We all know that the ability to earn money is important because it gives us greater choice about how we live our lives. In basic economic terms, the amount of money we earn is simply the market value we are contributing to others. Let’s explore the mindset of wealth creation and let me show you how you can attract more wealth into your life.
Let’s ask the billion-dollar question: “HOW do we earn MORE money?”
This is ultimately the same as asking “How can we add more value to more people?” Zig Ziglar said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want”. One example of this is Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who found a way to contribute to billions of people’s needs through social networking. However, it is not necessary to start a company like Facebook to become wealthy, particularly in the emerging burgeoning online community of freelancers, micro-entrepreneurs and consultants, who are creating their own income in what success.com refers to as the “You-economy”. People can make good money from network marketing, running an eBay business, or even making amusing cat videos on YouTube. The economy and wealth creation game has transformed, and definitely for the better. Never before in history has anyone with just a smartphone and internet access had this much opportunity to become wealthy.
But first, to achieve wealth creation we need to have an insatiable curiosity and desire to figure out how we can contribute more value to others. The world’s most successful and influential business leaders, speakers, authors and entrepreneurs in the success industry all unanimously agree that our own mindset is the first and most important aspect to work on to maximise our wealth. Entrepreneur Jim Rohn famously said, “Work hard at your job and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune.”
Tony Robbins, the world’s leading life strategist and author of best-selling book Money: Master the Game, asserts that “success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics”. This means the major contributing factor of our ability to generate wealth ultimately comes down to our mindset, which is made up of our attitudes, values, and beliefs around money, which have been entirely conditioned by our past experiences.
Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, has more to add to the psychology of wealth creation, saying “the size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” Zig Ziglar also said that “your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude”.
For many people with negative attitudes towards wealth creation, the ability to generate wealth is severely limited. One of the benefits of coaching clients from all walks of life is that I get to witness just how critical one’s mindset is in contributing to success. Within a very short time of working with a client it becomes clear what patterns of human behaviour, conflicting core values and limiting beliefs are holding them back from achieving their wealth creation goals.
In many cases the root causes of poor wealth creation are limiting beliefs such as:
- You need to be highly intelligent to be wealthy.
- You need to strike it lucky to get wealthy.
- You need to exploit people be wealthy.
- You need to have money to make money.
- Money is the root of all evil.
What is interesting is that you can find evidence both supporting and contradicting each of these beliefs. For example, there are some wealthy people who are happy and some who are depressed. So given there is evidence on both sides, we can see that these beliefs are simply ‘made up’ based on what biases, limitations and filters our mental ‘google search’ produces. In psychology we call this process confirmation bias. All humans do it and it mostly happens outside of our conscious awareness.
However, the key to success in life is realised not by whether a belief itself is true or false, but whether a belief will produce the results we are looking for. For example, if someone is resigned to accepting their situation will never change and they believe they need to be lucky in order to get rich, it is unlikely this will ever happen because they will disregard any evidence of wealth creation opportunities that contradicts this belief. If that same person decided to believe “I am in control of my financial destiny” and “money flows to you when you provide value to others” then this person could create vastly different results in their life.
Accountants and wealth advisers can provide sound financial strategies; however, they don’t necessarily address clients’ potential limiting behavioural patterns. This means some people never realise how restrictive their mindsets may be because these are often outside of their conscious awareness. This, in turn, prevents them from unlocking the psychology of success.
In order to become successful at wealth creation, we have to first develop awareness of our beliefs and update our ‘mental software’. To do this we need to ask questions like:
- What are the attitudes, values and beliefs that I need to update?
- What principles, strategies and philosophies do I need to adopt?
- What skills, strengths and weaknesses do I need to develop?
- How much do I really want financial success and how committed am I to investing the time and effort required to making it a reality?
T. Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth, reminds us that “Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know”.
If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten. So, what are you doing to be more successful at wealth creation? What mentoring, coaching and education are you pursuing in order to master your psychology and the game of wealth creation?
There are always consequences of our beliefs and choices. So, if we want to create more wealth we need to consciously create the mindset that will unlock the potential for wealth creation. Once we become aware that our own mindset is creating our results in life, we have infinitely more control over achieving the financial goals we desire.
Life is short; make it count.
