578. How Rich People Think About Money

The way that you’re thinking about money and the way you’re thinking about yourself in relation to money and all the other stories and beliefs that you have around money are showing up. And the most obvious way they’re showing up in your life is right there in your bank account.

Now, if that doesn’t feel true to you, it feels like that you’re at the effect of circumstances outside of your control, I got very good news for you. It is true. You can create anything you want to. And it doesn’t start by working harder or putting in more time or sacrificing yourself or your life in some way. It starts by paying attention to how you think about money. That’s what we’re going to dive into today. I’m going to tell you how rich people think about money so that you can decide how you want to think about money and create whatever you want. I’m Jody Moore. Welcome to the podcast. Let’s do this.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we apply all the tools of psychology, human behavior, and mindfulness to live our best lives, navigate challenges, and achieve our goals. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today. Let’s do it.

Hey there, friends. If you tune in today and you give me your undivided attention and you open your mind a little bit, you open your heart up a little bit, I want you to leave this episode with some inspiration and wisdom and maybe even a breakthrough around money. This is not for me to tell you how you should think about money. That’s absolutely not what I’m doing here today or what you should do or even what your money situation should look like. You get to decide how much money you want to have in your life and what you want to believe about money.

But I do want to expand a little bit what your current thoughts and beliefs might be about money because one of the things that has served me so well since I discovered all the tools of psychology and human behavior and coaching and self-help is exposing myself to different people who think differently about money. And I don’t always agree with the people that I come in contact with, obviously, because they all have different beliefs about money, right? But I’ve taken bits and pieces from, first of all, things that I already believed, maybe things that my parents taught me or how I was raised or socialized. Some of that has been useful, and I’ve kept some of it. Some of it has been very toxic and just not useful.

And then again, other people that I meet who are the kinds of people that are doing things I respect and admire have different viewpoints, and I like to steal little bits and pieces from different people and create my own view of money. And that’s what I want to encourage you to do today. But these are some patterns that I have noticed, but more so, they are patterns I have learned from experts who’ve gone out and conducted studies. And people who’ve worked with a lot of different people, and I’ve formulated things that I’ve learned, things that other people have offered me and my own experience into my own words here today. So I’m going to try to give proper credit and cite some of the teachers I’ve learned some of these things from, but this is not just my opinion because, let me be the first to say, I have still tons of work to do when it comes to my relationship with money.

I plan to continue to work on it and improve it. I like it a lot better today than how it was a decade or so ago, but I know I still have so much weirdness when it comes to my relationship with money. I don’t know why we do this. I tend to do this with bodies too, and it’s the same thing. I’ve done lots of work on bodies, but I still have a lot of weird thoughts and stories about bodies. Same with money.

So whatever it is for you, if you want to open your mind up a little bit about money, you’re in the right place. Okay, so where I want to begin is with a concept that was first created by T. Harv Eker who wrote Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. And I love thinking about money this way because it resonates really true for me. He talks about each of us having sort of a financial thermostat, which is to say the thermostat in your house says, “We want the temperature in the house to be about 70 degrees,” or whatever you set the thermostat at, right? I’m always turning it up because I’m cold, and then everybody else in my family comes along and turns it down because they’re hot.

But at any rate, if we set the thermostat at 70 degrees, then if it gets too hot, if it gets above 70 degrees, the air conditioning is going to kick on and try to cool it down. And if it gets too cold, the heat’s going to kick on and try to warm it up. And the house is going to do the best job it can to keep a 70 degree temperature there if that’s what we set the thermostat at.

Well, each of us has this kind of internal thermostat when it comes to money. We have an idea of how much money we need and have and are the kinds of people that live from that much money, right? I think most people would say they would like more money, but this is not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about how much money you want. We’re talking about how much money you view yourself having. It’s sort of your money identity. So some people will say this is how much we need to live, or some people say this is just how much we usually have, or this is how much we’ve always had, or this is the most we’ve ever made. They’ll word it in different ways, right?

