How To Increase Your Money Confidence

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome. Today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. Today we're going to be talking about code confidence when it comes to money. Oh, yes. This is an aspect of confidence that sometimes people don't think of as confidence. They don't really see it as related. It's like, no, there's your money, your ability to earn money, how much money you have, and then there's like confidence. And confidence is more of a social thing. And there is social confidence, which is something we talk a lot about on the show, but there's also financial and professional confidence. And it's something I've been fascinated with for many years. And I find that a lot of the clients that I work with are wanting to grow in social confidence, dating and relationship confidence, but also in their careers, also in their finances and money confidence. In fact, it's such a popular topic that we ended up creating a brand new live event that's going to be happening at the beginning of 2020 called Maximize youe Money Confidence, where we spend three days going in depth on how to really radically increase this sense of confidence. So we're going to talk about that some today in this episode, which is all about increasing your money confidence. And also if you're interested in coming to that live event, we are doing the Super Early Bird coming up right now. Maybe it's already happening, actually. And if you go to social confidencecenter.com socialconfidencecenter.com, click on the Events tab, then you'll see a link to go to the Maximize youe Money Confidence event page and you can book your ticket for maybe over 90% off is what we're doing. The Super Early Bird. We make them very accessible. And then as it gets closer to the event, the ticket price goes up. So now is the time to take advantage of that. If you also go to shrinkforthyguy.com shrinkforthyguy.com on this episode, there will be a link down below to go directly to that event page. So there'll be several ways to get there. If you're ready, you want to take that next step. I mean, what we're going to cover today versus what we can cover in three days with you doing activities and being immersed in that environment is night and day different. And yet it's still valuable to talk about it here in this context. So we will. So when I say money confidence, what comes to your mind? In fact, even before we get into definitions and everything, if we were just to say, okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, how high is your money confidence? 10 being the highest, 1 being the lowest, what number comes to your mind? What would you give yourself? And just before you even know definitions, just your gut. What is your money confidence? Interesting, huh? Now, here's the thing. Let's talk about what money confidence is. Because like any other type of confidence, it's an inner game, and yet we focus on the outside. So let's take a parallel. Dating and relationships. Dating and relationship confidence is an inner game, and yet we focus on what? Our appearance, our popularity. How many people like us are we, you know, do we look a certain way? Do we show up in a certain way? Are we the cool or beautiful or sexy person that we're supposed to be? And so we have this image of how you're supposed to be. And if you're that way, then you just must be confident, you know, which is just totally blown to smithereens when you hear an interview or, you know, a conversation with some beautiful celebrity and it turns out they have social anxiety and don't feel. Feel that confident around people. And you're like, but wait a minute. You have the exact external thing you're supposed to have to get you confidence. And that's where you really start to see, oh, wait, confidence is an inner game. And it's actually the same thing for money confidence. And this one is so important because most people are focused. Well, there's a couple things. One, people have a certain relationship with money that is often fixed. It's static. The. This is how money is. And it's not just what money is. It's their relationship to money. This is how I am with money. This is what it means for me to try to earn money. This is what makes me a good person or a bad person around money. And a lot of that stuff is fixed. A lot of that stuff is fixed when we're young and people just don't change it. And so flash forward 10, 20 years and they're not pursuing a certain career or certain job and they don't know why or they have stories as to why, but that's not the real reason. And the real reason is because they have this whole fixed perspective of money. Money means this. Money means you're bad if you haven't. Money means, you know, I'm bad. It means I'm bad if I don't have enough. And these things can get totally locked in there. And that's what creates some of our money confidence. And so often what we're doing is we have these fixed perceptions of money that really limit what we can do. Because we got to be a good person and not a bad person. You know, maybe it's bad to want money or bad to go after money, so I won't. And we have all these parameters that we're operating in and then on top of that, we just focus externally. So what is the fastest and best way to get money confidence? Would you say in that, in the external model? Earn more money. Right? Isn't that what we focus on? It's like, well, if I just had more money, then I'd be more confident with money. And that's the belief, that's the story. And like anything else, like the dating example, there's some truth that the external does