Very deep down have you ever thought that you may cause your own financial problems?
If you’re wondering how to rewire your brain for success, the steps are to own the current problem, identify the source of the problem, resolve your feelings about the problem, and choose to no longer live from the past.
In this post, I’ll cover each of these steps to rewire your brain for success based on almost 40 years of investing, my work with financial coaching clients, and a lifetime of research and fascination around money and mindset.
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Neuroplasticity for Rewiring Your Brain
It used to be that rewiring your brain for financial success was considered only for Ouija board believers.
But over the past decade the reality that your subconscious mind controls your behavior has become so widely accepted among mainstream finance that it has its own name: behavioral finance.
You know when Forbes is giving tips on how to rewire your brain for success, this topic is real and needs to be addressed. (1.)
Investors can know what they need to know but not do what they need to do based on that knowledge.
- How can you invest in the best stocks if you’re too afraid to place the trades or buy the stock fund?
- How can you buy the first rental property if it feels too dangerous?
- How can you meet with the financial advisor if it feels too intimidating?
- How can you create income from investing if it feels too scary to invest beyond money markets?
- How could you possibly start a small business when you think you have nothing to offer?
These negative emotions hold us back until they are resolved.
Study after study, for example, show that individual investors’ most common mistake is selling high and buying low.
And how can we possibly explain that almost one third of lottery winners go on to declare bankruptcy. (2.)
There is only one answer: Having and keeping wealth is about mindset first.
Lack of knowledge can no longer be the excuse given all the available information about how to manage wealth.
If you’re nervous already, click here to read my post with 10 ways to reduce investment risk while building wealth.
Global Leaders, Businessmen, and CEO’s Brain Rewiring
Mindset gurus are brought into huge corporations to help employees and CEO’s rewire their brains for success for the company.
The guru of all brain rewiring is Tony Robbins.
The list of global leaders and leading businessmen indicates there is something about this that is worth our attention. (Interestingly, there were no women on the list of Tony Robbins clients which I found.)
Robbins has worked with:
- Bill Clinton
- Peter Gruber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment
- Steve Wynn, iconic businessman
- Marc Benioff, Co-CEO of Salesforce
- Francois Mitterrand
- Nelson Mandela
- Mikhail Gorbachev (3.)
- Paul Tutor Jones – 1 of the top 10 traders in the world for 21 straight years (4.)
Aside from this, Tony’s own success in selling his $2,000 plus workshops to millions of individuals, and now his successful online investing platform (without him having any financial background) indicate he has mastered success.
And success comes from doing the right things at the right time.
And that takes the right frame of mind.
You may have noticed my posts are more about pragmatic strategies and solutions.
But by marrying the rewiring of your brain for financial success with action steps to implement strategies and solutions, it leads to amazing results.
Why Neuroplasticity Doesn’t Rewire Your Brain for Success
Recently CNBC featured an article on how to rewire your brain for success. The article was based on envisioning what you want in your life. (5.)
Doing so creates new pathways in your brain called neurons due to neuroplasticity, or the ability to change old patterns in your brain.
There is one huge problem with neuroplasticity that keeps it for working for most people. As you envision what you want, little thoughts start coming up in your brain like:
- You’re never going to have that
- Be realistic
- My _________________ said (financial advisor, mother, father, husband, wife)
- The news said 95% of Americans don’t have enough savings so my situation is normal
- I’m just normal
- That won’t work
- If that really worked everyone would be doing it
- You’re not that smart
- Who do you think you are?
Do you ever hear similar chatter, too, when you have a great idea or a solution? It’s like there’s negative monkey talk in my head!!
And as hard as you try, you can’t push away those little thoughts. It’s like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings (which I have been watching with my family.)
And the envisioning, which would create the new neurons in your brain, which would result in taking action simply doesn’t work because deep down you don’t really believe you can have what you are envisioning!
So much for rewiring neurons and all that nonsense, right?
Yet the science behind neuroplasticity leads me to believe there is life changing potential there.
But what I have found is that the blocks must first be removed to allow yourself to go to that place where your goals reside so you can embrace envisioning them without negative monkey brain. And this gives neuroplasticty a chance to work.
How to Remove Negativity to Rewire Your Brain for Success
Here are the 7 steps broken into very small bites that are easy to do.
1. Realistically look at your situation.
The key word here is realistically since we can stay in denial of our situation for years or even decades. (Ask me how I know.)
2. Own the problem.
This goes beyond acknowledging the problem.
When you own a problem, you take responsibility for it.
We’d rather blame someone else. Then we remain a victim, and thus have no control with this situation. This leaves us powerless.
And when we’re powerless, we can stay right where we are, in our comfort zone where we have been for a very long time.
The big aha is that this comfort zone is the place that got us where we are now. So we need to leave our comfort zone to move forward.
The Comfort Zone
Think about the times you left your comfort zone. For me, the financial related things include:
- Choosing a college major
- Buying my first mutual fund
- Speaking at a conference
- Interviewing financial advisors
- Buying a house
- Buying a rental property
- Entering partnerships
- Buying a stock
- Taking a job
- Signing a contract
- Negotiating a real estate transaction
Have you done any of these things and thus identify with the scariness of it?
And was I wrong about any of the things above? Heck yeah, but there’s the gold. I learned what I needed to learn to move forward which is covered more ahead.
