Prosperity Thinking – Episode 085

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler, and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, we have our co-host and bestselling financial author, Kim Butler, with us today. And we’re going to be talking about unbelievable thinking, not believable thinking, but unbelievable thinking. Welcome, Kim. Oh, hello, Todd. This is going to be so fun and I have to share with everybody where I came up with the title, because this is something that I’ve probably had in our repertoire for like 15,

[00:54] maybe even 20 years, and it started when I was in Phoenix, Arizona and I had a local practice met with everybody face-to-face at the time and I attended a talk, I don’t remember who it was by, it was just some person, you know, it was like maybe 20 people in the room. It wasn’t any big deal at all, but this person gave a talk. It was basically an inspirational talk and they suggested that if anybody ever asked you how business was, that you would use the word unbelievable, because the word unbelievable can be interpreted, as we all know, as either super positive awesome or, oh my gosh, I’m dying and it’s unbelievable. And so I just really, I don’t remember anything else about the talk, but I stuck with that

[01:50] and created this delineation between what we’re going to break down into two groups of unbelievable thinkers and it’s the poverty thinkers and the prosperity thinkers. So not only do I think the word unbelievable and the story behind it is kind of fun, I love the delineation of poverty thinking and prosperity thinking and it’s so important because all of us fall into the category of poverty thinking sometimes. And of course, all of us fall into the category of prosperity thinking sometimes. And if we can be aware of the difference, we can make a big change because our thinking is where all change begins to happen. And having a person in your life who knows you well enough to say, hey, based upon what you just said, you have shifted into poverty thinking

[02:46] versus prosperity thinking, that’s a key person to have in your life too. Agree? Isn’t that the truth? Yeah, the person that’s got a strong enough relationship with you to call you to the table. You and I have some friends. I won’t mention their names, but they used to do something called scrubbing their language. And it was a group of guys and they all felt like the words that they used were super, super important. And so they had this jar on the table in their workroom or whatever that enabled them to collect money if the words that were coming out of their various buddies mouths were in our words today, a poverty thought oriented word versus a prosperity thought oriented word. And so that’s what that person is.

[03:35] It’s an accountability buddy, if you will. It’s a person that’s got a strong enough relationship with you to call you to the table and say, hey, your shifting just changed. And because your shift, you’re getting my words all mixed up because your thinking shifted and consequently that caused your words to shift. Then there are a lot of studies that show that not only your thoughts, but your words have a big impact on what’s actually going on in your life. I think this first example, we may have confused a few people, but this first example is going to drive it right home. Poverty thinking focuses on cutting costs. Prosperity thinking brainstorms on ways to increase income. And I had this shoved down my throat as an example when it was, I think it might

[04:28] have been 2008 or another one of those 2008 ish moments where I’m slashing. I’ve got the red pen out. We’re going to take this out. We’re going to decrease marketing and all of this kind of stuff. And they said, well, just fire everyone. What do you mean? Well, you believe that the way out of your business problem is to cut costs. So if you fired absolutely everyone, then you would be a success, correct? And I’m like, well, that’s pretty stupid. That’s a great example. It goes right with the second one, which is a poverty thinker reduces involvement, whereas a prosperity thinker works on self-improvement. And it is so easy when things are going unbelievably, and then this is in the unbelievably not so good category,

[05:23] to want to just shrink back, to want to just bury our head in the sand and like you said, not market or not be involved or not be engaged or not be out there and about and even helping others. Whereas if we can work on constantly improving ourselves and being willing to give of ourselves and help others, we will absolutely get ourselves out of the mess. I can think of many 2008 ish examples. That was a great way to put it where I was able to make some progress by stopping the thought process of cutting back and reducing involvement and engaging or starting the process of working on self-improvement or brainstorming ways to increase things like income and involvement and giving all of those go together.

[06:17] How about the poverty thinker that stops dreaming versus the prosperity thinker that sets attainable goals? I love it. Setting goals is something that kids start to work on when they’re young and goal setting is a tricky job because if you set a goal that’s too low, then it’s not really inspiring and you made it and you just kind of go on down the road. However, setting a goal that’s too high is equally problematic because if you never get there, you’re constantly in something that Dan Sullivan of strategic coach calls the gap. And boy, if you’re interested in this concept, there’s a great little book called The Gap by Dan Sullivan that is so worth getting. But the setting of attainable goals,

[07:05] ones that you can actually reach within the timeframe that you set them is going to keep you on track in your thinking, in your activity, in the words that you use, in your actions with other people, etc. Whereas if you fall into poverty thinking, you are going to shut down. You’re going to stop thinking about possibilities. You’re going to stop dreaming of good solutions and you’ll stop anything that is of an improvement or forward-making nature. And sometimes that’s the best you can do is move forward. Once you’ve stopped forward motion, it is so hard to get going again. Absolutely. Very, very true. All right. How about decreased motivation versus celebrates baby steps? Well, it really picks up on the moving forward comment that you just made.

