Your Money Mind Story: The real reason why less than 5% of all people accumulate wealth AND achieve fulfillment….and how you can easily join and STAY in the 5%.
Building wealth and staying wealthy are two very different things.
You may know someone who has made and lost millions many different times in their life. They have all the skills, except the emotional intelligence to stay disciplined and self regulate their behavior. It’s usually as simple as that.
Lesson One: Lightning Fast Emotional Intelligence Requirements.
Emotional intelligence is in part about:
(1) controlling your emotions,
(2) your emotional connection and communication with others in building wealth, and
(3) being able to act on your plans regardless, of the feelings you may be feeling in the moment.
Controlling your emotions means that you do not let your anger take control of your body, but rather you control your body in spite of your anger. Debating whether an emotion you experience or a feeling you have in a moment or a day is “good” or “bad” is not constructive to wealth building. Being able to not “take your emotions out on others” is the key aspect of control.
Control of your Self is really control of your feelings in each moment that matters. If you rationally know that a specific action(s) is wise to do but you feel lazy, hurt, or sad and do the wrong thing or simply let inertia take over, then building wealth becomes all but impossible.
Good news – all of these skills are learned behaviors. So, let’s start learning.
Lesson Two: The Correct Wealth Philosophy
This one is easy. You can either do good and be good to those around you or act solely in your own interest. There are many ways that people can become wealthy and there are also many bad people with a high degree of emotional intelligence. The third factor that makes you better is how you treat people on the journey. This more than anything matters to me.
Wealth accumulation, in my personal philosophy, begins with a principle to begin your impact on the world today. It’s about being the 5% who do what matters most in LIFE.
It’s really tough to make a difference in the world without wealth. You can try to save the planet all you want, but without money, your efforts are just that – only efforts. Money gives you massive amounts of leverage in life. You can be the idea leader AND you can be the person who can actually get food to the starving. Most people can only talk about what things “should be like.” The wealthy can DO something about it.
Lesson 2.1 Be a Net Positive in People’s Lives
Be a Net Positive in Life: I want you to give more than you take in life. I want you to leave the campsite cleaning up your mess and throw away one thing someone else littered. I want you to wash your dishes and one dish that someone recklessly left for God to wash.
Eventually, I want you to be generous to a fault.
I want to see you making a difference in people’s lives. I want to see you do your damnedest to be a NET POSITIVE in other people’s lives. A “net positive” is Hogan Language for “I leave everyone and everywhere I go at least 1% better than when I got there.“
Don’t say it in the mirror. Do it, LIVE IT, in everyday life.
If you’ve ever hung out with me at an event you’ll notice I like to cause people to think, to have a better day, to feel heard, to feel appreciated, and most importantly to FEEL UNDERSTOOD.
Begin listening to people with the SOLE PURPOSE of understanding them. When in doubt, ASK A QUESTION.
You will hear me say this hundreds of times as you listen to my work everyday.
People don’t listen to each other. They simply wait for their turn to talk.
Me?
I take notes.
I ask questions.
I am genuinely interested.
I am not much for “quotes” of the famous, but Zig said it best, “You can have everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”
And that is a rubber stamped fact.
One of the real secrets of achievement, fulfillment and of course by extension, success, is that…
…if you are GENUINELY interested in others you will be not just liked but ADORED.
You can’t fake this one for long. Develop this CHARACTER TRAIT now.
In my estimation, this is a good example of a NET POSITIVE.
You can say it this way as well:
“Thou shalt not hurt people.”
“Thou shalt do good stuff and avoid the bad stuff.”
The First Steps of The Wealth Plan
To achieve most worthwhile outcomes in life, you begin with a “plan.” Unfortunately accumulating wealth doesn’t work via a simple plan. It requires more of a system.
It’s like losing weight. The plan and it’s implementation is not necessarily where you begin. The plan is actually going with might be considered the second step.
The real first step is to eradicate all unconscious road blocks and points of self sabotage.
Think about it this way: Losing weight should be incredibly easy. Eat less, lose weight. The bulimic should stop purging because it just doesn’t “make any sense” to purge. The alcoholic should stop drinking at two or three drinks but doesn’t. The hair puller should stop pulling her hair. The person who injures herself should stop. But she doesn’t. It just doesn’t make sense does it? But as you can see, life isn’t typically about what “makes sense,” and, wealth accumulation doesn’t begin and end in the thinking brain.
