Money Mindset - The Secret To Unlocking Your Career Or Business Success
Updated: Nov 30
Professional athletes have long understood the importance of mindset. Creating certainty, unshakeable self belief and removing doubt is required to win races, train hard and push yourself beyond your physical limits. So, if mindset equals enhanced performance and greater success, what does this have to do with money?
How you think and feel about money will be affecting your business success. Ever found it awkward to ask for the money or put your prices up? Feel 'icky' trying to sell online, or sell or product to a client? This is your money mindset at work, and changing this can make a significant difference to your life.
Your mindset is simply your collection of beliefs and attitude, formed by your thoughts, feelings and experiences. Some people will describe themselves as having a positive mindset, and you might have friends or colleagues whose overall mindset seems to be quite negative. Your core belief system is largely formed at a young age, primarily between the age of zero to seven years old. At this time, the brain operates in a different brain wave state to that of an adult, with young children experiencing theta brainwave frequencies whilst awake. Questioning or rationalisation does not occur, and new information is simply taken as fact.
During this time, we form mental programming, similar to the programming of a computer. This allows your subconscious mind to operate largely on autopilot, and we behave according to our programming. As well as forming programming to look after yourself and stay safe, you also laid down mental coding about money, based on what you saw and heard as a child. These influences will have come from parents or primary caregivers, school, friends, family friends, media, other institutions and simply overhearing a conversation.
If you think back to how money was discussed (or not discussed) in your home, you will probably see a correlation with your current relationship with money.
For many, they grew up with the concept that it is it ‘bad manners’ to talk about money, or ask someone how much money they earn. Perhaps money wasn’t mentioned in your home when you were a child, maybe adults had whispered conversations about money. Fast-forward, and this could explain why you find it hard to increase pricing, or you find looking at your personal or business accounts a bit of a drag. Chances are, you formed beliefs about money being awkward or uncomfortable to talk about.
Money can often cause difficulties in relationships, the lack of, how it is spent, who is earning it can all cause friction and tension. You might have formed thought patterns that money causes problems, or you can’t have a happy relationship and financial success.
Your beliefs around money are affecting every aspect of your life today. Your spending and saving habits, your financial prosperity and financial security, and the good news is that you can change these beliefs, which ultimately will have an impact on your business.
Your thoughts dictate your feelings, which determines your behaviour, which becomes your attitude and ultimately defines your personality. Adults experience around sixty thousand thoughts a day, it isn’t possible to control each and every one of these, but you can look at your core beliefs around money.
A simple exercise I invite you to try is to look at key times in your life, and how you felt about money at that time, note any significant events that occurred which could have influenced your money beliefs.
On a piece of paper, use the following headings:
Young child
Teenager
Young Adult
Adult
You will probably want to complete this exercise over a few days, as you will keep thinking of new memories to jot down.
For example, maybe as a young child you overheard conversations about money worries and that left you with a feeling of not having enough money.
Once you have a list of core money beliefs, you can decide which ones you can simply let go of. Perhaps you were told growing up that “Money doesn’t grow on trees”, this was simply someone else’s belief around money, not yours, and now you can release it.
You can also see how these money beliefs affect your behaviour today. Maybe your mother loved shopping and consequently you tend to splurge. Perhaps your father was a bit too obsessive on saving money, and you find it hard to spend money and enjoy the rewards of your hard work.
You can define a new money personality for yourself by forming new money beliefs such as
“I couldn’t ask for a pay rise” becomes “My work is of high service and worthy of compensation - I deserve to be paid more”
“I hate talking to clients about money” or “I hate asking clients to spend more” becomes “It is up to my clients what they spend and how they organise their finances”.
Working on changing your inner ‘money programming’ can have huge benefits to your business or career, as well as your own personal bank balance.
Nicola Kinnard-Comedie (Msc, BHSAI Int. SM)
is the owner and founder of NKC Equestrian Training, delivering horse care training to horse owners and business and mindset coaching to equine practitioners.
Nicola is a qualified riding instructor and has over 20 years industry experience, and now uses her coaching skills to assist equine practitioners. Nicola decided to combine her experience of equestrian science, sales and marketing, and teach this to others. Nicola works with veterinary physiotherapists, massage therapists, osteopaths and other equestrians across the world to help them build their dream business. Nicola's work focuses on harnessing the power of your mindset, together with cutting edge marketing strategies to support equestrian business owners to realise the business of their dreams.
You can find out more about Nicola here: www.nkcequestrian.com
This article is from the October issue of Equine Business Magazine
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