Breaking Through Your Money Mindset Blocks

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. Hey, there. Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. This one's a little different. Again, here's the deal. I did a live stream all about how do you break through the mental blocks when it comes to money, wealth, wealth creation, and that type of thing? Here's what we know. There's a whole lot of stuff going on in our head. There's a whole lot of stories going on that hold us back, that keep us in a place where we don't see money the way we should, where we don't see the wealth that we should have in our lives. And the reality is, is that we have the mental blocks and we have the habits. Remember, wealth creation is about behaviors. So in this live, I start to break down the things that you can do to build the habits to overcome the stories in your head. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It is a live training that I did, but I wanted to bring it to you because I think this is really important and to give to the whole community. So enjoy the episode. I'll see you in the episode. Cheers.

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 absolute entrepreneur.

All right, we are live on all the channels right now.

I got you on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube and. And all of that. So here's. Here's the wonderful thing. First off, make sure you say hi. I hope that you're having an incredible, incredible Saturday, an incredible day. And this week has been an a crazy, good week. I don't know any. Any week that I get a chance to serve any Any week that I get a chance to have a conversation with, with the community and helping people find this path, it's important to me. It means the world to me. It drives me. So we got people from Brazil. It's a place I haven't been yet. I got to get down there. So Brazil, Florida, some of you might be in my Facebook groups. And if you comment from a Facebook group, do me a favor, drop in your name. Because otherwise it comes up as Facebook user and I want to give you a little more respect than Facebook user and all of that stuff. So British, British Columbia, Canada is in the house. So here's the thing. I want to have a deeper conversation around the money.

Mindset blocks. Listen, this week, this week we did the very first training of my. The affluent entrepreneur experience. This is the deep dive training I do once a year to help people understand the process to affluence, especially as an entrepreneur. And the fact of the matter is that too often entrepreneurs get it wrong. Too often entrepreneurs, they jump into business cause they wanna have an impact, they wanna provide a solution, they wanna make a difference in people's lives. They want to improve the human condition and they believe that along the way.

That that's also gonna give them control and financial freedom. And nothing could be further from the truth. I know that, yeah, I'm just pouring cold water on the parade here. But the reality is, is that your business was never meant to give you financial freedom. It was never meant to even give you control. It was meant to have an impact. It was meant to create a solution. It was meant to improve the human condition and it was meant to do that at a profit. That's it. Now it's about what we do with those profits to create the financial freedom that you deserve. And, and so that's what this, the whole training is about, this path to financial freedom. And this isn't a. The training isn't about theory, it isn't about, you know, academics and statistics. It's about actually the miles that I've run. Not only myself, the mistakes I've made, the things that I've done, but also my clients, my own family, my son. Okay? So the idea here is to give you real world experience, real world tactics and strategies. And we do that over these three special trainings. Now this is an added training because I think it's important for us to deal with the mind stuff when it comes to money stuff. And so here's where I, where we start to look at it in this. Russell, thank you so much, man. It's good to have you back here and doing this so. Because here's what I found out and this whole session was actually.

A result of a question that came in from someone in the community. And I'll read the question to you because. And bring that up in a second as we get into it. But over the years that I've been doing this, I have worked with people that are just starting out. I have had the blessing to work with millionaires, 100 millionaires, billionaires. I've had conversations with them around their money. I've had conversations around wealth and what's meaningful and richness and all that stuff. Here's the interesting thing. It didn't matter whether they were millionaires, billionaires, 100,000 heirs, whatever it is, every single one of them, every single one of them without fail had some elements.

Of guilt and shame around money. See, some people actually had guilt and shame because they had the money. Some people had guilt and shame because they had the money and they lost the money. Some had guilt and shame because they don't have. But nonetheless, they still struggled with the same emotions. They struggled with stories, they struggled with a lot of that that went on. And when I first kind of came into this space, starting to teach, let's face it, I'm an accountant, we do numbers, columns and rows and everything adds up and it's beautiful and all of that stuff. So I was sitting back saying, I'm just going to talk tactics. I'm going to tell them what to do, how to do it. I'm going to give you the tools and the frameworks and that's it. And the mind stuff, I'm going to forget. It didn't take me long to figure out.

