Financial Blind Spots

In this enlightening episode of Wealth Consciousness, we delve into understanding and overcoming the hidden obstacles that prevent financial growth. This episode provides practical mindfulness tools to enhance focus, creativity, and clarity while addressing the deep-seated thought models that influence our financial decisions. Join us as we explore how to shift these paradigms to achieve significant business and personal financial success.

Key Points

Financial Blind Spots

• Discuss the impact of familial financial beliefs on personal and business finance. 
• Highlight the importance of challenging these ingrained beliefs to scale a business.

Thought Models and Business Scaling

• Explain how outdated thought models impede financial growth. 
• Stress the need for a drastic change in perspective to achieve exponential business growth. 
• Emphasize envisioning detailed end goals and maintaining clarity on them. 

Overcoming Stagnation

• Identify common pitfalls: getting stuck in outdated thought patterns or stubbornly adhering to ineffective methods. 
• Suggest strategies to overcome these barriers by maintaining a clear vision and practicing mindfulness.

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Transcript

Welcome to Wealth Consciousness, where we take the inner intuitive journey to living your heart's desire. I'm your host, Susan Hansted, therapist by training entrepreneur by nature. In each episode, we will start the dialogue necessary to understand that to scale your business, you must scale your heart, mind, and soul. We will uplevel the goal setting, dig deep, strengthen your discipline conversation to a how-to clear path, to deconstructing your habits and training your mind to release the limiting beliefs and live in limitless possibility. Your extraordinary life is right around the corner. It's really quite easy once you learn to trust yourself. Join me now in your next breath.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Wealth Consciousness. I hope that you'll find today that in this few moments that we spend together, that you'll find an inspiration for yourself, that you'll find something as you invest this time listening, participating, thinking about this topic today, and decide that there's going to be a takeaway just for you today. So with that, today we're going to talk about in our series of blind spots, financial blind spots. This one's always locked and loaded for everyone. So before we get started, we usually take a breath. We do something to drop into this present moment. What I'd like to offer to you today is two tools. You get to pick one, see which one works better, or maybe you'll pick one for today and another one for tomorrow. But instead of breathing today, I'd like to offer you two tools that you can use in practicing your mindfulness.

And why we practice mindfulness is because we want to continue to feed our creativity, our focus, our clarity, and we want to also try to lower the amount of time we spend in confusion, frustration, rumination, repeating the same behavior over and over and over. That's not working for us. So today, here's two tools. Decide which one works best for you. The first is this super simple snob brain surgery. What I'm going to ask you to do in your mindfulness practice is to count your steps. Now, whether it's getting up to go refill your cup of coffee or walking out to the parking garage or walking into your car, I would like for you to cut down your stress levels by reducing your rumination, by counting your steps. And so as you're walking, if you'll just count your footsteps one right in front of the other, and notice what it feels like when you finally get to your car or your destination to notice that you didn't worry or think about your to-do list or go over a conversation in your mind you only counted.

So the perfection in that is that we really can only do one thing at a time anyway. I know a lot of you would like to argue that point with me, but we can only really give our full attention to one thing at a time. And so as you count your steps, you allow the body to just get a teeny bit of rest, just a little respite from the overthinking, from the forced thoughts, and also from the to-do list. So that's tool number one. And then tool number two, this one can be super fun. So think about it. Tool number two for your mindfulness practice is to set an intention in the morning for the day. Now, what we like to do with our members is to make sure that your 90 day goals are top of mind all the time. Your annual numbers, top of mind, what that looks and feels like when you add a zero, and then also your 90 day goals.

So we review them at night before going to bed. We review them first thing in the morning. But what I'd like to suggest is that you also set an intention just for the day after you've reviewed your 90 day goals and you've taken a look at where you are in your own state of the union of your goals, but then also deciding to set an intention for the day. So here's what I mean by that. Setting an intention for the day like this, today, I'm going to find the humor in the day. I'm going to find the humor and interactions with people. I'm going to find the humor in the things that come up in work, in play with family, with coworkers. So the intention starts to direct our behavior. And when we allow the mind to just sort of run on its own, it tends to go over all the things that aren't working.

That's just human nature and it's survival based. It's basically scanning our environment for dangers. And so what we want to do is sort of curb that natural instinctual habit of looking for what's wrong and decide to have some clear direction on what we're looking for. So to set the intention to find humor in the day, to have laughter in the day, which is a great way to have more of all those positive neurochemicals. So oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, all super good for your creative thinking, for your problem solving, for your clarity to get rid of some of that brain fog that most of us have if we spend too much time in chronic stress. So finding the humor in the day is one example of how you could set an intention in your morning and decide, I'm going to guide my mind instead of allowing my mind to guide me through today.

So think about that. Figure out which tool is best for you, or perhaps you'll do both and be an overachiever. So today we're going to talk about financial blind spots. And here's what I see with members that I've worked with for now 20 plus years, is our relationship to our finances, whether in business or at home, tends to fall in two separate directions. One is that many people are super loyal to whatever they think was the predominant message in their household growing up. If you were raised in a family that was conservative with its finances, if the talk around the table or in the family was what we could afford or not afford or who spends money on what and what kind of people get money, money on certain things, then some people will remain extremely loyal to that family thought. I'm going to use the word thought because it's actually just a thought that keeps getting replicated over and over in a family and then sometimes passed down generation after generation. So the one of two ways, one is I see an overly abundant loyalty to the family rule. I either see that or I see someone who is polarized to what they learned in their family. In other words, they're so far in reaction mode to that, that they're actually on the far other end. But there is an interesting effect with polarization. It holds itself in place.

