A wealth mindset is a contentious issue for most, though my question today is simple. Is wealth hard or is it hard-wired?
On the topic of creating wealth. If I took a stab in the dark and asked you what your greatest frustration is? Would you say something like, “I can’t earn enough.” Though I bet few would say, “I’m just not hard-wired for wealth?” The latter of course is correct. Wealth is a set of do’s and don’ts, but most miss that those behaviors are found in a wealth mindset.
I have coached and trained so many people in this space, I thought it was about time I wrote about this wealth problem specifically. You see, there are only ever 3 wealth problems to master. Overcome one and you might do okay. Master them all and you’ll be able to choose any life you want and have anything you want. These 3 keys to creating wealth are nothing to do with a wealth mindset. They’re just the wealth behaviours and they’re not rocket science. They are: –
A. Create Cash – Creating income
B. Save Cash – Keeping the majority of your income, and
C. Leverage Cash – Increasing your savings by successfully investing. In other words, allowing your money to work hard even when you don’t.
I told you that they weren’t rocket science – it’s as easy as ABC. Yet most people don’t get to C and some don’t even make it to B. So it can’t be due to not knowing what to do. The problem of course is deeper, much deeper. It will be found in one of your three brains; your enteric (gut brain), cardiac (heart brain) and the cephalic or head brain. In other words; for some people they don’t have the ‘guts’ to take a risk, so they never get to C and for others, their ‘heart’ just isn’t in it so they might not even do A very well and the rest just over-complicate it in their head and will have a go at all the ABC’s and still get it wrong.
Wealth is as easy as ABC but your hard-wiring works against you.
When aiming to get my ABCs right, I was doing many “things” that I thought would create wealth. I attended seminars on wealth, I read all the books I could get my hands on and I listened to the advice of my friends (who were not rich by the way). But little or no results showed up in my life! Because I was listening and learning but doing sweet bugger all! I wasn’t doing anything with the knowledge. It was all too intellectual.
Finally, I said, “I’ve had enough!” I then assigned myself a mentor, a very wealthy mentor at that. I thought to myself if I can’t learn from a wealthy person then there is no hope for me and I’ll just quit. This was my last-ditch effort.
It came at a price, though I was soon to realise it wasn’t a price, but an investment. I paid around US$14,000 to my mentor and I thought I’d made a big mistake when he started our first session with a story!
He said, “Imagine a tree and let us suppose that this tree represents a tree of life. On this tree, there are many fruits. In life, our fruits are called our results. So we look at our few fruits (our results) and for most of us, we don’t like our fruits. We don’t like what we see. There aren’t enough of them, they’re too small, they’re rotten or they just don’t taste good. So what do most of us tend to do?”
I thought I was just about to get the mother lode when he said, “We invest most of our attention on the fruits (our results), but what is it that creates those particular fruits? It’s not even the roots of the tree that creates those fruits. It’s what’s under the ground that determines what’s above the ground. It’s time to fertilize your thoughts.”
My mentor went on to say, “If you can start to again believe in the invisible, you can create the magical!” He said, “What is invisible is what creates the invisible thing we call wealth.”
Then he verbally gave me the biggest SLAP! He said, “I’m not an entertainer. I’m not here for your amusement. I’ve told you things and you haven’t done anything with this good knowledge, so it’s not really knowledge.” Then he shared an old Zen saying, “To know and not to do, is not yet to know.” He said, “It’s time to do.”
So what does that mean?
Like me, I think by you might be starting to get the profound message my mentor shared with me that totally turned my financial life around. In that moment, my mind clicked! It shifted as I turned my thought patterns into a wealth mindset. I confused thinking for doing when it’s nothing of the sort.
To become wealthy, you just need to master your A, B, C’s. Though to take the necessary action is a little more complicated. We need to change our money beliefs, align our values and reimprint our past decisions. It’s all about purposeful change with a laser focus on wealth. That is what a wealth mindset is all about! At the time I really didn’t know what all of that meant, so my next piece of advice will simplify it for you too and help you to create your wealth mindset.
The critical key to shifting your thought patterns to a wealth mindset.
My mentor suggested I learn Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and start changing my roots. He said, “To change the fruits, you’ll first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible”. That was an incredible lesson that changed my life in 2004. It led me on an incredible discovery. It led me to write my first book which on its 5th republishing came to be renamed, “A Richer Way To Think” because I soon realised how so few knew how to create wealth and I wanted to change that.
Assigning a mentor and following his wise advice completely changed my wealth blueprint. Today I am thrilled to teach people how to change their blueprint in our Life Coach + NLP Practitioner program.
Life doesn’t have to be hard; it just has to be hard-wired.