People often think I’m harsh when I tell people to move through and work past their feelings and emotions. If I had the time, I’d suggest daily therapy to deal with the accumulation of life junk in the brain that is attached to fear, self-masochism, self-loathing, depression, anxiety, addiction, etc., etc. But I only have one life, so I’m going to tell you to get as much of that stuff cleaned out of your brain as is possible.
Then prepare to do what your plan that YOU DEVISED and DEVELOPED says to do – not what your body is telling you to do. Leave your hair alone, stick the drugs on the shelf, allow yourself to be depressed or in pain and MOVE TOWARD what you WANT in life that you put INTO YOUR PLAN.
Because your brain is incredibly powerful and will send signals to to everything other than working your plan and living your chosen life, you absolutely need another human in your life (an elegant coach/personal consultant who understands all the dynamics at work and has achieved what you are going to do) to override your brain’s demands to do all things that do not take you to your life outcomes.
Life Shattering Point: Each day your “gut” will tell you to do something other than what is IN YOUR PLAN.
If you want to get metaphysical, thank your gut, show appreciation for the signal and remind your gut that your brain needs to work and learn just like the gut did.
And I’m not kidding.
Both the drives and the phobias of accumulating wealth are rooted in the emotional brain.
When you fully unplug the self sabotage, accumulating wealth is just about as predictable as working any kind of a plan from a blueprint. Leave the unconscious tripwire (your feelings and everything that is not IN YOUR PLAN, in place, and you ultimately have “another one of those programs that didn’t work”).
Want to know just how powerful that nonconscius brain is?
I watched one of my students speak a couple years ago. He (for the sake of picking a pronoun) told this truly incredible story. It was powerful. It was compelling and it connected with the audience. They loved him. Interesting thing was the story was from my life…one I had told in at a live event perhaps five years EARLIER! The student had put himself in my place and told the story as if it really happened to him! At first I was startled. Then wondered what was going on. Then figured out that it was a simple case of cryptomnesia. (George Harrison/My Sweet Lord came from She’s So Fine. One of Bob Dylan’s album contains a lot of material that is a virtual rewrite of a 1992 Japanese book still in print.)
I said…nothing. Why? I didn’t want the student to feel bad. After all, I was in the audience…and the story served it’s original purpose…which was to change lives. In one sense it had indeed been in my student’s life experience…
This man has EMOTIONS and FEELINGS about something that never happened to him in reality but that he believes happened to him. Not only is this common, it is normal. And this is why “doing it all yourself” is not as easy as you might first guess.
After you hear a story over and over, you think about it, then don’t think about it, then let it burn into the neurology of your mind, and become part of you…it becomes a PART OF YOU. The story has no basis in “real life” but it can become a motivating and driving part of you that is moving in the direction of all things good. The story that has no basis in reality, but can take on a life of it’s own and redirect your life (for good or bad, of course)!
Mission Critical: One of the most important elements in accumulating wealth is rewriting your history with a NEW FRAME so old habits, phobias, and fears become new stimuli for your personal success. In other words: How did all of those bad experiences give you the impetus to have the guts to finally do it right this time?
What kind of an awakening did you get when you realized that your accumulated wealth was almost directly correlated to the amount of self sabotage going on in the unconscious part of your brain? How did you overcome the fear so it is no longer a fear? How did you overcome the phobia so it isn’t a phobia anymore? How did you change the habit so it isn’t a habit anymore? The process is fairly simple if not a bit time consuming.
Whatever meaning you unconsciously assign the stories you have constructed about money, wealth and earning in your mind, will determine what you do and how you behave in your “real life.”
There are about a dozen fears that can trip you up at every corner in your quest to live a comfortable life in which you can take care of those you love and care about.
Mission Critical: Uncovering the fears is the first project. The second project is determining what these phobias, fears, and habits MEAN to you…and what meaning YOU assign to them. The next project of course is putting a brand new FRAME around those stories so they develop NEW meanings that YOU assign to them. Then and ONLY THEN will your unconscious mind be able to go forward and accumulate wealth. Until that time you will trip and stumble along and never know what happened.
In the story about my student, he tells a great story about personal change and the story WORKS; that’s why I told it. Now, it has become part of HIS motivating force…part of the resources that are deep within his mind…and then he will never know the difference because the brain doesn’t know the difference.
