013 Expanding Your Money Mind

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training.

This is the affluent entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom. Because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there, Mel Abraham here, and welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. In this episode, we're going to talk about how do you expand the money? Mind your money. Mind your money mindset. How do we deal with that? Because here's the deal. We want more results. We want more income. We want more wealth. We want more of something. Here's the question that I have for you. Why is it that, you know, there's a lot of people, we set goals. I mean, we get to the end of the year, everyone's doing goal setting and all that stuff, you know, but here's the deal. Why is it people will set goals, they'll even put plans in place. They'll even get strategies. They even learn tactics. What makes the difference between those that actually achieve the goals, those that actually create the wealth, that make the money, that do the things that they want to do, and those that don't? Well, it's probably not the tactic. Well, I can tell you for certain it's not the tactics. It's not the strategy. First, it could be taxes and strategy, but. But the first thing is it's our thinking. Here's the thing, the reality is that, and you've heard me say this before, and I will say it over and over and over again because it's true. Most people do not have a money problem. Most people do not have a money issue. Most people do not have a wealth issue. What they have is a behavior issue. See, here's the Thing, our behaviors will determine our results. The things we do habitually, those things will determine our results. But here's the interesting thing. What, what determines our behaviors.

That'S where the thinking comes in. Because the bottom line is that everything will start with a thought first. So if our money mind isn't right, how's that going to translate into behaviors? And how are those behaviors going to translate into your results, into your money gain, into your wealth building, achieving the goals, into your profitability of your business and the growth of the business? Look, there's so many people that I've seen where they go. For some reason, Mel, I don't understand that. For some reason, I can't get past $100,000 in revenue, $200,000. I can't break the million dollar ceiling. Why is that? Well, it starts in the mind. And so that's why, that's why I want to do this episode, really talk about the money mind. And I'm going to give you a framework. Yes, it's me. So you're going to get a framework. It's called the money mind framework. We're going to walk through it. Because what I want to do is give you a framework and a way to start expanding your money mind. Because when we expand your money mind, when we can allow you to think differently, think better, think from a different perspective. Because when we, the things that we think about change, when we start thinking about the things we want to change differently. So let's just look at, look at it from that standpoint. So this framework was actually built off of a framework that was created back in 1955, but it's been dusted off and I've recreated it from the perspective of money, wealth, financial independence, financial liberation and affluence. So it comes from that perspective. So here's the deal. I think quite frankly, there's four zones in our money life, in our money mind, if you will. And so those zones are made up of what's known and unknown between you and the people outside of you, your advisors and the people around you. So what it is, for those of you that are listening, I'm going to be drawing on my iPad just a bit here and we'll make sure that you get that in the show notes so you can get the graphics also. But all I'm going to do is I'm going to be doing a quadrant model and on the left axis we're going to talk about what others know or don't know about you. And on the, the bottom axis going across we're going to talk about you. What do you know and what don't you know? So if we look at that, and I move to this, in this const, it's about what are the things financially. Now this is in the context of financing financially, money investing, wealth building, profit optimization business, what are the things that you know versus the things that you don't know. Now if you don't know them, you don't know the things you don't know. But we can at least get our arms around what it is, you know, your expertise, your knowledge, your wisdom, all that type of stuff. Now we look at the people outside of you now, these could be advisors, they could be experts, they could be people in your organization, they could be family members, they could be relatives and everything. Those that look at you now, there are things that they know about you. They've seen it from the outside, they've experienced it from your relationship, from being on the journey with. There is information around your money, your finances, your investing or your wealth, all that stuff that they know about you, okay? And then there's stuff that they are absolutely clues on. There's people in my life that know a lot about my finances, my wealth and the money and how I do things and all of that stuff. But there's some people, including my family members, that are completely clueless. They don't understand any of it. They don't know any of it. And in a lot of cases they probably, probably shouldn't know any of it. So just because they're family doesn't mean, doesn't mean that they have a right to know everything. Okay, so now let's look at what does this make up? What does this mean for you? This is how the zones are broken down. Is that initially, if we just look at what is known to you, how the information you have, the knowledge that you've gained, and we can talk about where you've gained it from and, and what is known to others. In other words, everyone knows it about you, okay? This is what we call the comfort zone. Okay? It really is this idea of a comfort zone. And the comfort zone can come from a couple of things. They will be created, if you will, by our habits. What do we do? What do we do habitually? What do we do each and every day? What do we do? Do we reconcile our bank account every day? Do or every month? Do we look at our investments? Do we read financial news? Do we, do we study any of, any of. Do we look at our