Transcriber: Clary Chow
Reviewer: Emma Gon I'm going to start with a quick activity
that a mentor of mine once showed me. So if you would, take your right hand
and raise it in the air. And with your right index finger, I want you to look up at the ceiling and all you’re gonna do, it’s very simple, is make a clockwise motion on the ceiling. Now, I know we’re in a digital age,
so maybe just flash back to remembering that hand moving around. 12, 1, 2, 3,
right, okay, we’ve got it down. Great. And all you’re going to do
is slowly put a bend in your elbow. You can look at me for reference.
I've done it many times. And slowly make sure that your fingers
come down to about for head level, then nose level, chin level, chest level.
Now look down at your finger. You go in anti-clockwise. I can tell you what’s happened. All that’s changed is your perspective. But with a change in perspective, it can lead to
a profoundly different outcome. In any journey of healing, restoration or the creation
of a more resilient you, the starting point is understanding
your story to this point. Take therapy, for example. We don't dive straight into reprocessing,
reframing, coping mechanisms. We start with your story and the narrative that has made you
you to this day. My posit to you is
that we’re doing ourselves a great disservice by not following
that same methodology and strategy in our wealth building. Here’s a few questions for you. What was the conversation like
around money growing up for you? Was it positive? Was it negative? Was it non existent? Have you ever struggled with
any of these limiting beliefs? Worrying that you don't have enough money
or that it's all going to run out? Debt is bad!
Money is the root of all evil! Have you ever been guilty
of any of the following actions? Spending all your money or more? Because you worked really
hard and you deserve it. Taking a job that you didn’t
really want because of money. Stopped living life and doing the things that truly bring you joy because of money. If you have, you’re not alone. Studies indicate
that Americans in general lack clarity, confidence and direction
around their finances. A study of over 2000 adults
revealed that more than 50% said that talking with anyone else
about money was taboo. I’ve found for my own industry experience
that there’s a lot of people out there that were just not taught
much about personal finances, regardless of their level of wealth
and their background. Now, this is all in a time
where, thanks to technology, we have more access to good
financial planning and wise money management
than ever before. Not to mention the set up
of investment accounts or savings automation can be done
at just the click of a few buttons, but we still have these issues
around our personal finances. Only 1 in 3 Americans have
a plan for their money. A FINRA study found
that only 40% of the people polled could answer four out of six
basic financial literacy questions. Here’s one. 77% of Americans have
anxiety about their money. So what’s the deal? Where's the disconnect? We have
more access than ever before, but maybe we're as anxious as ever. Could it be that we’re actually
starting in the wrong place when it comes
to financial planning? We’re attempting to build and
create with no real understanding of where it is we’re trying to go and truly no understanding
of the foundation that we’re trying to build upon. Let’s say someone pulled out
an IKEA box of contents on the floor and gave you no instructions,
no parts list, no picture of what it's supposed
to look like in the end. Who in their right mind is taking
on that challenge? I'm not. But it's often what we see happening
with people's personal finances, and it's inefficient, to say the least. The solution to the conundrum
we face with our personal wealth doesn’t lie in more hacks,
tips, social media guru Insights. The real solution comes from understanding our current relationship with money and then developing
a true purpose for our wealth. Now, that may sound simple, but those components truly become the corners and the edges
of the jigsaw puzzle. All the other strategies,
solutions and products are simply pieces
that fit within that framework. So let's talk about those two things. Let's start with the current
relationship with money. Now, we don’t have time,
unfortunately, to unpack all of the things that could be informing
your current financial narrative. But I want to identify one thing
that typically causes more problems than most with people's personal finances. This is the thing that clashes
with the idea of financial freedom and causes stress
and unnecessary concern across all the major
important areas of life. We may have goals
of affluence, abundance, maybe even the creation
of generational wealth. But the hidden killer of financial
dreams is a scarcity mindset. Now a scarcity mindset brings with it
an overall survival methodology. Essentially what it says is
there’s not enough pie to go round. If these five people are doing well,
I must be the one to suffer. Now, a scarcity mindset generally
causes some fear and some anxiety, which statistics have proven,
but also leads to short term, focused, hasty decisions around money. It makes it really hard
to plan too far ahead or look too far out into the future, which is exactly what we need to do if we value things like wealth, legacy,
