Ep 223: Preparation for Financial Success: What Most People Miss Part 1

Have you ever had a money or career question you really wanted to ask, but didn't know who to go to, or just felt uncomfortable even bringing it up. You're not alone. Talking about money can feel intimidating, even scary, and that's exactly what I'm trying to change. That's why I created a free virtual coffee chat, a casual, no pressure, twenty minute conversation where you can bring one thing you're wrestling with and we'll talk it through.

No judgment, no jargon, no sales pitch, just clarity, ease, and a real answer from someone who gets it. If you've got something on your mind, don't sit in the confusion. Book a spot at limit FreeLife dot com and let sip and sort it out. Hey there, and welcome to Money in You.

I'm Michelle Perkins, your host. My search for more fulfilling work led me to career in business coaching, where I stumbled upon a game changing discovery. Money issues often start with our mindset and habits. You see, our relationship with money is the key to overcoming those frustrating financial obstacles.

As an entrepreneur, coach, and problem solver, I'm passionate about helping you create a great relationship with money, because turns out that's the foundation for a limit free life. Each week on Money and You, I speak with amazing guests about all things money, mindset, practical tips, and everything in between. We're here to give you new insights, education and empowerment, so money can be one of your favorite relationships. So join us for some lively conversations and let's transform your financial life together.

Hello. Hello, welcome to the Money and New Show. I'm Sheelle Perkins, your host, and I'm excited about today's show. I was inspired by something that I've been reading and thinking about and I am just going to bring the show to you all by my little sale and so quick solo show.

If you watch me for a while, you know my soulos are pretty short, So hang in there because I know you need this, and I know everybody needs this, and I know I needed it, so I, as you know, I love to talk about money, and I especially love to talk about the underneath parts of what we're doing in our financial life and how we're creating financial wellbeing or not by how we think, what we do, what we plan for, what we visualize, what we expect, how we identify ourselves as money people, as financial folks.

So let's get into it today. I want to talk about something. I don't know if I've used the words as much I think I've said it, but I read something in my now new favorite book, How to Get Anything You Want. It's literally an ancient book that nobody's ever heard of, by Elsie Lincoln Benedict.

I would highly recommend it, whether it's money or anything else that you want in your life. If you're looking for health, love, fun, money, you name it. This is a phenomenal book because she gets to the root of everything. And I'm just amazed that nobody's ever heard of her.

I mean, maybe you have, but I hadn't, and most people I know have not. And I'm in a group where we're discussing this book, and you know, people all ages, all ethnicities, all career choices, and we're all just blown away. So okay. One of the things in lesson, one of the lessons that she goes through because she has her own lessons, is about preparation, which obviously right, we have to prepare to be good money managers, we have to prepare to have financial success, we have to prepare for any kind of success.

We have to prepare basically for everything. But while we know that intellectually, do we always do it. No. We spend a lot of time talking about the success we want to have, how successful we want to be, what we want to own, what we want to do, where we want our businesses to go.

Hopefully you have a vision for your business, but the actual preparation is the part that maybe we don't do as well. We might even think we're doing it. But my favorite thing, my favorite topic in the world is while we think we're taking the right steps, what we think about may not be the best thing to be thinking about. Maybe there are some other things that we're missing that we should think about that we just don't know because we don't know what we don't know, right, So I just want to talk about rethinking preparation.

Maybe you've been preparing by doing certain practical things, but your mindset is unprepared totally for the success that might come of that, and that will block and stop anything anything flow of what you want coming to you could be blocked by the way that you're thinking, making decisions, and ultimately the consequences of those decisions. So it's a fascinating topic. We could talk about it forever, so the fact that we're going to talk about it for fifteen minutes is not going to be the end of the story.

So I'm actually going to break this up because I do want to talk about mindset, but I also want to talk about practical things that you can do to prepare for whatever financial success you want. Now, if you're listening carefully, you have to pick up on the fact that financial success that you want. If that is unclear undefined, that's where you start. And I have a great visioning kind of workbook that I'm giving away for free, and you can use AI with it to help you clarify your vision.

It asks you a lot of questions. You answer those questions and you don't need AI for it. You can summarize it and synthesize it all yourself and come up with a vision. But AI does a pretty cool job of kind of taking every answered all the questions and condensing it down into something kind of cool for a vision.