financial statements on our business on a Regular basis. Are we aware of those things or do we just ignore them? What are our habits? Because they start to create our comfort zone, because we become habitually indoctrinated to doing that. And so you have some financial habits. The other thing that could come back from those, create the comfort zone, is it comes from your spending. So what's your spending habits? Well, let's look at this. All right? I know when I get stressed, I call myself a stress eater, okay? So when. When my stress level goes up, which it doesn't, usually I handle stress pretty doggone well. And this is the problem with having a home office and, and everything. You might have the same situation. So when I get stressed, what do I do? I get up from the desk, I walk down the hall to the pantry. So I'm a stress eater. If I don't handle that correctly, guess what's going to happen to me? So can you imagine, if you are a stress spender, that in order to feel, and they say, they call it retail therapy, okay, if you're not clear on those habits, those things, you fall into a comfort zone. It starts to create that comfort zone. The other thing that can come out and create your money mind is in your comfort zone, is your attitude, your attitude about money. If you're looking at things and saying money is the root of all evil, or anyone that wants to build wealth, they're greedy. Or maybe you look at it a different way and say, money's a tool for good. Money gives me the ability to get my message out to the world. Money gives me the opportunity to serve greater, serve deeper to do those things. But you see how the attitude starts to create that comfort zone. It starts to create the walls about how we do things and where we do things. And then the fourth thing I think that comes into play in the comfort zone is this idea of aptitude. Okay, what do I know? We can only operate within the confines of what we know and how that works. Now, the reason this is important is that your comfort zone will put the walls around your financial trajectory and your financial destiny. And it's only when we can expand that financial comfort zone, we can expand that financial comfort zone and move the walls out that you will see your wealth expand, your money expand, your business expand, your profits expand, and your wealth expand. And so what we need to do is expand that comfort zone. I'm gonna talk about how to do that once we talk about the other three zones. So that's the comfort zone. That's the stuff that is known by you and known by others. They've seen your habits, they've seen your attitude, they've seen your aptitude, they've seen your spending. You know what that is? And that creates the known segment. The second zone is this zone where it's known by you, but it's not known by anyone else. All right? It's known by you, but it's not known by anyone else. Now, let's get real here, okay? Let's get real real here, because we all have money secrets. We all have money secrets. You know, I've been blessed on this journey as a cpa, as a. As an accountant and as an advisor, as a mentor to so many great entrepreneurs and people in different spaces, helping them build the business and build the things that want to do to create the businesses that they want, but more importantly, to create the life and the financial liberation, the financial independence. I've had the blessing to have these conversations with them, and in the process, I've interviewed them. And let me tell you something. This is really interesting. Some of the things that create the secret zone, okay, where this comes from, it doesn't matter what I found in my studies, in my research, in my interviews. It doesn't matter whether they're worth A million, 10 million, 100 million, or no, millions. They all have the same secrets. Little different terms, little different numbers, little different things. But here's the four things that start to play into this here. And the first is this is this idea of shame. Yeah, I mean, shame. The idea of shame. And here's the interesting thing. Those that don't have money have shame about the fact that they don't have money. And then those that do have money, they have shame around the fact that they do have money. It's interesting to hear that, because in the interviews, in the research that I've done, it became really apparent that it's just the same feeling. It's the same element that causes you to be secretive about these things and not let people know. Now, I am not exempt from it. So just so we're clear, you all know that I had gotten caught in that Ponzi scheme in 2005. It wiped out one third of everything I owned, well into the seven figures. And here's the deal. In that process, I came up with all of these things. The shame. The shame of letting people know, look, I was a cpa. How did they get me? And I had the shame around it to make that happen and to look at that now, the other things that come into play, and it came into play with The Ponzi scheme, too, is with shame came guilt. I was guilty because I. I lost it. I was looking at my son and going, oh, my God, I lost all this money. What am I going to do? Which then led to me telling me stories. And can you imagine what it's like to sit back? I was telling my stories about, I'm bad with money, I'm bad with investing. I mean, maybe you're doing the same thing. Have you ever made a bad financial decision? Have you ever made a bad money decision and you're still telling stories about it? Because if you are, those things, we need to adjust. We need to fix those things. Because the shame, the guilt, the stories, and this last piece is your beliefs. That's going to create your need or your desire to try and keep it a secret. But when we're holding back, when we're holding back those secrets, then we're not learning the lessons from it. We're not taking the lessons of gold that come out of it. Now, granted, it may be painful gold, but it is gold nonetheless. The Ponzi scheme, I realized after I got resentful, after I had the shame, after I had the guilt, it took me a little bit, but it actually was Jeremy that got me to realize, my son Jeremy, to. Got me to realize that. Until I was willing to accept responsibility, until I was willing to accept and look at the lessons that came out of it and openly talk about it, those secrets were going to haunt me and they were going to affect my money mind, and I wasn't going to be