7 ways to ditch your toxic money mindsets ☠️
It so easy to adopt a toxic mindset. Whether it’s your past, or letting a new one creep in, we’re all susceptible to it.
The reality is, these mindsets are holding us back from achieving our potential.
Here are 7 ways to fight back against your negative money mindsets.
Keep moving forward
One of the best antidotes to negativity is to distract yourself from it. When I’ve had difficult times in life, rumination is our worst enemy. But if we keep ourselves busy, rumination is hard to do.
Quit sitting in front of the TV watching Netflix and get rid of unstructured time.
Replace this with time with friends or family, or add a new (free) hobby. Maybe that’s spending more time at the gym or at city parks. Maybe that’s reading. Maybe that’s starting a game night with friends.
I can’t tell you the right answer, but keeping busy and moving is a great way to stop yourself from allowing a negative loop to control your life.
Nix the negative self-talk
The first step to getting rid of negative self-talk is to call out that negative self-talk.
So often we have negative loops running through our heads, but we fail to acknowledge these self-defeating narratives.
The first step is to become conscious of these narratives. When you hear one, stop and think:
- Why do I have this narrative?
- What do I know that’s counter this narrative?
You might even write the narrative down to keep a running list of all the negative self-talk narratives you have.
But, it’s important that you continue with the next two steps, as well.
Remind yourself you’re in control
If you don’t replace the negative self-talk with something, it’ll come roaring back.
One way to do that is to replace it with a positive soundtrack (this concept comes from the book Soundtracks by Jon Acuff).
For a time, this may mean putting a sticky on your bathroom sink, writing down some sort of affirmation, or finding a song that drills this message into your head.
You need to proactively remind yourself that you’re in control, but then also quickly acknowledge negative self-talk and interrupt it with this reminder.
It’s hard work and will take time. But you have to start somewhere.
Be grateful for what you have
Another way to counteract negative self-talk is to start a gratitude journal. Gratitude is just reminding yourself of the positive things that are going on in your life.
It’s really simple, but extremely powerful.
Acknowledge money is just a tool
We like to assign human feelings to objects that are neither good or bad. This is especially true with money. Many people look at the richest people in the world and like to assign a negative connotation to that type of wealth.
But, think about this logically: are you going to get what you hate?
If you hate it, you’re pushing it away.
Money is just a tool that is used by the world and by you.
The person who holds the money determines what impact it has.
Once you realize this, it allows you to reframe your relationship with money.
If money is not bad and will provide you a path to your goal, it makes it more likely you’ll seek it out. This is vitally important because it’s a prevalent mindset.
Go and get it
If you’re struggling with a scarcity mindset with money, the best way to overcome that is to start a side hustle or find other ways to make more money.
In some ways this is a simplification, but believing that money is scarce will make it scarce for you.
The belief that money is hard to come by will change your actions.
Instead of looking for money-making opportunities, you’ll do nothing.
When presented with a money-making opportunity, you’ll be skeptical instead of accepting.
When you do find an opportunity, you’ll actively work unconsciously to make that job harder.
So, to counteract this, start selling household items on Facebook Marketplace. Start going to pawn shops looking for gems to sell. Start driving for Lyft or Uber or take up DoorDash. I can’t answer for you what extra money you should make, but there are a bazillion options.
Just start with something.