matter to some degree. So let's say you look like a really beautifully aesthetically appealing person that fits the mold of society. You might have people more interested in you, you might have more dating opportunities. There is truth in that. Same goes for if you have a lot of money, whatever a lot of money is for you, then you might develop a greater sense of money confidence. And you might not. It's not the direct way, it's not the default way. In fact, there's this really fascinating study. I don't remember what book I saw it in. It was a book about youth and child raising and psychology and confidence in adolescence and stuff though. So it wasn't even a book about money. But they had this really interesting stat that just got burned into my brain from some research work they did where they interviewed families that earned $50,000 a year collectively. It could be a single earning, it could be a two parent income, household, whatever. 50k is what they earn per year in salaries and wages. Then they said, how much money would your family need to earn just to be totally abundant, free of money worry, basically money confident that you didn't use that term. Guess what they said on average, $100,000. So they wanted to double their money. And so that most of us think, if I doubled the amount of money, in fact, take a moment, think about that. If you doubled the amount of money you were making, would you be confident with money? Now, your initial answer might be yes. But my follow up question would be like, what does that even mean to be confident with money? That's what I want to explore with you today in this episode is we've got to uncover what that really, really even means. Because more money does not necessarily mean more confidence with money. But here's the kicker about that study. They took households where the income between one or, you know, single income or double income. Same, same kind of setup. $100,000 is what they earned collectively as a family. And guess how much they said that they would need to feel totally abundant with money? $250,000. That's right. It goes up for them. It wasn't like, oh, we want double our. Everyone just wants double their money. It's like, we want 150% more. And so when I read that it really. And that was back, I was younger, I was in graduate school, I was like earning no money. I was actually getting a lot of debt at the time. And I read that and made me like, oh, that doesn't sound good. Something's off there. And it made me want to change the way that I approached that game. Money. And so what is money? Confidence? What would that mean to be confident with money? And there's a couple components, right? One is, yeah, you can, you have money. Well, the reason we want double the money, we want more money is usually people want a sense that they can buy things without worry, right? It's like, well, if I want to buy that plane ticket, I can. And they don't want to feel a sense of restriction. That's often what people feel. That's why they want double the money. It's like, I feel restricted. I want to do that, but I can't afford it. I want to get that plane ticket. I can't. I want to do that trip, but I can't. I want to buy that item, but I can't. I want to pay for, you know, my kids, these extra education classes, but I can't. I want to buy that new gadget, but I can't. So there's a sense of restriction. And so what we want is we want a sense of freedom to be able to buy what we want. The other thing though is we want to be able to buy it without fear. Because oftentimes what happens is as people's income goes up, and you might have experienced this, there are moments where you can buy something. In fact, people often are buying more. They just don't realize it. It's kind of like the water slowly getting turned up in the bath. Like you don't quite notice the adjustment. And so we're acquiring or accumulating more, and yet we don't feel that sense of freedom because there's still fear there. And to me, that's one of the biggest pieces of money. Confidence is the absence of nagging, chronic, ruminating, anxiety, fear about money. And what I've seen is that this fear can persist no matter what someone earns. And that sense. And it can manifest as literally, like, I'm scared of losing, but it can also manifest as not enough, not enough, a sense of emptiness or craving, like, I need to earn more. And I've seen this in a lot of people. And I've been able to interact with people. And, you know, the career path that I'm in would be first in the psychology and psychologist field and then into the coaching world. And especially in the coaching world, I would see people that were earning a lot of money and still seemingly dissatisfied. They didn't reach it yet, they didn't have enough yet. So I need to do more. I need to grow this and get bigger in that way. And there's nothing wrong. So we want to separate wanting to earn more or wanting to grow a business. We don't want to make any of those things wrong. We just want to realize that that's not going to automatically give you what you seek. Just like, you know, trying to get fit and healthy. There's nothing wrong with that. But you're not going to reach a certain body image where you get that and all of a sudden your insecurities are gone. So what we want to look at is we want to look at what's underneath that's creating the insecurities. So what are your fears around money right now, not in the future, when you imagine you have more or something different, but like right now, this week, what kinds of anxieties, like, what are the top two or three fears that come to your mind when