You see, the brain can construct – and does daily- any storyline it wants to.
Every human being on earth does this every single day. I do. You do. Everyone does. We don’t intentionally make up these stories, the brain simply constructs them while we are busy doing the dishes. The brain is simply trying to make sense of what is happening in the real world.
KEY QUESTIONS: What story do you want your brain to BELIEVE to be true about accumulating wealth? What meaning are you going to RE-assign to your stories so that your stories take on lasting new meaning?
Key Point: One thing is certain…just because you unplug an old habit, fear or phobia doesn’t mean the brain will forget about it. It won’t. It will always be there, but now as a powerful and positive resource…something you can use…instead of it USING YOU. Instead of having some phobia, fear or habit jolt you through life, you can enjoy life at each turn.
You want your story to have a turning point and BE a turning point for you and your life! That turning point is today. In every story there is a turning point. There is a point where a person has suffered for so long, then they read the scroll and discover the map to take them the rest of the way. Allow this article to be your scroll and your map!
But how do you convince a brain that has been phobic for so long, fearful for so long, and ingrained in bad habits that it can actually cause you to become wealthy?
It’s not an easy task, but the first part is making sure you have the story written down as the mind believes it to be, to date. In other words, write down your story of why you have accumulated the wealth you have to date. Write down why you have the debt, the fear, or whatever isn’t quite perfect in life yet. Be detailed.
Your brain has an enormous network of information that is creating reactions and responses, even to what you are reading here! Don’t leave anything out or it will come back to haunt you.
The story of your money-life could take 10 pages. More…or less. You will discover why you BELIEVE you have come to the point you have come. Perhaps you have accumulated a million dollars of wealth but you earn a million dollars per year. Something is wrong with that picture isn’t it? A person who earns $60,000 per year can easily quit working someday with an accumulated wealth in excess of one million dollars. And someone who earns $35,000 per year can begin to accumulate wealth by making a few simple choices or go deeper into the well to hell.
If you are earning $45,000 per year (heck, no matter what your annual earnings are, answer this question!), I want you to ask yourself, “Why am I earning this amount of money?” And answer it. There could be a good reason. You may have a life threatening illness and your employer’s insurance is covering your medical expenses. Another insurance company won’t pick you up and you would be bankrupt in less than a year if you did. That’s a good reason. But if it’s something that isn’t a good reason, I want you to ask yourself what will happen to you and your kids if you become disabled, lose your job, become a burden on someone else in your family, or die not having experienced what you wanted to experience in your life…
Now there might be another reason. You might LOVE this work you do. It gives you an enormous sense of pride and self esteem. You wake up in the morning and race to work because it is going to be fun and exciting. And if you do then that is definitely a BIG payoff. If it’s just you that you are responsible for, then earning less and LOVING it more can be a HUGE reward all by itself! Even in this situation you might want to ask yourself: “Am I missing anything I really want to experience because of my limited wealth?” If not, and you won’t be a burden to anyone if you don’t accumulate wealth, you may be in the right place at the right time and can consider yourself very fortunate!
There is no “right” amount of money to earn, invest (which implies risk) or save (which does not).
But you do have a RIGHT to determine how much money you CHOOSE to earn per hour, week, month, year…and then perform a service that will match that choice. Now, between the choice and the performance there may be a gap. You may not have the knowledge or skills. You may not have a good road map. Those are all real problems that are usually very solvable in a very short amount of time. I will help you develop a specific strategy for defining your value and show you how to get it.
Your current choice to be paid whatever you are currently paid is an interesting one.
Here is an extraordinary fact: As soon as you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are worth more than you are currently being paid, you will be paid more. It’s that simple. You earn what you earn because you choose to earn that figure.
Whatever dollar figure per hour you are earning is because you choose to not bring your services to someone else and absolutely convince them that you are THEIR answer. It is …a choice.
There definitely are circumstances that can limit the amount of wealth you will accumulate. There are very few circumstances that will limit the amount of wealth you will accumulate to the degree that it will let you live the life you have always dreamed of.
The world is filled with opportunity. There is no shortage of people or groups that can use unique and incredibly valuable skills that I can share with them. Only in a poverty consciousness… is the world…that small.
“Abundance Happens on Purpose.” Kevin Hogan