So that's available to you. I will put it in the link to the show notes. So let me just start with something that Elsie writes in one of her chapters. Whatever we prepare for we get.

The more quickly we prepare for it. The more quickly we get it, the more completely we prepare for it, the more completely we receive it. The more perfect our preparation, the more perfect the materialization. And I'm going to skip a little bit and go to this next part that says, the realizations of the people you know match the preparations they made in advance.

You will see that these two sets of things in all the lives we know coincide too nearly to have just happened. So let's think about this. This goes back. It kind of made me think about when my son was in cub Scouts, and you know, the whole like be prepared thing is sort of the boy scout cub Scout motto, and I don't know that we apply this very well in our financial lives.

Part of preparedness is learning, is understanding, getting financial literacy, and beyond to financial advance to knowledge. And that's what I'm hoping to bring to people with this show, because that's the start of everything. We can't really prepare if we don't know things. So learning is step one.

Desiring knowing what you want is probably equal to step one. Do that at the same time. But then let's move into how to actually prepare. So one of the things that we need to be clear.

So if it's making more money that you want to prepare for, you know, if you have a future vision of your financial success, what does it look like? Where are you living, what are you doing, where are you working, How are you spending your time, how are you spending your money, who are you spending it on? All of these questions are super important to kind of create this overall vision, and we need to actually prepare for the money before it arrives. I think that's the mistake that most of us make, is like when I make more money, then I'll do X, when that money finally comes in, when my investment pays off, when I get that better job.

It's always this future thinking. So you're not really preparing, you're preparing to prepare basically, So why don't we prepare for the wealth and the riches and the success and the abundance that we want in the future now as if it is here? And I know that conceptually can be a little tricky. I'll give you an example of something I just did.

I hired a new team member for before I really need her. Could I continue to do the things that she's doing with other people that I have or with some additional effort on my own. Yes, but I'm taking a little bit of a leap because for me to grow, I need to set up the structure that allows me to grow into it. And that goes the same for your money.

I can't tell you how many people tell me, well, at some point I'll start investing in the stock market. Well, do you have any accounts set up? Are you ready to go? Do you understand how those accounts work?

Could you, at you know, a moment's notice, start putting some money into an investment that you just read about or saw or heard about that you want to invest in. That is how preparedness creates you or doesn't create you. The opportunities that come along. If you are prepared, then you can jump on those opportunities.

So it's about preparing in order to take advantage of opportunities that come along or that you create. Okay, so we need to prepare both mentally and practically. So having the account, setting up an account, deciding which brokerage house, that's a decision. There's a practical decision that you can make getting yourself in a mindset of actually being able to see yourself as an investor, identifying as a person who saves and invests.

That's where the mindset peace, and that is where you'll get tripped up by your own mind, because what are the things that are going to fly into your brain when you start thinking about these things. I'm not ready yet. I don't know what I'm doing yet. I've never really understood this world.

These are the things. I don't care who you are at different levels, different different topics. But our brains are super smart in this area, and our subconscious mind will find doubts and fears and just things to say to us that are going to cause us worry and anxiety. And you know that's just the way it is.

That's your survival brain. So the biggest thing that you can do is to prepare yourself to be aware, Prepare to notice when these thoughts come into your mind, and prepare not to necessarily believe your own thoughts and feelings, even if your thoughts are positive, but your feeling is like my heart's racing. I feel a little sick thinking about this. I don't really believe it.

We want to tune in just as much to our thoughts as to our feelings, because those two things have to align. And when you start feeling icky when you think about something, that's a tip off. Notice when you start thinking and saying things to yourself that are really negative, the things that you would never say to somebody else in your world, that's a tip off. And that's where you start noticing.

Noticing is fascinating because you have to notice in order to shift it, to change it. So if you rise to the occasion, well here's a little saying. You don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your preparation. So these opportunities and these occasions to do certain things that you say you want, right, we're all saying we want these things.

That's the interesting part. We're saying we want them. Sometimes we're saying we want them so badly, But how are we preparing for them to be received. We have to prepare so we can receive them when they show up out there, because that's the biggest mistake.

