Rewriting Your Money Story
Yesterday, I was listening to John Assaraf of The Secret talk about his tips for breaking through the mental money barriers that limit you and keep you from earning what you are really worth. It comes down to the programming you’ve received about what money is and what your relationship to it is, and if you want to change that, you have to change the story that your brain is writing in your head about you and your finances.
This is actually a topic I’ve been preparing to give a talk on recently. Not on rewriting your money story, specifically, but on giving yourself a life makeover by rewriting the stories of your life in every area where you want to see change. Those stories are ultimately what dictate your belief and the belief is what dictates the thoughts and the thoughts are what dictate the behaviors. Some of those stories got written by you when you were just four years old!
Most of us wouldn’t consciously choose to put a four year old child in charge of our lives, but subconsciously that is exactly what we have been doing. The results, not surprisingly, are to have our lives look a great deal like a four year old child has been running them. Financial and relationship disasters, poor work habits and career choices, and even our choices in how we handle traffic.
To get to the root of the mindset that needs to change, we have to find the story that needs rewriting. That was my thought process. And I still think that is part of the answer. But after watching John’s YouTube video I think there’s more to it than that. He talked about cognitive priming being one of the first steps to achieving your goals.
Cognitive priming means preparing the brain to accept the idea of your new way of life as being something that is good and right for you to achieve. Essentially, it’s teaching the brain to believe that you already possess what you want, even if you haven’t yet gotten it. Here was his advice:
“Write down one of the biggest goals that you want to achieve in the next 12 months. Now, I want you to start today and I want you to look at it three times a day. And while you look at it, I want you to pretend that you are a Hollywood actor or actress that’s going to win an Academy award if you take that goal and you emotionalize it and you really feel the part. What I want you to do is to really get into the mindset, the emotion, and the belief, the internal belief, of what it would mean to you to really have this goal in your life already achieved.”
That was the moment it hit me. While his strategy would no doubt work over time, there was a faster way to reprogram the brain. It’s a method that I happen to know a lot about as a writer. I’ve done a considerable amount of research on how the brain processes ideas and how it is wired. It isn’t wired for random thoughts or ideas. It is wired for stories.
When we read a story, multiple centers of the brain light up and are activated. If there is sensory data provided, our brains will process what we are reading as if it was actually something we were personally experiencing. The better a job that is done at writing the scene, the more intensely that we will experience it.
That is when I realized that simply taking a belief and rewriting it wasn’t going to be nearly as powerful as writing a totally new story in which we walk through what it would be like to be what we want to be, complete with all the sensory details that we need for our mind to fill in the blanks, and then reading that story to ourselves over and over again until it carves itself on the brain.
Now, as part of writing that story, we need to treat ourselves as if we were the main character of this new story. Whenever we come to the part where we are talking about the goal we achieved, we need to ask ourselves how we got there, what we did to achieve that goal. Write that into the story as well.
For example, I have a goal of winning a contest to speak in front of 150 women this September. Now, I need to not just visualize the dress that I will wear up on stage and the flight that will take me there, but meeting the 20 women that bought their tickets through me and spending the weekend enjoying time getting to know them when we aren’t busy soaking up the amazing content provided by Carolin Soldo.
Who did I invite? Why did I invite them? What results do I know that they are going to achieve because I helped them to find out about the contest and encouraged them to invest in their own personal development?
What is going to happen to my business as a result of having won that contest? How does it feel to be able to stand up on stage and share with them my personal story of turning my tragedies into triumph? What contacts and connections do I end up making as result of having won that contest?
How does it feel to get to stay in luxury accommodations there in Miami? How does it feel to know that I earned my way here and achieved my dream and the bed that I am sleeping in is mine because I devoted myself to helping other people? Those are the questions I need to ask. This is how detailed the story ought to be.
And when I read it back to myself, it needs to be done out loud. If I can record it and read it at the same time, I will have the confidence to achieve it and the strategy in place to get it done. It will be mine. It’s just a matter of time.
When I’m done writing that story, I’ll also have the keys to writing any other story I want to write about the life I want to live. I’ll have unlocked the ability to create strategies and execute plans that lead me wherever it is I want to go in life. Because I have big dreams and goals, and I am more than enough to achieve those.
If you want help with your Mindset Makeover, consider this my invitation to join me tomorrow, Saturday, July 23rd at 1 pm CST for a webinar I’m hosting. You’ll be given a blue print to create this amazing story of your new life at the end of it. I look forward to seeing you there. Together, we’re going to write the world a better place.
