Your Money Mindset: Income Goals

Do you deliberately set any income goals for yourself? Maybe for the year? Is there a specific amount of money that you're going after whether that's in your career or in your business?

When I talk to people about income goals, usually I find that there are two major types of challenges when it comes to setting effective income goals.

The first one is that some people don't actually set any goals at all. When you don't set a goal, you end up having a default goal which is usually somebody else's goal. A good example of this is corporate jobs.  A lot of people say “I just ended up here”, or “I landed in this job”, and often that's why. It's because of the absence of having clear goals, specifically an income goal.

By not setting a clear goal, you are actually imposing a ceiling on your income and earning capability.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Do you aspire to be the head of your department? It's not that if you're an accountant you need to want to be a CFO. It's that if you don't believe you have the capability of being a CFO, then that doesn't just stop you from being a CFO, it stops you from getting the promotion at the very next level as well because you’ll stop yourself from exhibiting the behaviors that you need to even make small amounts of progress.

There’s a gap between what you want versus what you truly believe that you can do.

The second type of challenge I see around income goals is that some people set goals that they can't relate to.I remember when I read The Secret many years ago, there was a part in the book where they said to print out a cheque, write 'one million dollars' on it, and stick it up on your wall to look at every day. It’s great to have an inspirational goal, the problem is, if you're setting yourself a goal of a million dollars, but maybe at the moment you're earning $50,000 or $100,000, that goal seems so far out of your reach, that you just can't relate to it and therefore you do absolutely nothing about going after that goal.

There’s a gap between what you think you want and what you believe you're capable of achieving, and that can really affect the quality of the action that you take towards your goal.

So I want to ask you where you're at when it comes to your own income goal? Firstly, do you even have one?  We're going to do this quick test, I want you to quickly visualise what you current amount of income is. Whether that's an amount that you earn each month or an annual salary - it's not important. If you have already set up an income goal for yourself, then I want you to picture that amount of money.

Think about that amount of money, for example, $10,000 dollars a month, and what I want you to do is double it. So that $10,000 dollars a month becomes $20,000 dollars.

I want you to imagine that you and I are working together and we've just been in a great coaching session, and I've said to you that we're going to agree right now that for the next year, that new amount of money is your income goal, and you're going to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

Focus on what you feel and think of the idea of doubling your income goal, and in particular, me telling you to double your income goal.

Some of the responses I get is initially people might feel annoyed about that, especially if you already went to the effort of setting your own goal. But, why is that annoying? Usually what people say to me is “it's ridiculous” or “ well that's the amount that I get paid for my job, so I can't just double that”. An extension of that is, if something seems ridiculous it's because it seems impossible.

If that resonates with you, then I want to just challenge that reaction a bit.

Think about whether you know anyone personally, or know of anyone who is earning that amount of money, or maybe even more money than that.

You might know someone who's in a really successful corporate job for example, or you know someone who owns a successful business. If you can agree with that, then what that's really saying is that it's not that this outcome is impossible, but it's impossible for you specifically.

What thoughts and beliefs sit behind that? We've established it's not impossible, so why is it impossible for you to double your income this year? Usually, the thoughts and beliefs around that tend to be fear based. Maybe you missed some goals in the past, or maybe you failed at something in the past and you store that energy of fear of failing again.

Or maybe you've just never gone after such a big goal, so there's fear of failure because it just seems too big for what you believe you're capable of.

That really stems from the fear of not being good enough and sometimes also not being worthy enough to receive that amount of money.

Another common one is, “what would people think of me if I did earn that amount of money?” That can be a driver not to do something as well.

What causes these beliefs? One of the very common factors that I see when I work with my clients, is growing up either in poverty or in middle-class families. And that's because when you grow up in a middle-class family, you can get brought up on this notion that money always runs out or “it's not enough for people like us”.

This really creates a set point around what you believe you're worth in financial terms. You believe money always runs out, and that drives you to keep your income from growing. It's not even necessarily about the specific income amount. It's that you might spend it all after you earn it, and so a lot of that stems out from our upbringing and based on what you observed as a child around money.

Another thing that really drives people to not set income goals, or not believe that they can achieve their income goals is that we are very much primed to want to fit in, so we're primed with this desire to fit in with our tribe, and that's usually our family. If you did grow up in a middle-class family, and then you’ll tend to push yourself to fit in. An easy way to do that is to earn a very similar amount of money to what everyone else in your family earned. In a lot of cases, even if you are able to sort of push through that barrier and earn a bit more, then you may find ways to not keep any more money, and you can do this either by spending it all or by getting into debt.

A good way to test whether you might be affected by family paradigms is to ask yourself well, what would my family think if I suddenly earned that amount of money? Or if I told people I was earning that much? What would my parents say?

I'm sure most people's parents would actually be happy, but there might be some judgment there. “Is it greedy to want to earn that amount of money?” “What would you do with that amount of money?” “Rich people are bad”. This line of thinking prevents you from going towards your income goals or even sabotage your own efforts.

What a lot of people do instead, is rather than focusing on a specific income goal, is they'll focus on “feel good ideas” around money, like abundance and wealth. It’s easier than thinking, “well where is that next thousand dollars going to come from?” Or “where are that next ten thousand dollars going to come from?”  It’s getting into the specifics that make most people uncomfortable.

How Can You Overcome These Challenges?

The first one is, you actually just want to come to terms with some of those fears around money, and fears around achieving your goal. What you want to do is start to neutralise that energy.

In my previous posts, I talked about the technique that I used called tapping, which is simply where you tap on some acupressure points. Basically, if you want to shortcut the process, you can tap on your collarbone point. It’s a quick and easy way to stop and have a conversation with yourself.

What you want to do is come up with a list of fears. Such as ”I'm scared I'm not good enough to achieve that”, “I'm scared that I'm not worthy of achieving that”, “I don't feel like I deserve that”, or “I might get knocked down by my family”, “I'd have to hide this from them”.

Then what you want to do is have a conversation with yourself and just talk about them. The effect of the tapping is that it neutralises this energy that you're carrying in your nervous system. You're going to feel physically better.

Over time, if you keep repeating this process you're going to find firstly that maybe some more stuff you weren't aware of will come to the surface, and that's okay, you can just keep tapping through it. Secondly, you'll actually find that you start to neutralise that energy, and some of these beliefs will no longer affect you. You'll find some of them quite ridiculous, and your results are going to start changing.

If you haven't been setting goals, start, but again, don't go straight for that million dollars if you know you're earning $50,000 today because it's too big a leap, and you'll end up just doing nothing about it.

Go for something in between, and once you've achieved that goal and proved to yourself that you can do it, then you can set that million dollar goal.

Start with something that you can actually write a plan towards, and tick off your achievement list.

Only set a goal if you're going to accompany it with actions. When you think about income goals, I want you to think actions. You want to start thinking about things that you can do every day to gradually move towards that goal.

The last thing which you can do is: shift towards a state of gratitude. Continue to feel grateful, and to express gratitude for what you already have. If you've never done this before then just try to name five things a day. By expressing gratitude, then you're going to shift your energy and you're going to open yourself up to receiving.

The combination of all of that is going to help you really to start to shift into a more abundant mindset, but by taking practical actions. It goes beyond wishful thinking. You’ll be changing the physical energy within your body, which will change your thoughts and beliefs, and then if you accompany that with action, you'll start to see yourself move forward with some of those goals.

Comment below and let me know whether or not you set income goals? 

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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