community and familial impact. The other thing about
a scarcity mindset is it’s subtle, because it intertwines itself
with your beliefs, your logic and your habits
in your subconscious mind, and it can do that regardless
of your level of wealth. It doesn’t allow a sense of clarity,
peace and direction to coexist with it. Now, this is a major issue
because that could mean for you the very thing that you’re trying
to create with money isn’t capable of growing and thriving
in the current environment. Now, when we're young, our brains job is
to adapt to our immediate surroundings by creating modes of operation
that help us be successful, to exist, to do well in our current context. As we grow, those adaptive strategies in
adulthood can become, well, maladaptive. If you’re in a situation growing up
where money was tight and there was the need to hoard,
well, now in adulthood, it’s hard to do things like invest
in yourself or in external assets, which is exactly what needs to happen
if we're ever going to have the opportunity to experience
compounded or exponential growth. On the other hand, if you saw
frivolous spending growing up, it may be hard to get that under
control in your adult life and prioritize something
as crucial as saving. Now, I want to give you a little bit
of grace, because when we're young, our conscious mind isn't fully formed. So a lot of the input on the big
things of life, finance is included, go straight into what becomes logic,
belief and habit for us as we grow. So how do we know if we're dealing with a little bit of scarcity
mindset in our world? Again, we don’t have
the time to unpack it all, but here’s a few things
to consider to evaluate the financial foundation
that you may have right now. The first is to write down all of your experiences
and childhood around money. Then I want you to write down
how you feel about major financial terms investing, saving, insurance, debt. Then identify any major experiences
you had around money in adulthood. Then what you’re going to do with
your likely extensive list at this point is go back through and put a positive or
a negative sign next to each one of those, depending on whether your interpretation of those experiences
was positive or negative. Hint: if it’s mostly negative, there’s
probably a little bit of scarcity mindset we’ve got to deal with. But that activity in
and of itself is going to reveal so much about that foundation that we’re going to start
to try and build from. Now, once we have
the foundation identified, it's time to move to creating a vision
and a purpose for our money. Andy Stanley says it best,
everyone gets somewhere in life. A few people get their own purpose.
Those are the ones with vision. I hear people with goals
of affluence and abundance and they say numerical objective
financial goals like Mikey, I want to make six figures.
Mikey, I want to make seven figures. I want to have three, four, five, six,
seven streams of passive income. I want to have this many thousands
or millions tucked away in savings. We can tell you a secret. If that’s where you stop,
you just stop short. You’re 1 or 2 steps away
from really creating consistency in whatever your financial plan is. You’re 1 or 2 steps away from the freedom of not having to look around and seeing what everyone else
is doing with their money. When you can clearly articulate
a purpose and a goal for your wealth and emotionally engage with
what that means for you, now you have something meaningful and concrete that will
hold you accountable, even when the instant gratification
version of ourselves doesn’t feel like it. And I want to bring that to life a little bit in terms of what
that looked like for me, because this all sounds well and
good and it all sounds simple, but what does it look like to really
understand the narrative and then to build a purpose and a vision? In summer of 2020, I came home
to my now six month old, oldest son. And if, you know, six months old, start to smile and engage and giggle
at you and make you feel really good. And I realized holding him
in a studio apartment that there was no business
having three people in. That now my why was deeper.
I’ve always had goals. Numerical objective financial goals
of what I wanted to achieve. But in that moment, I realized
that the inputs that I gave to him, they’re going to impact his logic, his belief in his habits.
across all the major areas of life, but definitely with finances, too. And now my goals
were tied to a deeper purpose because I wanted to be able to have
the time, freedom to see that smile, that giggle and that response
any time I could. I didn’t want to miss a game,
a performance, a recital, any of that. And the moment
I connected with a deeper why the solutions, the strategies and
the products that were needed for my financial journey
started to reveal themselves, We each have an opportunity to repair
the financial wounds in our money mindset and build something
that we can truly take pride in. Let’s do the work of cultivating
the soil in our money mindset so that as we are sowing financial seed, we’ve already created an environment
that is vital for growth and for wealth. That I believe it’s not only how we live, but truly get to live
our financial legacy. Thank you. (Applause)
