Our Money Language Habits – Episode 543

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, we’re going to be talking about money, language, and money habits. And often this is what is keeping people broke and poor. So Kim, before I jump into the talking points that I have set aside, where does your mind go? Probably to a Robert Kiyosaki quote that I have re-quoted for the entire, however many years that I have known him and Kim. And that is to switch your language around from, I can’t afford it, to the question, how could I afford it? Oh, love that. That is one that a four or five year old can actually grasp and start to use that as the building block through a life. So good. So here is where I’m starting and where I have some talking points.

[01:04] And this came from doing research in this area of language, linguistics, because I’ve been working with a lot of AI tools and language is how we’re creating foundational elements. And it went like this. We’ve got three different categories of people. We’ve got those that are talking about their dollar per hour, how much they’re making. Then you hear people that talk about how much they make per month. And then you’ve got the salary language there. Now again, I’m putting in three giant buckets. Just by you knowing those three buckets, where does your mind go? And how can we optimize? How can we fix that so that they’re thinking in a prosperous way? Well, I have to tell a quick side step story because immediately when you gave me

[02:02] that information, I thought about some very famous people who I will not quote that said they got divorced from person A and married to person B because person A talked about people or things and person B talked about ideas. When you went in with the dollar per hour, dollar per month, dollar per year, that’s just all I could think of was talking about ideas for talking about people or things. So let me try to get my head around the thing with the dollars now. And it is very interesting and holy cow, do we not have some really misguided commentary in the press and in people’s language around earnings? And isn’t it a shame that that’s the word? Because another quick story, Todd and I went to town last night.

[03:07] That’s a big deal. We live a ways from town and we make a big deal when we go to town. And we had two retail experiences that were so disheartening. And the people there that earn income were not earning their income. I don’t care how they got paid. And so it’s just really sad to me that we’re in this space, but sometimes this is what our world needs to get a little bit of a wake up call. So first of all, thinking about and speaking about, yes, love linguistics, it’s one of my favorite words, earnings is the wrong beginning. Like, what about the value that you’re providing? What about the learnings that you get to have? Nevertheless, I’ve even heard of, we need to add like dollars per week in there.

[03:59] Somebody said that to me one time and I was like, wait, I can’t even think about that. I mean, per week, I had to get my calculator out. So yeah, it’s really interesting, especially when you also think about people that have real amazing value giving potential and like work. And consequently, they’re trying to shift the, let’s just use a number, million dollars that they earn a year to a million dollars a month. Like I sat in a coaching program just in the last couple of years with somebody that said that I want to take my million dollars a year income and move it to a million dollars a month by helping that many more people. So I’m afraid I’ve completely derailed from whatever your question was, but that’s

[04:53] my thought at the time. No derailment at all, because this is the linguistics piece of it. The way that a person thinks, you know, you mentioned again at the inception of this of talking about people versus talking about ideas. And so these happen. The other reason that we see this and I’ve seen it happens a lot with sales professionals, meaning they may have started from a background where they had to work themselves up. They weren’t financially, they didn’t come from a lot of financial security. And I’m not saying that’s good or bad, I’m just stating, and they tend to be successful in their career yet still talk about the dollar per hour that their time is worth. Or again, the weekly income they make, and I didn’t even correlate that as well.

[05:49] I think it wasn’t even in my vernacular. And so it changes by the way that you change your thinking and we can get into net worth. But now that we’re going back and we’re talking about the language of this, I would imagine from your career, we roll back a couple of decades and you say, okay, I got to sit in the room with high net worth individuals. And then you had peers that you were rising up and working together. You probably heard some language that was different. So what is that like those language habits? I want to work on those right now. Yeah, that’s a great question. So because I have been in the entrepreneurial world pretty much my whole life, I did have a stint as an employee for about two and a half years.

