Are Limiting Beliefs around Money Holding You Back?

 

In our actual, credit-crunch ridden and depressed economical situation, there are many people who would vehemently dismiss the thought that they have a tremendous lot of influence on their economical situation. Money control seems to be in the hands of a few, struggle seems to be the buzzword of the hour and money is as tight as they can think of. The cards seem to be pretty much stacked against us and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it, with working conditions and incomes deteriorating more and more, foreclosures and bankruptcies all around us and us right in the middle of this whole turmoil.

 

And yet, there are always those who say:

 

Money will always match your mindset

(Joe Vitale)

 

Money will always match your mindset. What does this mean for us when we look around and see the economic world go to shambles and more and more shops out of business? When we see friends loose their jobs and corporations laying off hundreds or thousands of people?

 

 

What is our mindset?

 

Wikipedia says to the issue:

 

Mindset refers to a set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people or groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviours, choices, or tools. This phenomenon of cognitive bias is also sometimes described as mental inertia , "groupthink", or a "paradigm", and it is often difficult to counteract its effects upon analysis and decision making processes.

 

Most of us have acquired their mindset long before their really knew what was going on. Money consciousness, all the good advices around prosperity and wealth, the “save the penny” attitudes, are mostly hammered into us way before we really recognize what happens. We get the money consciousness from our parents and friends, and very often, learn most of their beliefs around money and how to act with regard to it.

 

So our money mindset will very often reflect the mindset of the family we grew up in. Very often our own lifestyle is like a reflection of what we experienced at home when we were kids, with a few changes, depending on our own development and our goals compared to the development and the goals of the rest of the family, but not really a tremendous lot of variance regarding the overall amount of wealth.

 

All these money rules that we learn already very early and which are reinforced by a system of reward or punishment, are rooting very deep, and that is also the reason why many people have a certain pattern with regards to money going on, which changes only marginally in the course of their lives. Some barely scrape by, no matter how much money they make, some always manage to put away a bit, no matter how little their income is, some are always on the verge of bankruptcy….

 

The really interesting part about that is that these patterns very often don’t really relate to the fact of how much money the individual really has at his disposal, the dimensions change, but the deeper pattern very often stays unchanged.

 

That is the reason that there are more than enough people who earn a substantial amount of money and still barely make ends meet, while there are others who earn barely more than they need for their daily life and still manage to save a little fortune.

 

Times like the present, with fears hammered into us and exaggerated by media and the corporate world to make us more malleable to their agenda, easier to exploit and less prone to complaining about unfair working conditions or insufficient pay, just help to reinforce the beliefs in scarcity and the deep seated fears of being helpless and unable to change anything for the better.

 

These fears and limiting beliefs are as old as mankind, and they have kept many of us in a constant feeling of  entrapment and powerlessness, since we have forgotten our true nature as creators of our own reality and instead just bought in into the construct of reality as it was presented to us as a “fact”.

 

But reality is malleable, it is interactive, even though it doesn’t feel that way, it can be influenced to the better and it is within our own power to do so.

 

The challenge is to let go of some old, limiting beliefs and to acquire new, more prosperous belief systems that will allow money to flow into our experience. Since our belief systems are an important factor for our everyday reality, changing a belief system provides a tremendous leverage.

 

In my next article, you can find tips and advice to how you can change belief systems and replace it with some that serve you better.

 

© 2010 Dorothee Geray