Safeguarding Your Financial Mindset

Join Financial Therapist, Amanda Clayman and Host Megan Spicer in talking about Safeguarding Your Financial Mindset as a Business Owner. We dive into how past experiences and relationships can affect how you use and see money today, as well as how to go about changing your financial mindset to a more positive and successful one.

What we cover in this episode:

02:04 – What is a financial therapist?
06:48 – Your thoughts, emotions and their relation to your money
09:56 – Become aware of your triggers
17:58 – Structuring to become functional
22:28 – The reality of backsliding
25:57 – The personal side of your business finances

What is a financial therapist?

So what is a financial therapist and what do they do? Amanda Clayman explains, “A financial therapist is somebody who is looking at money from a holistic point of view. So looking at money and how it lives in our lives cognitively, emotionally, relationally. How we infuse money with a, a great deal of personal symbolic meaning.”

So what can you expect to discuss if you were to work with a financial therapist and how would that differ from normal therapy? Amanda says it’s “ A place where you can go and engage with a professional who is there to talk to you about money and what’s happening in your financial life, but really from the perspective of how money contributes to our overall well being.”

Your thoughts, emotions and their relation to your money

Acknowledging the irrational thoughts that you have about money, starts with figuring out what they are and why they exist. It is really hard to diagnose yourself with what causes you to do what you do with money because thoughts can be tricky. Also, let’s be honest, we are all a little biased towards ourselves, naturally.

Stepping back and really analyzing yourself and asking yourself why you are doing what you are doing and how that is affecting you and the goals you have put in place. Another way is utilizing feedback from others. What are the perspectives of people around you that are close to you? You may know what you are doing or what you need to do, and just don’t know how to implement these actions and not sure how to change your financial mindset.

Become aware of your triggers

External and Internal

Triggers in life can happen anytime and for many reasons. But how do they impact your financial mindset and well being? Amanda talks about internal and external triggers and how you may be responding to them.

One external trigger she talks about is “a lot of times, especially for very anxious people, there is some kind of external trigger that makes the pain of avoiding something, less than the pain of having to actually deal with it.” This reminds me of the saying ‘Your problem won’t just go away if you ignore it.’ In fact, in the financial world the problem may just become bigger.

It might not be the easiest thing to do, but try to “be aware of those triggers and the pain point that you’re experiencing. Make sure that you, take a 30 second pause to just say, what am I feeling right now in my body? How am I experiencing this?”

“Is there a thought, a belief that’s coming through right now about like, ‘you’re so bad, you should have avoided this situation.’ What are our thoughts trying to tell us in that moment? And, being able to have awareness of our internal experience before we tackle the external problem, I think brings us to a place of greater clarity.”

Be Curious

Learning how to change your financial mindset isn’t going to come overnight or by just one method. Amanda talks about being curious when these thoughts and questions pertaining to money, especially negative ones, pop up in our head and throughout our daily lives.

Being curious and aware of why we think the negative thoughts to ourselves after doing something we would deem financially bad. We have to remind ourselves that we are still human and just because we make a bad decision doesn’t mean your financial mindset is off track. Be aware and observe who you are and why you did what you did, and that will go a long way.

Structuring to become functional

Changing your financial mindset shouldn’t be going from one extreme to another. That usually almost never works out. If you are trying to lose weight you can’t cut down from eating 3,000 calories a day to eating 1,500 calories a day.

If you want to start working out, going from 0 times a week to everyday probably won’t work either. You have to structure your day, schedule, mind, tasks and ease your way into a functional zone. “Like we can kind of engineer a new way of sitting down with our money, feeling our emotions as they arise, and still being able to, work with ourself in a constructive way.”

The reality of backsliding

When and if you get to this phase of backsliding, you really shouldn’t be too concerned. This is because, at this point you are aware of your pain point, you understand the emotions you go through and why you go through them.

This may happen more than once. As Amanda points out, “here’s the thing that I love about money; is that we’re never done with money. And so we are going to get an infinite number of chances to continue to work on this and to continue trying to change existing patterns.”

Once you have felt the relief during that period of time when you were on track, you will want to feel that again. This is because you have found out how to change your financial mindset, even if it is a little change or a short lived one for the first round. You fall down, you get right back up.

The personal side of your business finances

Amanda talks about how we can not “control our way to success” when it comes to the money side of things in our business and even personal finances. We know that in order to grow you have to do some uncomfortable things and even some fearful or risky things. Being open to knowing you may trend some uncomfortable waters when in the process of growing your business financially, can help you through the harder times.

“I do feel like we have this very narrow understanding of what money is and how it works… I think money is one of the best, like self-care and self-reflection practices that we can develop. That when we do that and give ourselves permission to exist there as opposed to just operating or performing money the way that we think that we’re supposed to, money can be transformative, really transformative.”

Conclusion

Money can be looked at in so many different ways; we have some many different viewpoints about money. As Amanda talked about, these feelings and emotions and relationships with money, go all the way back to people’s upbringing. No matter the relationship you or someone you know has had with money, it can always change.

Becoming aware of your triggers, thoughts and feelings of your financial situation can make a huge difference in the way you grow your business. Building a better relationship with money should be an exciting fulfilling relationship, not dreaded and anxious.