The Money Story You Inherited And How To Rewrite It (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #643

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast. This is another snippet of wisdom, a moment from the podcast archive that I felt deserved to be heard again.

[Matt Morizio]
I think the best way to articulate that answer is maybe with an image. Maybe I can tell a little bit of a story or just sort of paint an image of how people live their life. So, I would encourage anybody listening to this to think about your summer of eighth grade going into your freshman year of high school.

When you reach the end of that summer, let's say like the last week of summer and you're about to become a freshman for the first time ever, you're about to be in high school, you start to have these butterflies and these nerves and this anxiety around what it's going to be like to be a freshman in high school. Because it's probably a new building, there's probably students from multiple schools all congregating to one. You don't know the layout or the teachers or who your classmates are going to be.

Are you going to be picked on by the upper classmen? All these things that are running through your head that you don't know the answers to. But once you go to that school and you spend five or ten days, maybe let's call it a first week and a half of being a freshman, 80% of those fears and worries are now gone.

All the stuff that you had the butterflies and nerves and the fast heartbeat on about becoming a freshman, they don't exist anymore because you know where your homeroom is, you know what your class schedule is, you know where those classes are and the teachers and your classmates and you're starting to get the rhythm of life as a freshman and you're no longer fearful of it. Well, I will compare it to us and I say us because here I am at 32 or whatever it was, I was that person and that's why I say I'm case study number one because what I articulate to people are my truths. So we all learn something about money and we usually learn it from our parents and we usually don't learn it through communication because it's taboo in society to talk about money.

So instead, as a parent, I learned firsthand that more is caught than taught with my kids. So what we do as kids is we sort of catch whatever our parents feel and say and think about their money. Most of the time, it's unhealthy, it's fearful, it's scarcity-driven, it's fear-based, but we don't know the difference because we can't talk about it so we just sort of inherit that relationship and then we bring that into adulthood.

That's like being an incoming freshman and never entering freshman year. We all walk around day-to-day lives, doesn't matter the age, 30, 40, 50, 60, we walk around like we're incoming freshmen because we've never crossed over that wall of the known. So to answer your question, there's the unknown and the known is really the two different lifestyles you can live.

The good news is there isn't a day in time that has more information than today. The accessibility to information to figure this stuff out has never been more abundant. So we all can cross that wall from the unknown to the known if we choose to.

A great place to start if you want to use AI, if you use ChatGPT or any others, you could quite literally say, hey, I don't understand anything about personal finances, but I want to become an expert, where do I start? That could be your first prompt on some AI tool and that will give you a pretty great starting point probably and then you could ask it to answer those questions if you want or you can ask it to give you more information or you could expand upon stuff, but that's a great starting point. Quite literally, a major, it's not the only change, but a major change in my life about finances.

It sounds overly simplified, but a major reason for my relationship with money to change quite literally has just become being exposed and understanding the rules of the game better because I never took the time to learn them.

[Agi Keramidas]
Tell me about the beliefs, you said beliefs from the parents. Would I be right to assume that one step to take would be to identify these beliefs? So, how does one actually do that in that way?

What is the step, the actual step they need to take in terms of the money mindset to cross over that border and go to the other side?

[Matt Morizio]
Yeah, the first step that you mentioned is exactly right. I call them your money stories as a child. One of my favorite questions to ask is, tell me a story from your childhood that really exemplifies the way you think about your money today.

That's the work, man. Agi, you got it. That's the hard work.

That's that deep introspective journey that you're going to need to go on because you need to pull up the roots of this problem. We don't need to just mow the grass here and leave the weeds so that they look like grass. You have to actually dig out the weeds and pull them from the root.

So, you have to find where is this coming from? I'm sure you can probably, everybody can probably think of something from their childhood, young adulthood that really can be an example story of, yeah, that's basically how I think about money. That right there, that thing, that story, that time, those words, those are my words.

Those are my mindsets. That's how I purchase things. That's how I make buying decisions.

And if you can get that, you can change that. So, I think that's the first step is to get there. And that's a lot of introspective, hard work, but it's the work you need to do.

But once you're there, you're right. You can't stop there. You need to start to grow.

[Agi Keramidas]
If you enjoyed this podcast, can you think of one person that would find it useful and share it with them? Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.