A couple of blog posts ago, I started a series titled Your Money Mindset: Thoughts That Are Keeping You Broke – Part I. This is obviously the second installation in that series but what isn’t so obvious is that this post probably should have been the first in the series.
The reason for this is that understanding “Why” your Money Mindset is “what it is” turns out to be the critical point in which to start. It’s hard not to understand that before any of us can change our Money Mindset, we first have to know what has caused it and then how to unravel it.
In this blog post I’m going to go way back with you to the beginning of your money journey, your childhood. While we’re there we’re going to try to unpack the things that you learned, were told, heard and observed as they related to money and how all of those factors contributed to creating the Money Mindset that you have today.
How did you grow up with money?
One of the biggest determinants of how you think about and deal with money now is how you grew up hearing about it when you were growing up. It sounds like a total page out of the Freudian play book but it really is that obvious.
We learn by modeling what we see and hear from those around us and it’s the same with money. How we were introduced to the topic of money as children essentially set the blueprint of how we approach money in adulthood.
If we thought money was always for someone else, without us knowing, our brains have been programmed to repel money. If we expected to be someone that would be able to make it and deal with it responsibly, there’s a high probability that we do just that.
What we saw or heard our parents do and say about money shapes our own beliefs
What we saw our parents do with money and how they talked about it either set us up successfully or unsuccessfully with money. For some of us, our parents neither talked negatively or positively about money and we then formed our money blueprint in a different way.
Possibly by modeling behavior that we saw from an aunt or an uncle or someone we admired or despised. Money is something that takes on the story and the perception of the person interpreting that story. In many cases, we might have even misinterpreted what we saw or what we heard about money and that then becomes part of the foundation we build around it.
It would be the complete exception and not the rule if we were brought up having a purposeful and instructional conversation about money. An educational foundation about how money works and what it can and can’t do for us. But instead, most of us then to have a tangential introduction with money.
A mish mash of stories that are infused with as many truths as there are untruths and so it is that we create our own understanding of money through a mixture of ill-advised and partial truths or what money really is and how to manage it.
Was there enough?
When you were growing up was it your belief that your family had enough money? What led you to that conclusion?
It probably goes without saying that if you grew up in a family that had enough money to cover the basic costs of life such as health care, food, shelter and transportation it’s harder to differentiate whether your family was well off or barely over the poverty line. The reason for that is your parent’s orientation to money.
As you know now, some people who have money live like misers. They’re cheapskates and as a result may have lived a very miserly life. On the other end of the spectrum, some people can barely cover the basics but have a propensity for living on the edge always willing to take on “just one more payment”.
So if you had enough money to have your basic life costs covered in your childhood, you at least ‘had enough’ to cover the basics. However, could you determine at what level of financial security your family was at? Did your parents have occupations such as physicians or successful business owners that would otherwise indicate that they had higher incomes than other people? Or did your parents have low wage or infrequent employment while you were young?
Did your parents talk about money?
Having parents that talked about money with you or around you is no indication of a successful Money Mindset, as these conversations could have been misleading and/or negative in nature. That said, whatever conversations that they did have about money invariably shaped your opinion about money.
Your parents could have had conversations about money only when there wasn’t enough, causing you to interpret that money was only a conversation to have during stressful times. Or, your parents might have talked about money when making a particular investment which would have given you a positive perspective anytime when money came up.
Regardless of which way your parents talked about money, you made certain connections with emotional feelings and cataloged those discussions with certain morality judgements, both positive and negative. Even though you may debate internally as to how you interpreted these conversations and why, they have created the very foundation that you have around the topic of money.
Were conversations about money positive or negative?
Can you remember when money was brought up in your childhood whether it was identified with a positive or negative experience? Many individuals in adulthood that struggle with their Money Mindset would freely admit that their early introduction around money from their parents was in a negative connotation.
Whether the message was that money was something to be concerned about because there wasn’t enough of it or whether it made good people do bad things, a negative association is very difficult to overcome.
In the same breath, a twisted message that money is the cure for everything or that it’s the ‘only thing that matters in life’ also sends a skewed message that can have damaging consequences. These types of messages, although interpreted by many as a positive association about money, actually leads to greed, selfishness and the pursuit of materialism at the cost of ethics, morals and usually a few relationships along the way.
Looking back on what the money messaging was in your childhood, can you recall specific situations when money was brought up and whether that was in a positive or negative connotation? Can you identify how that messaging still impacts your life to this day?
What were your parent’s emotions around money?
No surprise to you but money is as much about emotions as anything. It may not be that money onto itself conjures up those emotions but certainly what money can buy and or provide does.
For some of us, money represents lavish vacations and for others it represents freedom from ever having to work again. Still for others, it represents sacrifice, disappointment and even in some cases, misery.
Regardless of what these items, experiences and options maybe they are sure to conjure up an attachment with a certain emotion that we will have otherwise mapped in our mind.
As an example, if we associate money with financial freedom and not having to work once we accumulate enough of it, money represents a strong euphoric feeling and release of those happy hormones, dopamine and oxytocin.
On the other hand, if you grew up in a situation where money might have been scarce money may conjure up a totally different set of emotions for you. More specifically, money for you may mean stress and anxiety and may release the stress hormone Cortisol.
Chances are how your parents reacted to money is probably more than likely how you react emotionally to money. That said, what were your parent’s emotions surrounding money?
People who were raised in households where money was a source of arguments and constant stress tend to have formed some negative emotional baggage with money in adulthood. These destructive associations drive our mindset and are behind our negative behaviors such as credit card debt and habitual spending.
What were the money stories you heard and were told growing up?
One of the ‘stealth’ ingredients that makes up your existing Money Mindset are the stories that you were told and heard growing up.
These stories are so powerful in having created your mindset about money that in many cases you have to give this area some serious thought, not only to recall some of the specifics but to decipher how you interpreted them and what meaning you gave to them.
As an example, I grew up listening to how rich people were not happy people, implying somehow that acquiring money led to becoming a miserable individual. Therefore, the more money someone was to accumulate, the less happy they would be.
You may have grown up hearing about a ‘greedy’ uncle or a ‘cheapskate’ relative. Whatever the stories that you may have heard, they HAVE made an impression on how you see and deal with money even if you weren’t paying particular attention to the impact that they’ve had.
Conclusion
Take some time and thoroughly try to unpack those stories that you can remember hearing. What were they? What impact did they have on your Money Mindset, either negative or positive if that was the case? Did it create a particular opinion about how you think about money or people with or without money?
In subsequent blog posts, we’ll continue to unpack what has led to the creation of our current Money Mindset. We’ll also discuss some effective strategies that we can follow in order to rebuild it the way we WANT to!