[07:58] And that’s that sometimes we only know one step. But if we will take that step, then the second one will appear. And then when we take the second step, the third one will appear. Whereas the poverty thinker that’s especially fear-based is going to just decrease their motivation. They’re going to be so afraid to even take a baby step because they’re afraid that step might be in the wrong direction. It’s better to take a step forward and have to retrace that step than to not take any steps at all. The absolutely worst thing in my mind is to be frozen in fear, not motivated to do anything. And it goes right along with what’s next. And by the way, we are going to have a download of this list available right on the blog and there on the podcast.

[08:46] So if you want to have this list of unbelievable thinking with poverty thinking on the left and prosperity thinking on the right, just go to the blog and the podcast area and download the list. But this issue of baby steps goes right along with a very specific financial issue, which is when people are poverty thinking or fear-based thinking, they want to hoard their cash. And in a couple future episodes of our podcast, we’re going to be talking about some entrepreneurs from South Africa and an example of hoarding cash that will be really interesting to learn from. The alternative to that, of course, is to keep money moving. It’s the sixth principle of prosperity is to keep it moving. But we know that when we keep it moving,

[09:34] it multiplies, which is the seventh principle of prosperity. And keeping money moving is very similar to taking baby steps. And again, sometimes you don’t always know the full motion of the money, but if you can just get it going forward one little bit, then you’ll pick up the multiplier effect of that action, both with your money as well as whatever else it is that you’re doing that you’re taking small baby steps with. Which moves us into paralyzed decision making or trust that crisis equals opportunity. To me, this is the same thing. There’s a lot of people hoarding cash right now because they are paralyzed. They don’t know what to do, so they decided to do nothing. Absolutely. I was just riding in the car the other day with somebody

[10:26] that doesn’t really know what we do. And they really had no knowledge even of our financial work, much less the fact that we love whole life insurance as a place to store cash. And a comment was made about, oh, gosh, you know, if you could get four or five percent on your money, that would be fabulous. Again, this had nothing to do with whole life at the time. Four or five percent would be fabulous on your money compared to what banks are paying, which is less than one percent in taxable. And the other person said, yeah, there’s got to be a product out there that’s at least paying for. I wish I knew what it was. And it was so funny to me because our clients do know what that is and they can trust that whole life insurance company

[11:14] is a place to store cash to store it safely and that their cash will then be available to them when opportunity presents itself. We’ve quoted on this show numerous times from Nelson Nash that if you have cash, opportunity will seek you out and that that opportunity sometimes comes because of a crisis. It doesn’t always come because of a crisis, but how wonderful that you as an owner of cash can step in and make a crisis probably turn into a win-win where you get to win as the holder of cash and whoever is selling can win also because they get to get out from under whatever it is that they’re selling. I think so many times as entrepreneurs we’re constantly looking for where’s the need? Where can I fulfill and serve?

[12:06] Crisis makes it so much easier to see that because the market’s screaming at you what it wants. Absolutely and we just need to listen and I love that you filled in both the word need and the word serve because it is a vital part of any good profitable enterprise and we’re starting to see now we’ve talked about on this show the value in solving problems in profitable enterprises as opposed to in the nonprofit realm and this is a good example of those. All right our next one is holding back constantly versus moving forward in some form. This is my big challenge to myself in my life is so many times I want to try to create a way to make money out of something first and then do it but I think if we’re here

[13:02] and we feel like we have the ability to serve and solve a problem with somebody sometimes we need to give that value first and trust that the universe is going to bring it back around to us. Absolutely I remember a 2008-ish moment where our company really had not the kind of cash flow that we were used to and I chose to get on the phone with any person that wanted help. It didn’t matter what kind of financial help they wanted I was on the phone with them trying to provide that help and in many cases it was not help that I specifically gave them but just pointing in the right direction to go get some specific help that I was aware of and it didn’t matter that I didn’t get paid. The point is I was helping

[13:49] and I fully believe that there was a good two years there of that. I fully believe that that activity, that giving first, that moving forward in some form enabled us to survive not only the 2008-9 period but also have a lot of good built on that afterwards and it’s not an easy thing. The next piece on our list is to complain versus to give gratitude and it’s so easy to fall into complaint mode. I forget if we’ve shared on this podcast but there is a group that is a favorite of mine and it’s called Complaint Free World. ComplaintFreeWorld.org and it’s a pastor in a small town that was constantly hearing the complaints from the, I believe, he called them the ladies at the church, might have been men too, I don’t know