And I had a great tax strategist, the tex Goddess, was on the show a little while ago, and she gave some great advice. I would go back and listen to her show, because that's everything she was talking about is set money aside. So when opportunities to take advantage of certain things for tax purposes come along, you have the funds to do it. Those funds are sitting there just waiting for some great tax strategy.

But if you have no money. When you realize that tax strategy or someone tells you about it, you're stuck. It's too late to pull that money together and take advantage. And that goes for literally everything, even goes for things like health.

Right, we have to keep preparing and doing the right things because when you know, when that trainer comes into your life, you know, you want to have the money to be able to hire that trainer or whatever it is. That kind of mixed up money and health. But so you want to prepare your mind. If you're thinking about getting a raise, if you're thinking about new opportunities, if you're thinking about selling a house or an investment, or doing something new with your business.

You have to prepare your yourself mentally to be ready now. And so how do we do that. That's tricky because we don't necessarily feel ready. We might feel, you know, like we'll have to do a whole lot of work.

We'll have to learn some things, we'll have to do some things before we can really be ready to do that. But that's a mindset too, that's a that's a procrastination mindset like later, later, later. And if you switch your mindset to being I'm ready now, even though you don't necessarily feel it, I'm going to do what it takes to get myself ready. And that is different.

Okay, saying to yourself, I'm not ready. I've got a lot of work to do before I'm going to be ready. I've got a lot of money to make before I'm going to be ready. That's that's on the negative side.

So you want to shift your statements to yourself and ask yourself really good questions, questions life, what is it going to take for me to be ready? And the answers will come to you. Now, we all have our patterns. We all know that we and sometimes our patterns are positivity.

Sometimes our patterns, well, it'll all work out. I'm just gonna wait and see again with the waiting. So I think a lot of this is the idea that preparedness. You might still wait, but you're ready.

It's readiness. So you've got what you You know, you've got some structure set up, You've got I don't know exactly how I'm going to use this new team member in the future, but she I've chosen somebody I prepared for things to happen, and she's on board and she's started. So the direction she'll actually go, you know, I'm not really ready to know that yet, but I'm prepared in the sense that I've found somebody who I trust and I think is going to work out well. Okay, So your financial identity is so important, and if you don't prepare to have the identity of a strong financial person, then you're going to get tripped up, no question about it.

You can do all the right things. But if your financial identity says I'm not good with money, no matter what I do, I'm always broke. I'll just have to figure that out some day when other things are taken care of. Or if your identity is I just really hate numbers.

I'm not going to look at that stuff because it just isn't for me. Somebody else is going to need to look at it. These are identities that you've taken on, These are patterns, These are just things that for whatever reason. You can probably spend a lot of time looking back to figure out how you got to that identity, but I'm not sure that actually matters.

So frankly, I think I would spend my time looking forward and not back. But it is interesting time time to see did I just get that identity? Because that's what I was told when I was young, that I heard my parents sing and I just copied that. You know, how did I come about that?

Because those thoughts are subtly, quietly controlling what you do and how you prepare and what decisions you make. With every decision, there's a consequence. And if you look at some of the decisions you made, good or bad, you might like what happened from it. That's we call that manifestation.

If you don't like what happened, that is also manifestation, and that's the really important thing. It might be a negative that you made a decision, you got a certain consequence, it's not the consequence you want, but there's something that you did that resulted in that happening. So again, this is not a judgment zone. This isn't about you getting on yourself and being upset and thinking about hindsight and all the things you could have done or should have done.

You can do that for a second, just if you feel like it. But again, this is about moving into a place of preparedness, readiness. If you're afraid, if you're thinking you're going to repeat past mistakes, you know, if that's where your identity is going, I can't be trusted with money. Ooh, that's a big one.

You want to shift that, Okay, and you shift it by preparing? How do I prepare to trust myself better with money? Well, so a lot of things you can do. You can learn more like listening to shows like this.

You can read more like reading some of the amazing books out there. You can take classes. You can talk to a coach or mentor like me. So there are ways to prepare yourself.

I talk to people all the time or just trying to prepare to have a better future. And we're sitting down together and we're looking at where's all your income coming from? Where could it come from? Where are all your where's your money going?

You know? How do we see what is fixed and we have to pay for and what is more like where you're a choice about whether you're spending that money or not All the parts. How do we get out of your debt? How do we start saving all of these things?

