To change people’s lives from a financial point of view what you need to do is to work at two levels.  This is to ensure that they have control over their finances rather than have their finances controlling their lives.

The Practical Level

Firstly there’s the practical level where you look at people’s situations and what they can do to essentially have control of their funds, and be in control of their finances rather than have their finances control them.

The Psychological Level

Then, secondly, there’s the psychological level.  This is where you get people to understand why they have difficulties in holding onto money or even making money. Here, you need to work to change the psychological side of things so they’ve now got a positive relationship with money.

Regarding the practical side money management, you can look to increase someone’s net worth.  And by working with an experienced money management coach you can instill positive money management strategies  within a relatively shorter space of time than otherwise had they carried on in the way that they had been.

It’s best to work on the psychological level first.

What Is Your Relationship With Money?

You need to find out what your relationship with money currently is and more importantly what your beliefs are about money.  So that’s the starting point.

Someone might have a negative belief about money for example “money doesn’t grow on trees” and “it’s only the bad guys that have money”. Then it’s easy to realise that they’re not going to have a good relationship with money if their underlying beliefs about money are negative.

Where Do Your Beliefs Come From?

It’s good to look at where those beliefs came from.  But as those beliefs are embedded in your subconscious, you need to work at a subconscious level to change those beliefs. This is because whatever practical measures you put in place on a conscious level, it’s the subconscious that runs the show and eventually that will supercede anything that you’ve done at the conscious level.

It sounds complicated but actually the methods that you can use are quite easy and quite quick in looking at those beliefs.

The first important step is to identify those beliefs.  And a quick way to do this is to use a checklist of the most common negative beliefs about money.  Simply check off the ones that ring true for you.

Then you need to change those beliefs at the subconscious level so that your new beliefs will continue to work for the rest of your life.  And that’s a topic for another time…