The Truth About Income

This article is part of the Money Mindset series where I've been talking about your relationship with money, and in particular around the six types of money.

So far we've covered savings, debt, and today we're going to talk about income.

When it comes to income, I like to dive right in because this one is best tackled on a practical level.

Take a few seconds to think about your income. How much do you earn? When do you get paid? Is it monthly? Or every other week?

We typically refer to income from a job, but it can also be from your business.

What I want you to do is to think about your income, it doesn't have to be exact, just something close. Visualise that number. Picture when that money comes in, when it hits your bank account, try to see that figure.

What I want you to take note of is whether any feelings are coming up around the visualisation of that amount of money.

The reason I'm asking you to do that is when it comes to income, particularly if it is a salary that comes in monthly or fortnightly, then a lot of people start to have feelings of anxiety or even frustration around this amount of income that comes in.

It's not because the income is bad. Earning income is great. We couldn't survive without it. However, stress starts to come up. The reason that happens is because often there's this little voice that's going on in the back of your head that starts to say, "it's not enough, the money always runs out. I get paid every month, but by the end of the month, I've got nothing left and I'm waiting on that next pay check".

That obviously generates an amount of stress and and frustration.

If that resonates with you, I want you to think about how long you’ve felt like this.

Go back as far as you can remember, maybe even to your first job, and start to think about your different stages of life. If I take myself as an example, I can picture my very first full-time corporate job, and the income that I earned back there. Until I started working on my money mindset, I remember feeling like I would run out of money each month, and it was easy at the time to think, "Well, I only earn this amount of money. Life would be so different if I earned $1,000 more or if I earned double that".

And when I think over my corporate career, I doubled that several times over, probably more, and still I found myself month in, month out thinking that the money wasn't enough.

It's not actually about the exact amount of money that you're earning, it's actually an energy that you carry, because as your income increases, if you're carrying that energy that it's never enough, then you find ways to make all of your expenses increase as well so that the money is never enough.

You may have enough to cover the essentials like your mortgage repayment, but then it runs out.

Hopefully, you can start to understand what I'm saying about this really being an energy. It's an energy, and it then also becomes a habit. You carry this energy, it runs through your nervous system, and then you start to behave in ways that ensure that the money always runs out.

 This pattern of behaviour leaves you with a feeling that the income is never enough. As a result of the combination of that energy and your spending patterns, you neglect savings, and that might cause you to get into debt.

You’re now probably starting to see how the different types of money start to relate to each other as well. The purpose of me going through these six types of money is that hopefully you can see, where your weakest point is, because that's the one that you want to focus on first.

You'll find that if you can fix that really tough point, then the other areas start to improve naturally and you can work on those in parallel as well.

This pattern is actually really common for people who either struggled with childhood poverty or who grew up in middle-class families. People who grew up in a certain environment where money always ran out and was only just enough, tend to carry these different thought patterns and classify themselves as being in a certain group.

So you may not call it middle-class, but you definitely don't associate with being one of the wealthy, therefore, that does create a separation, which then introduces different thought and emotion patterns.

Basically that gets people to form a certain type of interaction with income, and this then manifests itself through your own adult life because of the things that you would have picked up through your childhood. We call this your family paradigm, and in later articles I'll talk about this in a lot more detail. But for now, I just want you to get this idea, that if you do have that feeling that money runs out all the time, then that is typically something that you would have learned as part of your family paradigm.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been taught these concepts. As a kid you may have started to form these different beliefs about money that may have been based on a conversation or an event that you didn't even fully understand. You didn't necessarily know the context, but it left you to interpret your own financial status. Part of this does get based on things that you observed from your household, from your parents and your family.

Another common source to form those childhood beliefs about money is environments like school.

If you think back, and it may not come to you instantly, but take a moment to reflect on when was the very first time that you formed an opinion about your own financial standing or financial status? Are there things that other kids said or ways that people behaved that for the first time you said to yourself "I'm rich" or "I'm poor"? Whatever it was, how did you know that you were in a certain financial group? At what point did you put a label on that and what was that label?

These are interesting things to think about, because it's those formations and those initial beliefs that if you don't know how to challenge them and redirect that programming, you’ll start to carry into your adult life. It can really affect your relationship with money, and in particular income.

  The other area where you would form beliefs about money, too, is how hard you have to work for money. What I find with a lot of people is that even though they’re able to start to break through that ceiling of an income cap that they might set for themselves, they then work themselves into the ground to earn that money.

That is a self-limiting belief as well. When you pick up these different ideas as a child, if you don't know how to challenge them and correct them, then they end up getting stored in your nervous system. That's what causes you to experience different levels of anxiety and frustration, when you get that pay check, month in, month out, and you just feel like it's not enough.

You feel a bit indifferent towards it because you know that it's going to run out.

The basis of this is a really strong self-limiting belief from childhood that basically say, I can never get ahead. If you carried this belief as a child, then getting paid a regular income every month or every fortnight will be a constant reminder of the fact that you believe you could never get ahead.

Interestingly, too, these programmed beliefs also create a set-point for you on the amount of income that you can earn.

 A lot of people get stuck at a certain level of income. In the next post, I'm going to talk about income goals, so we'll cover that in a lot more detail in that piece. But typically the result of that is a lot of people find it hard to earn any more than a particular level because they've established this set-point on what their earning capacity is.

 The next question is what can you do about this? What can you do to stop feeling negative about your income and how can you start to correct some of these programmed beliefs?

One tip that I want to give you that works pretty much instantly, is to learn to express gratitude.

I will do a lot more in-depth work on gratitude as well in a separate post, but just for today, I want to show you a really simple and practical way that you can use gratitude. It's as simple as being grateful and saying thank you for some of the small things you have. It might even be the significant things you have, like your amount of income, that you take for granted, and you may even feel negative about it. The real benefit here is if you can start to feel grateful for the small things and the things that come inconsistently, then you'll attract a lot more bigger things with ease in your life, because you're generating and operating with a lot more positive and abundant energy. 

What I want you to do here is replace that thought and that feeling of "it's never enough" with "I'm so happy and grateful that I earn X amount of income and it's able to put a roof over my head, it's able to feed me, feed my family, I'm able to go on great holidays, I have a car that takes us to where we need to go, I'm able to invest money in my education and courses, and maybe even make a contribution to something".

Whatever it is that that income does for you, I want you just to take a moment every day to stop and pause, and tell yourself that you're grateful for what this money is doing for you. Because if you can't be grateful for what you've got already, you're going to find it really hard to bring more into your life, and even if you do bring more into your life, you'll carry that same energy of feeling like it's not good enough and it's never enough, and if you don't feel good about it, then what’s the point? Because you'll stay potentially as unhappy as you are in the current position.

So gratitude will really start to shoot that energy for you and it will start to rewire a bit of that programming, maybe not to the fullest level, but it's definitely the simplest and most immediate tip I can give you to implement that will change the way that you feel about income.

What you can do as well, if you want to take it up to the next level is come up with a list of things that you are grateful for and write these out. You can also use a bit of tapping, which I showed you how to do that in my previous video post. Express those words of gratitude while you tap through the point, and that's going to help to physically settle the energy in your body, and will start to engrain the beliefs that you're grateful. You’ll start feeling a flow gratitude energy and abundance through your nervous system, and you'll see how much better you feel just by doing this for a couple of minutes every day.

Give it a go and leave me a comment if you try it. Let me know what you think of that technique or if you already do express gratitude and how that's working for you.

 To your success,

p.s. Whenever you're ready to experience a massive money mindset breakthrough, here's how I can help you: 

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