Changing your money mindset takes practice but can lead to a completely new you
The internet is full of advice and tips on how to save money and turn your finances around. With all this great information, why are so many people still struggling living paycheck-to-paycheck?
The problem is that so many people have a money mindset that doesn’t allow them to succeed.
This idea of a money mindset is fairly new so I reached out to one of the thought leaders in the topic.
In this exclusive interview, Amanda Abella reveals the secret to changing your money mindset to earn more money. I’ve transcribed the interview below so watch the video or you can read the transcription.
The video is part of our expert interview series on the Let’s Talk Money YouTube channel. I’m bringing you the very best experts in beating debt, making more money and making your money work for you. Click through to check out the other interviews and subscribe free to the channel.
Joseph: Today’s interview is with Amanda Abella. She graduated college in 2010 which turned out to be a great time to be a newly unemployed college grad. Months of unemployment, finally came that time that everyone dreads when you have to move back in with your parents.
She decided to make her own future after the economy wasn’t bouncing back as fast as fast as she wanted.
She ended up becoming a best-selling author, learned how to invest and eventually increased her income to three-times what she was making at a traditional job.
I know one of the things Amanda does besides her work as a millennial money expert is she runs a course teaching people how to become influencers themselves, how to get those big brand sponsorship deals without the need for a sweet layup or the golf swing.
Amanda, thanks for being here with us and offering some of your insight into that idea of changing your money mindset and being an influencer.
Amanda: Yeah, thanks for inviting me. It’s pretty much one of my favorite topics ever. So I love talking money mindset so thanks for inviting me.
What is a Money Mindset?
Joseph: You’ll have to dumb this down a little bit. I’m gen X, I think money mindset or that whole idea of a mindset is really kind of a millennial thing that’s catching on really quick but I’m still clueless.
What is a money mindset?
Amanda: So a money mindset really is just our thoughts and beliefs around money.
Obviously, culture affects the way we see money. What we learned at home affects the way we see money. We have these blueprints that we learned, I would say by the time we were seven years old that helps shape our money mindset.
For example, one of my blueprints was, you go to school and then there’s just kind of a job there waiting for you at the end of it.
That’s clearly not what happened. I had to reassess those blueprints I had about life and money.
What I notice is with a lot of my students and coaching clients, it gets to a point where they have to identify these unconscious beliefs they have about money, whether it’s their own self-worth, whether it’s how difficult it is to earn money, whether they feel uncomfortable earning money, or a million other money issues.
In many cases they have to unlearn a lot of the BS that they’ve picked up along the way as it pertains to money.
Joseph: Okay. So it sounds like it’s partly a cultural thing, a family thing, a lot of different ways that our money ideas can be shaped.
Amanda: Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of different ways. And I remember for me one of the big aha moments was in 2010 and everywhere I turned there were these doom and gloom stories about Millennials.
I still can’t even believe it but they still talk about Millennials and our doom and gloom attitude. It was like that New York Times article ‘What is it about 20-somethings?’ that basically we just take pictures of our food and we’re crawling under student loan debt and we’re lazy.
I had this real sort of ‘aha’ moment because everywhere I turned, there were these negative stories about money. I just had this moment where I started questioning all the stories I was hearing about the financial situation for my generation.
I think what happens with mindset a lot of the time is just we absorb and adopt these things, but we don’t necessarily question them. When we start questioning them then it starts changing the way we behave with our money.
What Money Mindsets Keep People from Being Successful?
Joseph: What are some specific money mindsets that keep people from making as much as they should or from being successful?
Amanda: When it comes to earning money there’s a book I recommend to all my students in my influencer course and all of my private business coaching clients. It’s called Overcoming Under-Earning by Barbara Stanny. And it’s life-changing.
In the book she refers to some research which shows that 1-in-4 American workers are under-earners and the majority of those are women.
I looked a little deeper into that and we know there’s a disparity between what women earn and what men earn. When you start going into different subgroups like women of color, it’s even worse.
There’s a lot of data that includes self-employed and traditionally employed in the book and what I’ve seen and helped people through and taught them, a lot of it just has to do with our beliefs about ourselves and our ability to earn money.
People learn different things about money, creating these money mindsets from an early age. Maybe they think that becoming rich is bad because rich people are evil; that’s one that we hear all the time, right? Maybe they learn that making money somehow means you have to compromise your values.
There’s a bunch of different ways that these money mindsets develop. Those are the basic cultural ones but there are also money issues that you could learn at home depending on what it is that you saw within your own family.