able to expand my comfort zone. It was actually going to get it to contract more and more. So I don't know what secrets you might be holding, but we're going to talk about how do we get past that and what do we need to do? Let's look at the next zone. The next zone is, is this area where it's known by others. In other words, people know this about money, about business, about investing, about wealth building, about all that stuff, but you don't know it yet. You're not aware of it. Maybe it's you sitting back and saying, I want to invest in real estate, but I don't know how to invest in real estate. I've never done it before. So this zone is called the expansion zone. This is the place where you can expand your comfort zone by doing things to educate, to grow, and all of that. So here's the space. This expansion zone is built on a couple of things. This is the area for your greatest growth. It's going to allow you to grow. It's going to allow you to find new seeds of wisdom, new seeds of skill sets, new seeds to move the walls of your comfort zone out. It's a place where you probably need the most guidance and help to allow that to happen. And it's the place that when you get real around the truths about money, about what you know and what you don't know, that you can set in and start to learn by taking those skill sets in, taking the guidance in, and using discipline. Using discipline to really put things into place for you to grow. Because some of it might take practice just like any other skill set. It's not something that comes naturally. I get it. But once you develop it, it can't be taken away. Listen, that Ponzi scheme, like I said, wiped out one third of my net worth. But the skill set I had to build, it wasn't taken away. And that's how we were able to rebuild it and surpass it. In 18 months, we recovered everything that was lost and beyond by 3x300% more. Okay, and that leads me to this last zone. And then we'll talk about how do we expand your comfort zone. This last zone is what we call the speculative zone, because this is the stuff that you don't know anything about and no one else does. It's stuff that's undiscovered, it's stuff that's speculative, it's stuff that maybe exists, maybe doesn't. We don't even know. In fact, if we look at it in this context, your best thing is this is a place where you're probably guessing more than anything else. Okay. And if you're not guessing, you might have a hypothesis that you chest this out and that's fine. But when it comes to your money, we don't want to speculate. When it comes to wealth building, when it comes to financial security, when it comes to financial independence, we don't do it through speculation. We do it through tried and true fundamental principles that are proven that that'll get you on a success path. Now, will we take a little sliver of your wealth to speculate? Yeah. I've got some things in more speculative hypothetical investments to just see hypothesis, you know, whether it'll work. But I'm not putting a lot there. And look, if I lose, what's in it, it doesn't hurt. Yeah, I mean, hurts a little bit, but it's not going to leave a mark like the Ponzi scheme did. You might. In this zone, it might Be about opinion. You're going to hear people, you're going to see things on the Internet, people having opinions about what's next, what's the next hot stock, what's the next thing to build it. Or you just might simply be contemplating it. You just might be thinking about things and you'll just thinking about things. So you look at it in that context. So these are the four zones of the money mind framework. It's the comfort zone, which we want to expand, okay? The secret zone, which is the stuff, you know, that we're going to try to shrink and make sure that goes away. The expansion zone, which is your zone for your greatest growth, and the speculative zone, which we're probably going to leave alone. So how do we expand your money mind? Here's how we do it. There's a couple things that come into play to make it happen. The first is this. When it comes to us trying to move from the secret zone to the speculative zone, or from the comfort zone to the expansion zone, we want to look at things and I would say that we spend a lot of time looking at how do we go into the expansion. But the first thing really is to understand training. What training can I get, what classes can I take, what kind of programs can I go into, what can I learn, where can I learn more? Now we want to make sure that they're credible and that they're, they're effective. What training can I get that's going to expand my knowledge, my wisdom, my expertise? If I'm looking in a speculative area, if I'm looking at a contemplative area, if I'm looking at in some sort of hypothesis or something about what's coming about? Is there training out there? Is there education? Are there conferences out there? If we talk about things like artificial intelligence, we talk about self driving cars years ago, a decade ago, two decades ago it was speculative, but now it's coming about. Are you researching it, that type of thing? The second possibility is this is to move from the comfort zone to the expansion zone. Truly it's about getting curious. It's about asking questions. You know, are you spending time with people that you can sit back and say, how did you invest in that real estate? How did you buy that? How did you finance it? How are you managing it? Questions. Being willing to ask questions of people that have been there. Being willing to ask questions of people who have done it. Being willing to ask questions of people who screwed it up. This is going to start to expand your comfort zone because we learn through questions, we learn through curiosity. We just got to ask the right questions, the right people that you know. I think Tony Robbins says that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask, the quality of your money, the quality of your wealth, the level of your wealth will be determined by the questions you ask and the learnings you take from those questions. Okay, what's the other thing that you can do here? The other thing that we can do is find those people that are already living in the expansion zone. In fact, they know the stuff that you want to know. And instead of asking questions of them, you ask them to mentor you. You sit back. This is what I end up doing with a lot of people. In fact, I just got a text from someone