Purposeful Profit

18. How the Story You Tell Yourself About Money Impacts Your Profit

• Carla Moats

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Making more profit in your business and more money in your life doesn't start with your numbers. Or your strategies. It starts between your ears with your mindset.

The money stories we tell ourselves directly impact our ability to build profitable businesses and create wealth and money in our lives. These stories, many of which we accept as fact, are really just thoughts and beliefs we keep repeating to ourselves. They've been framed by our lifetime experiences, upbringing, and societal messages.

And buried in these thoughts are our limiting beliefs about money. And those limiting beliefs hold us back in our business daily. By getting in touch with our stories and deciding what we want to keep and what we want to let go, we can directly impact our ability to create more profit and money.

Join me for this week's episode and I talk about where our money stories come from, how to find our money stories and 4 questions to ask ourselves about our stories.

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For the full show notes, including the transcript, go to www.carlamoats.com/podcast/episode18

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an accountant-client relationship. While we use reasonable efforts to furnish accurate and up-to-date information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any errors, omissions or regulatory updates.

Hi there, and welcome back to the Purposeful Profit Podcast. This week, we're going to talk about mindset, specifically the money mindset. A lot of my work with my CFO clients is about strategy, the actions we take to achieve results, to improve our profits improve our cash flow. Those actions really start with our mindset. Successful execution of a strategy is about not just the strategy, but about how we manage our mind. A good strategy or a great strategy without a good mindset usually doesn't get executed very well. So today, we're going to talk about how the story you tell yourself about money impacts your profit. I'm going to help you learn how to uncover your own story about money, and I'm going to give you 4 questions to ask yourself about your money stories.


So let's dive in. First, let's talk about thoughts versus facts. I'm going to be teaching you, basically, a tool today that I learned and that using coaching that I learned in my coaching certification program. It's called “the model.” It's basically comes from CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy. But it's basically a model for understanding how your thoughts create your results. One of the things is that a lot of what we think are facts in our life or circumstances in our life, they're really just thoughts. 


We have, as humans, 60,000 thoughts a day that run through our mind. And thoughts running through your mind, I'm really just referring to sentences that run through your mind. 85% of them are unconscious - you're not even aware you're thinking about them. They're habit. They're unconscious. They're just out there. Some of them because they've been taking them for years. Others, they're just…think about it - when you get up in the morning, you go to brush your teeth, there's actually a thought through your head that says, you know, I should probably brush my teeth before I go out, or I should probably brush my teeth in the morning. You don't really even realize you're thinking it, but it's a thought that goes through your head that then causes you to get up from what you're doing, go into the bathroom, put toothpaste on the toothbrush, and brush your teeth. 


These thoughts are just sentences that are our interpretation of the world around us. They are shaped to our upbringing, our culture, our society, those people around us…but they are not facts. Facts are provable. You could show anyone in the world, and they could argue a point. And I mean anyone in the world. You go into a court of law, and you could prove it in a court of law. You can show somebody here, tell somebody here the fact, and you can show somebody in another country, the fact, and there wouldn't really be any dispute. So much of what we think are facts are really just thoughts. 


So here are some examples of thoughts about money that I often find people have running through their head:

  • I'm not good with numbers. 
  • I'm not making enough profit. 
  • I'm not far enough along. 
  • If I talk about money, people will think I'm bragging. 
  • Focusing on profit means I'm greedy.
  • If I raise my prices, my clients will leave me, or I won't be able to sign new clients. 


So let's take a few of those thoughts right there. Like, “I'm not good with numbers.” This is something I struggle with with my own daughter. “I'm not good with numbers” is something that probably, to a lot of people, feels like a fact Because, maybe they struggle in math class when they're growing up. Maybe somebody told them when they were younger, “you're just not a numbers person, you're an art person, you're a creative person, you're not a numbers person.” So, we consider it to be fact, but it's really not. It's just our interpretation. One person being good with numbers is different than another person being good with numbers. I might, for instance, actually think I'm pretty good with numbers. But if I were talking to somebody who was an astrophysicist or whatever, they might look at me and think, “you're not very good with numbers after all.” So, it's it is our interpretation.


