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Penny and Thomas Power interview top Experts from the BIP100 community to introduce them to you. Finding Experts that you can trust is a challenge for us all. By sharing their clients with you, they hope they can reduce your search for great people that can help you build your business.
Mastering your money mindset
Lesley Thomas is also known as the Money Mastery Business coach. In this interview she talks about how, as a business coach, she finds it essential to work with her clients on their money mindset alongside other aspects of business growth.
Some people think that developing a positive money mindset is a bit woo-woo. They conjure up visions of people sitting around, chanting and trying to magic money out of thin air. A few minutes of listening to Lesley will dispel any such ideas.
Other people think it is all about signing up to a business accelerator programme, employing a wealth manager or other strategic approaches to making money. And while these activities may help you to make money, they won’t necessarily change your money mindset.
Working on your money mindset is much deeper than that. It raises issues around self-value, confidence and competence.
Why money mindset coaching?
Lesley had a successful corporate career, and then decided to leave that behind and join her husband in business.
After some years she chose to change careers again, and train as a coach. As she worked through the training and working with her early clients, she made a discovery.
While she was well-equipped with tools, experience, and capability to go into a business and help the business owner make the necessary changes, there was no point until they had the right money mindset in place.
It is like putting the cart before the horse to expect to be able to make serious money or build a highly successful business when your core beliefs are not sufficiently aligned with that possibility to enable the right outcome.
Money mindset is integral
Lesley explains that this is not simply a question of getting your pricing right. A positive sense of your own worth, in business terms, stems from your confidence in your competence. And you need both elements, working together.
Business owners build their competence over years or even decades.
For some people, they are so used to being able to do what they do that they take their own abilities for granted. Because their training and experience make this activity easy for them, they forget that it is impossible or difficult for others. Another group of people compare themselves unfavourably to other people in the same industry. They see that someone else has a higher academic qualification or has won an award, and they allow imposter syndrome to take over.
An important part of developing a healthy sense of self-worth is to become more aware of the value you provide for other people. It’s much easier to put yourself out into the world, to make yourself visible, to stand head and shoulders above your competitors when you have that belief in the value of your product or service.
As Lesley says,
When we are struggling with a sense of self-worth and self-value then we very much retract into ourselves and don't want to be on the stage of big business so we're allowing others to take centre stage while we are in the wings.
What creates a negative money mindset?
While a lack of self-worth and self-confidence can stem from many causes, Lesley talks about money archetypes. She explains that by understanding these concepts, and how we relate to them, we can gain a deeper understanding of our own thoughts and beliefs relating to money.
It is not always easy to do. Many people are reluctant to have an open and honest conversation about money because we attach so much of our own self-worth and self-value to how much we earn or how much we have rather than actually being able to separate it.
She also talks about the necessity to set boundaries, and how many people feel as though they “shouldn’t” do this—it somehow makes them a bad person.
By having such limiting beliefs, we place obstacles in our own way and limit our own opportunities.
Whatever your current ideas about what money mindset means and how it ties in to your business life, listening to Lesley is informative. She explains the concepts easily, and demonstrates how they are relevant to anyone, especially anyone in business.
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