The Different Types of Capital In Our Life – Episode 274

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[00:03] 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. Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Today, before we hit record, Kim and I were talking and we were discussing the different types of capital in our life. We hope in this episode, for listeners, they’ll be able to see that there’s just more than financial capital. In fact, there are two other pieces of capital in this life that are going to affect your financial capital. So let’s start diving into that. Kim, are you there with me? Yes, absolutely. I’m thrilled to talk about this today. Wonderful. So I think the first is, we’ve hopefully got our listeners saying, okay, what are

[00:59] those other two pieces of capital? So the first one let’s talk about, which is your mental capital. Can you explain what that is? Absolutely. So to me, mental capital is what you have in your thinking every single day. And one of the most valuable tools that I have been taught by a couple different people is to really think about my thinking. And I certainly don’t do this at a deep level every day or even every hour. But when I can step back and observe myself almost as if from afar, I do a much better job with my mental capital. So think about it this way. You wake up in the morning and your brain turns on, if you will, and you start to go about your day developing the kinds of attitudes that you want to have.

[01:57] And literally, it starts right in the morning. And so I’m always very, very careful about what I put in my brain space in the morning. I want to fill it with inspiration. I don’t want to fill it with news. I want to fill it with my own personal approach. I want to fill it with spiritual thoughts. I don’t want to fill it with material thoughts. I get water in the morning real quick when I drink up. But for the most part, I don’t want to be all focused on, oh, how did I sleep last night? How is my body feeling? Et cetera. Again, just for me, I choose to have spiritual input in my brain as opposed to material input, if you will. And then you go about your day and start involving yourself with your family and

[02:40] you start involving yourself with co-workers. And always, your mental capital is at play and you can step away from it and observe yourself and say, am I depositing, am I contributing, is my brain on? Those are questions around mental capital. Or am I not in a good space and maybe I need to take a break, go for a walk, go to 10 jumping jacks, pet the dog, whatever it is, to then reconnect with the best of my abilities, the best part of being human that I can possibly be. And there’s even some coaches that say you should visualize the various meetings and things that you’re going to be doing during the day, think about the most positive outcome that you could think of for that meeting and really just live with that or

[03:32] meditate on that or think about that for a little bit. So, again, this is sort of the thinking on your thinking that Dan Sullivan, as an example, one of my strategic coach mentors constantly talks about and there’s many, other mentors that I’ve had that encourage a really proactive point of gratitude as well as a really conscious point of observing your mental capital. Yeah, wonderful. So what I’d love is, will you take a second and tell our listeners about your airplane story? So and I’m going to jog your mind as I remember it. Perfect. Tell them about that, because I think that’s a perfect example of mental capital right there. Yeah, absolutely. So I believe in doing something called positive focus.

[04:24] It’s an exercise that came out of strategic coach. And sometimes you might call it proactive gratitude. And sometimes it takes really some effort to do it. So I was traveling somewhere. I was I was at the away airport. I don’t even remember which one. And just as I was literally boarding the plane, I got a phone call with some pretty negative news, like pretty extreme negative news. And there was nothing I could do about it. Like, you know, you get on the plane, they tell you to shut your phone off. And so I sat down and I thought, OK, like I was a little distraught. What am I going to do here? Well, Kim, you can do positive focus. So I started thinking about just mentally and I could have done it by writing

[05:08] as well. But I just chose to do it mentally. All of the good things that I could think about. And I was going after it. I mean, I was just listing, listing, listing things. And first of all, they were very material things like the dog. And then as I progressed, I got a little more inspirational in the things that I was identifying that I could be positive about. But it was in I don’t know if people remember this. There was like about a six month period when the airplanes put ads on the tray so that when you flip down the tray, you didn’t get a solid piece of tan plastic. You got this obnoxious array of ads and they were kind of in your face. And it bothered me a little bit. Well, the particular plane that I was on at that time did not have that.

[05:56] Furthermore, it also did not have the screen. So a lot of the planes today, pretty much all of them have the screen. Well, this particular one didn’t. So what I was looking at was this very nice color of blue, probably textured fabric. And I chose to be grateful for that blue. I mean, I got specific. I got grateful for the fabric, not the screen, because I always shut my screen off, but it takes a while and da da da da. And I just be grateful. I mean, I was just digging things out of my mind to come up with to be grateful for. And so I’ve shared that story numerous times because, I mean, you could think, OK, that’s a little ridiculous. Well, I needed to get ridiculous because there was nothing

[06:44] I could do for a two hour plane ride. And I had a choice. I could either be reactive, negative, stressed, fearful, whatever. Or I could be grateful. Now, as you know, what’s cool is what happened afterwards. Have I laid the land well enough? You’ve laid the land because I was sitting there saying, come on, tell us what happened right when you stepped off the plane. Well, of course, I was able to deal with the problem because I was in a good frame of mind and I was in a stable frame of mind and a grateful frame of mind. And what’s so crazy today is I do not remember what the problem was. And it was a serious, so some legal issue that we were dealing with. And yet, because I had been proactively grateful,

