The Major Obstacle to Financial Success by Brian Tracy.
The major mental obstacle to financial success is that some people believe that they don’t really deserve to be rich.
The Biggest Demotivator of All
They have been raised with a steady drumbeat of destructive criticism, as I was, that has led them to conclude, at an unconscious level, that they don’t really deserve to be successful and happy. The worst effect of negative experiences in childhood, which are all too common, is that when people actually do succeed as the result of hard work, they feel guilty. These guilt feelings then cause them to do things to get rid of the money, to throw it away. They spend it or invest it foolishly. They lend it, lose it or give it away. They engage in self-sabotage, in the form of overeating, excessive drinking, drug usage, marital infidelity and often dramatic personality changes. To change your results with money, you have to change your attitude toward it.
Treat Money With Care and Attention
The fact is that money is very much like a lover. It must be courted and coaxed and flattered and treated with care and attention. It gravitates toward people who respect it and value it and are capable of doing worthwhile things with it. It flows through the fingers and flees from people who do not understand it, or who do not take proper care of it.
Sometimes people say that they are not very good with money. But being good with money is a skill that anyone can learn through practice. Usually, saying that one is not very good with money is merely an excuse or a rationalization for the fact that the person is not very successful or disciplined with money. The person has not learned how to acquire it or to hold on to it. Be A No-Limit Thinker
The starting point of accumulating money is for you to believe that you have an unlimited capacity to obtain all the money that you will ever need. Look upon yourself as a financial success just waiting for a place to happen. And see yourself as deserving all you can honestly acquire. Open Any Door
Money is good. Money gives you choices and enables you to live your life the way you want to live it. Money opens doors for you that would have been closed in its absence. But just like anything, an obsession can be hurtful. If a person becomes so preoccupied with money that he loses sight of the fact that money is merely a tool that is to be used to acquire happiness, then money becomes a harmful thing. Money is Neutral
The Bible says, "The love of money is the root of all evil." It doesn’t say, "money is the root of all evil." It says, "the love of money is the root of all evil." It is the preoccupation with money, to the exclusion of the really important things in life that is the problem, not the money itself. Money is essential to our lives in society. It is also neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It is only the way that it is acquired and the uses to which it is put that determines whether it is helpful or hurtful. Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:
First, recognize and accept that virtually everyone who has money today at one time was broke and probably broke for a long time. Then they learned the skills of accumulating money and they are now financially independent. Whatever they have done, you can probably do as well.
Second, become a student of money from this day forward. Study it, learn about it and apply the lessons you discover toward your own financial life until you begin to attract more and more money in your direction.
Flying Into Headwinds
When you set off toward a new destination or goal, like taking off in an airplane, you will have an idea of both your departure time and your arrival time. You will set a schedule for yourself and expect to arrive pretty much on schedule. But as soon as you take off, you will experience what pilots call “unexpected headwinds.” The situation in your life is similar. As soon as you embark on a new journey, you will experience headwinds as well: everything will cost twice as much and take three times longer than you anticipated. You should estimate how long you will take to achieve certain milestones and then triple that time to get the actual time period required.
Types of Headwinds
Headwinds in your business and personal life will come from several sources. Your primary source of headwinds will be other people. They will disappoint you, cheat you, betray you, and fail to live up to your expectations, and turn out to be incompetent or indifferent. Your customers will be a major source of headwinds. When you start a new venture, you will be amazed at how difficult it is to get customers to buy your product or service for the first time. Your customers will disappoint you in that they will buy less than you expected, take longer to buy than you expected, pay slower than you expected, and complain more than expected. Remember that the customer is always right. It is not what you produce but what people buy that counts.
Another form of headwinds that you will face has to do with money. Some people will tell you that it is easy to make all the money you want just by thinking positively and visualizing yourself as wealthy. Everyone wants to believe that this is true, and many people embrace the idea of effortless wealth with their whole hearts. But that doesn’t include those people who have actually achieved financial success. People who have made a lot of money have learned through bitter experience that the only thing easy about money is losing it. As the Japanese proverb says, “Making money is like digging with a pin; losing money is like pouring water on the sand.”
Personal HeadwindsYou will experience headwinds personally in that you will discover, much to your surprise that you lack specific talents, skills, and knowledge that you need to succeed. You may find that you are a poor time manager or that you lack self-discipline. You cannot seem to focus, concentrate, and apply yourself single-mindedly to your most important tasks. You waste time and feel overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time in which to do it. You may lack financial, analytic, marketing, or selling skills. You may not know how to plan and organize your business, advertise effectively and attract customers, or persuade your prospects to buy from you. Fortunately these are all learnable skills. But the starting point of mastering these essential skills is for you to admit that you need them. After that, the education can begin.
Action ExerciseBecause of your incredible mind, you can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. You must never allow yourself to be held back because you lack a particular skill. Figure out what skill you
Goal-Setting Rules…
There are several important rules that accompany effective goal setting.
First
Your goals must be in harmony with one another, not contradictory. You cannot have a goal to be financially successful, or to build your own successful business, and simultaneously have a goal to spend half your day at the golf course or at the beach. Your goals have to be mutually supportive and mutually reinforcing.
Second
Your goals must be challenging. They must make you stretch out without being overwhelmed. When you initially set goals, they should have about a 50 percent or better probability of success. This level of probability is ideal for motivation, yet not so difficult that you can become easily discouraged.
Third
You should have both tangible and intangible goals, both quantitative and qualitative. You should have concrete goals that you can measure and evaluate objectively. At the same time, you should have qualitative goals, for your inner life and your relationships.
You need both short-term goals and long-term goals. You need goals for today and goals for five, ten, and twenty years from today. The ideal short-term timeframe for business, career and personal planning is about ninety days. The ideal long-term period for these same goals is two to three years. These time horizons seem to be the ideal for continuous motivation. Fifth
The ideal life is focused, purposeful, positive and organized so that you are moving toward goals that are important to you every hour of every day. You always know what you’re doing and why. You have a continuous sense of forward motion. You feel like a "winner" most of the time. Sixth
The decision to become a goal-setting, goal achieving, future focused person gives you a tremendous sense of control. Your self-esteem increases as you progress toward your goals. You like and respect yourself more and more. Your personality improves and you become a more positive, confident person. You feel happy and exited about life. You open the floodgates of your potential and begin moving faster and faster toward becoming all that you were meant to be. Action Exercise
Map out your short-term, long-term, qualitative, and quantitative goals for your future in both your personal and professional life.