you think about money? When we just quiet for just a moment to have you really engage with me, really think about this, at least come up with one or two. And they often come across as chronic worries. They'll come up when, after you spend a certain amount of money or you have a big bill, or they might just float around in the background when you're like trying to go to bed at night. Fear about money. What is it for you? So I noticed one for me, which is really interesting in that it persisted no matter what amount of money I made. And this is probably a very common fear, but it's a fear basically summarized as death and ruin. Some people talk about it, you know, living under a bridge. Or one guy in his book, 10% happier. I forget his name. He's a journalist. Talked about ending up at a flop house in Duluth. You know, kind of like this end of the line. You lost everything. Death and ruin kind of thing. And for me, I noticed that I had that fear no matter what amount I was earning. And I had that fear when I was first getting out of graduate school and starting to. Well, even when I was working and doing my internship in postdoc and I had a small stipend, I had it. And then I got out, and I was trying to sort of make my way and grow a private practice and all that. And there was a ton of fear there, like, I'm not going to. Not gonna be able to do it. And it was always about the future. And so the fear was that loss and ruin, like, kind of the edge of the cliff is up ahead somewhere, and one day I'm just gonna fall off. And so the natural response to this fear for a lot of people is, well, you accumulate money. If you earn more and you save more and you got more money, then that cliff is further off. And so that's what I set out to do. And I remember this is another aspect of money confidence, but we'll throw it in here, which is the belief in your own capacity to generate wealth in the world, to earn money, to create money and wealth, to find opportunities, to grow, to add value. And at that time, I'd say my money confidence was low. I was starting out a private practice, and I had a pretty strong voice in my head that said, no one's gonna want to work with you. Not gonna work out. You're not gonna earn any money. The cliff's coming dead under a bridge. But I. At that time, my wife was pregnant, and I was. Well, was she pregnant yet? But anyway, we were on that path, and it was kind of like. And then as soon as she got pregnant and we had her son, it was like, I have to earn money. So that gave me more impetus to do whatever it took. And still, though, there was this lack of belief, lack of faith. And I think that's a big part of money confidence, is knowing I can generate money. In the world. I know how to play this game. I can do this. And there's often this mysterious quality that we have. The money confidence. It's like, I don't know, or money in general. I don't know how it works. I hope I can get. It sort of seems to come from somewhere, salary maybe. And we don't realize that we're directly related. We are the ones who are determining how much money we earn. And there's so many different avenues to figure out how to generate more money and more wealth. But that's just a piece of the confidence. It's not even the getting of the more money. It's the confidence that you can do it. Because no matter how much money you accumulate or get, if there's that fear that you can't do it in the future, then you're always going to be scared, right? Because what if something happens? What if I lose it? What if I don't invest it properly? What if there's inflation? What if this, what if that? And so there's never any of that sense of confidence, because that is really the core of it, right? Is we want to feel confident. We want to feel stable and secure and strong and capable and not live in worry and fear. So in any case, I had this worry and fear at that time that the cliff was impending. I was gonna fall off of it. And so I went out there and grew private practice. It got me to network in ways, show up to meetings, do all different things that I would not have done in the past. And then over time, I realized I didn't wanna have a private practice in therapy. I wanted to have a coaching business. And so I transitioned into that. And sure enough, in that it was like, well, no one's gonna hire you for that and that's not gonna work. But I built that on the side and over time started to get more clients with that and eventually shifted over to a coaching business. And as time went on, grew, that business earned more money, expanded, started offering programs and products and live events. And what I found, though, is no matter what amount I earned, there was this sense that soon the tide would turn and everything would start to recede and I'd fall off that cliff. It was like impending, you know, it was far out, but there was impending doom. And what really interested me about this is I thought, well, maybe I just need to have more. I just need to have more systematized income or I need to have more passive income in my business. And I started building all these other channels and I Realized I don't think there's any problem with the business. The problem is with my psychology. The problem is with fear here. The problem is a sense of lack of safety projected into the future, a lack of trust, a lack of trust in myself, a lack of trust in others, you know, to support me and team members and other things. And also, ultimately, fundamentally, though, a lack of trust in life and the world and the universe and God and whatever language you want to use around it. But this view that life