How to Build a Wealth Mindset with Dr. Caroline Leaf

[Music] you know what i've been doing with my money is not working i'm living paycheck to paycheck i'm stressed out i want to change my habits you know i say on my show all the time i'm like you can change like you have to put things in place and da but from the true science side what is the thought of the brain and the mind to help do something totally different and change habits hey guys welcome back to this episode of the rachel cruze show and i i'm really excited about my guest today and i'm actually gonna read directly from my card because it's so impressive and i don't want to screw it up so well dr caroline leaf is who's the guest i'll go ahead and do that and and i guess my first intro i will say i actually learned about you from my mother-in-law who was like you have to read this book and she went on and on about you so actually that's how i was introduced to you but you know even more importantly you are a communication pathologist and clinical neuroscientist who's been researching the mind brain connection and nature mental health and formation of memory since the 1980s that's so impressive how did you even get started in this like i read that and i'm like i mean it is so it makes me sound so old because like nearly 40 years now that i've been in the field so um yeah i would just always love the mind and the brain and i was going to become a neurosurgeon and i was very fortunate to get into doing a degree that combined medicine and psychology in linguistics and neuropsychology and neuroscience and it was very very new in those days back in the 80s and it was a seven-year degree that they compressed into four years and needless to say after 60 of us to be trained they actually split the degree up because it was just we were working seven days a week and it was just it was kind of traumatic because it was so hot so much hard work and i remember at the time thinking why did i do this to myself but now i'm so grateful because it opened a whole pathway of thinking to me that i would never have got if i had just gone into neurosurgery which is an amazing thing but i would never have understood the mind the way i do now and the difference between the mind and the brain and just the direction i've gone and and been practicing clinically for almost 25 years really gave me a lot of insight and experience into just how resilient we are how amazing we are how we can change things that we've got this capacity and ability and just doing the research i do i still do clinical trials and it's just incredible to see what how people can be helped to understand just what it means to have a mind and how we don't have to you know we can't change our stories but we can change how the stories play out into the future so that encourages me all the time i think it's so powerful because before we dive into the money part of psychology and all of that you know on this i'm like you know i grew up in a household where i mean lots of you know i guess you could say motivation we listen to motivational speakers in my parents car on cassette tapes and we just heard you can do anything you can be anything you want to be put your mind to it i mean that that was drilled into my head ever since the kid and so for me it's a little bit of the raw raw cheerleader but what i love about your work is you actually take the science of that and you actually show the brain and you talk about the difference between the mind and the brain but but you really can i mean this idea that you can really change you know what you think about and how that affects your life is true is that is that correct absolutely and it really is it's it's good to be motivated it's very important but it's also good to be realistic because we can sometimes have a gap between what we think we should be doing and achieving and what we actually are the place to be at in that moment and that can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and there's also you've got to be careful of thinking well if i just believe it it's going to manifest in my life because um you know there's a one thing to say it and there's another thing to really deep down inside actually have got to that growth process where you're ready to move forward with anything whether it's financial whether it's relation or whatever it may be so i think we can be hard on ourselves sometimes in the expectation of i've got to have this external success we've got to define internal success more and we see this so much in the mind brain connection because your mind is not your brain even though you would think it is the way that people talk about it and but essentially your brain and body are the physical part of you and right now as we're speaking the only reason that we can communicate and share this and go back and forth and see each other and process is because of the mind not because of the brain it's because of the brain alone it's because of the mind driving the brain so you you actually you know your brain is is a physical substrate it's not a real i mean it's not doing anything without you right now as we're speaking we're also making 810 000 cells every second that's quite phenomenal may even be more than that and that then determines the health of the body but if you did you don't do that if you were dead you wouldn't be communicating like this so that what i've been doing for 38 years and trying to refine this process and make it accessible for people is to understand what this relationship is and what level of control we have or empowerment or management skill do we have over this mind brain body connection and what does it mean for us as humans being alive you know how to kind of deal with that on every aspect whether it's managing our mental health managing money as which is your area of expertise and managing whatever it is your lifestyle decisions parenting you name it all of it i think it's so fascinating because also the the complex part of it the complex