I’ve heard it said before that comprehension starts and ends at the point of articulation. That is, how we talk about what we experience, the language we use to describe it, shapes our understanding of that experience. 

Quite often when people feel “stuck,” it’s for a lack of words to explain what's going on. We simply just experience something, but we can't really explain why we're stuck, and for that reason, we can’t understand it, and for that reason, we can’t get out of it. 

While true in all areas of life, today we’re looking at how working with a money vocabulary can help you improve your life financially.

Specifically, we’re looking at money blocks. 

What Are Money Blocks? 

Money blocks are self-limiting beliefs around money. They affect people in three main ways: 

1. Money Creation Money Blocks

People with money blocks centered on money creation struggle to create money and create wealth. These people want to earn more, and try to earn more, but seem to get stuck earn...

When you have a powerful money mindset, you can start to excel in all areas of your life because you’ll learn how to operate with more clarity, focus and balance. 

A lot of the personal challenges I faced during my 20s stemmed from having a weak money mindset.

When I left high school many moons ago, I was really fortunate to be accepted into a prestigious business scholarship program at one of Australia’s top universities. Even though my scholarship opened up many doors for me, I very quickly realised that the corporate world wasn’t what I hoped it would be and I felt really unhappy in my career. Most of the time I felt like a square peg trying to squeeze through a round hole. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that a lot of my challenges stemmed from having a weak money mindset and not believing I was worthy of success. This self-limiting belief caused me to work long hours and I would often stare at my computer screen and wonder: “Is this it? Is this really all I’m going to do wi...

Building a business is a bit like building a house. You're going to have much longer lasting success and a much stronger house if you lay solid foundations to begin with. A powerful, positive mindset helps build a strong foundation in your business. There are three core elements that you need to succeed as an entrepreneur in business.

1. A powerful and positive mindset: This relates to having the right kind of energy, clarity and focus in your business.

2. Strategy: Embarking on a business and succeeding requires you to have really clear goals. You need to have clarity on what your goals are and specifically, your key success metrics. 

If your goal is to hit seven figures this year from a service-based business, you’ll want to break down the following metrics: 

• How many clients you need for your various products or packages to get to your revenue goal.
• How many sales calls you need to make to enrol that number of clients.
• How many leads you need to generate that number of calls
...

When I reflect back on my life, I think it's fair to say I’ve achieved a good amount of success, however the truth is, I was never really as successful as I wanted to be. Or to be more accurate, it didn’t happen in the way I wanted it to.

During my teens and twenties, I had very low self-esteem even though I appeared to be confident (probably because I did a lot of public speaking and sang in bands). My successes felt like a fluke because I didn't believe in myself and I just sort of pushed myself to achieve certain things.

During my 30s, I was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder, but the stress of the job was killing me. I knew I didn’t want to do accounting forever - and that is when I drew on my passion around personal development and started a life coaching certification.

Life coaching teaches you a systematic way to achieve your goals alongside working on things like your self-limiting beliefs. I used it to get promoted in my own career and I started to help others to prog...

One of the quirky things that I always wanted when I was a child was a waterbed. As soon as I bought my first home, I got myself a waterbed and I've had it ever since. Waterbeds are built with very strong, solid foundations so they can last you a lifetime if you look after them.

Just like a waterbed, you've got to have really solid foundations in your personal life to be able to succeed in building an authentic business. If you don't clean up the rubbish in your personal life, then you're going to bring that energy directly across into your business.

Two areas that entrepreneurs in particular need to address when trying to succeed in business are:

1. Making sure that you deal with your personal baggage. If you’re still harboring resentment or anger towards others and if you can’t move on from memories of past events, then it’s going to affect your ability to focus on what’s happening for you now.  You're going to feel like your focus gets broken where you're being pulled into the p...

Sometimes when you go through a series of life events, your life feels like it’s in an absolute state of chaos. Maybe you're physically busy or you're mentally busy, or both. At other times you may just be feeling your energy isn’t in the right place and you’ve lost your focus. Perhaps you go to work on things every day, but you find that you have to keep resetting your plans or revisiting them, and you're not sure what it is that you should be working on.

The solution to getting your focus back is to be in a specific kind of energetic state where you're productive, creative and able to tap into the right resources that are going to move you forward. You usually know when you're not in a productive state because often two of the most toxic emotions surface - anger and fear.

There can be anger around things to do with your current circumstances or even things to do with the past. One of the tell-tale signs of anger is you might be snappy or impatient and the anger gets reflected in y...

If you've been experiencing a particular money pattern for a while, then it could be because you've gone through some kind of financial trauma. Since a particular traumatic event your money might not have been the same, or you might be struggling with a particular issue, like not being able to save or being in debt or not being able to hit your income goals.

Types of Financial Trauma

I mentioned in my last video that there are two types of financial trauma.

1. The first of these is loss-based financial trauma. This is a trauma that is surrounded by feelings of sadness and unfairness that keep your finances stuck the way they are today. This inability to let go of these feelings of sadness and unfairness means you're not actually putting all of your energy, your brilliance, your great ideas and your problem-solving capability into solving whatever the issue is around your finances.  
2. The second type of financial trauma is anger-based financial trauma. Anger is such a strongly fue
...

If you've been stuck in certain money patterns for a while, it could be a sign that you've encountered financial trauma in the past. Maybe you've been unable to shift your level of savings and actually accumulate meaningful savings. Maybe you've been stuck in debt or maybe you've been unable to break through and achieve your income goals. Often when the same patterns repeat themselves over and over again, there's a deeper root cause that may not be presenting itself on the surface.

In a lot of cases your relationship with money is actually impacted by your early money paradigm - i.e. the way you grew up around money and what you experienced by observing adults around you, particularly your family. It can also be a combination of your family paradigm and financial trauma. In fact, financial trauma can actually have a compounding effect on your family paradigms around money.

What is Financial Trauma?

A financial trauma is an event that usually occurred sometime in your past. The a...

Are you chasing a really ambitious goal? Maybe you're going after a particular profit target, or you're in corporate and you're trying to get to that next level, get your next promotion. Whatever it is, you’re working really hard and going after something that really matters to you. This is for you.

In the context of chasing after a really big goal, the best advice I can give you is to remember to take care of and prioritize your health and wellbeing. I’m talking about both physical and mental health, which includes working on your mindset.

Often the reason we chase after something that's financially-incentivized has to do with a quality of life metric; it’s about the type of lifestyle that you'd like to have that money can bring.

If you're working really hard on going after your goals to the point that you're working yourself into the ground,  you end up putting your health at risk and jeopardizing your ability to enjoy that lifestyle that you're working so hard to achieve.

Don...

“Nature abhors a vacuum.” 

Artistotle.

Through the process of packing and unpacking all my things during my recent move home, I was surprised by how much stuff I have and how I haven't used a lot of it in a long time. It got me thinking about the way that we hold onto loads and loads of stuff, and why?

Today I’m reflecting on how we hold onto a lot of stuff we don’t really need or use, and what we can do with this stuff to improve our lives.

Why do we keep the things we keep?

1. They have a utilitarian purpose.
2. They have an emotional purpose.

Stepping back and looking into that second reason can really help us to create emotional space for bigger and better life experiences.

When you do hoard things you don’t really need or use anymore, it may be because they symbolise a person, place or experience that you’re also unwilling or not yet ready to let go of on an emotional level.

The material things that we hold onto are often connected to memories from our childhood or p...