is like this kind of stingy, uncaring force that's like, I'm not gonna give to you. You're not enough. You're not worthy enough. Now, this was all sort of subconscious. I wasn't walking around thinking like, life and God are stingy and I'm not enough. I didn't say those things, but that was how I felt. That was the. That was the. That's what led to that experience of shakiness and of fear and of a lack of stability. No matter how much I earned, you know, even though I was able to now pay all my bills and support my family and everything, it was like, yeah, but what about the future? How do I know? So what are the fears for you? Because it's so important to identify them. Because as you start to identify them, you learn how to work through them. You learn how to overcome them and release them so that you can have a lot more money. Confidence. And here's the thing, hustling to try to earn more money quickly is not going to solve the problem. That's a symptomatic solution. Because what's going to happen is you're going to be one of those people that have a lot more money and still that same anxiety. And then oftentimes that anxiety and that insecurity leads to grasping, craving, poor business decisions, quick cash grabs, working with people that aren't the best fit, making business partnerships that are not sound or right for you, selling yourself out, selling your services for too short, not pursuing a business venture that you could build on your own, which might have great rewards in the long term. But you're scared to take a haircut right now on your payment, on your salary. So you never make that leap. You never make that risk to get the greater rewards. It shows up in a million and one different ways. And so what we want to do is we want to find those fears. I mean, I really think that's the pathway to money. Confidence is not just to run out and earn more money, because you're going to have a Lot of obstacles to that if you haven't done the inner work. I think the pathway is to find the sticking points, the toxic stories, the hangups, the fears, the doubts, the stuff that trips you up, and identify them and systematically release them one by one. Go into them, find the story, the specific story that is tripping you up. And this isn't like a 1, 2, 3, whiz, bam process, as far as I can tell. It's a very personal journey, but it's about healing your relationship with money, which is actually, in turn about developing this deeper trust in yourself and others in life, which is probably one of the most important things that we're here to do. Way beyond money, right? But money is sort of the focal point of part of that journey, as our relationships might be another focal point. So we want to identify what those are and then start to work through them one by one. And that's why we created this live event. The Maximize youe Money Confidence Event is to create a space and a community for us to do that together. Because to say that in this podcast, you're like, yeah, totally, sounds great. Okay, now back to whatever. Now back to earning money. I don't got time for this shit, right? But when we focus on it for three days, and I would highly encourage you to come join me, I think that this would be very valuable to make these shifts in your life and ultimately to be able to earn more money. I mean, that's one of the outcomes of the event, is as you grow in your money confidence, guess what you can do. You can take bolder action, more risks, more putting yourself out there. In fact, that's something I noticed as I started to work on this fear. So I was like, okay, I get it. It's not about earning more money. It's about increasing trust. And so that's the angle that I started going at it with. And it actually took me down a more spiritual path because I realized, like, well, I can have faith in myself. And that was part of building my core confidence. It's like, I can do this, but that can only get you so far, because what if something happens to yourself? What if something happens to your physical body or your mind? What if something happens in your industry? What if something happens that's beyond you and outside of your control? Well, yes, I'm adaptable, and I can work with that. And that's part of the faith, part of the confidence. But what about out there? Maybe out there is not so distant and distinct from me as I thought. So it really led to this growth in spiritual confidence and spiritual awareness, which I think is part of money confidence and growth. If you really want to reach the highest levels of liberation around money. Because I'm not interested in maximizing my personal bank account and money. Some people are. Some people want to play the business game and they're like, in the business and career and money game and they're like, yeah, I want to earn a shit ton and I want to have lots of nice things and cars and this and that. And I just want to accumulate all the money in the world. And that's fun for me. That's what I want. That's not the game that I'm interested in at all. I want to grow a thriving business to support me and amazing team members so that we can help even more people and reach even more people. And then I want to have the business set up so that I can do just the work that I love. To me, that's more success than the amount of money that I earn. But on top of that, I want to run the business smart and be giving to the world and receiving so we can sort of nurture all of us that are working on this in the center and growing everyone, including my own income and salary. And what that allows me to do is have a sense of freedom to say, I want