But what happens is if you for some reason start earning a lot more than that, or you come into a lot more than that for some reason, maybe you inherit it or you win it, or you get a big bonus, or you win the lottery or something, right? If it’s a lot more than what aligns with your money thermostat or your money identity, then you will probably hurry and get rid of that money in some way. Maybe you will spend it, maybe you will be, whether it’s responsible or irresponsible, you probably won’t maintain that level if you haven’t consciously raised your money thermostat, right? You’ll see that as a one-time unusual thing until you get back to your base level.

Now, the same things happen if you drop below that base level. If you suddenly lose your job or something happens and you have a big pay cut and a big decrease in how much money is coming in for some reason, you’ll probably hustle extra hard. Your brain will offer you some stress and worry and anxiety, and maybe some of that can be useful even. It can help you really hyperfocus on finding the new job or in some way compensating for that money so that you again adjust to living off of the amount of money that you are used to having. So this money thermostat is something that we need to pay attention to. This is what I mean when I say you got to change how you’re thinking about money. You got to change your relationship with money.

We want to turn the thermostat up so that the amount of money we view ourselves as having goes up if you want to have more money. Wealthy people have a much higher internal financial thermostat. The amount of money that they view themselves having, that they even in many cases would say that they need to live off of, is a lot higher. Okay? So how do we raise your money thermostat so that you don’t just temporarily make more money, but you really literally change your financial status if that’s what you desire. We do that by paying attention to the things I’m going to break down for you today about how wealthy people think about money versus what is more of a poverty mindset around money.

Now, I hate to be binary. I’m not trying to put anybody in buckets here. I’m also not ignoring the fact that I think privilege is a real thing, that I think there are some people who have access and advantages that other people don’t have. I think all of those things are real circumstances in our world. I don’t think we should ignore those things either. I think we should work on improving our society in general. But I do know that on an individual level, you have a lot more authority over yourself and what you create in your own life and that you don’t have to wait for the world to improve. You don’t have to wait for everything to become fair or more equal in some way. You really don’t. You have so much authority and leverage over creating what you want.

And that’s what we’re going to dive into today. So again, I apologize for the binary. I’m going to say things like wealthy people think about it this way and poverty people, people in poverty, I should say, have this type of a mindset. This is a poverty mindset. That is not to say there are not tons of nuances and exceptions. Of course there are. I simply want to simplify it today to give you some awareness and some leverage. All right? Sound fair? Okay, so let’s dive in.

Wealthy people view money as fluid, whereas a poverty mindset is going to view money as a more set thing. Okay, so when people say things like, “He has a lot of money,” that is a poverty way of thinking about money. Or often what they’ll say is, “We don’t have the money for that,” or, “I can’t afford that.” As though that’s a fixed state, right?

People who are wealthier, who have a more wealthy mindset around money and are probably creating more wealth, understand that it is constantly changing. There are not just people with money and people without money, right? Even someone who has a lot of money has to keep earning that money and keeping that money coming in. It is constantly changing. Money is less like a fixed state that you could describe in a fixed way, and it’s more like an ever-changing river, a flowing river. Money’s coming in, and money’s going out. And the intensity of that river can change. Sometimes there’s more coming in, and sometimes there’s more going out, but money is constantly moving.

So I remember, again, a decade or so ago when I had a very poverty mindset around money, and I started thinking about it more in this way of it being a fluid state, a constantly moving and evolving and dynamic thing. And it helped me a lot because I realized I didn’t have to describe myself as someone who didn’t have money or who was barely making ends meet or who wasn’t good with money. All the things I used to say about money. That might have been my situation on that given day, but that didn’t have to be my situation tomorrow. And that certainly hadn’t always been my situation. And so if it’s ever evolving and changing and dynamic, then what am I doing today that’s creating the flow, the river flow, if you will, that I have today, and how do I change it for tomorrow?

So again, when you find yourself saying things like, “I don’t have the money for that,” you’re not thinking about it in a wealthy way. Wealthy people understand that money is more about access. And you probably have a lot more access to money than you realize. You just may not be aware of it. I know I only have a tiny level of awareness of the access that I have to money. I have more access to money, and I should say more understanding of my access to money today than I had 10 years ago, but I know there’s a lot more access to money that I’m not even aware of. And that’s about education and knowledge and learning and diving in and finding mentors in whatever way you want to maybe increase your finances.