part i mean it's it gives our our brain our mind all of it such credit right like we we are incredible beings of who we are exactly and to be able to kind of tap into that i think is so great and and i talk a lot about habits and forming habits and and making choices with your money and for a lot of people that are listening or watching you know that they've had a tough two years whether with the pandemic and all of it but they're coming to this point where they're like man i i'm kind of fearful i'm kind of fearful of what's going on in the world i'm i'm i'm nervous about my money i have kind of a more scarcity mindset all of that plays in so how do you see fear play out in the brain specifically if you have any thoughts around the money part of the fear around money but also just in general how does fear stop us what is going on in our brain when that comes up okay so basically remember the pattern of the brain whatever the brain does is because of what the mind is doing so the brain on it's on its own contour anything it simply reflects and it's kind of just listening to what the mind so it just whatever the mind tells it to do it does so the mind uses the brain to build experiences into the brain and those experiences then we of those experiences in in the brain become thoughts so thoughts are the product of mind and then from the thought we then say and do and act and spend our money whatever and scarcity mindset whatever all that kind of stuff how we use so we'll use the money example as of of that so in the over the last two years we have been immersed in a very uncertain environment and it has affected some people have done better financially because they work from home anyway or something like that people have had to change their way that they do their business i mean all a lot of us have had to do that and so it's created a lot of um innovation inside of of humans it's not all bad at all um change is really change will come and be forced to do things differently and we've been forced to do things differently so there's a really positive aspect to that but every all of us that i'm saying all these experiences we're all being wired into the brain and into every cell of your body so we have 37 to 100 trillion cells in our brain and our body collectively every experience and let's just take this two year combat period there's been a lot of experiences that we've had every day in different aspects really and that we can then relate to you know what all eventually related back down to finances or whatever you want to relate it to but each and every one of those experiences and there's about 8 000 a day that we have have been built into our brain and body by our mind they don't just get there they they if you're alive they are going in via your mind but your mind has got an unconscious aspect to it none as an n-o-n not unconscious unconscious is when you're asleep or anesthetized or knocked out with a baseball bat um but then unconscious is the biggest most intelligent part of us it is our driving force it is our spiritual nature it is the spiritual part of us that's deeply wise and on your side very much very very much looking to get the best of life for you to keep you as healthy as possible survival love driven et cetera et cetera so its job is to store every experience and to manage those experiences in terms of negative positive now but obviously if it's healthy stuff you're going to want to just grow that so you you know you'll you'll know that the the message that the non-conscious mind was seen through the conscious mind is you know this is great you get excited you get drawn to it you do more of it you think more of those good things whatever you think about the most grows and then that feeds in and you build your resilience then there's the toxic things that happen in our life like perhaps your business didn't do so well and you did have major financial issues and there's been a huge strain and so those experiences have have also wired into the brain but they would have been toxic so this this would be healthy let's say that you had a good financial last couple of years so you've got a lot of healthy thoughts so you just become more innovative and you know better at making more money or whatever this has been a toxic experience and i hold up these trees because the experience that the mind builds into the brain the life experience it's built into the brain in proteins and chemicals and they form into these tree-like structures and these three parts this is how you interpreting yourself this is the interpretation of how you see yourself in that situation this is the origin the roots are the origin like roots in a in a plant and then this collectively is how you then show up how you are physically managing your money so that there's the conscious thing that's happened then there's an unconscious stuff um and so that's quite we've consciously focused on stuff and we've built that into your brain and then that goes into an unconscious mind but then there is and this is really crazy rachel this 95 of who you are and how you're functioning now today at this moment and we can relate it purely in this case your discussion is around finance how you are functioning financially 95 of that is driven by your life experiences that revolt into your brain none consciously that you weren't even aware of so right from very young um every experience you've had with money and finances has and this goes for everything not just money but we're using money as an example has built into your brain non-consciously so we literally as humans by the nature of our humanity by the nature of the way that we are structured mind brain body and and mind being spurred and our soul is is that as soon as we interact in life we're going to be building the world into us so this is a very particular it's a great thing i mean this is how god has structured us it's phenomenal it means that we are that's how we cope in life if we did not have these