Do You Believe in Money Magic?

Join us for a special 4-week podcast series this November all about money gratitude! We're celebrating thankfulness by showing you how being grateful can change how you deal with money. Learn how gratitude can not only make you feel better but also help your brain make smarter choices with your finances.

We'll explore why emotions are so important when it comes to spending and saving, something traditional money advice often misses. Find out why just trying hard isn’t always enough and how being thankful can help you develop better money habits.

In each episode, we’ll introduce you to simple but powerful ways to use gratitude for long-term success with your finances. Whether you're having money troubles or just want to be better at managing your money, this podcast is here to help. We’ll guide you on how a thankful attitude can open up new paths to prosperity and transform your money life.

Don’t miss this exciting journey! Tune in to discover the power of gratitude in making your financial life happier and more successful. Subscribe now and start seeing money in a whole new way!

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Transcript

Let me ask you, do you believe in money magic? What if your next financial breakthrough isn't about making more money? Hi friends, welcome to "The Her Money Mindset Show" and I am so grateful you're here. 

As we enter November here in the U. S., that is the season of Thanksgiving, and I always love to take this month and reflect on how much I have to be thankful for. While many Americans are preparing their turkeys and planning to get loved ones together, I like to carve out time in November to dive deep into appreciation.

And so I have this annual ritual, if you want to call it that, of following this book by Rhonda Bryne. She also wrote the book, "The Secret", if you know about that. And this book is called "The Magic". It's basically a 28 day gratitude journey. I've done it now for, Oh my gosh, more than five years, every November and every day, there's just  a small lesson, and then exercise that you do, I just love it because it helps me take time to really feel the deep appreciation in my life. But let me be transparent with you as a tech leader at a fortune 500 company, a real estate investor, I've experienced many business and money successes. But it was that devastating business failure that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars that truly taught me the power of gratitude.

 When I was knee deep in spreadsheets and strategy of what to do next, what's the action going to be? It was those years of gratitude practice. The very ones that I'm going to share with you this month that helped me start to rebuild not just my wealth, but my confidence, my peace, my momentum.

You might be familiar with Rhonda Bryne's work. Like I mentioned, the book, "The Secret". "The Secret" introduced millions of people to this concept of using your thoughts, basically to attract what you want in your life. Some people call it manifestation. In this book, she calls it the magic and it's really focused on the magic being gratitude.

And while that term magic might raise eyebrows for some of us logical folks, there's really solid neuroscience backing these principles. So I'm excited for you to join me this month as we go through a money focus gratitude journey.

Now, obviously on a weekly podcast,  we don't go through day to day to day, like the 28 journey. So what I'm doing is consolidating those lessons and tools That really apply to money and really apply to how we might deal with a money setback.  I'm going to consolidate those. Then the next three weeks, that's what we'll focus on in the show.

Through my own recovery. If you call it that from financial loss, whether it be after my divorce 15 years ago, or walking away from my business several years ago, and then the many, many things in between. I have learned that gratitude isn't just like a woo, woo, feel good practice. It's truly, truly powerful for transformation and anything in your life, but especially in your money.

These practices are simple, but profound.  Like I said, they're backed by modern science and ancient wisdom. And they helped me rebuild when I was at my lowest points in life. I've seen them work in other people's lives as well.

So the book starts out with this simple question. Do you believe in magic? And there's also a quote that says, "those who don't believe in magic will never find it." She also reminds us how excited we were as children when we looked at life with,  just wonder and awe, and isn't that so cool?

When we would be so excited to lose a tooth because that meant we were going to have a visit from the tooth fairy that night. We would count down the days to that magical night, Christmas, even though logically, you have no idea how Santa is truly gonna get to every child's house in one night. But we don't question it as kids.

It's just magic and it just happens.

So this whole idea of these practices is to bring back that magic that is inside us that as adults it has basically disappeared.

So before we dive into the actual practices next week, let's talk a little more about how being grateful can change the way we handle our money. 

We'll talk about the science behind money, gratitude, and these gratitude practices and why traditional financial advice falls short because it's missing how our emotions affect our spending and our saving.

If we're going to talk about the science behind money and gratitude, we first need to talk about how gratitude changes our brain when we focus on being grateful, we're lighting up the parts of our brain that help us make smarter choices, help us feel less worried and less stressed about money. And this has been confirmed by scientists from UC Berkeley.

They did research on people's brains and could see those decision making parts of the brain light up when people were thinking grateful thoughts. It even helped them be less stressed about their money situation. There was another study that showed that being thankful can help calm that part of your brain that is impulsive and rushed and and worried.

Shizard Chamine, who wrote the book  "Positive Intelligence", which I talk about a lot because he's a mentor, I'm a coach in his program, and he says, that gratitude makes us better at these three things. Gratitude makes us better at stopping negative thoughts.

You know, the negative, he calls them saboteurs, those inner critics that are just yelling in your head. Gratitude helps us to focus better, which I definitely need more of. The way that works in this 28 day journey is that we're focused on gratitude.

