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Is Your Old Money Story Ruining Your Business?

The reality is, you're not alone if you're undercharging for your work.

Like it or not, what you and I heard and picked up on as children about money and wealth (what our parents taught us, what they said to us, and how the people around us spoke and interacted with money) got into our heads.

Whether you realize it, those stories and ideas around money were downloaded subconsciously, and if you’re not aware or haven’t investigated your ideas or beliefs around money and wealth, they’re probably impacting you — even today.

Unless you’ve ever consciously challenged your beliefs around wealth and money, it’s likely that what you’ve first learned about money is affecting all your money decisions to this day.

Whether you have an easy or hard time making money, or an easy and hard time saving it, these are all rooted in your beliefs, which ultimately lead to your actions and your results with your money.

 

Are you limiting your earning potential?

As a wealth mindset coach and speaker, my specialty and gift is getting to the root cause of why so many of my clients have a hard time closing the gap between where they are and where they want to be financially in their businesses.

For example, a 2012 study by the International Coach Federation (ICF) reported that personal coaching is a multi-billion dollar industry and growing. Yet half of the world’s certified coaches earn less than $25,000 a year.

So in a multi-billion dollar industry, why are half of the coaches earning less than $25,000? Given that we transform lives, shouldn’t that number be higher?

What I’ve discovered is that many business owners in general are beaming with confidence. You have an amazing sales conversation, you’re 100% sure you can help potential clients, and when you’re ready to close the sale you start to get shaky.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s because of your old money story and you haven’t reset it. That story goes something like this: 

”What if they say they can’t afford it?” or “Maybe my rates are too high?”

Without realizing it, you’re actually projecting your money story onto your potential client. 

Ironically, when you do that you wind up attracting real client objections because they get a sense that your lack of confidence translates into a lack of value.

 

It’s time to reset your money story

The truth, the reason why half of the coaches make less than $25,000 a year in a multi-billion dollar industry is that their old money story is still running on repeat in the background.

The reason why you’re not making as much money as you want starts here: you haven’t challenged or course corrected your old money story.

When I’m working with a client, I often help them discover their limiting beliefs (ones they are often completely unaware of). For example:

As I was talking with a coach recently, she shared that she’s always known that it takes hard work to get money. If she wasn’t working hard for it, it’s almost like she didn’t deserve it.

When I reflected that back to her, it was a huge a-ha moment. She remembered when she was growing up that money was either tight or a struggle and contentious conversation topic. Her parents always fought about money and there never seemed like there was enough.

She holds that belief today because growing up … that was her story. Her parents didn’t have a lot of money and had to work hard for what they got. As a result, she believes that building a successful coaching business must be a struggle and has, up until then, been unconsciously making it hard to receive her value.

Without that awareness, there’s no way she would have known she’d been sabotaging herself. As we explored and talked more, she realized old and unhelpful beliefs had been running her life and business. 

It’s not that she doesn’t know she should be making way more money — she “knows” she can charge more. 

But her old beliefs were preventing her from taking the action of making it happen.

 

Until age 7, we don’t have the ability to think and reason about things. Our conscious mind hasn’t developed yet. So we just accept everything as truth.

Our first mentors, who are usually our parents (though not always) teach us everything we know. 

So, when you hear things about money at age five, it downloads straight into your subconscious as — “this is the way things are!”

If you were fortunate enough to have parents who were great with money, had healthy relationships with money, or who taught you to value yourself … that found its way into your subconscious too.

 

Cultivating a healthier relationship with money

I’ve also worked with people who grew up with healthy relationships with money, and have no problems turning their goals into reality. These same people easily have those internal money conversations without blinking.

They acknowledge they were fortunate enough to have an upbringing where they were informed about creating wealth and money, in general, was discussed in a positive light.

Maybe they were lucky enough to have parents who had a higher level of awareness, but either way, they didn’t have too many negatively charged stories, so for them, it’s always been easy and natural to attract money and create wealth.

The reality is, that you’re not alone if you’re undercharging for your work.

You’re 100% right to think that you can be making way more money than you are right now. 

But to actually make more money, you’ve got to fully believe you can and will. It may sound cliché, but successful people will tell you that it starts with your mindset and a lot of self-discovery.

Once you start to have a look and make those permanent shifts to your thinking (which takes time and practice), you’ll get the results you want.

 

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