That if we don't deal with the stuff in the head, we'll never deal with the stuff in the bank account. Let me say that again. If we don't deal with the stuff in the head, we won't be able to deal with the stuff in the bank again. And so this is the thing that I want to. I want to dig a little deeper. And we touched on it in the first training. If you have not seen that first training, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to Affluence Live. I think I have it here. For those of you that are on YouTube or Facebook, you can see it affluencelive.com go there, grab your spot and watch the replay. I just put it up on an all access page and in fact I put some additional trainings on that page. One training around how to get out of debt the right way, and another training around the money maxims to live by that the wealthy live by. The four money maxims to live by. So there's additional training up there too for you. The idea here is I want you to, to feel like you've got a safe same place with resources that are actually going to move the needle for you financially. They're going to give you the tools. This isn't about selling you investments, isn't about selling you portfolio or insurance or anything. This is about equipping you, educating you, and empowering you to take control of your financial future, to put your hands on that steering wheel, to be the captain of the ship. And so when we look at this idea of the mindset and breaking through the mind blocks, let's just go back for a second. And those of you that are on Instagram, unfortunately, you won't be able to see this, but I'll explain it to you as we go through it. We talked about in the series, we talked about the whole money story dynamic, the stories that are going on in our head. Here's the thing.

I said this before. No one actually has money issues. And I know that you might sit back or you haven't seen my bank account. You haven't seen my life now. No, I haven't. But I have seen a lot of people's lives, including my own. Okay, we don't have money issues. I just truly don't believe that what we have is money symptoms. Symptoms of choices, behaviors and decisions we've made in the past. Whether it's to take a job, not to take a job, whether it's to do a side hustle or not do it, whether it's to get to skill up, to learn new skills, to increase your value so you can get paid more or not, whether it's to get coaching or not. Those are choices. Those are decisions. They affect our future. And we need to realize that they do affect that. See, I think, and I believe.

That when we look at it through those eyes, it's actually empowering. I, I get that it's confronting because if I tell you that the reason you are where you are financially is because of the behaviors and the choices and decisions it's confronting, you're looking at and going, wait a second.

Because it feels like I'm blaming you, but I'm not. I've made a ton of bad financial decisions. I've lost more money than some people make in a lifetime.

So it's not about blame, it's about responsibility, your ability to respond.

When we come from a place of saying, if it is my behaviors, if it is my habits, if it is my decisions, it makes it easy to change because all I got to do is change the behaviors, habits and decisions. And now the results that we get are different. We're going to talk about my to walk you through a four part framework of how do you change those habits so you get different results from a financial standpoint to make that happen. But we need to understand that how do these stories become such an impact in our life from a financial standpoint? Does this make sense? If it's making sense, let me know. But the reality is that is this. When we start out.

We don't learn our financial.

Acumen, our financial literacy by taking a class. In fact, there's only 14 states right now in the United States that actually require high schoolers to take a course on money. I think that's a travesty. We need more. This should be a, a skill, a core skill that we are teaching our youth. But we don't. So that being the case, where do we get our information from? Where do we get our education from? And most of it is caught, not taught. What I mean by that is that we're observing what others are doing. We're watching what others are doing with their money. And we think that that is right. We might have watched our parents, but yet our parents are struggling. So what are we watching? A struggling parent trying to figure out the money thing. And now all of a sudden we're going to take on those things we're watching on social media. Well, we all know that social media is, is not truthful. People are parading their facades of a perfect life and that's not the reality.

We're observing what they say in the media. But the media is all about ratings. It's all about eyeballs, it's all about advertising.

So where are we getting this from? Because here's what happens is we actually end up in a situation where we observe something.

And through that observation, what ends up happening? It's not the observation that creates the problem, it's the interpretation. We interpret it. And if I misspell anything, I am so sorry, but my iPad doesn't have spell check and that. But we're just going to deal with it. Now here's the thing is that we give it meaning. So we observe something, we see something. We see that our parents are arguing about money and now we interpret it as, oh, money creates problems. Well, how's that going to serve me down the road? Okay? Or we see something on the news about someone who stole and everything, and we start to say, money is for the greedy.

Okay? And so we create an interpretation, a meaning on the observation that meaning then moves us to an identity.

In that identity. And this is where it starts to really come off the rails for us if we're not careful, is that that identity then leads to a behavior.

So if I see money as a greedy tool, if I see money as dirty as bad, it's going to create a behavior in alignment with that belief. And when it creates that behavior, what it ultimately does is it creates something that I call your money set point. This is the threshold in which you'll never rise above until we remove.