networks and this relationship and life being built in we would not be able to even communicate with each other so it's an incredible gift but the problem is if it's toxic if there's toxic stuff so if there's an abuse or there's a you know the form is on a scale of one to ten and we all experience those so those are going in unconsciously so now a lot of the decisions that we make are being driven all our decisions are being driven by an unconscious mind not if you've got trillions of experiences so not all not all trillions inform one decision it's related one so if you're dealing with a financial thing it's going to pull up the related financial so there could be some good ones which is great and there could be some bad ones they may be more bad than good but those as soon as they pulled up what it means is that something into an external environment triggers a response this moves into a conscious mind and now this is how you view the current situation and this is fear this is scary because this is oh i'm going to lose more money or i don't know what to do or i can't feed my kids or we're going to lose our house or whatever it may be so you sing it through that because that's related to that experience and that's then driving the next decision that you make about finances so that's kind of what's happening and the fear then when you get into that fear state that disrupts your neurophysiology so in the brain what that looks like is you're going to get a disruption and i'm going to hold it up to the scary looking skull but the left and the right side specifically the front we're going to get a disruption of energy across the two sides and we never want that what we want is a balance between the two sides of the brain we want a lot of oxygen and blood flow in specifically in the front all of the brain but specifically we want bursts of cycles of high blood and blood flow and oxygen we want good nutrition we want the brain to wave like the waves of the sea where they are big waves far out and then they get a little bit smaller and then they build into the into the sort of build up into a big wave and then they get the white cross breaker on top and then they crash on the beach and they make little waves and they go back in now that's we want that to be happening all day long with the different energy waves in our brain which then allows the chemicals to flow correctly which then allows the electromagnetic effects etc etc and then that has a downstream effect on our hormone system our immune system our cardiovascular system pretty much every system down to the level of our dna right down to the chromosomes and the ends of chromosomes are little things called telomeres which are like little little too less the little end plastic part of a shoelace you know that little ending that holds the shoelace together i think it was a counselor someone said they have the signal almost this therapist that when you kind of get in that moment of anxiousness and fear and it kind of starts to take over it's like this even this physical signal of kind of pointing to the front of your brain to remember to breathe to get that oxygen going to kind of almost reset what you're saying which makes sense because i think people do they get whether it's paralyzed or fear so fear-based with money because they're either thinking i'm in just a terrible situation where i'm at or i want to change what i've been doing you know what i've been doing with my money is not working i'm living paycheck to paycheck i'm stressed out i want to change my habits so how do you tell somebody to change the way they view something in life right like if someone's just had the same habit the same viewpoint because of their experiences and what they've chosen in life with their money and they're saying okay i want to do something totally different you know i say on my show all the time i'm like you can change like you have to put things in place but from the from the true science side how do you is it creating new neural pathways like what is the thought of the brain and the mind to help do something totally different and change habits very good question so we want to get enough oxygen first and blood flow to the front of our brain because we want good decision making so it is very important to prepare the brain and the body so when you're in that state as you see people you know we always talk about look at me breathe which is just one of the ways and there's multiplicity of brain preparation things you can do which will calm down your neurophysiology so before you can do any changing you do need to calm down your neurophysiology because it's like otherwise it's like driving a car through a snowstorm with no windscreen wipers you're going to make a lot of bad decisions so what we can do is we have to recognize that we've got to get or get ourselves mad or mind managed thinking of it think of it like this you can go three weeks without three days without water three minutes without oxygen but you cannot even go three seconds without your mind working so if you don't manage your mind it'll carry on getting more messy and so the the neurophysiology side the breathing and that kind of thing just this helps to reset the neurophysiology and you may have to do that i found the most effective one that i did with patients and i do is myself when i'm in that state where i just can't function is to breathe in for three counts but really breathe deeply so that your stomach blows out literally that you fill up your stomach so you really got to push that stomach out and then you force out for seven counts and you like it so it's in for three and out for seven and if you do that six to nine times so it's for 60 to 90 seconds it's a fantastic very efficient tool to bring your breathing there's many different ways of breathing but from the work i've done that is my go-to every time when someone's in a really bad place um and you know you just want to get that you want to get your cognition back