How to Change Your Money Mindset
Joseph: How does somebody go about changing all that? How do they change their money mindset? And how do they know if it’s really changing?
Amanda: Speaking as someone who had to heal a lot of her own money mindset stuff and I also call myself a recovering under-earner in a lot of ways, it is hard. I’m not going to sit here and be like, “Oh, it’s easy- peasy!”
No, it’s not.
It requires a lot of resilience on your part and a lot of self-awareness. I think the first step really is starting to become more self-aware of what those issues are, what those beliefs are you have about money.
Some people would go ahead and tell you identifying those beliefs and where you picked them up. That’s a start but the next step is, you have to make a decision.
That decision comes down to whether you are going to keep living the way that you are and believing things in this way or are you going to choose to start seeing things a little bit differently?
In the beginning, it’s a matter of just being willing to see things differently.
When that happens, it turns into a beginner’s mindset and you start learning all these different perspectives on things and it blows your mind. Suddenly you’re just not the same anymore.
You’re like, “Oh my gosh! The way I’ve been living for decades is wrong!”
That’s when you turn into a completely different person. Then it’s just a matter of taking action on this new mindset.
For me, boundaries was hard for me for a long time. Now, I don’t care because I’ve done it so many times, right? Or sales was really difficult for me. I didn’t know anything about sales. I had to learn it as I went along. Well, now I’m actually pretty good at it because I kept putting myself in situations where I would have to figure it out.
There’s two ways that can go. If you’re in that type of a situation and you realize you screwed up, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re learning new habits for the first time it’s going to take a while.
Also, celebrate the progress you make. For example, I have a private coaching client now that in a matter of eight weeks, she has seen more progress in her business than she has in years. A lot of that has had to do with just unlearning a lot of stuff that she was taught about running a business that obviously was not working.
Is There a Difference Between Money Mindset and Your Mindset in Other Parts of Your Life?
Joseph: Is there a difference in a person’s mindset when it comes to managing money, saving it, maybe different mindsets not even associated with money that people should be looking at?
Amanda: What I’ve noticed with my clients is oftentimes they come to me and they’re already pretty good at managing money.
They’ve done the work in that department.
Sometimes they got themselves out of debt, sometimes they were always good savers. They never really had an issue with spending. Maybe for them, the issue was in the next step.
The next step becomes, once you’ve learned how to manage money, is learning how to increase that income. You can’t jump to increasing income before managing your money because you won’t know what to do with the money you’re making.
That’s why we have doctors and lawyers who still don’t know how to manage money. Once you get to the management part and you’re going into the income part, it does require a little bit of a different mindset especially if you’re self-employed.
What I’ve noticed sometimes is people will like stick to the managing and then not spending a lot and the penny-pinching and the thrifting. They feel like if they do that, then they don’t have to go earn more.
That’s a backwards way of sabotaging their earning potential.
What is an Influencer?
Joseph: I know this idea of money mindset fits into your course as just one section, one module. I wanted to give you a little bit of time to talk more about the course, what it means to be an influencer.
How does the idea of being an influencer work with that money mindset? What can people do to get some of those influencer deals?
Amanda: I run a course called Persuasive Profit and really what I teach people how to do is how to know their markets better. They can then use that to create an offering they can sell and also build their brand online so they can keep making more money.
What ends up happening is they start being perceived as experts in their field and as influencers. I don’t necessarily start them off with, “Here’s how to get the sponsorship deal,” because that takes a while. I start them off with, “Here’s how you can make some money right now based on your market research.”
Then as a result, these influencer deals are going to start coming because you’re going to be an expert in your field.
What my course does is it teaches people how to go from the market research phase all the way through creating a sales funnel for a specific offering, and then growing that influence online.
I’ve had students, for example, who within a few weeks get client contracts of $15,000 or within a matter of six weeks, they go from ‘sorta’ having an idea of a plan and their brand to they have a plan and they’re ready to go.
It’s just a matter of implementing that strategy.
I’ve had others who start monetizing in different ways. They started as freelance writers for example and now they’re making money with affiliate marketing through their influence with their audiences.
There are multiple ways that it can go but ultimately I just teach them how to really get in their markets’ heads so they can use that to position themselves as experts and influencers and then monetize that.
I created Persuade to Profit based on market research, based on the questions I was getting all the time. I know what people are going to ask me on consultations before they ask it. I use that same idea of market research in the course and for students.
End Interview
I want to thank Amanda for her insight into changing that money mindset, finding your goals and how to reach those financial goals. Don’t forget to click through and check out some of those other expert interviews and subscribe to the YouTube channel.