Those limitations. Okay?

So an innocent observation as a child can create an interpretation that creates an identity and a behavior that affects us for the rest of our lives. Finding financially, hopefully this makes sense.

So the idea here is this. One of the things that we need to do, remember, is to look at this and first separate. And we did an exercise in that first training, and I. It's in the workbook, and hopefully you're doing the journaling, is to separate the observation, the facts of what happened from the interpretation that we gave it. Let me give you, for instance. Some of you know that I lost one third of my net worth in a Ponzi scheme. I got involved in something 2005, lost 1/3 of my net worth, and I started to give an interpretation to that. I started to beat myself up. I said, I shouldn't be a CPA anymore. I shouldn't be giving financial advice. I shouldn't be investing. I'm an idiot. I can't believe this. You know, I'm a loser. I mean, all the things were going through my head.

But I had to separate the meaning, the interpretation.

From the facts. See, if I lived with that interpretation, where would I be? Well, first off, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Second, I wouldn't be at the financial freedom point that I'm at. I wouldn't get a chance to serve the way I am. But the way we separate out the facts from the interpretation is this. I pretend that I have a camera and I have no sound, so I can't hear anything, but all I can do is see.

And you got to look at it and say, well, what? In that observation, what would the camera see? What the camera saw is me giving someone money. What the camera saw is me giving someone more money. What the camera saw Is this person taking the money and never giving anything back.

What the camera saw was that my money was taken from me, but my skills weren't.

When I look at it through those eyes, then I can separate the interpretation of me being a loser and the fact that someone took money from me. Separate and look at it through a different set of eyes, because it is that point where then I can take responsibility and said, what was my responsibility? Not blame. Responsibility to do in this. What caused this? Well, what caused it.

Was me giving money. But really, what caused it was me not following financial rules. Me. What caused it was not following sound financial principles. What caused it was me not having the right priorities and processes in place. What did that result in? It resulted in exactly what I'm teaching you all today. It resulted in me turning around saying, what are the rules that I will not violate moving forward? So I grew out of it. I learned from it. I should have, because it cost me a whole bunch of money. I mean, it is like I paid for five PhDs at Ivy League schools with what I lost in that Ponzi scheme.

And the worst thing about losing money that way.

Is if you don't take the lessons from it, you will be doomed to lose it again. And so when we start to look at those stories and the interpretations. This isn't about you. As hard as it is, it isn't about you when you personalize it. Like I was saying, I'm a loser. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm personalizing it. But it wasn't about me. There was things that happened that were facts. There are things that I did to allow that to happen. But that's not a judgment on me. It's not a judgment on you. There should be no shame. There should be no guilt. You made choices, I made choices. And now we get to make different choices because we have more information. I learned something. All right, so when we look at it through those eyes now, the situation is, okay, great, Mel. If it is behaviors, how do I bring those behaviors to, like, new behaviors to life? How do we bring these new habits? Well, through the training, we're going to talk about the principles that you need. I'll do that in the next training.

So you can follow principles. And the reason I use principles instead, because some people will say, hey, you know, what should I invest in right now? It's the wrong question to ask, because investments will come and go. Investments will go in favor and out of favor.

Principles. They're here to stay. It doesn't matter. Time. It doesn't matter what country you're in, what part of the world you're in. Principles are true no matter what. Principles are universal systems of behavior. And that's what's going to drive you. Well, so let's just look at this. I want to, I want to bring up the question that was, that was posed so it'll set the stage for what we're going to talk about here. And this is from Tina. I will read it to you if I can. Let's see. Hey there. A couple questions. How do you know.

If you've truly hit on the right root cause of your money demon? So I call them money demons, the things that are haunting you.

There can be so many layers and there can be. I feel like I've done this work before, but obviously still lots of things to flush out. Is it a matter of taking a newfound truth about the facts from all the reflection and create new meanings and then affirming it and consistently getting it to build in subconscious, you know, is it, does it take 21 days, 30 days? What can it happen quickly? I'm paraphrasing it now, but. So here's the thing. This is such a good question and comes with some things that we need to consider in doing this and that is this. So first off, I believe that it can change in a moment. This isn't long term, but one of the things that we need to understand in order for it to change in a moment is what's your why?

