4 Ways to Reframe Your Money Mindset
Photo by Valentin Antonucci
Your relationship with your money is crucially important to make sure you can live the life you want, but too few people ever stop and cultivate that relationship. By not intentionally creating your mindset when it comes to your money, you are defaulting to the way somebody else told you your money should work. While for some people that’s alright, for most of us that just doesn’t work. If you’re in the latter camp, I’m going to go over four ways you can start to develop a new, better relationship with your money.
By being intentional about developing your money mindset (something I spend a lot of time on with my coaching clients), you will feel more in control of your spending. You’ll be able to stress less and enjoy your life more.
Your Money Mindset: Defined
What exactly do I mean when I say your money mindset? Just like you have a certain frame of mind in each of your interpersonal relationships, you have a system of automatic thoughts and emotions when it comes to your money. You (hopefully) have people you love to be around, and you probably feel annoyed when you see that coworker coming who just talks a little too much.
Most of us aren’t intentional about those relationships, and just let them develop based on our initial emotional reaction. For all you know that coworker could be your next best friend, he’s just lonely and coming on a little strong.
Your money mindset is at least as important as the most important relationships in your life. Money pops up in every single thing you do, and yet most of us treat money as the annoying chatty coworker. That is, we don’t take the time to understand it, and rely on our initial emotions to guide our decisions. The problem is that most people’s initial emotions about money, and therefore their relationship with it, are negative.
Stress, anxiety, and overspending on things that don’t make you happy all stem from a broken money mindset.
How It’s Broken
Most of your money habits were formed during your childhood without you even realizing it. Every time an adult said “we can’t afford that,” or “it’s rude to talk about money,” your brain internalized it, and it could be sabotaging you in your adulthood. Not to mention all the ways society and social programming, directly and indirectly, influence how you spend your hard-earned dollars.
That’s okay though, it can be fixed with practice, time, and a few tools.
Cut Out The Clutter
No, I’m not necessarily talking about physical clutter. Although, you may find your space a bit tidier if your money mindset has led to overspending on things you don’t want in the past.
You need to remove the mental clutter that is bogging down your relationship with money. A lot of people will tell you all the ways you should feel and act with your money, and it’s easy to internalize too many of those and lose sight of what actually matters to you. You may even have some bad habits you picked up from your parents or other authority figures in your life. They probably just wanted the best for you, but their goals are not yours and you have to decide if their habits should be your habits.
Strip all of your thoughts and emotions around money down to their base level and decide what to keep, and what is no longer serving you. Even if it was a good habit when you first adopted it, be willing to accept that it no longer helps you live a life that excites you and move past it.
Ask For Help
This one probably seems counter-intuitive, since I just told you that a lot of your bad habits could be adopted from those you care about. While that may be the case, they are still your support network and it’ll be a lot easier to change if you get them on board. You don’t have to ask for their advice on how to change, just explain what you’re doing and ask for support.
If you feel more stuck than you can tackle on your own, you should strongly consider working with a financial coach. I know I’m biased, but we truly exist to help people overhaul their money mindset, and we have access to tools, resources, and skills that you would be able to use to make progress.
Working with a coach also provides some much-needed accountability. Changing your habits is hard, and having an impartial ear to remind you where you are headed and walk the path alongside you can be a real lifesaver.
Another place you can seek help is with a licensed counselor who specializes in financial issues. If you can’t stop fighting with your spouse about money, or are dealing with compulsive overspending or crippling anxiety around your money, a counselor can provide tremendous value.
Celebrate Your Old Habits
We aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Creating new habits to overwrite your existing ones is going to be tough, but it doesn’t have to be a negative experience. Negativity will only hinder your progress.
Chances are at least a few of your habits were adopted at random, but most of them probably served you in some way at the time. You might spend too much on clothes because you always got your sibling’s hand-me-downs as a kid, so it helped your self-image to see yourself in those new threads when you started making money.
Whatever the reason your old habits around money were adopted, it’s important to remind yourself of it as you seek to change it. Celebrate your old habit for what it was able to do for you at the time while acknowledging that it no longer serves you in the same way.
This isn’t a knock-down-drag-out break-up, you and the habit have just drifted apart, and it’s time to move on to bigger and better things.
Reward Yourself for Improvement, Not Mastery
The cliche goes that “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” I think it’s from a Chinese proverb, but it certainly applies here. Changing your money mindset is a gradual process, and it’s important to reward the progress you make along the way instead of waiting until you reach the end.
In college, I worked a summer job one year in the I.T. department for our student union building. At the same time, there was a pretty expensive new hoodie that I had my eye on. So I made a deal with myself: If I was able to save $1000 by the end of the summer, I would splurge and buy the hoodie (bonus: it would just be starting to get cool enough that I could wear it). This motivation pushed me to save more than I otherwise would have because I knew the reward was so close and so tangible.
As you begin your journey to your new money mindset, you should reward yourself along the way. After all, you didn’t form your current mindset overnight, so you shouldn’t expect to change it overnight either. By rewarding yourself for the single steps, you’ll be able to walk 1000 miles without throwing in the towel.
Conclusion
Most people are controlled by their money because they have never intentionally developed their money mindset. If you take the time and put in the work to develop yours, you’ll be light-years ahead of the game. Your money is a tool to be used to live a life that truly excites you, it’s time you started treating it that way.
If you’re serious about changing your money mindset (and I assume you are if you read this far), I highly recommend scheduling a time to chat with me about financial coaching. It’s completely free to schedule a consultation, and coaching is a great option to level up your progress and get where you want to go a lot faster.
So if you think you need that extra bump that a coach can provide, or just want to get to a life that excites you faster, schedule a consultation and let’s get to work!