Transcription
The number one foundational key to building wealth is to cultivate a healthy relationship to money. Most people don't have a healthy relationship to money because they've been conditioned, first and foremost, by society to be a bunch of doers. I believe it was the Rockefellers who developed the schooling system and turned it into a 9 to 5 setting, where you go to school at 8:00 a.m. and come out at 3:00 p.m., 4 p.m., or 2 p.m., whatever it is. Then you transition from that to a full-time job, a career where you're dependent on a stable paycheck.
So, everything in society, up until the last, like, what, 50, 60, 100 years, has been tailored to making you a slave to money. Everything is geared to you following a certain set of orders, a certain set of rules: be this way, don't be that way, don't take one wrong step, earn your paycheck, and be secure, safe, and live in comfort.
When you begin to change your relationship to money, you start to realize that you no longer have to live by the norms to do that. It gives you permission to be more authentic and walk your own path. As soon as you start to walk your own path, you start noticing these different opportunities that other people can't see because they're so hooked by that societal norm of, "I must be this way, otherwise I will get shunned by society."
The number one problem that most people experience once they start to change their mindset around money and cultivate more of an abundance mindset is kind of like crabs in a bucket. The people around you try to pull you back down. "Don't try to be too good. Don't try to make too much money. Don't try to get too rich. The rich are evil." These ideas are all put out there.
But most of the times in my life, when I've met wealthy people, I've noticed literally how nice they are and how differently they think about money. While I'm worried about little bills here and there, they're like, "You know, you live a life that's short. Why worry about money? Just spend it, trade it for positive life experiences."
So, my relationship to money has changed in that regard, where I'm not constantly trying to hold on to it just enough to pay my bills. I'm thinking about it in longer time horizons, like, "Hey, you know, I earn money. What's the most productive use of it? What can I trade it for that is more valuable than money could ever buy?"
That thing is time. Every single rich person trades money to buy more time, whether it be delegating tasks that you do, like lawn mowing, hiring a chef, or, you know, if you can afford it, obviously, or getting like minor house tasks done. If you're in a job right now and you can delegate a lot of these tasks that you're doing so you can spend more time with your kids, you're not going to regret that.
You're not going to regret spending an extra, you know, 50 to 100 bucks a week delegating some tasks, like going grocery shopping or cleaning the house, just so you can spend more time with your children. At the end of your life, that's not what you're going to regret.
So, the mindset shift occurred to me when I asked myself one main question: at the end of my life, which option will I regret the least? How can I minimize the regrets that I have in my life? When I've done that, I was able to not choose that 9 to 5 route out and that safe, comfy, cushy career.
Upon graduating, I was offered a $50,000 a year stable job with health benefits, etc. It would have been any graduate's dream, especially with the uncertainty that some of my friends were having. But I knew for me, it's like I could never do this for the rest of my life. I would literally be selling my soul to do something like that. I would be forfeiting a piece of my soul, and it made me deeply, deeply frustrated.
To the point where I asked, "Okay, what do I want instead?" I would rather have a life of freedom where I can do what I love and get paid for it. Have my cake and eat it too. That's the other thing with people who are wealthy: they're always looking for how they can eat their cake and have it too. How can it be a win-win on both sides?
So, once I adopted that mindset, I gave myself permission to first do what I love, do it for long enough until I found a way to monetize it. I started making these videos, first building an audience, sharing value, and then I asked, "Well, now I need to feed myself. I need to find a way that I could do this long term."
So then I asked, "How can I monetize?" For wealthy people, money isn't actually the first thing on their minds. Value is the first thing in their minds, and purpose is the first thing in their minds. What's going to be valuable to society? What's going to be valuable to me?
Then, as a secondary, they ask, "How can I now monetize this?" For the people who are starting off and want to change their relationship to money, the first thing you have to concern yourself with is paying attention to where you are directing your focus. What am I focusing on? What is consuming my thoughts?
Are most of my thoughts concerned around how there isn't enough, how I can't afford that thing, and I shouldn't buy it? Or what people who make the change do is ask, "How can I buy it?" That's one of the lessons I learned from Robert Kiyosaki. Instead of exclaiming, "Oh, but I can't afford that vacation. I can't afford that car. I can't afford to spend that much time with my children," instead, reframe that to, "How can I afford that vacation? How can I afford that car? How can I spend more time with my children?"
Because we all possess this subconscious mechanism called the RAS, the reticular activating system. It's like this hidden organ that scientists have discovered. Whatever you focus on, your RAS gets primed to look for proof of that. So when I say, "Oh, I can't afford that," I will receive more evidence of instances where I can't afford that.