Why? Why do I need to change it? Why do I want to change it? Let me give you, for instance. Many of you know that in 2019, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. They found what they thought was a five centimeter tumor. My bladder turned out to be seven and a half centimeters. Been through three surgeries, four tumors, 47 treatments. I'm clear, clean, two and a half years clean right now. But I wasn't a candidate. I didn't have the risk factors for cancer. I wasn't a smoker. I wasn't really a drinker. I ate healthy. I worked out all the time. I did have a sweet tooth. I had a sweet tooth. And one of the things that they said is that sugar fuels cancer. And I said, huh, okay. But a lot of people knew I had the sweet tooth. They said, oh, Mel's never going to give up sugar. He's got a sweet. He's never going to give him sugar. But here's the why. I love life. I love my wife. I love life. I wasn't ready to give it up. And I said, all right, let me figure this out. Because now all of a sudden, sugar was no longer pleasure. Sugar was equated to cancer. Cancer was equated to death. Changed in an instant. Since June of 2019, consciously, I've avoided as much processed sugar as possible. I've tried to not take any in. I am sure that I got some in. But I am looking at labels, I am asking at restaurants. I'm avoiding it at all costs. And it's not that it was hard, it was just that my why was strong enough that I said, huh? I can change it in an instant. So your money habits can change in an instant. But I'm going to give you a framework to help you make that happen. Okay? Because it wouldn't be a training for Mel if there wasn't a framework involved. And so. But the first thing that I think we need to really look at is this.

Is to be willing and open to accept wherever you're at. See, too often, especially as things get uncertain, things get unstable and maybe you see your retirement going down or you didn't get enough, you didn't put enough money aside, we start to fall into this blame game. We start to beat ourselves up. I should have, I could have, I got, you know, I should have listened and you know, I should have. I wish I'd have found Mel sooner, whatever it is, but that doesn't serve us. Blame is in the past.

I think that we just need to accept. And as soon as we accept something as is, we can move to what could be.

It wasn't until I accepted the fact that, okay, I got cancer. What's next? What do I need to do? Wherever you're at. So the first thing is to accept it. Now let me walk you through this idea of how habits go. And this is something that I call the, the habit cycle. And this is a shift in Charles. I think his name is Duhigg. D U H I G G He wrote the Power of Habits. It's a great book. I don't know how to pronounce his name, but he does three steps in what he calls the habit loop. I think there's a missing step. And I want to walk you through this so you understand this. And then I want to give you a four step process to start to create habits that will shift, shift your financial future forever. It's not even your financial future. It'll shift whatever habit you're trying to change when you do this. Okay? Because here's what we found. When you start to look at statistics, 40% of our actions during a day, 40% are not conscious decisions, but habits. So think about this. 40% of everything you do is done unconsciously because you created habits. Habits are a big part of our life. And so a lot of times things are going on, and we don't even know that they're going on because we're just going about it because we built these habits unconsciously. Research has shown.

That the best way to bring change into your life life is to bring a set of new habits into your life.

See, when we have habits, productive habits, what happens is just like the bad habits become unconscious, what happens is, because we're operating from a habit standpoint, there's no friction.

In the decisions, good or bad. So I want to make sure that we're creating something that removes the friction from the decisions for the good stuff, but puts the friction in on the decisions of the bad stuff. Let's make it hard to make bad decisions and easy to make good decisions. And so this idea of the habit cycle is a. Is kind of a cycle that you will go through. And this is the way habits kind of are formed. And. And the first piece of it is, is this, is that there's a root to all habits that are created, okay? And when I mean root, it's. It's the beginning that it has to start somewhere. There's something that triggers the habit, triggers you to go and grab a cup of coffee, triggers you to go and pick up a piece of, you know, a cracker or something, triggers you to do something, okay? But it is the root of it. It's not the habit. And what happens is that once that root happens, it leads to a routine which is actually the habits. That's the thing that actually is running in the background is this routine unconsciously. I mean, how many of you automatically get up in the morning, first thing you go, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth. I mean, you probably do the exact same process every single morning unconsciously. You don't deliberately think about it.

And so when you do it that way, this is what I mean by unconscious habits. You know, if your unconscious habit is every time you get up, you put your feet in those tennis shoes and you put your gym clothes on, you go to the gym, or you do a walk, or you do some writing, all that stuff, we can talk about my morning ritual, because I have a ritual. I have habits that I do every single morning, every single evening that that routine will turn around and create something in your life.

