Creating an amazing relationship with money

I want you to ask yourself, really ask yourself, how is your relationship with money? Do you have a really beautiful, confident, unwavering trust in money? Or do you have a bit of a on and off kind of connection? In today’s episode, I’m going to dive into how you can create an amazing relationship with money.

Hello and welcome to The Clare Wood Podcast, where myself and incredible guests share about money mindset, financial successes, and how to manage your money in a fun and practical way to create wealth and abundance in both your business and your life. I’m your host, Clare Wood. I’m a business coach and a money mentor. I strongly believe that money has the power to positively change the world. I can’t wait to help you transform your mindset around money, create a love of numbers, and build the business of your dreams so you can live a life of financial freedom, giving, and global impact.

So to start the episode off, you guys know I like to try and be really honest and upfront with you about a lot of things. And one thing that I would like to start with is that I do not have a perfect relationship with money all the time. I just want to be really clear about that. And that’s okay. Nobody has a perfect relationship. But if you do want to create an amazing relationship like any kind of relationship, it’s something that you have to put work into. And that is definitely something that I do in my relationship with money. I do a lot of work on my mindset. And I also do a lot of work on the practical stuff. I’m constantly looking at my systems. I’m constantly reassessing how I’m managing money in my business and my life. And today, I want to dive into a bit of that with you.

So if you and money haven’t really seen eye to eye, if you feel like you aren’t living in a beautiful, cohesive relationship with money, some of the time, any of the time, all of the time, hopefully there are some things that you can take out of today.

The parallels between relationships with people and relationships with money

One of the things that I talk about a lot is the parallels between actual relationships in real life and the relationship with money. And the very first step in really starting to recreate or improve any relationship is to recognise that there’s an issue there. It doesn’t have to mean that it’s a bad relationship or that you don’t have to be in a really toxic place with money to recognise that your relationship could do with some help. In fact, you can have a really great relationship and want to make it even better. I’m like that in my marriage. I’ve got a fantastic marriage, but I’m always looking for ways to make it more connected. And the more that you work on the relationship, the more that you identify that there’s always more work that can be done.

Recognising money problems 

So, the first step to improving your relationship with money is to recognise that there’s an issue. Now, that issue doesn’t have to be a big gaping debt that you’ve got or anything horrendous like that. It’s just to recognise, hey, I don’t quite have the money that I dream of, the money that I desire. I don’t have the money to give me the freedom and all of the experiences that I do want to have in my life. I don’t have the money to give in overflow to people that I care about or organisations that I care about just yet. So I want to take this good relationship and make it even better, or maybe it’s not a good relationship. Maybe it’s actually quite a bad relationship. In which case, it’s still really important to say, hey, there’s an issue here. This relationship needs some work.

If there’s one thing about problems, any kind of problems, it’s that they don’t go away on their own. And money problems are certainly no exception. If you want your current reality to change, you need to do something to change it. And like I said, this applies to many areas of your life. If you’re unhealthy and you think, I just won’t think about it, you don’t miraculously get healthier by pretending it’s not happening. If you’ve ever had the feeling of invoices piling up in your business and not really knowing how you’re going to pay for them, if you have ever wanted to invest in something and you haven’t been able to confidently do it because you’re not quite sure what money is coming in, if you aren’t making the money that you dream of and you’re not quite sure how to, then this is an issue.

The very first step is saying, I am not where I desire to be. And it doesn’t even have to mean that you’re in a bad place. It just means that you want to make it even more amazing, more spectacular. You want to create more money, more wealth in your business and in your life. So step number one, recognise that there is an issue there.

Working out the core money issue

The next step is to work out what the core problem is. So a lot of times there will be a surface problem, and then there’ll be a deeper problem. So, let’s first of all chat about what the surface problem might look like. It might look like, I don’t make enough money. I’d like to make more money. It might be, I don’t have enough time to look at my money, at my bank accounts. I don’t have enough time to run my financial reports. I don’t have enough time to create a budget. The surface level problem to you might look like, I forget to send out my invoices, or I don’t want to put my prices up because I don’t want to turn my customers off. That’s what the surface level problem might look like. But what I’d love to challenge you to do, if you’re ready to change it, if you’re ready to rewrite your relationship is to look a little deeper. When we dig below the surface, what is really going on there? And you’ll probably find that there is a story, a belief that is sitting underneath the surface level problem.