“I'm not making enough profit.” Enough for who? Compared to who? Compared to what? “If I talk about money, people think I'm bragging.” A lot of us, especially as women, we were brought up, it was impolite to talk about money. “Focusing on profit means I'm greedy.” Maybe we were brought up anti-business, anti-capitalist. I have a couple friends I follow on Facebook that are very anti-business. They don't really believe in profit. We each had different upbringings. We have different thoughts. 


So you have all these thoughts, and they get in and create feelings. Feelings are just emotional vibrations in your body. We think it's the facts or we think it's the profit. We think it's the numbers that create our feelings. Somebody looks at financial statements and says, this is so frustrating. I don't understand it. They think it's the financial statement. They think it's the numbers, but it's not. It's our thoughts about these things that create our feelings, and then often we even judge our feelings. 


I've mentioned this before: a lot of times clients will come to me, they're making seven figures, and they have some shame about their knowledge of their numbers or where their finances are at. They're judging themselves. 


I want you to take 2 businesses, December 31st. They look at their numbers, and they each made $100,000. One thinks, “oh my god. I'm finally a 6 figure business owner.” She feels elation. She feels pride. She feels accomplishment. Another one thinks, “Well, finally. Took me long enough. I should have made it to this point already. I'm just behind.” Exact same number. She feels disappointment and frustration. The third one thinks, “well, that's less than I made last year.” She feels disappointed and failure. Same exact number. People have 3 different thoughts. And that's just one example. 


Each of these emotions cause us to show up and act differently. So, our thoughts create our feelings, and then our feelings drive our actions. Actions are how we show up every day. It's both actions we take and can be things we don't do.  


I want you to pick 2 contrasting emotions that you can think of. Say happy and sad, proud and disappointed, excited and ambivalent. Pick some pair of contrasting emotions, and then I want you to ask yourself, when you feel each of those pairs, how do you show up? It works even better if you can think of a time when you felt each of these. A time where you felt proud and a time where you felt disappointed. A time when you felt happiness and a time when you felt sad. And I want you to think about how you showed up differently in life and work in each of those cases. 


When you feel happy, how do you show up in life? What do you do? What do you don't do? When you're sad, what do you do and don't do? Those actions are going to be different. So let's just take proud and disappointed. When I feel proud, what do I do? I probably feel motivated. I continue to take action. I might even celebrate my accomplishments. I make a plan to make more progress. When I feel disappointed. I might buffer. Buffer is just sitting on Facebook scrolling. I might shame myself. I might lay in bed. I might not take any action. So how I show up for each of those emotions is very different. And it's the actions we take each day to drive our results. 


I said earlier that I'm coaching clients on strategy. These are the actions we take to drive our results. And this is why I'm saying it all starts in your mind. Because if your thoughts are creating feelings of, say, disappointment or failure…no matter how good our strategy is, where we said we're going to do x, y, and z, those feelings are affecting how you show up each day. So we can have the greatest strategy, but if our mindset isn't aligned, we're not going to execute those strategies well.


The actions we take each day drive our results, our revenue, our profit, and our efficiency in our business. So let's take the thought “I suck at numbers.” That's going to leave you likely feeling inadequate, maybe afraid, failure, something like that. And the actions that typically this results in is I don't review my numbers. I don't know where my money goes. I spend blindly. I hope for the best. And this is where actually, where a lot of people come to me. It doesn't really matter where their stage is, whether they're still making 5 figures or they're making 7 figures. They've come to me because they've had this thought that “I'm not good at numbers. I suck at numbers. I don't understand numbers,” and these are the actions that have manifested. 


And then they've come to me because now it's kind of snowballed, and now they're ready to maybe change their thought to, “I'm learning to understand my numbers.” And now maybe they feel determined. Maybe they feel empowered, hopeful, something like that. And some of their actions then could be they do some research on their own. They find a mentor. They dedicate an outreach amount to their finances. They attend workshops. They create a budget. They hire someone to help them. 


So, again, this is why I'm trying to demonstrate you that that thought that you have that generates that feeling, is really affecting how you show up or have you can see you're going to create very different results. If I'm not reviewing my numbers, I don't know where my money goes. I spend blindly. I hope for the best. What kind of result do you think that's going to create? 