That for some reason you look at it as a reward.

Something comes to you that.

Rewards you or you wouldn't keep doing it.

There's a reason people have coffee and I have coffee in the morning. So there's a reason that people will. Will eat. There's a reward there of some sort. Not maybe not consciously.

Maybe not intentionally. Now, those are the three things that Charles talks about in his book. I think that there's one piece that's missing that I think we need to consider. And this is where I think we have the opportunity to change the habits. And that's when we start to look at things through this. The eyes of reflection.

And what I mean by this is that we take a moment to start to evaluate the habits.

That are driving our life.

Because when we evaluate them, then we have the opportunity to change them. But how do we change them? So this is where I want to go. I want to walk you through something that I call the habit builder framework. It's going to give you the four steps. There's just four steps that you need to take to start to create new habits. At the end, I want you to be. We're going to create a habit. I want you to create a specific money habit that is going to serve you as we move forward. You can use this for health, you can use it for money. You can use it for relationships. We'll talk about some of this.

So many of our habits are created unconsciously, just like the money money stories are created unconsciously. We observe things and we create things. We start to do things habitually. We don't even realize that we're creating it. It's like we create this rut in the road. And too often we live unconsciously. 40% of our life is driven by habits unconsciously. What we need to consider is, how do I create habits with intent and with a specific outcome. And so that's what leads me to this whole idea of the habit builder. And like I said, there's four steps to it. Now, the first step in it is this is that I want to define the root. If the root is the thing that triggers it.

Let'S define it. Now. Your triggers. The things that kick off habits come in five different areas. There's five different ways you can create, and you'll see where this starts to play into the things that you're doing. Okay, the first trigger is this.

Is time.

Remember as. As. As we started to look at this, and I said, how many of you wake up in the morning and automatically go and brush your teeth? Automatically go and do something here automatically. Go downstairs. Like, we have an app. We have a. Okay, I'm almost embarrassed to say this. We have a coffee machine that runs off of an app. So literally from the bed, we can say, start making coffee. And it's. It's grinding the beans, it's doing all of that, like, before we ever get downstairs.

Time. We do things in the morning, we do certain things in the evening. We do certain things at a certain time of year. Create habits.

And so time is a trigger. And we can use time as a trigger. Now, all of these are things that can be happening to you, or you can use them as triggers for you. So, for instance.

In the evening, I set everything up that I'm going to do for the morning. Now, I know in my morning. My mornings are usually going to be. I get up early, I get up before Stephanie does, and before Budo does, I go out, I sit, I think, and I write.

Once I'm done with that.

I then go to the gym, I get my workout in. But in order to get my workout in, I have. In the morning, I have my shoes set out, my clothes set out, everything. So I immediately get up, get dressed, go brush my teeth, get ready, sit, right.

Reflect, go to the gym, come back, take Buddha down on the beach, come back, I watch the stock market open, get some things done, then get on with my day. So time triggers things, okay? The second trigger that you'll see. Whoops. The second trigger is location. Location. Here's an interesting thing that happens to me, and I don't know why. So I will travel and speak all around the country and all around the world. And for some reason, as soon as I walk into a hotel room, I have this urge to eat. I don't know why not because I'm hungry. But the location.

Triggers a response. What locations trigger a response? What things? Trigger response in your life. You know, you go to a place that maybe you've been to before, and it triggers a response. Every time that I'm down on the beach, it triggers a response. And that response is to relax.

To inhale, to shift my breathing.

It wasn't always that way. I consciously created it that way. I used the location as a trigger. So you gotta. You'll decide on the trigger. The third kind of trigger that you have is an event. Now, this can be negative, positive. This is where PTSD and things like that can come into play, is that when there's an event.

It can trigger a response. Now, I. I'm embarrassed to say this, but. So my. My Wife was.

She was out in the field for a while. Now she works primarily from home and everything. She, she's got an amazing, amazing career. She's, she's, she's brilliant executive, doing the stuff that she does. But she used to come home from being out in the field and I would be, I was in my work, in my work, in my work. And she come home and I'm yeah, yeah, honey, I'm in my work. That didn't feel good to her. And it wasn't until I got conscious of it to say, wait a second. So I had to shift the habit. Shift the habit. So the event was garage door opens, garage door opens, phone goes down, everything goes down. I sit up, I get up and I meet her.