When I say, "I can't afford to spend more time with my kids or that car," then I will be reminded in my bank account of how little money I have right now. So instead, if I were to focus on asking, "How can I afford it?" then my focus changes to looking for opportunities and how I can afford it.
The difference here is a fundamental shift in focus. So if you're someone who's getting started off trying to get into an abundance wealth mindset, you have to pay close attention to the content of your focus. One particular example I can think of with one of my clients who implemented this is Lupita.
When she started off, she was always focusing on the lack and how there wasn't enough money and how she wasn't losing weight. She would look in the mirror and always exclaim, "Oh, you know, I don't look good enough yet. I don't look good enough yet. I don't look good enough yet." And that's what got reflected back to her.
When she shifted her focus, typically why this happens is because we get obsessed with the result and not the process that leads to the result. What I mean by that is we're comparing ourselves, and we're living in, as Dan Sullivan likes to call it, the gap. We're living in the gap of where I am versus where I want to get to, not where I am versus where I was before.
So when we help to shift that mind state to not focusing on the end state but on the process, on continual improvement, on her journey, she literally had an instance where she manifested 17K from two clients. In the past, she was having blockages with money; she couldn't quite attract the kind of clients that wanted to work with her.
She wasn't attracting wealthy clients who could afford her services. After switching her focus to that, she started attracting more high-value clients who were very willing to pay her for her time. But also, she manifested weight loss. She started to notice old clothes that she really wanted to fit into that didn't fit, all of a sudden started to fit, all because she focused on this current moment, the process of improving, and how every single day, little by little, there were confirmations of her becoming that person that she wanted to become—the version of Lupita that she wanted to be.
An exercise you could do every single day to make sure you're aligned with that wealth mentality—and by the way, this doesn't just apply to wealth mentality; it applies to making a change in everything—is to use that reticular activating system. That mechanism we always focus on is the end state, the gap, and what we don't have, measuring ourselves up to that.
But what is instead even better to focus on is the progress I've already made based on where I was yesterday. So when we start to look for more and more evidence of us becoming better and better every single day, with money, let's say you have made the decision to go from 5K to 10K a month in a corporate job to maybe starting your own business and doubling your income, making 20K or 30K a month, right?
We had one of our clients, Louise, who actually did this. She went from 5K a month to 30K a month in her own business, which allowed her to take Mondays off and spend more time with her daughter. But she only did this because she was focusing on what she did have rather than what she didn't have, looking at the glass as half full rather than half empty.
One main mechanism that she used was the process of looking at confirmations—consciously looking at confirmations. So when you make the intention to get to 30K a month in your own business, what's typically going to happen is you're going to be like, "Oh, but I'm not there yet. I'm lying to myself." Yes, maybe you are, but it only appears that way when you look at the gap.
If you look at the gain, which is based on where you are and where you were, you look at the progress you've made, and you start confirming those, like, "Hey, I've taken the first step. I formed the LLC. It's happening. Progress is happening." Your mind actually believes that because it's true.
So we're overriding this logical part of our mind to get access to the RAS and prime it with what we want to see. Right now in my life, you know, just literally, if I look around me and I look for the color red and I focus my mind on looking at all things red, I'm noticing everything red around me.
But what's even more interesting is this wall behind me is brown. I'm actually looking at where it could be red, right? I'm trying to manipulate it to what I'm focusing on. That's exactly why wealthy people get wealthier and poor people get poorer.
This gap between the upper class and the lower class keeps getting wider and wider, where the middle class doesn't exist, among other things, because the rich keep focusing on all the good things and all the wealth they have. They start manipulating their reality to gain more wealth, whereas the poor do the complete opposite, and they just keep getting poorer and poorer.
If you'd like to learn more about how to cultivate a wealth mindset, the fundamental thing that needs to happen is an identity shift. Who you are and who you identify as has to shift; otherwise, you'll never notice a permanent result in your life. Everything will be temporary.
Unfortunately, for most people, they only look at temporary techniques, like meditation or visualization or affirmation, to manifest a lottery win. But very few people are actually focused on maintaining their wealth. What rich people do is they're focused on how they can stay rich forever rather than gain a bunch of money and then lose it all.
As a wise man once said, it doesn't matter how much money you make; it matters how much you get to keep. In order to do that, you need to shift your identity permanently. That's been my mission for the last six years and how we've helped over a thousand clients do this for themselves.
So if you'd like to learn from me and gain mentorship with me to make these kinds of results in your life, all you need to do is go to realityrewind.com.