Versus, I'm doing some research on my own. I'm finding a mentor. I'm dedicating an hour. I'm getting proactive. I'm attending a workshop on creating a spending plan or a budget. What kind of results do you think that's going to create? So go out and find your money story. 


I work with clients and strategy, but the best strategies don't work if your mindset's blocking you. So often when I'm working with clients, even CFO clients at the 7 figure level, there's almost always a mindset component we're going to find some type of mindset issue that's in there. So mindset could be the difference between a strategy that is executed and one that is not. 


I want you to go get yourself a little notebook. Doesn't have to be fancy. Just get yourself a little spiral notebook, maybe something your kid's got hanging around the house. And for the next 30 days, free write for 10 minutes about money. If 30 days feels overwhelming to you, then do it for 1 day or 7 days or 10 days. Pick a number that feels doable to you. If you go to www.carlamoats.com/moneyprompts, all one word, I will send you prompts to write about for the next 30 days will help you uncover your money story. 


Once you write your story I mean, again, it's just free write. So your money prompt will have a prompt for the day. And if you opt not to get the money prompts, which I don't know why you wouldn’t, but if you opt not to get it, you could just basically put over the top what I think about money. And for the first day, write about that. And then somewhere in there, there'll be something that'll come up. Maybe it'll come up that, you know, my parents always taught me. It was impolite to talk about money. Then the next day, you can write about what you feel about it being implied to talk about money. You can talk about what your parents taught you about money. The money prompts are really a facilitated way to go through this process. 


Once you've done that, I want you to go underline the facts, things you can prove in court. And then I want you to go underline your thoughts in a different color, thoughts are your interpretation. What you should end up with is about 80%, at least, of what you underlined should be thoughts, not facts. And just to be sure - for the facts that you see out there, ask yourself if it's really true, and how do I know it's true? Because, again, a lot of the things that we think are facts are just thoughts. Could you prove that fact in a court of law? What will probably happen is you will underline some things as facts. And when you go through that exercise right there, you'll go back, and you'll change it, and you'll realize they’re thoughts. 


Then for the things that are thoughts, I want you to ask yourself 4 questions. 1. Is this really true? 2. How do I know it's true? Because a lot again, because so many of our thoughts feel like facts. A lot of us are like, okay. Well, maybe this technically is a thought, but, really, it's a fact. It feels like a fact to me. So I want you to ask yourself, is this really true? How do I know it's true? Question 3 is, Is this thought serving me? 


So let's just say you say, yeah. It's true. For example, I'm going to pick “I suck at numbers.” Is this really true? You're going to say, yeah. It's true because I've always felt like I sucked at numbers. And when you ask yourself, how do I know it's true? Oh, I always struggled through math classes. Science classes in College were a struggle. My dad told me when I was younger, you just don't have any number sense. So everybody else tells me it's true, so it must be true. Let's just say that's the case. Then I want you to ask yourself, is it serving you? Is it serving you and your business to think “I suck at numbers?”


And then the 4th question is, what will my business and life look like if I released this thought? If I decided today I was going to start to release the thought that I suck at numbers. What will my business or life look like if I could release that thought? 


So, I want you to do this for 30 days, and I guarantee, guarantee you will uncover unconscious thoughts that are holding you back, and you can be on the path to start changing them. One of the greatest powers we have as humans is the ability to decide how we want to think. 


If you go grab my money prompts, you'll also get a bonus that will teach you a tool to begin changing these thoughts. And, I mean, this is just super powerful…mindset's really where everything in life starts. Uncovering these money stories will help you uncover profit because sustainable profit starts between the ears. 


If today's podcast resonates with you, I do 1-on-1 coaching. I have CFO clients, but I also do 1-on-1 coaching. I take out about three 1-on-1  coaching clients at a time, and I do have a couple of 1-on-1 coaching slots opening up in October. These are for business owners who don't need or want or aren't ready yet for CFO services, but they want to massively uplevel their money mindset that they can increase their prices, reduce their spending, sign more clients, create more cash, make more profit. And in these 12 weeks, we also work on getting your financial foundations in place. You get a little bit of financial mentoring, but we also work on your money mindset. So, if this resonates with you, I would love to invite you to go www.carlamoats.com/workwithme, and you can book a call. Alright? And I will see you the next time.


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Carla Moats

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