Leaving Our Comfort Zone
And if we want to be somewhere else from a financial or any other life standpoint, we have to go to a different place in our mind. We have to rewire our mind for success instead of our comfort zone.
Albert Einstein said, “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” He seemed pretty smart.
It makes a lot of sense to use this reality to our advantage when it comes to our money.
3. Allow and Identify Your Feelings
As you own the problem, you’ll probably notice some feelings deep down inside, or maybe even right on the surface that make you feel afraid, or like you want to cry. This is exactly what you want.
Forget all the advice about only thinking positive. When positive thoughts are only masking old wounds, they are not serving us.
But when we wallow in those negative feelings, we can change our behavior in this process as outlined here. Wallowing in negative feelings is great here.
Identify the feeling.
The feeling may be:
- Shame which is very common around money
- Fear, which is also very common around money, too
- Regret
- Intimidation
- Anxiety
- Any other feeling
If you feel blame, that’s an action taken to avoid responsibility of the problem (so we can comfortably stay where we are.)
The same is true of avoidance, another common money action.
Circle back to owning the problem in step 2 above, and then notice the feelings about owning the problem.
4. Find the Root of the Feeling
Now see if you can recall when you first began feeling that way. Odds are that you have been carrying around that feeling a very long time.
Maybe it was from one of the times below:
- Age 6 when you lost the baseball game with a strike out
- Age 8 you were bad at math
- Middle school when you were teased about our ________________. (Fill in the blank. For me it was a horrendous back brace for scoliosis.)
- Age 17 when you wrecked the car.
- Age 27 when you got laid off.
- Age 38 when you lost money in stocks.
- Age 45 when you got laid off again.
- Age 52 when you sold stocks near the bottom.
Identifying the source of the past feeling that continues to affect your actions will let you release it. This identification takes the power away from the feeling.
Each of these things felt so big at the time but you got through them.
And maybe you were a bit bruised from them, but for childhood events you now see how little it really mattered that you fell flat on your face in the fourth grade play.
Or for an adult event, like losing money from a stock, you learned from your mistake. And that learning was required for you to move forward and become a better investor.
In my twenties I lost money on my first random stock purchase (outside of a mutual fund or my employer retirement account), Alkermes. I bought it on a hot tip I got from my friend, Brickell, while we were snow skiing. I couldn’t wait to buy it when I got back to Houston.
My dad told me that losing money on that stock was the best thing that could have happened. (You may have read here he was an amazing investor and wise man.)
Dad was right again. I never bought another stock on a hot tip.
Successful People and Mindset
Has Paul Tutor Jones (from the list of insanely successful people listed above) ever made a bad trade? I’ll bet he has. He did, after all, hire Tony Robbins to help him with his mindset.
And it would seem that Steve Wynn, Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton also had some mindset issues which were almost certainly related to past mistakes.
And if they can mess up, well, so can I. And so can you.
And we can stay with the mindset that got us there or we can keep moving forward all the wiser to live the life we want.
Watch my video below for ways to avoid investment mistakes and then keep reading on how to rewire your brain for financial success. There are 2 more steps!
Here’s the next step to move forward.
5. Shift to the Present to Rewire Your Brain
Recognize that the event that triggered the feeling (of fear or shame or whatever) was in the past and choose to live in the now.
The way our brains are wired for survival causes us to focus on the past for protection. But we no longer need to do that since imminent danger is rare, at least, hopefully, for everyone reading this article.
So, we can all choose to live in the present instead of the past. This is a core tenant throughout major philosophies and religions.
6. Ask How You Can Have What You Want
And write it down. This may be something like:
- Increase income by 50%
- Flip a house and make $25,000
- Invest $25,000 every year for the next 10 years
- Create and sell a business and make $100,000
- Start an online business and make $5,000 a month from it
- Increase my portfolio income by $3,000 a month
You get the idea.
At this point, you can believe that it can happen because you have dumped your negative beliefs that kept you where you were before now. You’re ready for the new place you are now in.
You can envision what you want! (I’m breathing a sigh of relief as I type this?
7. Take Action with Your New Money Mindset
Now it’s time to chop wood and carry water.
Look at the list of things that can create the results you want. List the first step needed to make that happen. It may be to research income investments or find a coach to figure out what kind of online business to start.
And this is the gold:
- Write the date for completion.
- Take action within 24 hours from this moment.
You’ll run into failures and setback. When you do, be happy. You get to learn what you needed to succeed at the next step. Repeat this process as often as you feel resistance.
How to Rewire Your Brain for Success Summary
How you have the 7 steps to rewire your brain for success. Do them now and see results tomorrow.
This is a lot cheaper than therapy, and it really works. Your bank account will thank you, and so will your life.
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I poured my heart into this post and I feel so fortunate to share it with you:) Thank you for reading my advice on how to rewire your brain for success and sharing it on social media with anyone you think may benefit from it.
It took a major brain rewiring to implement the alternative income and wealth building strategies we did after stumbling upon early retirement. Click here for my eBook with our favorite 9 strategies.
Sources:
All my many teachers from ancient philosophers, religious leaders, and contemporary thought leaders. This post is a compilation of what I have learned and experienced since I was a young child with all it’s many setbacks and steps forward.
2. https://www.ryanhart.org/lottery-winner-statistics/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins#Associated_people