The event is the garage door.

What events can you, can you do now? The event could be getting paid and I'm going to make an investment. The event could be. We were just having a conversation yesterday about when you start to build things, do you take and celebrate the success? The event is, the success is going to trigger a celebration. So there's event driven triggers that come into play.

Then there is emotion triggers that can be into play. Now emotions. This is interesting.

It's just another confession. I'm a stress eater. So if I've got things going on in my head and there's stress, I'm typically going to go eat something. And I know that now this is a real problem because my office happens to be downstairs not far from the pantry. It's dangerous. It's a dangerous geography. But emotions, stress, fear.

You know, angst, okay, anger, all those things can cause you to go spend, cause you to go shopping, cause you to do Other addictions, those emotions can also be triggers for habits. And we need to be aware of that or at the same time, we need to embed it for a positive change. You know, when I feel this, I do this, okay? Being conscious and intentional about the habits is the key to creating new habits, at least at the start. And then the last trigger that you can have is people.

And I think that if you look at this, you'll understand. Look, there's a lot of us that, that are, have been in people's lives where we kind of go, I cannot be in the same room with that person. It's a trigger. It's a trigger. Now there are other sides of it where you go, I just love being with that person. They got this positive energy and excitement. I always feel good when I'm around them. Those are triggers. Or like a little my Little dog. He's not little. He's 60 pounds now. Buddha man, he comes in, you can almost see the smile on his face. And there's a peace.

That comes over me every time I see him. And he comes wagging his tail. And so the first step to creating habits that will affect changes, change for you is to sit back and say, what triggers am I going to use? Define the trigger for the habit. Is it every time you walk in the house? Is it every time you get a paycheck? Is it every time you see the person? Is it every time? And you define the trigger with intent. Then the next stage of that. So that, remember, I said there's four steps to it. The second step of this is that we define the trigger. Now we need to define.

The reward.

What are we actually going to come away with.

When this trigger happens? Okay, So I decide that instead of going to the pantry to go get crackers or something else, we have much junk food since the cancer and everything. I'm going to eat a piece of fruit. So that's my reward.

This is the same reason that when I coach people and we're building and we're budgeting, we're planning and we're projecting, we say, what is going to be your celebration reward when you succeed? See, too often as entrepreneurs, we don't take the moment to slow down and say, I'm going to celebrate. So it might be, you're going to buy a new iPhone, you're going to go on a vacation, you're going to go out to dinner with your spouse, whatever it is, how big or small, define the reward that would be emotionally compelling and meaningful for you.

For you.

And now we define the reward. We now know what the reward is. That leads us to the third stage. And the third stage, and I'll explain this to you, is expectation.

Association.

This is something we need to be actually mindful of as we start to look at this, and that is this.

Often, especially in today's world, we get moved to do things that we wouldn't otherwise do because of the expectations of others. How many times have you thought about buying something because someone else just bought it? How often are you seeing this stuff on Instagram and going, oh, listen, the reason we got that freaking coffee machine that works from an app is because I saw it on Instagram.

You know, but the question is that at what point do you stop and look at and say, wait, am I making a decision because of the expectations of society? Parents, others, my neighbors, my peers, or I'm making A decision.

That is specific to my intent and my vision from a financial standpoint. See, one of the old kind of sayings was keeping up with the Joneses. We start to make buying decisions because someone else bought it. Give you a for instance.

I drive it. Yeah. A lot of people know I drive a Tesla. I love Teslas.

And. And I've had a few, right? And a friend of mine and his wife rode in the back of the Tesla. We went to dinner with time. Literally within a week and a half, he sent me a text with a picture of him. He put a Tesla on hold. Okay. Wasn't because I expected him to do it, but was he in the market for a Tesla? Was he even in the market for a car? Or did he make a buying decision because of expectation association? This will cost you in the long run if we're not careful about it. Let people live their lives.

Their way. You may or may not agree with it. That's not your choice. Okay. But let's separate and make sure that we are not making buying decisions, financial decisions, money decisions, because of expectation association.

So we know how to define the trigger. We know that we got to define the reward, and we know that we have to eliminate the expectation association. Now, there is a positive way to use expectation association, which is the fourth step of this. And the fourth step of this is a belief.

Community.