So, let’s dig a little deeper at what’s going on. If you aren’t making the money that you really desire, is it that you aren’t showing up and marketing your services enough? And why is that? What’s going on deeper? It might be because you were secretly scared of success. And you might think, I’m not scared of success, of course I want to be successful. But perhaps you’ve got some subconscious stories around what success looks like that is actually holding you back. Some examples of this could be that successful people get haters, that successful people outgrow their friends, they become snobs. There might be something on a subconscious level that is sitting there that is holding you back from making more money. Going back to the problem about not having enough time or energy to look at your money in detail, to really dive into your reports, to create budgets, to really get intimate with your number, what’s going on beneath that? It’s not really that you don’t have enough time. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of time for whatever distracting habits you have.

I know for me, it’s Instagram, scrolling to reels and things like that. I bet you that there’s things that you make time for in your life. And yet, for some reason, you were choosing not to create the time to look at your numbers, to understand your money, and to really wrap your head around the details of what’s going on in your business. And the reason why you aren’t creating the time perhaps is maybe because you’re scared. Maybe you don’t want to know that your business isn’t as profitable as you thought it was. You’re making good sales. Let’s just focus on that and not dive into the profit numbers there. Maybe it’s all just a little bit overwhelming. And you just think, if I don’t think about it too much, hopefully it will go away, or the accountant will take care of it. Again, there’s something deep going on. There’s a fear, a sense of lack.

Maybe there’s a fear that you’re not across it, and that actually scares you. So you just think, I’ll just ignore it and hope that it goes away. So beneath the surface level stuff, there is a likely some sort of money story or money belief that is going on that’s a bit deeper. And it’s really important that we do this money mindset work and really start to identify what those stories are. We can’t rewrite our relationship unless we really dig a bit deeper and start to understand what’s really going on.

Strategies to change your money mindset

So once you’ve done some of this work, once you’ve really started to explore why you are sabotaging your success, ignoring what’s going on, holding yourself back, whatever it might be for you, the next step is of course to work out a strategy to change it.

If you’re in a relationship and it wasn’t going well, and you’d realise that you had a bunch of stories about relationships that were holding you back, and you are ready to rewrite it, what would you do? You would probably go and get help. So, you’d go and get perhaps some marriage counseling or some relationship counseling. And it’s the same with money. You want to learn the skills to improve it. You want to learn how to manage your money, how to invest your money wisely, how to create and attract more money into your life. So, how do you do that? Well, you learn the how, and the best way you can do that is from an expert, an expert in whatever space you are needing support. Maybe you need support in all of these spaces. So that might look like working with an accountant, a financial planner, a coach. Learning the skills is the first step in changing it, but that’s not where things stop. Once you’ve got those learnings and you’ve learnt the skills, the next step is to actually implement them. For example, if you go to a marriage counselor and they say, you need to spend more time together and put time aside and go on date nights, and you’ve learned, let’s go. Yes, that’s a great thing. But if you don’t actually go and do it and booking those date nights and take the time to connect with each other, guess what? You’re not going to reap the fruits of that skill, of that learning. So, it’s then taking those learnings and actually implementing them into your business. I truly believe that you can rewrite your relationship with money at any point in time. Whether you’re really needing some support or whether you actually have a great relationship and you’re wanting to make it even more magnetic, you’re wanting to attract even more abundance, money, wealth, and freedom into your life, you can make a choice to change it.

If you would like my support to do some work on your relationship with money, I am running a free training very soon, which is called the 60 Minute Money Makeover. So, it’s only an hour of your time. And in that training, I’ll be teaching you the power of money systems and money mindset to make more money. If you’d like to find out more, you can jump into this training via the link in the show notes for today’s episode. I would love to help you work on your relationship with money. It will be a live training, so you can come along and ask any questions in that training as well. So to sum up today, if you’re wanting to create an amazing relationship with money, the first step is to recognise that there’s actually an issue there, whether it’s problematic or whether you’re just wanting to make it even more amazing.

The next step is to work out what the core problem is. And then to dig a little bit deeper and work out what’s really going on if we look even deeper below the surface. Then you learn how to change it, learn the skills to transform your relationship with money. And last, but definitely not least is to then take those learnings and actually implement them, so you can reap the rewards. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you would like to take this work a little bit deeper, then please make sure you do register for my free training, 60 Minute Money Makeover in the show notes for today’s episode. Have an awesome week and I’ll catch you soon.

Thanks so much for listening. If you love this episode, please share it with your audience and don’t forget to tag me on Instagram @clare_wood_coach. And also make sure you hit subscribe, so you never miss an episode. Have an abundant week. And I look forward to talking to you again next week.