online and that sort of thing then the the next thing to do is you have to be very systematic as humans we are i mean this you will relate because of your you know your financial background we very actually all algorithmic quantifying we in in the little protein branches of every thought these are made of proteins inside that protein there's a vibration and that vibration is actually a quant a calculation that's happening so your brain is doing like millions and millions of calculations every second and that's an energy it's picked up as an energy vibration inside a protein so proteins are like alive with calculations cover computers i said and think of the fact that their computer does nothing until it's been until some human plugs it in charges it downloads software makes the software work then you actually operate the software and you on zoom or whatever and you're doing whatever so all that functioning is mind every all those things the energy et cetera et cetera so this is it's very systematic and organized so now sometimes your computer packs up and you have to edit the code in the case of finances you in this panic state so you need to edit the code so calming down and then five five sig process the first thing is you gather awareness and that gather and notice i say gather because it means that you're empowered to take control you are standing back and observing it's not that it lands on your head you choosing there's choice involved this um you do it when you're ready it's calm it's not nonjudgmental all that stuff that's what what gathering means and you gather wins one off of how you function how are you it's in relation to this financial thing um exactly how you describe the problem and set it up so what are you feeling what are your emotions gather awareness of those emotions i'm feeling depressed i'm feeling uh can you say more so even if it's one word depressed how's your body feeling gut egg how are you what are you doing and saying i'm panicking i just don't know what to do i'm frozen perspective i'm going to lose all my money okay four signals you look at those emotions body body reactions behaviors what you're saying do and perspective you become aware of those and then that takes you to that that exercise actively starts connecting you with your intuition and get your intuitive abilities going starts connecting you with an unconscious mind the deep spiritual part of you which will then send a thought up so those signals will point to a thought and that thought has a name and that name is i'm worried about money i'm worried about the next decision whatever it is specific to your situation i'm just getting a very broad term and so then you go to the first to the top part the top part over here is what are the signals point to your interpretation what am i thinking now let's take those four signals and now expand them into full sentences i'm feeling the depression but why i'm also feeling sad i'm feeling frustrated because i don't know what to do okay so now we've got more description then take the next one what am i saying and doing well i'm irritable worked up i don't know what decision to make i'm making bad i'm buying the wrong stuff i'm spending my money wrong i'm not saving so what are you doing so you get more specific and you do that with each signal that then starts showing you what you're doing and you've now um weakened these branches so neuroscientifically these branches have become weakened so you can now take advantage of neuroplasticity which is what we when i talk about editing the code or rewiring the neural code we're using neuroplasticity but it's mind directed because you're directing this with your mind then that would take you then you start asking yourself the second step is to reflect and you do this in a very ordered way time limits like a couple of minutes in each step you're gonna not gonna solve this in one day you do this over 63 days cycles because that's how long it's going to take you to find and rewire and find the right thing so you go to the next step which is to reflect and that is asking yourself the who the what the way in the way the why am i feeling like this what are the circumstances and be as specific as you can then you write third step is you write in a form that's called a metacog which is all over the page just just pull your thoughts no order that's the writing step it's very important that you just write very fast what you've gathered awareness and reflected on because that will bring stuff up from your non-conscious that you're not aware of there's four step is called the recheck also writing step notice i'm tracking down this this thing i've gone from there i'm actually tracking down because you're going deeper and deeper to the root system and so the real check is to now make sense of what you've written so it makes sense of okay this is um i've got this pattern that's happening at this time where is it happening when's it happening how what situations are you getting you're starting to see the patterns and then you start creating antidotes in other words you start reconceptualizing this has happened what can i do about it and then you end that that bit of work don't translate one day you end it with step five which is an active reach which is one seven okay i can see that i'm very frustrated because i'm really making bad decisions with my money i need to get um i need to get some sort of level of help and that's okay and you tell you and that's that statement is what you hang on to for the rest of the day the statement that you end off with step five the act of reach is all you think about doing as you go through the day every time you want to fall back into the fear pattern you use this healthier positive i'm going to get help it's going to be okay i know the reason why whatever it is whatever the little statement is it could be you could attach a scripture to that you could attach a favorite quote to encourage you to motivate you so that's where the