt all these factors do exist, but if they were THE deciding factor, nobody would ever succeed. For example, Oprah would never have become a self-made millionaire and one of the most influential women in the world.
OR
- You can change your response (R) to the events (E) until you get the outcomes (O) you want. For instance, you can change your thinking, change the way you communicate, change the pictures you hold in your head (your images of yourself and the world) – and you can change your behavior.
The point here is that although we may not have power and control over our circumstances, what we do have is absolute power and control over how we RESPOND to our circumstances. We can respond in the ways of a Victim – blaming, complaining and making excuses – which will not create any result that will improve our Or we can respond by taking 100 percent responsibility and find ways to improve our situation.
Unfortunately many of us tend to fall into the Victim Game because of our personal “money blueprint.” Let’s have a look at this.
Your Personal Money Blueprint.
In his book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Ecker explains that the difference between rich people and poor people is not that rich people are smarter, or that they have more time than others, or that they received a better education, or that they started at a better place in life than others – the difference is in what he calls their “money blueprint.”
According to Ecker, each one of us has a personal money blueprint embedded into our subconscious mind. He says that it is this blueprint – more than anything else – that will determine our financial future.
Here’s how it works:
Your personal money blueprint is made up of all of your thoughts, feelings, and decisions in relation to money. It is formed primarily from the programming (messages, ideas, modeling) you received in the past (especially as a young child). The point is not to dwell and blame the past, but to look back and learn from it. Here’s what I am talking about:
Your early programming leads to your Thoughts. Your Thoughts lead to your Feelings. Your Feelings lead to your Actions, and your Actions lead to your Results.
Thoughts – Feelings – Actions = Results
T – F – A=R
Here is an example how this blueprint works in general: Consider what happens to a woman when she is in a great relationship with someone she loves and she arrives at her office to find a big bouquet of flowers from him. Her Thoughts are along the lines of: “Oh, he is so great. I love him! I’m so lucky to have him in my life.”
As a result of her thoughts, her Feelings are love, happiness, joy, and gratitude.
As a result of her feelings, her Actions are that she phones him, thanks him, waters the flowers, and smiles every time she looks at them thinking about how wonderful her boyfriend is.
The Result of all of this is that her relationship becomes stronger and she feels even more love for her boyfriend.
Now, let’s take that same scenario with the big bouquet of flowers being delivered to the same woman’s office, except this time her relationship is not going so well. Her Thoughts are: “What’s wrong? What is he up to … why is he sending me these today?”
As a result of her thoughts, her Feelings then become suspicious, untrusting and angry. As a result of her feelings, she takes the same Action of phoning him, but this time the tone of her voice is different than in the above scenario. Instead of a warm, loving voice, she is distant and cool, and even throws away the flowers after she gets off the phone with him.
The Result is that she becomes suspicious of her boyfriend, has a fight with him that night, and the relationship gets worse.
Now, let’s have a look at it how it works when it comes to financial blueprint. For example, if you grew up with your parents saying to you: “Nice girls don’t ask for more money. Only greedy girls do.” – What do you think your thoughts would be when you consider asking for a raise as an adult? Of course you think, Nice girls don’t ask for more money. Only greedy girls do.
If this is your thought, your feelings may be that you feel ashamed or embarrassed by the idea of asking for a raise. And if you feel this way, your actions might be that you stop yourself from ever even going to talk to your boss about a raise. The result? No raise.
Here’s another example. Let’s say that when you were seven-years old, you spent all of your allowance one time on a CD you just “had to have.” This CD was so important to you, but your parents’ priorities were a bit different than yours. They thought you should save your money for something more important according to their priorities.
But instead of saying it that way, they said: “You aren’t good with money.” You took this message to heart (as most children do).
Now as an adult you go around with the thought: “I’m not good with money.” Despite this, you are a risk-taker and decided to start your own company. Although you want to run a successful business, when your company starts going through a big growth spurt, you panic. You feel afraid. It feels scary to you to have to manage more money and run a bigger budget because you have the thought running through your head, “I’m not good with money.” Because you have so much fear, you sabotage your chance to grow your business. You do this by getting yourself completely disorganized and you procrastinate on taking the action steps to ensure the growth of your business. The result is that your business starts to lag and six months later, you are out of business.
Are you getting the idea?
So are you seeing now how the T–F–A=R formula works? Are you thinking about how this is playing out in your life?
The first place to look is at the messages that you picked up early on about money. You’ve already heard some of mine:
- “I’m not good with ”
- “You have to have a steady paycheck and save for retirement to be ”
- “We can’t afford ” (I’ll be talking about this shortly.)
Here are some others that are common:
- “Money doesn’t grow on ”
- “Rich people are ”
- “Money is the root of all ”
- “They are filthy ”
- “You have to work hard for your ”
- “You can’t be rich and spiritual at the same time.”
- “Money can’t buy you love/happiness/friends.”
Do you see how strong of an imprint these can create? Do any of these sound familiar to you? Take a minute or two to write down some of the messages that you received in your childhood. We will be digging more into this in Chapter 6 (the first week of the Course).
We Can’t Afford It.