[06:39] But being an entrepreneur as a kid, like literally with milking the cows and selling the milk and all that. And there were a lot of dollars that flew through our household because of that. And then having this job right out of college, but then very quickly shifting to entrepreneurial world again, it has always been about cash flow. I don’t think the net worth word other than, okay, yes, I deal with finances. So of course I’m going to ask and know and talk about net worth. But in a general lexicon of conversations, it isn’t about net worth. Business owners are all about cash flow. And that’s what helped me very early on in my career as a financial guide, realize that cash flow was the name of the game, not net worth.

[07:29] And especially when you look back at like the 90s and the 2000s, nobody was talking about cash flow then everybody invested for growth. It was all about growth. It was the rate of return that you earn. Real estate was not the popular thing that it is now. And so nobody was talking about cash flow. And I’ve literally, I mean, I wrote the seven principles of prosperity and I didn’t make them up, but I wrote them down on a piece of paper. Probably around 1994, I want to say 93, something like that. And flow to indicate cash flow was principle number four and has remained so ever since. And so it is interesting to realize really how our language as a society causes us to make mistakes and causes us to be confused and

[08:31] causes us to learn things inaccurately, which, holy cow, when you get into the life insurance space, the words that get used around life insurance are so inaccurate and drives me crazy. So if we take this episode and these foundational principles that we’re talking about right now, we can create this barometer. We can say, okay, if I am having conversations about people, like predominantly it’s about people. We can talk about people if it’s our organization and we’re trying to help coach improve or whatever that would be. But at the end of the day, we’re sitting on the couch and we’re talking about some famous person who I don’t even pay attention to any of that. We can imagine where the other parts of our life are going.

[09:21] If we’re talking about, oh, how can I get a raise of X dollars per hour? We can take a barometer of what our financial wellbeing is. All of that, that’s just the linguistics. Last, I wanted to add in a quote from Warren Buffett, because this ties into what you were saying earlier. And this is when Warren Buffett approached Benjamin Graham. And he, you’ve probably heard this as well when he wanted to work for Benjamin Graham and he said, I’ll work for free. And Benjamin Graham said, you’re overpriced. Working for free. That’s the importance of getting this, the mindset correct. So Kim, we’d love to hear final thoughts before we wrap up this episode. Well, I love what Warren was trying to say there, which is I’m

[10:22] willing to work for my training, to learn and back to my story with Todd and our two stores that we hit last night in town with such disappointing human beings that you have to almost say are untrained because why, why are they acting the way that they’re acting or not acting the way that they’re act, you know, that they should be acting or what have you. And so it is very interesting, I think for us to really be on the lookout for the words that we use and know that words do have meaning and know that the things that come out of our mouth are indicative of what’s going on in our brain and to really be conscious of that and to turn our brain on and sometimes step out of ourselves and be like a third party listener to the conversations that we’re having,

[11:25] both conversations with ourselves, as well as literal conversations that we would be having with other people and, and pick up on what can occur there in learning and just have some fun with paying attention to the words that you use. I have a whole document that’s I think the one side it’s been a while since I’ve looked at this is I think that the title is unbelievable thinking and the one side is prosperity and the other side is poverty. Now that’s a strong word on purpose and the side by side comparison of a whole bunch of words that are prosperity oriented and a whole bunch of words that are poverty oriented. And so I would encourage you to make your own list. Now it’s titled unbelievable thinking because unbelievable is one of those

[12:22] words that can either be positive or negative and usually extremely positive or extremely negative. And I love it because of it. So I would encourage people to make their own list of prosperity words and poverty. So good. That’s so good. That is great for all of us. When I listen to the words that you’re saying on the podcast, and I think of those principles of prosperity and even past episodes, these words have so much meaning. And on top of that, this language of prosperity, this is our club. This is what we do. If you’re the prosperity thinker, this is the language. And if you come in with the inappropriate language, we welcome you. It’ll just get adjusted so that you can be a part of the club.

[13:13] And if not, well, you know the rules to get in. So there we go. How about that? And you know, the door is open for you to leave. Yes, absolutely. Kim, wonderful episode. Thanks for sharing this and a little exercise that all of us can apply. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.