saying, would you mentor us? So if you know someone that's already been down that path, if you know someone that has already made the kind of money you want to make, the way you want to make it, or they're in an area of investing that you want to do, whether it's real estate, cryptocurrency, stock investing options, all of those things. You know, find those people and have them mentor you. Now, some might mentor for free, but most of them, it's going to be. There's going to be a cost associated with it, which is totally fine because that is an investment in your future. That is an investment in your wealth. That's an investment that when you take those lessons and go execute and implement those lessons, you're going to get a return on that investment multiple fold over time. Because once you gain the skill set, remember, it can't be taken away. And so there's the mentoring and then this last one that is about how do I shrink? How do I. Actually, there's two more. How do I shrink? The secret zone. Let's having conversations. See, I know that you have money secrets. I have money secrets. We have shame, we have guilt. We have all those things. My question for you is this. Are you talking to anyone about it? Are you having conversations to allow you to release those or shift them or to see them from a different perspective? Because it's holding you back. It was holding me back if I stayed holding on to some of the. And I've made some really bad financial decisions over the years. Bad investments, lots more money than some people will ever make in a lifetime. Totally get that. The question is, if I'm carrying the baggage of that in today's world into my current living, then it's not going to serve me. But what I Am carrying is the gifts of the lessons. And in some cases, when I made a mistake or something didn't go well. Instead of me pulling it in, in guilt and shame and being afraid to talk about it, I go to some of my mentors, I start asking the questions and I say, let me get this off my chest. Let me understand it. Okay? So I want you to have conversations with the right people so you can release those secrets, so you can start to eliminate the shame, the guilt, the stories, change the stories and shift the beliefs. And then the other side of this is the possibility of observing what's going on. And this is where it starts to move you down into the speculative zone, is really just understanding what's going on in the world today. When there's a change in administration, where there's a change in socialization, when there's a change in things, things will shift. From an investment standpoint, we start to see that maybe there's certain, like green investments these days are starting to be big. So when we can observe what's going on, we can look at what might be coming down the pipeline later, which we're now, we can hypothesize, we can look and speculate. But remember, if it's speculative, it's going to be higher risk. I'm not going to put a lot into it. So the real keys to expanding the comfort zone, the expanding your comfort zone, just so I summarize this before we close this episode out, is to one, ask questions. Because when you ask, ask questions of people that have already done it, you're going to move your comfort zone into the expansion zone. Okay? Two, get training around the areas that you don't know. Get training from credible sources that will expand it again. Now, this will also expand you into the expansion zone and it'll take up some of the speculative. It's going to give you a new skill set. It's going to give you a new knowledge base. It's going to give you a new, new wisdom to do that. So ask questions, get training, get curious. Look for mentors that are already doing it, have done it, whatever it is, whether it's real estate investing, cryptocurrency, ETFs, index funds, whatever it is that you're trying to do, money management, cash flow management, profit optimization, all of those things. Look for the proper mentors and ask them to mentor you. Then have appropriate conversations with those that can help you shift your stories, change your shame, change your guilt, shift your beliefs and shrink the secret zone. And lastly, stay with your Fingers on the pulse of the world. Stay with your fingers on the pulse of what's developing where, the direction, what's the zeitgeist, what is going on? Because through observation, you'll start to see other opportunities. So that's the money mind framework. I hope that that helps you understand this. Your money situation is driven by your behaviors, your habits and all of that. Your behaviors and your habits are driven by your mindset and your mind frame and your money mind. If we can change, when we change the money mind, when we expand your thinking, when we expand that comfort zone, that financial comfort zone, we expand your wealth, we expand your money, we expand your profitability, we expand your life. That's the game we want to play. Okay? And that's going to take learning, it's going to take studying, it's going to take possibly guidance from mentors. It's going to take pushing the boundaries of discomfort and growing. But once you grow, you'll never go back. So I hope that you found this of value to you and I look forward to talking to you on another episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. And so if you haven't done so already, do me a favor, make sure you subscribe and make sure that you. You leave me a review and a comment because it means a lot to me, but it means a lot to itunes and everyone else to let people know about this show. All right? And we have a community called the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook Group. Do me a favor, join that community. We'll put the links up on all this stuff in the show notes. Join that community so we can have real conversations with you about money, about wealth, about financial independence, financial security. How do we do this the right way, especially for entrepreneurs? How do we take you from treadmill Entrepreneur to affluent entrepreneurs? So I'd be blessed to be on this journey with you further, and so I'd look forward to hearing from you, helping you and seeing you soar. Until next time. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook Group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

And that's it for this episode of Building youg Money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.