Sometimes you just need another set of eyes on it because what you've done has been repetitive and you can't see past it. So where is your emotional capacity for money? That's another thing. We have these set points, we have these limitations we put on ourself.

You know, I can only make so much. And if you ask yourself, this is a great thing to ask yourself, how much do I really want to make? And then assign a number, how much do I really want to see in my bank accounts? And just put you know, grab a number out of your head when you ask that question, and then ask yourself, is this really what I want?

Or am I trying to be like a good person and not ask for too much? Because most of the time we won't ask for anything astronom and out there, which I'm not saying to ask for things that are completely unrealistic. But we often shortchange ourselves, just like we do when we're You know, if you have a business and you're charging clients, you may be undercharging. So we have to get emotionally ready to have a larger capacity to receive more money, more wealth, and frankly, it's the same thing that capacity.

We want to stretch our capacity to be financial. People like to be able to look at our own identity and say, wow, I'm good with money. I really you know, I've got the basics down and I'm doing well here. That's the kind of talk we need, and we tend not to say those things to ourselves.

And that doesn't mean you're brilliant at it and that you've mastered all of it. But as you take on more and more of this idea of preparing for your for your wealth and your abundance, you've got to give yourself some credit for what you're doing, because that stretches your capacity. It's just same as when you go to the gym and you're doing a certain weight and then you move up to the next one. You know, it's good to kind of recognize that and congratulate yourself a little bit.

We need to be able to have that sense that, yeah, I can look at my numbers, good or bad. I can look at them. Because here's another thing. If you are avoiding looking at your numbers, if you are making decisions without really knowing the data, it's more like you know, either a leap of faith or a panic move or something like that.

And if we can't, you know, if we're avoiding money, you can think of it this way. We're basically sending a message to the universe that I don't really like money. I don't want to look at it, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to learn about it.

And so what is going to come back to you? Obviously not money? Money things you don't like it. So I know that sounds a little woo and weird, but it really does pretty much work that way.

We attract what we want, what we like, and what we're prepared to receive. So mostly I want you to give yourself give a little thought to all of this. Where do you trust yourself with money? Where do you not trust yourself with money?

And what do you need to be able to trust yourself better? That's the most powerful question here. What can I do to identify as a smart financial person more in my life? What do I need to stop avoiding my money and start really dealing with it on a regular basis.

This is where I go with my Money Day program. It's all about spending time with your money, getting to know it, paying attention to it, and receiving it as a great relationship in your life that's going to support you and work with you. It's really important to ask yourself these questions, what can I do to not Why is it so bad? Why do I never make what I really need?

That's a terrible question. We want to be aware of our questions, be aware of the things we're telling ourselves, and switch to something more powerful. So that is the mindset part of preparedness readiness. You have to prepare your mind and your whole being to receive this new level of who you're going to be with your money.

And that's part one. And this is the harder part. The other parts, the practical stuff, we can figure that out pretty darn easily. This is the stuff that we're dealing with a mind that maybe we haven't really understood on this level.

Maybe we haven't understood how negative we are when we speak to ourselves and others around money. Pay attention. If you hear yourself all day long, I can't afford that, oh gosh, I'm never going to be able to buy that, never going to be able to buy a house. That's when we hear all the time stop yourself and just stop saying it, even if you can't replace it with anything else.

Right now, just know to stop saying it. Stop yourself in your tracks. I do it all the time. I'm about to say something, I have to literally go what am I saying?

And I have to stop myself and either say nothing or just move on. And I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've deleted a statement from an email or a text because it was about to go down that road. I don't know if I can afford this. I'm not sure.

Maybe it's true, it doesn't matter. You don't have to keep putting this negative stuff out there to yourself, and you will get in the habit of not doing it. It'll take some time, but you'll exercise that practice and you will start to see more positive things happening with your money and more positive ways of thinking about your money. And that is all incredibly important to our reparation.

So with that, I'm going to close. I'm gonna put a little worksheet together too to ask you some other questions, not about the vision why you might want your money. That's in my vision workbook, but I'm also going to put a little worksheet together with just some of these questions to see where you are in terms of your mental preparedness to become the master of your money and do so much better in this life and stop having all that worry and anxiety around the future and your security or insecurity.

All that needs to go. That's a pure sign that you're just not preparing.