[14:46] and he decided that he was going to stop complaining and so he made it a goal to be complaint free for 21 days and it took him about 64 days, I believe, to get 21 solid days of not complaining and in the course of that he shared this whole idea with his congregation and then he ended up really getting a lot of them on this Complaint Free World idea and he wrote a book and he ended up getting on Oprah and having an opportunity to really share the complaint free world with himself, of himself, excuse me, with everybody else because of the book and his exposure on Oprah. The thing that’s interesting about it is it’s not that you can’t complain at all because sometimes things need to be brought up and addressed.

[15:29] The key is that if you have a complaint that you share it with somebody that can do something about it. So have some fun on complaintfreeworld.org. There’s some YouTube videos that are some fabulous examples of people going complaint free and of course the alternative to that is to give gratitude or to begin with gratitude or to start out finding something to be grateful for and to quote Dan Sullivan again, he has a little exercise he calls positive focus which of course anybody can do this and it’s wonderful and it’s a fabulous thing to teach our children and that is that you find something to give gratitude for first even if you will never see that thing coming back and I’ve had some fun trying to elevate that gratitude

[16:21] beyond material things like it’s really easy to give gratitude for oh somebody let me have that parking space or oh the weather is good and I’m traveling and I’m grateful that there’s no bad weather or what have you but if we can sometimes even elevate it a notch further where the thing that we’re giving gratitude for is a good deed that we saw done or a smile that somebody gave us or something like that then I think it takes it up even a notch further. Oh absolutely what a great example and finally our last one is seeks outside approval versus building internal confidence. Yeah this is a fun one too because so much of our lives and this goes back to some of the materialistic types of things

[17:12] which are not all bad you know first impressions count etc but if we’re constantly seeking outside approval we’re probably never going to truly get it because if alternatively we can build internal confidence and a word that I really like is humble confidence because confidence can be not so enjoyable you know if somebody’s overly confident they’re not really a lot of fun to hang around but people that are very humbly confident I think are a joy to be around because number one they spread that confidence and usually people that are humbly confident are very willing to help others feel confident also and because the confidence is built inside it doesn’t have to have external things occur in order to have the confidence

[18:05] in other words I don’t have to go out and be happy because somebody said I looked good in my outfit that day I get to go out and be happy because I’m awake and alive and able to speak and hear and walk and do and provide good for people or whatever example you might want to use but again if your confidence is built from the inside then not only does it not take somebody else to spark it but somebody else cannot put it out It makes you reliable doesn’t it Absolutely yeah reliable is a good word not only reliable to the outside people that you’re dealing with but to yourself and that again when it’s coming from inside and then you can rely on yourself you can be confident about that then that is a way that you can get better results

[18:55] because think about anything you’re out there doing in the world can you get better results when you’re confident or better results when you are constantly seeking approval and afraid well obviously you can get better results when you’re confident and then if you can be humbly confident you can get even better results and this is true of whether you’re making financial decisions or you’re making a sales presentation or you have finals my kids are both in college they’ve got finals and midterms coming up depending on which system their school is on any of those times when you can go in with begin with gratitude and have an internal confidence you can get so much better results and for those of us are investors who are listening

[19:37] that means listening for the sound of internal peace not going out to the people that you work with who are stuck in poverty thinking getting their opinion but seeking that internal peace to guide your finances because you definitely don’t want to get the same results that most of the markets getting right now absolutely and that external environment includes the media and there’s a lot that the media does to try to destroy our internal peace whether it’s about finances or the world at large so you’re absolutely right if you seek that internal peace and can create it yourself and make decisions with your money and about the other things that you’re spending time on really focusing on what you can control

[20:24] which is another principle of prosperity you are going to get better results not only with your money but again in anything that we do in life I’m digging around in my computer for the seven principles of prosperity applied to health I did a webinar on it somewhere and I think it would be so fun to share with everybody if not we can recreate it because those seven principles of prosperity apply to our money they apply to our health they apply to literally our businesses our relationships they’re widely applicable which is the beauty of a principle it enables us to apply it to lots of different things in our lives super well this is No BS Money Guy Todd Strobel for the Prosperity Podcast reminding you if you haven’t done so

[21:10] click on the link download this give it to your kids hang a copy on your refrigerator however the tool helps you keep those questions coming in because we need them we want to know what you’re thinking about again check out www.partners the number four prosperity.com thanks again Kim Butler and take care everybody Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you visit us at www.partnersforprosperity.com if you liked this episode make sure you subscribe and leave a review