I mentioned before that I had two big messages running in me from my childhood:
- “I am not good with numbers.”
- “You need to have a steady paycheck and save for retirement to be safe.”
Now I want to tell you about a third message I received. “We can’t afford it.”
My parents would say this whenever we (the kids) asked for them to buy something for us. Today when I look back, I see that we actually could have afforded a lot of things we asked for – but my parents said, “We can’t afford it,” to stop us from begging them.
Once I was on my own though, I started saying to myself, “I can’t afford it.” If I wanted a luxurious vacation, or a great trip, or something really beautiful – I would look at it and say, “I can’t afford it.” It became a habit. This kind of thinking kept me small because I never had to think about how I might afford something big and special. I always stopped myself short with, “I can’t afford it.” My whole money mentality was based around this belief – which was never even real!
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I want to point out that some of these messages we are conscious about, but many of them we are unconscious about. So how do we know if we have unconscious messages that are not serving us? Answer: Look at your results. If you are not getting the results that you want in your life, chances are you are living with messages that are not serving you.
One example to look at here is the lottery winners who change their financial situation very quickly. They go from “rags to riches” in a heartbeat. Research shows, however, that after a couple of years most of these winners return back to the same financial level that they were before they won the big money! Their financial success was temporary because their inner world was not set for long-term riches.
So the question is how do we change our results? As T. Harv Eker puts it: “The only way to change your level of financial success “permanently” is to reset your … money blueprint.”
Let’s look at how we can do this.
Changing Your Money Blueprint.
There are three steps to change. These are:
- Awareness
- Understanding
- Re-Conditioning
Let’s go through these in relation to changing your money blueprint:
Awareness: You recognize the statements you heard about money as a child. You recognize the behaviors you picked up from your parents surrounding money. You recall incidents that had a strong impact on how you relate with money today.
Understanding: You begin to understand the origin of the messages and how these statements and beliefs affected you. You have compassion for yourself and realize that these unsupportive messages came from outside sources – and now you have the power to change.
Re-conditioning: You use affirmations to create new, positive programming. You take different actions from what you have done in the past – creating new, positive habits. You surround yourself with positive, successful people. Re-conditioning is actually re-wiring our brain for a new way of thinking. It is teaching our brain to use a different set of beliefs.
I want to point out here that while reading a book can take you on the first two steps to create change – awareness and understanding – the third step, re-conditioning, comes through having experiences. This is what we will be doing in the 6-Week Course, Taking Control of Your Money, coming up in Chapters 6 -11. This Course will help you create new habits that will re-condition you to have a different perspective toward money and working with it.
If you have tried other financial courses before and found that you made some progress, but then backslid or gave up entirely – this is your opportunity to keep moving forward!
I want you to know that resistance is a natural part of the process of change, and is usually the strongest at two points: 1. At the very beginning, and 2. When we are right about to reach a goal. It can show up in a variety of ways – like becoming disorganized, too busy, losing interest, procrastinating, and feeling downright I encourage you to honor these things when they show up, but KEEP MOVING FORWARD. If you give into them, they will surely keep you in Victim mode, and we are here to STOP THE VICTIM MODE.
Summary.
Any time we blame, complain, justify or make excuses for our circumstances, we turn ourselves into Victims. The moment you are honest with yourself that no one is creating your financial situation except you, you will discover your power to change it. You will recognize that blame renders you powerless, and you’ll move from being a Victim to owning your power.
Once you take your power into your own hands and you stop playing the Victim Game, you’ll notice that shame will also start to disappear. You’ll see that instead of shame, you’ll feel proud. You’ll feel proud of taking action, proud of your willingness to be honest with yourself, proud of having the courage to change centuries of conditioning, and proud of becoming a trailblazer for other women and for our daughters.
This book is about helping you take an honest look at all your beliefs, feelings, and concepts concerning money. If you are willing to do this, you will have the opportunity to let go of old, unsupportive programs running within you and have a chance for your responses to be different to events surrounding money. You will start to take control of your life and gain the power you need to create the life that you want.
Questions for Reflection:
- Do you blame others (your mother, father, boss, colleagues, husband, children, government, economy, taxes…) for your financial situation? Write down the people and the circumstances you tend to blame when things go wrong.
- Do you procrastinate or create distractions for yourself when it is time to pay your bills or go to the bank? Write down why you think you do this.
- Do you scare yourself with worst-case scenarios when you think about applying for a new job, asking for a raise, starting your own business or in some way advancing your career? Think of the last time you did this and make that the last time
- What were the messages that you received around money when you were a child? Write down the top 10 messages.
- How do you think those messages have affected you today? Have a look at your results today – particularly those results that you are not satisfied with –- and identify what message(s) created those results in your life.
Commitment to Yourself:
Remember, when you commit to yourself and stick with it, amazing things can happen.
I commit to taking 100% responsibility for the current and future state of my finances.
Affirmations:
Say these affirmations out loud as often as possible. The more often you hear the words coming out of your mouth, the more you will internalize them.
I am the creator of my life and am in charge of my destiny.
I am building a financially prosperous future.
I am capable of managing large amounts of money.