So when we talk about this, this idea of a. Of a belief community, what we're really talking about, how do we put ourselves in a place and with people that understand our vision, our values, our desire, our intent, and where we're going to go and are going to support the journey to get us there.

This is why we need coaches. This is why we need mentors. This is why we need masterminds and things like that. This is the good of it. Now you need people that are not. These aren't people that are in your life that are just going to simply say yes to everything you do.

These are people that I say, I got you. You got this. You keep going. It's the same thing. It's the reason I do my show. It's the reason I do the things I do. I got this, you got this. And we got. We're going to keep you going. Financial freedom is your birthright. We're going to give you the pathway to make it happen. Let's go claim it. Let's do it without. With sane and safe conversations. That's it. But at the same time, there will be the same people in this belief community that know you enough that they're going to sit back and hold you to the higher standard that you want to be, that they're going to be willing to look at you and say, you know what? Isn't it true you want this?

But these things that you're making decisions on.

How do they align with that? That they're willing to lovingly kick your behind and say, hey, you're not living into what you say you're living into. So this belief community isn't just a bunch of positivity. It is a belief community that is. It is moving you in the direction that you want to go. It is supporting the habits I'll give you. For instance, when I stopped, when I got the cancer, one of the things that I did is I stopped sugars, grains, and dairy. I got a dear friend of mine, and we would go out to lunch, and one of our favorite places is this. This Mexican place. It's not really Mexican. I mean, it's nice stuff, okay? Their tacos are off the charts.

And they'll say, would you. You know, they come to the table and they say, would you like, you know, you want to start off with guacamole? You want to start off with chips and guacamole? He said, yeah, can you bring us chips and guacamole? And do me a favor, can you bring me some carrot sticks or cucumber sticks and everything? Because my friend doesn't eat the chips. That is a belief community that gets you. That's going to support you in your journey, and that's going to help you move yourself forward. And so when we look at this, we. We look at and say, all right, so the four steps define the trigger. The root. And the root could be time, it could be location, it could be an event, it could be emotion, it could be people. The five different ways that you can get it. Define the reward, beware of the expectation, association, and create a belief community, whether it is a coach, a mentor, a group of people, a mastermind, or something do that. I have belonged to masterminds and coaching groups for decades, okay? I belong to a board of directors. I sit on many companies. Boards of directors. One company that was founded in the late 1800s. Why do they have boards of directors? Is because they need perspective. They need a belief community. They need people to. To make those. Help them make the decisions and make sure that they're focused on the goals. It's the same thing. We all need it. And they may not be. This may be hard, but a lot of cases it May not be your family, there may be someone else. Okay, so here's the thing. A couple things I want you to do as I close this out. Hopefully you found this valuable. I want you to ask yourself some questions when it comes to these four things.

And you get to this association. Ask yourself, what associations do I need to support my desired journey?

And we back that truck up and we say, what habits do I need to support the outcome? So what habits do I need to support the outcome? Well, if it's wealth and it's financial freedom, we need a habit of.

Investing, which means that we need savings, we need money management, we need a financial literacy. Okay, so what habits do I need? Well, that might include every night reading a couple pages from a financial book. It might mean listening to like a show or a podcast like mine. It might mean getting into a course, those habits. Then ask yourself, what associations do I need for this journey? Who do I need to be around and be in their world to support me in this journey? Make a list.

Figure out how to get into that circle. Some of it might be paid, some of it may not be paid, but we need to. I listen. No one is self made. I don't buy into that. Okay, I'm not self made. First off.

I'm not made by myself. I'm made by some higher powers. I'm made by. By you. You impact me. I couldn't be where I'm at if it wasn't for you. I couldn't be where I'm at if it wasn't for my loved ones. I couldn't be where I'm at if it wasn't for my customers. I couldn't be where I'm at if it wasn't for my teachers, my mentors, my coaches and my friends. And so self made, I don't think so. We're all made by the associations.

And the experiences that we, we come into. So I asked myself, what associations do I need to make that happen? Now.

The next question to ask yourself is this. Who do I have to be.

To have the things that I want?

If I don't have the things that I want, a part of that is because I'm not being what I need to be or who I need to be to have those things.

Which then leads to this last question of am I doing the things that a person that has what I want would do? Am I doing the things that a person that has what I want would do? So in other words, when we talk about money and we talk about finances and we talk about financial freedom, we need to ask ourselves, am I doing the things? Would someone in that is building wealth or that is financial free, would they make the same financial decision that I'm doing to put a bunch of stuff on a credit card, to live beyond my means, to not put money away? And the answer is no.