So we're looking for it throughout our day because we know we're going to have some activity, whatever it may be, in the book that talks about gratitude. So we're,  actively looking for it and actively focusing on it. So we're paying attention to it. And then thirdly, he talks about gratitude as getting access to our inner wisdom.

When we're feeling gratitude, he calls it the sage. We can access our inner wisdom  and truly we have all the answers to all of our problems inside of us, inside of our sage. But we can't access our sage when our saboteurs are being so loud. So gratitude is a tool that can help us access our sage and our inner wisdom. Just to pound this home or say it again, gratitude turns on these different parts of our brain that help us think clearly. Be creative and support better money decisions.

Researchers have found that grateful people are 12 percent more likely to wait before spending their money. So in other words, when we're online scrolling and just clicking to buy things on Amazon because it makes us feel better in the moment kind of impulsively. If you're practicing gratitude in your life  on a regular basis, you're more likely to wait

and decide and not do this impulsive spending. And if you keep a gratitude journal about your money, you might end up making 34 percent  better, money choices and saving more,  it's just putting this focus on what you're doing and being intentional.

Gratitude can even use that filter that I've talked about in our brain to notice more chances to earn and save money because it's training our brain to look for that kind of stuff, the good stuff. Over time, this makes us better at handling our money, creating loops where gratitude keeps making things better and better.

I've seen firsthand with myself and others how being thankful can change how we feel about money and the science proves it. The science shows why it's such a helpful tool and can help us get over that money setback.

Why does more traditional financial advice fall short? Obviously, some of it is very sound, logical, and good, but sometimes it doesn't  push us to where we need to go because emotions are in our decisions. They just are. We're humans and we have emotions and we have thoughts.

And that is what traditional advice sometimes doesn't deal with. And so there's a very valid tactic or strategy, but if our emotions aren't in the right place, we are not able to think. Traditional advice usually talks about tactics like budgets and savings, how to spend less, how to save more.

And these tips are great. They're things we need to talk about and do. But if we ignore our  feelings that affects our outcomes. Sometimes we might spend money to cheer ourselves up, like I talked about, when we're feeling down. Even if it's not the smartest move. These emotions have a lot of power and they influence our decisions more than just math and rules.

Willpower comes into play and willpower isn't enough. Many people think that when we try hard, when we stick to good money habits,   it's all going to work out and we're going to get our outcome. But willpower is like a battery that runs out, especially if you're tired,

if you're stressed, if you're upset. Think about trying to eat healthy all day. If you're super hungry or tired, you might grab a snack without even thinking about it. You're kind of unconscious. That same thing goes for money. If we're having a tough day, it's easy to spend without thinking about our budget. Emotions can override willpower, making it tough to always make the best money choices. It's not your fault. This is our brain. Our brain has something called neuropathways.

They're just like little trails in our mind and we dig them deeper when we do the same things over and over again. So if you're spending money quickly or impulsively or avoiding checking your savings or not paying your pile of bills, it makes you nervous. Those things become habits that deepen those paths that in our brain, those neural pathways. The great news is changing these habits is about deciding to do something better. I talk about that all the time that we can decide. And I know when we're in a setback or in a challenge, it's, it might be kind of annoying. Like, why do you keep saying that I can decide this is not my fault. My situation is happening and it's heavy, but if you reframe that and deciding means you have the power, that means you are in control and you can get through this setback by deciding, and what we're going to decide in November is we're gonna just decide

to be grateful, grateful for the money we do have, grateful for our ability to earn money, grateful for bills because we can pay them, and we're going to decide to look at our money habits and see how to make them better.

Being thankful for what we have and recognizing how we feel about our spending or our saving is where we can start to change these brain pathways and in effect, as we change these brain pathways, we make better decisions over time. By being grateful, we're focusing on positive emotion and actions, which helps us get the outcome we want.

As we wrap this up, I want us to just remember that

when we're thinking about money, it's not just saving and spending. The traditional advice often skips how we're feeling and that's what's going to really propel us to a better outcome. How hard we try isn't enough on its own because our emotions make us take actions. Especially when we're stressed or upset in the setback. That's where gratitude truly helps being thankful for what we have changing our brain, changing those neuropathways can shift our actions and our habits and make it easier to notice opportunities with our money.

This practice doesn't change your life overnight. Just like going to the gym once and lifting some weights doesn't make you have big biceps overnight. It takes practicing, going, showing up for yourself, doing the work, and then over time it can have a massive impact.

Just like small good decisions add up to big achievements, being thankfully regularly can lead to serious important changes and break a cycle of bad habits and make you ultimately feel happier and being happier leads to better decisions.

So friends, thank you for joining me. Stay tuned for next week's conversation where we'll dive deep into the amazing magic and explore some of the real tools and practices that can help us get us there. Please subscribe to Her Money Mindset Show and if you found this helpful and someone came to mind who you think it can help, please share.

That helps get the word out and help other people that are struggling through a money setback.