So for example, maybe you want to explore the world of real estate or owning a small business or whatever. There are people out there who will teach you, “How do you access the money?” If you decide you want to get into real estate and you find yourself thinking, “Well, I don’t have the money to invest in real estate,” a lot of investors don’t have the money sitting there in the bank. What they do is they understand how to get access to the money. They understand leverage. They understand responsible risk-taking and creativity and relationship building. And all of those things are how wealthy people think about money, less about the actual money they have.

Now, another thing, I’ll piggyback off this, that is a poverty way of thinking about money is thinking that the main way to get more money is through time or effort. Like, I have to work harder, or I have to work longer, and that’s how I’m going to make more money. Now, there’s nothing wrong with working harder or longer to earn money, but that is not how wealthy people think about money because think about it. Your time and effort is always in limited supply. It’s going to cap out at some point.

So when I was probably 15, 14 years old, I got a job at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Is that restaurant still around? Good spaghetti, if you need some good pasta. Go to the Old Spaghetti Factory. At any rate, I got a job there bussing tables. It was, in my super easy, privileged life, one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done, one of the dirtiest jobs I’ve ever done. I was often there late at night. I was on my feet for many, many hours. I was cleaning off tables of people’s leftover spaghetti and ice cream and bread and salad. And this is a family restaurant, so sometimes you’d have kids in there making a nice big mess. And it was my job to come along and clean up that mess and then reset the table.

So I worked harder when I was a busser at the Old Spaghetti Factory than I work today. And I earned a lot less money when I was a busser at the Old Spaghetti Factory than I earn today. In fact, a couple years after being a busser at the Old Spaghetti Factory and putting in my time and earning my keep there, I got to be promoted to be a server at the Old Spaghetti Factory, probably when I was 21 because I think they serve alcohol, and I had to be 21. But at some point, I became a server at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Now that I’m thinking back, I had to be at least 16 to work there. But anyway, that doesn’t matter.

Okay. So at some point, I became a server at the Old Spaghetti Factory, and I still was on my feet long hours. I was still serving a lot of food, but you know what? That job was actually a little bit easier than the job of bussing tables because I wasn’t bending over tables, pulling in dirty plates and cups and silverware. I wasn’t getting food all over me. It was still, we might say the same number of hours. We might even say it was still kind of hard work. But if I had to pick between the two, serving, easier for me anyway, than bussing. And yet I made more money as a server than as a busser.

Okay, so if you start to wrap your head around this and recognize like, wait a second, wealthy people don’t just work harder and longer. That can’t be the way because there’s so many examples of where that’s not true, and you’re going to max out at some point, right? You can’t work enough to achieve the levels of wealth that so many people have. So again, not that there’s anything wrong with deciding to work hard and put in more time, but that is going to be a last resort or sometimes it’s a starting point, but it’s not ultimately where you’re going to get to wealth. Again, it’s going to be about access, leverage, risk, and creativity. That’s how wealthy people think about making money.

Here’s another thing I noticed as I started working on my money mindset years ago is that wealthy people are inspired by other people’s success, especially their financial success. They want to hear about how other people are succeeding because it gets them excited. They’re happy for the other people, and they’re inspired by what they see is possible if they desire to create something similar. That’s a wealth mindset when it comes to money.

A poverty mindset uses other people’s success to be resentful, to feel threatened, to feel like a victim, or they just use it against themselves to say, “See, you’re not as good as them, or you’re not as worthy in some way, or you should be further along.” They use other people’s success to feel bad. Don’t do that, my friends. Now, how do I stop doing that? If you’re asking yourself, “Oh, I think I do that, and how do I stop doing that, Jody Moore?” Well, you first just be aware of it. You notice yourself using other people’s success against yourself or against them to feel bad. And you ask yourself, “Wait a second, could this be proof that this is possible?” Why can’t I look at somebody succeeding and go, “Huh, I guess that’s possible.”