When people come into our programs and we start to talk about the idea of finances and finances in our business, finances in our personal life, and what our relationship is to that, most of the time early on in the relationship with new members, they fall under one of those two categories, super loyal or completely polarized. There's not usually much in between until we really bring our attention to it. But what I find is that especially as we're talking about how to make changes in our relationship to the finances in our business to scale the business, and also in our personal life, that most client members early on want me to climb in their boat with them. They want me to be on board with their thinking about their finances and about how that will affect scaling their business. But the funny thing about this is that really what good would I be to you if I were to follow your family rules in your business, especially if they're the very thing that is the blind spot to scaling.

So in other words, if I were to climb in the boat with new members who see finances in a way that's creating an obstacle to their scaling, scaling, then basically you just want someone to keep rowing in your same direction. What we find really is that we have to start to look at these thought models that are getting us these results. This is where I have to make it clear I'm not getting in your boat with you. I'm actually going to help you to row in a new direction. But what we want to really look at is this idea that our thought models are typically continually getting us the same results. So with that, you may have incremental growth in your business, and that's great, that's fantastic. But if you are looking for the next level, if you're looking to scale your business exponentially, if you're looking to add that zero, then we have to look very differently at how we get there.

So many times you've heard the saying that the same thinking that gets got us here is not the same thinking that will get us to a new level. This is very true. But what I find is that the thought models that are getting us a result that is just good enough but not great, is usually those thought models are usually being held into place by belief systems that we really don't even remember where we got them from. They just have been unconsciously communicated to us probably over many generations, but over many conversations. And so our awareness has to be brought to the idea that is this thought model. In other words, one plus one equaling two in your mind, does the one and the one have to mean the same thing you've always thought it did? Maybe it doesn't. And so that's the thing that we have to look at.

And so what I want to suggest today when we look at the idea of financial blind spots is that we have to actually change that thought model. We have to change the equation that keeps getting us the same result or incrementally better result. Each time we change up that thought model or that equation, we have to drastically change it. We actually have to be able to see ourselves in a new level, in a new place. We have to be able to see that end game with our business, adding the zero for this year's revenue and how that allows for us to continue to grow a business, to grow a legacy, to have impact in the world, to have impact in our families. We have to see ourselves there first, even when the actual evidence, I'm using air quotes in the air, if you could see me when the actual evidence isn't supporting that yet.

So we have to figure out how do I see myself there? How do I see my business there? What would that look like in great detail? Actually, the more detail the better. Allowing yourself to really get clear what does that end game picture look like? And then you may or may not know. In fact, you probably don't know exactly how we're going to get there. But here's the one thing that keeps everyone stuck, and actually I think it's more than stuck. It's kind of like taking the car out of gear and putting it in neutral. People go into neutral when they're talking about their finances or doing financial planning or planning to scale their business when they are not sure how they're going to get to the next level, and they become stuck. In other words, that feeling when you're sort of dowing headlights, and sometimes it actually lasts a quarter or two where we're actually sort of stymied.

We're out of gear, we don't know where we're going next. And then the other thing that I see is, other than that doen headlights, is that I also see that many, many, many people are hugely stubborn. They're digging their heels in because they're saying, this thought model and this equation is supposed to produce a different result, and it's giving me, so I'm just going to work harder at it. I'm just going to dig my heels in. I'm going to work harder. Neither of those two are going to get us anywhere. Where we really have to look to is the idea that I may or may not know exactly how I'm going to get there yet because there actually might be something I actually don't know about it, right? There might be something I don't know yet about scaling my business or my current market, but the way to get there is to so clearly know what that end state looks like.

And so in your visioning, in your journaling and your whiteboarding, however you do it in your planning, allow yourself to get so clear about what arriving at that end game would look like. What this year's revenue with a zero attitude would look like. What would that look like in terms of your output? What would that look like in terms of your day? What would that look like in terms of your headcount? What would that look like in terms of how you spend your time and your money? How would that be all changed? How you would be delivering to your customer base? So we want that to be so clear, and then we want to reinforce it with nice mindful activity and mindful practice so that your creative mind has the time and the bandwidth to start working on that. So I want to suggest to you today that in order to get to 10 x, we have to shine the flashlight on our blind spots.

Our blind spots are our loyalty to old messaging about finances or our overreaction to old messaging about finances and how to really be so clear about what the end state's supposed to look like, what 10 x, not just as a phrase, but as an actual output would look like, and then to catch yourself when you find yourself in that stuck place where you're in doen headlights or in your own stubbornness. So today I want to leave you with this idea as you're counting your steps to your car or as you're setting your intention tomorrow morning for your day, I would love for you to think about this idea in order to get to 10 x. You'll have to believe it before you see it. Until next time,

Thank you for listening to today's episode. I'm so grateful to have you here with me. If you'd love today's content and you want to share your inspiration, feel free to rate us and review us. Take a screenshot of that review and send it to info at Institute of Possibility Thinking, and we'll send you a masterclass releasing the Habit of rumination as our gift. Looking forward to being with you on our next episode. And until then, you have everything you need with within you.