to travel, to visit family or something like that. We can just buy a plane ticket and not have to stress or think about it. Or we want to get health insurance, we could do that. Or if we want to send our kids to a certain school or save for their college, we can do that. To me, that freedom to be able to buy things and groceries and organic stuff and whatever, that to me is the ultimate goal. And then to be able to do work that I love. And then along the way, if I accumulate more money, great. But that's not the point of the game. So you've got to really define what is that success for you? How do you want to play that game? And when people always want, part of their confidence is they want more money, I'll say, great, what for? What do you want that money for? Because another fear or sticking point or wound that's causing all the issues that we want to work through is, I'm not enough, I'm inferior. I mean, that's what we're programmed with in our society, right? Is like the more money you earn, the more worthy you are. And if you don't earn that much money, you're not worthy. And that gets really deeply ingrained for everybody. In Western culture, but especially for men in America, like your. Your. Your work is your worth, how much you earn is your worth, your net worth is your human worth. And these things are spider webs of meaning and belief and emotion and identity, and they just get in there. Even if you think you don't buy into that, you probably do. On some level. We all do. Growing up in this culture and whatever culture you grew up in might have its own versions of that. It was different than United States or Western country. But in any case, for me, the goal is liberation with money, freedom with money, total trust and ease with money. And I realize that that can happen with a small pile or a big pile, a small number in the bank account or a big number in the bank account. And there's a certain amount that you want to be able to have your bills taken care of and other things. So you're not like, really struggling week to week, paycheck to paycheck. I mean, that is inherently a more stressful way. You can work with that, too, as your medicine for confidence growth. But ideally, you have the money confidence and the ability to grow your capacity to earn in the world that you could be earning an amount that feels like it covers that. But then beyond that, to be really free involves systematically finding these fears and letting them go one by one. And that might happen in one day, that might happen in months. That might be a process for you. So let's talk about how we can do this together and how you can turn this into action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step for today is going to be to take. First of all, if you have not written down three money fears, do that, or at least two. The two big ones, what are the ones that get you? They come up in various ways. Now pick one, and I want you to investigate that over the next week. Just investigate it. Where did I learn this? Where did this come from? Why do I think this? Is this how dad thought about money? Is this how mom thought about money? Even if they never said it, that's just what I was exposed to, subconsciously absorbed it in the household that I grew up in. Did I learn it from society? You know what's contributing to it? Is it a sense of insecurity? Is it insecurity that was kind of. That I took in by absorbing the dominant culture about my sense of worth coming from this? Is it something else? Is it a lack of sense of safety in the world? A sense of I'm not okay that I'm imagining is related to money, but Actually, it goes much deeper than that and you don't have to come up with specific answers. It's not about getting an ABC checklist answer because that intellectual story is not necessarily going to liberate you. What's going to liberate you is the investigation is asking the questions residing in the question, letting the question mold and shape and start to break apart some of the networks of meaning and association in your mind so you can be open to something new. That's what we're going for. And of course, if you want to go for this like all the way and you really want to master this area of confidence in your life. And to me, that sense of freedom with money and ease with money and confidence with money is extremely important because it can affect every area of life. It can make you stressed out at home, stressed out with your kids, afraid to give, afraid to contribute, afraid to give to charities, stingy, scared. I mean limited. And we want to be free of all that. So to me, a life of confidence involves not only social confidence, self confidence, relationship confidence, but money confidence. So if you want to learn a ton about this, I highly recommend coming out to our live event, Maximize youe Money Confidence. Coming up in the end of January, beginning of February 2020 in Portland, Oregon. You can get your tickets if you go to shrinkforthshyguy.com There'll be a link at this episode down below shrinkforthshyguy.com or socialconfidencecenter.com and go to the events page socialconfidencecenter.com and we're doing the super early bird right now as well. So now is the time to get, I mean man, the amount that you'd invest versus what you'll get out of it in terms of life quality, but also ROI in terms of you want to increase capacity to earn in the world. This event is going to be really a no brainer if you want to invest in yourself what you're going to get out. So I believe in you. You can do this. Come join me and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.