How to Change Your Money Mindset (and be successful!)

[ez-toc]Have you ever wondered what makes one person rich while another one struggles to make ends meet? The answer is simple: a difference in money mindset.

Sadly, the population of people struggling with their finances is higher than those who have it figured out. A good number of people believe that they’re destined only to achieve a certain level of socioeconomic status in life. And they end up not amounting to something greater.

The truth is, you can achieve financial freedom by changing your money mindset. It’s possible to have a life without debts, 9-5 grinds, and anything else that holds you back from building wealth.

What Is a Money Mindset?

A money mindset is made up of all the thoughts, beliefs, and feelings you have regarding money. It affects how you make and spend your income. Most of the time, your financial situation is the result of this mindset.

What Influences Your Money Mindset?

Several factors can influence your money mindset. These include information input, environment, and previous experiences.

• Information input

All the information you’ve gathered throughout your life affects your mindset. For instance, children believe their parents, students believe their teachers, and young people believe their elders. It’s an automatic process to base your financial decisions on what you’ve heard or read.

• Environment

The environment is a huge factor when it comes to developing a mindset. Your home is the earliest influence on your mindset. The relationship your family members, especially parents, have had with money affects how you perceive it.

Other environmental influences are educational settings and other organizations where you interact with people each day.

• Previous Experiences

A single experience with money can shape your perception afterward. Every day, our brain records our history with different things. This becomes the information we rely on when making decisions in the future.

How to Know if You Have a Positive or Negative Money Mindset

It’s pretty simple to figure your type of money mindset. You only have to dig deep into what you think about money. If the majority of your thoughts are negative, so is your money mindset.

Keep in mind that how you spend money can also be beneficial or unhelpful. If you overspend or have lots of unnecessary expenses and fewer investments, your money mindset falls into the negative category.

Having a positive mindset means that you think of money as something resourceful and strive to spend less while making more.

Reasons Why You Need to Improve Your Mindset

A positive mindset is a key to success. Here are the reasons why:

• You won’t be afraid to take risks. Challenging yourself is the only way to learn what works. This means that you embrace new money-making opportunities when others still hold their doubts.
• Failure becomes your opportunity to grow. Many successful people failed several times before getting it right. An individual with a negative mindset gives up before exhausting all the options and discovering their full potential. Persistence is crucial for achieving your financial goals.
• You’ll use other people’s success as inspiration. It’s difficult for negative-minded people to see the positive side of life. That’s why you need a positive mindset that helps you spot other people’s successes and follow their path.
• It becomes easy to believe and achieve anything. Most of the activities you do while thinking negatively rarely turn out successful. But if you do something (even for the first time) with positivity, the results are almost always above average, good, or perfect.
• Your mind becomes open to learning. Changes are inevitable in this day and age. If you’re open-minded, you’ll always adapt to any economic changes. And there will always be a way for you to generate income.

7 Proven Ways to Change Your Money Mindset

The best way to deal with negative beliefs about money is to get them off your mind. You get a chance to spend your money wisely and speed up your journey towards financial freedom.

I realized I had developed a healthy money mindset when I started caring about where my money goes. Before spending any cash, I’d make sure that the benefits outweigh the losses. This approach ensured that I made more and more investments each day.

It might appear simple, but many people are struggling to acquire a positive mindset. Some don’t even know that the reason they aren’t making progress in life lies in their mindset. If you’re one of them, this is the right place for you.

Here are the strategies you can use to change your money mindset today:

1. Consider Money a Resourceful Thing

Forget about the cliché that “Money can’t buy happiness.” Life is simpler when you have money than when you don’t. You can have freedom, influence, and security. These are some of the things that make life worth living.

While money has some downsides, most of them relate to how people interact with it and not the medium itself. That’s the reason why you need to love money and appreciate it. You’ll hardly ever experience the bad side of it.

If you practice good spending habits, saving, and investing, your dream life won’t seem unrealistic. By starting such practices as early as possible, your financial situation gets better sooner.

2. Set Big Goals

Having goals helps you focus on the positive things that life has to offer. If they are big enough, nothing can stop you from achieving them in the long run.

A good number of goals usually revolve around money. Setting a financial goal automatically drives you to love and care about your finances.

Negative belief is the most common obstacle that prevents people from accomplishing their dreams. It becomes simple to achieve your goals when you write them down, visualize them frequently, and stay positive about them.

3. Practice Positive Affirmations

You can get rid of negative thoughts and improve your money mindset with the help of affirmations. These are statements you can say to yourself every day that inspire positive changes and help you perform better.

You can either create positive affirmations yourself or use quotes by famous people. You can also find useful phrases in books for this purpose.

For instance, something as simple as “I can do this” makes it easier to accomplish the task at hand. The affirmations may also have words such as happy, joy, rich, and wealthy.

Make it a habit to affirm yourself each morning before getting out of bed or during the night before sleep. There’s no better way to get ready to pursue your daily financial goals. You can also do the same every time a negative thought crosses your mind.

4. Create a Vision Board

A vision board makes it easy to visualize your goals and achieve a positive money mindset. It’s a powerful tool because it helps create powerful mental images that can keep you chasing what you want.

Taping or pinning a picture of your dream car or house onto a vision board enables your mind to think about the good things money can do. You’ll be able to manage your finances wisely until you reach the target.

You can also create some affirmation texts and put them on your vision board. Maybe you want to start a new business, quit your job, or buy something new. Write that on your vision board!

5. Read More Financial Books and Other Materials

A lot of knowledge can be found in books. Unlike the Internet, books contain a higher level of accuracy. Authors perform a lot of research to ensure that all the information included in their work is reliable.

While the Web is a good source of information, many web pages contain misleading information. Anyone can publish their content on the Internet, but not everyone can write a book.

Also, many blog posts contain 1k to 3k words, while books have hundreds of pages. This means that a single blog post can’t cover a topic the way a book does.

So, it’s necessary to buy more books or go to the library more often.

I recommend the following 3 books for improving your money mindset:

• Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One (by Joe Dispenza)
• You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth (by Jen Sincero)
• MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (by Anthony Robins)

6. Take an Online Mindset Course

You can find many mindset-changing tutorials on the Internet for free. But some of them are too general and aren’t based on the publisher’s experiences. You may also lack the time to find reliable content by browsing through tens of web pages.

Online courses are perfect for gaining knowledge directly from the source. You get a chance to learn from someone who’s had experiences with the subject. And they give you the techniques they use to solve problems such as having a negative mindset.

7. Appreciate What You Have

Always be thankful for the things you have. Appreciating your achievements helps you keep track of everything that pleases you. Your mind and body will work together to ensure that you experience this joy over and over again.

If you pay attention to the little things, your focus won’t shift to the bad stuff. For instance, be grateful for one or two sales you got rather than being disappointed because your competitors are doing better. Or being happy about a new job opportunity instead of stressing over the big career you unfairly lost.

By appreciating the small pleasures, you go closer toward crossing the major goals and ambitions off your bucket list.

It’s Time to Take Action

You’re the only one in control of your mindset. This means that you can seclude yourself from anything that inspires negative money habits and thoughts. On top of that, you can train your mind to avoid the same by following some of the tips on this list.

Achieving your financial goals is liberating, and you shouldn’t give it up for anything. If you really want it, you can definitely have it!