Now, I know a lot of times when I offer this to my clients, they say, “Yeah, but the next thought I have is, yeah, that might be possible for them but not for me.” Okay, so if that’s you, I hear you. I get it. You don’t have to get in a fight with yourself over it. Don’t try to resist and push away those thoughts. Just be willing to have kind of like a nice, soft, open-hearted conversation with your own brain. It will try to talk back to you, and you just want to kindly hear it out but not just believe everything it tells you, okay?

So for example, when I hear people talk about being a billionaire, about making a billion dollars, my brain’s like, “Whoa, that’s amazing. That’s impressive. That’s inspiring, the fact that someone can in this lifetime make a billion dollars is kind of cool and amazing to me.” And then my next thought is like, “But you couldn’t do that, Jody. You’re not capable of that. That’s way too hard. That’s way beyond anything you’ve ever done, and you probably couldn’t do that.” And I just go, “Hold on. I didn’t say I even wanted to do that. I didn’t say that I’m trying to do that right now. I’m just happy for that person and impressed by whatever they’ve become in order to do that.”

And yeah, maybe from the person I am now, I don’t have the skills or the capacity to do that, but I could become someone who does that if I really wanted to. I’m not even saying I want to. I’m not saying I care to. I’m just noticing what an amazing world we live in and how impressive some people are, right? So notice that you just kind of open your mind up to, again, not being mad about it, not feeling bad about it, not using it against yourself. Now, maybe it is somebody who’s just a little bit ahead of you, and it’s something that you do want to create. Maybe you notice somebody making whatever amount of money or having whatever level of success that you want to have, and your brain comes back and says, “You can’t do that.”

Again, what I say is like, “Maybe I could though, because that person’s a human being with whatever they have that I can relate to,” right? I might say, “That’s a woman in the world who has children and a family and a laptop and access to the internet, and she did that. And I’m a woman in the world with children and a family and a laptop and access to the internet. Maybe I could actually. Maybe there’s some things I’d need to learn. Maybe I’d need to grow and evolve in some way. But if she could do it, I probably could too. Maybe I could,” right? It’s opening yourself up to a maybe even without having 100% believe it, but start taking action in that direction.

Okay, the next thing that wealthy people think about money is that they believe money is an amplifier of who you already are. Now, people will word this in all different kinds of ways, but that’s the simplest way I can describe it. It’s an amplifier or a magnifier of who you already are, whereas a more poverty mindset believes that money changes you.

Sometimes people will be believing that money will make you better in some way. It will prove something to the world or impress people or make your life such that you’ll then be a better person. Or sometimes poverty thinking says that money will make you worse. It will make you more evil, more selfish, out of balance, out of touch with true priorities and values. Any of that kind of thinking is a poverty mindset, right?

Because none of us want to become worse people, right? We don’t want to become bad people. And if we’re sitting around believing that the money is the thing that’s going to make us better or happier or worthy in some way, that’s not going to serve us either. So wealthy people understand, a wealth mindset understands that money simply makes you more of who you already are. If you are a generous, kind, giving person, you can give more and be even more generous and more kind when you have more money. If you struggle with scarcity and selfishness and overworking or perfectionism or whatever it is, money will magnify all of that. It will take it all to the next level.

And guess what? None of us is perfect. So your strengths are going to become magnified when you have more money, and your weaknesses are going to become magnified when you have more money. But again, you get to choose who you’re going to be. You get to work on yourself. You get to refine yourself. Don’t be afraid of having more money in this way. Certainly don’t be judging other people with money because people are just people. It’s just that their strengths and their weaknesses tend to become a little bit more obvious as soon as they have more money.

All right, next, a wealthy mindset understands that money is a tool that solves a lot of problems but also creates additional problems, new problems, different problems. A poverty mindset just believes that money would solve our problems, period. I know this is super hard to believe. It’s one of those lessons that until you experience it, you’re going to be like, “Okay, let me just try it out for myself and see,” right? People with money will tell you, “My life is easier in so many ways because again, money solves all your money problems, right? But I still have problems and overall, my life is still what I like to call 50/50, right? Because some of the other problems have disappeared that I could solve with money, but now I have different, bigger problems.”