[07:29] I came to the problem from that space instead of one of fear and reaction and negativity. It’s wonderful. So from what we’ve learned is you really filled up your mental capital bank. I mean, you you got that thing overflowing. You overfunded your bank. We’ll call it that. OK, so you did that. And then you were able to approach the problem differently with probably some peace, with the clarity. Right. How did that affect? Which is the next part of capital, your relationship capital. Once you had the gratitude, how did it affect the relationship capital? Well, that’s such a great follow up question, because when you are in a space of gratitude mentally, then when you go talk to the human beings that you need to talk to

[08:21] the relationships that you have, you know, whether they’re just surfacey business ones or deep, important business ones or not or whatever, you can do so much better of a job because you’re being a decent human being instead of acting out of fear and scarcity and et cetera. And so I’m sure that the phone calls that I had to make once I was off the plane went much, much better because I was coming from a place of depositing for relationships. And it’s interesting because actually this morning I was having a conversation completely separate from this whole story with someone. And I said, I want you to know that I’m being very intentional right now about the words that I’m using and the way that I’m being

[09:12] because I am committed to solving this problem. You know, we have a problem. We’ve got an issue that we need to work through us, two human beings that are tackling this particular challenge. And I wanted that person to know that I was coming at it from a give first attitude to the relationship and a deposit first mental space. And of course, words that go with that and demeanor, tone of voice, you know, as a phone conversation. So that’s really all I had. And all those things play a role. In fact, I really think that people can hear body language through the phone. I think it’s very, very obvious what somebody is doing. You know, maybe not all the time, but if the body language is extreme, I think it’s obvious through the phone.

[10:04] I agree. I think so, too. So now that we’ve established there’s two different parts of capital that most people don’t think about the relationship capital. And we’ve got both the mental capital that would then go into the next, which is financial capital. And so how do relationship and mental affect financial? Well, without a doubt, your finances are built because of the relationships that you have and the mental capacity that you bring to solving problems. All entrepreneurial environments are about solving problems. And I get it. I get tired sometimes of solving problems, too. And when I do, it’s time to take a break. So, you know, might be a short break, lunch, dog, pet, walk, whatever, or it might be a vacation for a little while, some free days,

[10:55] complete disconnect from the business environment at all. So when you look at your finances, I believe that they are a function of where you are mentally. So are you in abundance mindset? Are you in a scarcity mindset? And by the way, you can change that immediately. Like your thought can change immediately. And when you look at your finances and you look at not only the mental capital that you bring to the table, but the relationship capital, it is a function of those. And people might not like hearing that, but I really believe that. And so we need to be looking at our finances, asking what questions we need to be learning, what things we need to be learning from the position that our finances are in.

[11:42] And then maybe going back and fixing some relationships that we may have adjusted in a negative way or building something up that we have adjusted in a positive way and, you know, putting more effort and capability in there. And same is true of our mental capital. Very true. And I think for our listeners, you know, it depends on who you are as a person or even where you live. You can build up your financial capital, the relationship capital, mental capital in various ways. If you’re looking to increase those relationships, that can also be done through books. So reading the right types of books or listening to the right types of podcasts and being really aware, observant of the information you’re bringing in.

[12:31] Notice, Kim doesn’t start our day off with the news. And I would imagine you don’t end the day with the news. We just don’t need that information. Absolutely. I think a news diet is the best recommendation that I can give anybody. Maybe it’s a news fast and it lasts forever. That’s what I was going to say. I was going to say a news fast. I’m gone. I don’t want to do it anymore. And, you know, Peter Dumandis talks about this, Dan Sullivan, Tony Robbins. You hear it from a lot of the mentors that are out there because you do have to be very, very careful about what you’re putting in. And it’s not that I’m ignorant about what’s going on. I have my sources, but I also just as we’re repping up here,

[13:08] I want to share a quick story about Jordan Adler and the helicopter pilot. And Jordan is a great friend and client of ours and was learning how to drive a helicopter. And the teacher said that you literally can turn the helicopter with a shift of your thought because the helicopter’s joystick is so sensitive that just thinking in your head, I want to go right, is enough to move your thumb on that joystick, just enough to get the helicopter to go right. If we can move a, what, I don’t know, you know, 10 ton machine, 5 tons, I have no idea how much a helicopter weighs, with our thought, then we can clearly move our finances and our relationships and even our bodies with our thought. And just that knowledge that it just takes a shift in thought to get better outcome.

[14:07] That’s free. Like that doesn’t cost you anything to shift your thinking. What a wonderful story. I love that. That’s great. So I think for all of our listeners, a good call to action is right now, as this episode is wrapping up, think about where you are and look at your balance sheet, see where you are with your mental capital, with your mental capital, your relationship capital and your financial capital. And if you want to affect your financial capital, well, you got to start with the mental and relationship. And what we can also ask you to do is make sure you hit that subscribe button or you follow us on Spotify and other platforms so that we can continue to give you good information that will increase your mental capital and strengthen your relationship capital.

[14:55] Any other parting advice or words for our listeners, Kim? Well, always just know that you can change and all human beings have that capability. And so if you don’t like what the results are, then change it up. Simple enough. Thank you for being with us again today and stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.