motivational stuff would come in and during the day as the day goes by and you find yourself getting that gut-wrenching fear you don't allow it you capture that and you just think of the positive thing and then the next day you go deeper and you start your your active reach could end up being okay i'm going to actually go and see what rachel cruz says about how to deal with this and i'm going to start getting and so you work through by day 63 by day 21 actually you would have deconstructed this and reconstructed it into some healthy thing it doesn't mean this disappears completely but it's now weak and very little and tiny and this one dominates and this is now what you want to stabilize but it's still not big enough to dominate this can still come back so to make sure this doesn't come back you spend another 42 days five minutes a day the first 21 days you spend about 15 minutes the second 20 to 42 days you spend about five minutes and that just goes through the five steps quickly and you're just expanding on this and you're adding more things that you can do and you may be speaking to people and you're getting a plan in place and you're getting it and you're starting the plan so it's a very oriented and stabilizing the mistake people make rachel is that they stop at day 4 day 7 day 14 and then they keep going back into the same cycle you will keep going back and will not change unless you follow systematically through the time frame so the 63 days is literally what it needs to be you to change your habit you don't need 21 it's not enough time you're worse at 21 days if you stop there you're going to fall back really badly and that's where a lot of people do they stop at day 4 7 14 and 21 and it's not good to stop that you need to push on 242 to complete the neural recoding in the brain and the body in order to get the new habit going so fascinating and what i love about it though is that there's this level of intentional living to understand what you're feeling what's going on inside of you what your situation is and i think it's it's so easy just to kind of live at the surface level of life and just go through the motions you kind of get through the day but when you really do dig under that level and you really start asking yourself and understand what's going on that's not only when change is made but also you you know yourself more and i think it helps relationally exactly and all of it there's just a richness to it that i love and you bring the science to it which i think is just beautiful okay so before we wrap up i just have a i have a question because i'm a spender when it comes to money so really quickly what happens to the brain when we spend money because we talk about splitters and savers really is there do you have any science around that there's a reward system involved so basically the reward system is a lot more complicated than we used to think in the past it's got a lot more involved in it and it's basically what you know you can sometimes even the toxicity can be a reward system because you get that initial high so it's sometimes it's a coping strategy and when if something something happens to us we have a coping strategy which is fine in the moment but it's not sustainable over time and when you have something that copes it helps you cope in the moments you get a neurophysiological reaction and that reinforces it so that's what happens when you know sometimes people get that from saving from spending whatever um and as long as i mean there's nothing wrong with spending as long as it's being balanced and all that kind of that's right right but the coping mechanism is so true though i've got an example you've got to see is it disruptive is it a grouping mechanism is actually coming from something that you haven't resolved and that you haven't reconceptualized you've got to embrace process and reconceptualize which is what those the neurocycle teaches you to do and then you can move move forward so basically when i talk about the neuro cycle for finances this is not just this is for everything you should we should we should always be renewing our minds this is pretty much the science of renewing our mind and it's something we're supposed to be doing all day long so then it can apply over and we can find the balance in saving and spending it's amazing well dr caroline lee if you are brilliant be a hunter but i really do i appreciate you coming on and just talking about this because i think it is i think we are just complex people and we can talk about our habits we can talk about our choices with money all of it but understanding truly our brain and our mind i think gives us such power so thank you for coming out where can everyone find you my website's dr leaf.com and my social media handle is dr caroline leaf i'm on all the normal platforms instagram facebook i'm also on tech talk my podcast is called cleaning up the mental mess um and yeah the app i've got an app called neuro cycle that's there it is that's on itunes and google play so that's literally me giving you therapy walking you through the process with audio and visual and so on my latest book is cleaning up a mental mess which is available wherever books are sold it's beautiful so wonderful thank you for all the work you do i know you've helped so many people even just in my own personal circle you have a lot of fans that i know a lot of friends and family so thank you i appreciate your work and thanks again for coming on thank you so much and thank you for what you do thank you [Music]

Channel: The Rachel Cruze Show

Views: 23,412

Keywords: the rachel cruze show, the rachel cruze show youtube, money, budget, how to save money, budgeting, personal finance, rachel cruze, save money, how to budget, debt, saving money, save, how to make money, ramsey, finance, how to get out of debt, debt free, How to Build a Wealth Mindset with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Id: yxbeBqkaUJM

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022