For example, you have maybe more liability. You have more of a target on your back. Really wealthy people are often dealing with a lot of lawsuits or even more difficult relationship issues or things like that come along that again get magnified with money. So it’s not that all your problems go away. Some of your problems go away, but new problems emerge that you didn’t have before. Now, again, I remember back when money was really tight and hard, saying, “Well, let me be the judge of that. I’ll go ahead and take the more money, and I’ll let you know if that’s true for me because I’m pretty sure my life would just be a lot easier and a lot more simple.” And again, in some ways it is, and then in other ways, it’s more complicated.

Last thing I want to offer to you is that a wealthy mindset about money is that making money in and of itself is a very noble thing to pursue. A poverty mindset believes things like, “Well, it’s wrong to just want to make money.” They’ll say things like, “It’s not about the money. I’m not doing this for the money.” Or they feel that they have to justify having money. They’ll say things like, “I want to make money, but I’m going to do this, that, and the other thing with it.” And they’ll give explanations that they think are noble causes that just wanting to make money for the sake of having money is in some way wrong or evil or bad. And most wealthy people do not believe that, my friends. I’ve never met a wealthy person who believes it’s wrong or bad to make money just for the sake of having money.

So what are we going to do about that if you’ve been taught otherwise, like most people? Most people were taught that you want to have a certain amount of money, but only enough, and then beyond that, it becomes greedy or selfish. And like I said, I’m not here to tell you how you should think about money, but if you believe that, I promise you, there’s going to be a part of you that’s going to try to prevent you from making too much money.

I have found that the more money I make, first of all, one of the best parts about making more money is that I’ve been able to employ some people and help them now make money for their families. But I didn’t go after it with that intention. I told myself it’s noble and good to want to make more money. You know why? I’m not out there trying to rip people off or take advantage of people or steal money or do something dishonest or harm people. I’m trying to serve more people. I’m trying to make a bigger impact. I’m trying to make more people’s lives better in any way that I can. That’s how I want to make more money. So that alone is a noble thing to do in my mind, right?

It just so happens that again, money is a magnifier, and one of the things I love is trying to take care of and serve and lift up those around me. And one way that I do that is by employing people. Now that’s not just out of the goodness of my heart. That’s because I need those employees to be able to run my business and grow my business and provide the service I want to provide. But it’s kind of a benefit I hadn’t even thought about that I love being able to provide just a little bit of income for – I have a couple full-time employees, and I have some part-time, but I love being able to contribute to their lives in some way, something that’s fulfilling, something that brings them a little money, right?

There’s so many amazing things about making more money, both in how you make it and what you do with it after. But if you think it’s wrong in some way, unless you justify it, you’re going to have a subconscious block that will try to prevent you from making too much money.

All right, listen, I like to talk about money, I think, because it is an area, like I said, that I have done a lot of work on and I’ve seen the results of it in my life. I’ve seen it in my actual bank account, and that’s pretty exciting to see. But I also, like I said, I know I still have so much weirdness and drama around money. Maybe I always will. I don’t know. But I know that in our society, we don’t talk about money. It’s kind of hush-hush, right? And I really appreciate the mentors and teachers and people in my life who have been open about money, about how they think about money. That’s why I’m offering it to you here today.

The truth is though, I don’t get super excited about money. I’m not super motivated about money when it comes right down to it. And so that’s okay. If you are motivated by money, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But if you’re not, you don’t have to be. But what I’m motivated by are all the things necessary for me to make money, and the money is the result. And that’s pretty fun, right?

All right, thanks for joining me today, everybody. If you got questions or follow-up thoughts about this subject of money, you can find me on Instagram. I’m on there all the time. Come and tag me, come and send me a DM. I’d love to help you out. Thanks for joining me. Please share the episode if you found it to be useful, and I’ll see you next time. Take care.

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