So this is where I think we look at what associations do I need? Who do you have to be to have the things you want? And are you doing the things that will drive towards that? But all of this is umbrellaed under why you want it. Because if the why isn't strong enough, you won't get the associations, you won't do those things. You'll find excuses and not get results. So here's what I'm going to ask from you today, is that as I close this out, I want you to think about one money habit, one that you could do in the next seven days.

That could be simply opening up a High Yield Cash account and putting five, five dollars in it. One, what can you do in the next seven days? That takes a step in the direction you want to take. And now I want you to pull out your diary, your calendar, your whatever you want to call it, and I want you to schedule it. We don't leave the site.

Of setting a different trajectory without taking the first step.

So if it is that I'm going to open a High Yield Cash account, I'm going to put it on the calendar for Monday because it doesn't take long. You could even do it today online. Go to bank bankrate.com, find a high yield Cash account, get it open and then move $5. And remember, I'm not worried about the amount. I'm worried about the habit that you're starting to create. Because If I put $5 to tomorrow in and I put $5 in a week and another week, all of a sudden that gets momentum over time. This is about creating habits that shift behaviors which shift your results. And when we start to strip away the mind blocks and break them down to behaviors, we now find our way into a different place. So I hope that this helps. I hope that this kind of gives you a framework from which to look at.

The habits that maybe drive the things that are, that are going on. Listen, I get it. Some people might be in debt, some people may be struggling, some people might be sitting back saying, hey, I'm 60 years old now, mind you, 60 is not old because I'm 61, all right? And my wife says I'm not acting a day over 12. So I'm never going to grow up, I'm never going to mature. I am who I am and this is the way it is. So. But, but my point being is that whatever your circumstances are, we can change it. Will we get 100% to where you want to go or where you wish you would have gotten? Maybe, maybe not.

But we will get closer.

Than we would if we didn't try. And you don't have to do it alone. That is why we're here. That is why I'm here, is why I'm doing the training. It's why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. It's why I want you in the training with me. It's totally free. Let's do this thing together. Let's get into a community where it becomes your belief. Belief, community to move you forward where you can get the right expectation association, where they can help you define the rewards that move you towards your goal and create the triggers that will get you Moving. Go to affluencelive.com if you are not in the training, join the training. Go through the first training's replay. It's on an all access page, give you access to it. And then the, the. We've got more trainings coming up next week. All right, but let's move you forward. No matter where you're at, we can get you further along to the goals, the vision that you want. Financial freedom. It's your birthright. We've never really been taught how to go claim it. Well, that stops today. That stops now. You found a home, you found a family and you found a place where we can have, have real conversations, safe conversations around money, around wealth, around a financial future that matters. The reason you want it is because of the difference you want to make in the world and the way you want to make that difference for your children, for your grandchildren, for the movements, for the missions to do it. All right, so go to affluence live.com if you're on Instagram, there's a link in my bio that will do it. If you're anywhere else, I will put something up so you can get it. Affluencelive.com join me in the training. Let's go through it. You'll get the workbook. We'll go through some exercises, you'll get some things. We'll move you forward and give you the tools, the tactics, the strategies. It's about getting the right priorities, the right principles, the right processes that have been proven over time. No matter what's going on in the economy, I don't care. Recession or not, I don't care. Bear market or bull market, let's give you the foundational elements that will drive wealth and dive financial, your financial future. Okay? And let's do it together. All right. I hope that you found this of value. I can't wait to see you soar. And if there's anything I can do, do me a favor, reach out to me, let me know. DM me, send me a note, share this with people. Because I think that we have people that are in pain financially and they don't need to be. So let's give them some tools. Let's do this with a whole group of a whole lot of people. Because the more financially free that you are, the more financially free the world is, the more we can get behind the missions, get behind the movements, make a difference, and have the things that we want to have. Not material possessions, but to experience the richer lifestyle, the deeper impact and the complete freedom that you deserve in an affluent life. Until we get a chance to see each other, another training or in the training or in the Facebook group or on the road, As I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Thank you and God bless you all. Cheers. I'll see you soon.

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 forward/group, and I'll see you there.

And that's it for this episode of Building your 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 your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.