MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (31 page)

But I knew the truth. I had a deep, unconscious fear that people would judge me because I had expanded in this area as well. I wanted to please everyone, I wanted to be loved so badly that subconsciously I not only made doing well financially something wrong but also subconsciously sabotaged my own success. Like so many people, I told myself that money was not spiritual. How crazy is that? Anyone who’s become truly wealthy knows the truth—the only way to become wealthy, and stay wealthy, is to find a way to do more for others than anyone else is doing in an area that people really value. If you become a blessing in other people’s lives, you too will be blessed. Money is only one of those blessings, but it
is
a blessing. It’s simply another form of freedom and abundance.

Money is nothing more than a reflection of your creativity, your capacity to focus, and your ability to add value and receive back.
If you can find a way to create value—that is, add value for a massive number of people—you will have an opportunity to have a massive amount of economic abundance in your life.

I had to hit that threshold where I was tired of living that way and where I saw the absurdity of trying to fit in. It’s true: if you do well financially, you may be looked at as “the 1%.” In my life, as a kid, being a part of the 1% was something that was aspirational. I came from the 99%, I just wasn’t willing to settle for that, for my family or for my life. But staying there just to fit in—well, that didn’t make any sense. I decided I was tired of blaming others for my lack of financial progress. The story I had of my financial limitations had to go. I would love others, but I would not spend my life trying to please them—especially knowing that to please them I would have to play small. I don’t believe in my heart that our creator made us for that. It was time
for me to find a way to earn more in the same way I strove to give more, contribute more, love more, and expand my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacity.

With that shift in belief, suddenly—when it was clear that this was not a
should
to conquer this area, but a
must
—along with the relational areas of life, strategies started showing up in front of me; they’d probably been there all along, but because of my mind-set, I was blind to them. Your whole world changes when you change your story.

Change your story, change your life. Divorce the story of limitation and marry the story of the truth, and everything changes.
I can tell you: when you get rid of the limiting stories, take massive action, and find the strategies that work, the results you can create are truly miraculous.

Let me give you one final example. A dear friend of mine, Julie, a successful screenwriter who gets paid top dollar for her work, could never seem to make any financial headway. By the time she and her husband were in their 50s, they had a modest mortgage on a nice home, but only about $100,000 in an IRA—way, way short of what they’d need to retire. And their money was invested in a “socially responsible” mutual fund that charged high fees and ate up most of their returns.

Julie’s husband, Colin, wanted to invest more aggressively, but Julie wouldn’t even talk about finances with him. She told him she hated Wall Street and everything it stood for. In fact, the whole idea of money made her uncomfortable. To her, money was evil.

But then a breakthrough happened. Julie attended my seminar Unleash the Power Within (UPW), where we use the power of Strategy, Story, and changing the State of your mind, body, and emotions to create breakthroughs in every area of people’s lives. UPW is intense: I use music, dynamic movement, humor, and a host of other tools to put the audience in a peak state—and that’s when breakthroughs happen.

Julie’s goal that weekend was to turn her financial life around. How did she do it? First, she recognized that something had to change, or she and Colin were looking forward to some very painful “golden years.” It finally hit her that her negative beliefs about money were creating constant pain in her marriage and in her future, and she asked herself, “Where did this story
come from?” And then Julie did something really important: she dug down deep and asked herself, “Is this what I really believe? We are not born believing money is good or evil. So where did this belief come from?”

She didn’t have to go very far to find the answer. Both of Julie’s parents grew up during the Great Depression. Her mother never got the chance to go to college even though her academic scores were off the charts. Instead, she worked as a department store clerk for $9 a week, and didn’t dare complain about the low wages or long hours on her feet. Julie grew up hearing the stories over and over: how the rich exploit the poor, how banks and Wall Street stockbrokers destroyed the economy, how you can’t trust the stock market. So Julie made the association in her brain: “If I become a wealthy investor, I’ll be a bad person, and my mother won’t love me.”

Julie realized that the story she’d been telling herself about the evils of wealth wasn’t her story after all; it was her mother’s story. “Money is the root of all evil,” was her mother’s mantra, not hers. This realization jolted her. The truth set her free, and those words lost all of their power over her. (In fact, when she did her homework on the biblical phrase, she found that it’s not “Money is the root of all evil,” but “
the love of money
” above all else—love, relationships, contribution—that’s the recipe for surefire disaster.)

It was an amazing transformation. Once Julie got past her limiting story, she could sit down with her husband for the first time to talk about their finances. He was thrilled they could be partners in taking back control of their financial life. Imagine how hard it is to build wealth when your core belief is that money is evil. They dumped their high-cost mutual funds and transferred their IRA to a diverse portfolio of index funds with Vanguard. Then they put in place a long-term financial plan, like the one you’ll be reading about in these pages, to finally put them on the road to financial freedom.

Julie and Colin shifted their story. And what happened? They learned how to play the game and win, they learned how to create an income for life—just like you’re going to do in chapter 5.2. Julie and Colin learned how to put an extra $150,000 to $250,000 into their pockets over their investment lifetime just by getting out of those expensive mutual funds. How great do those golden years look now!

Remember, you know the answer, and the secret is simple: change your story, change your life. Divorce your story of limitation and marry the truth. You can make anything happen.

YOUR STATE

It’s hard to change your story when you’re in a lousy state. If you feel like hell, you don’t think to yourself, “Life is beautiful!” Have you ever been really angry with somebody, and suddenly you remembered every freaking thing that person ever did to irritate or annoy you? When you go into an angry state, it switches on the part of your brain that supports that state, and the story that keeps you there quickly appears.

By contrast, if you’ve ever fallen head over heels in love, can you remember how the world looked? It was like looking through rose-colored lenses: everything was wonderful, right? Rude clerks didn’t bother you; crying babies seemed cute. That’s how a positive state can change your outlook—your story.

Your mental and emotional state colors your perception and experience of everything in life. When I work with anyone—from world-class athletes to high-powered executives—
we change his or her state first.
There’s a part of you that, when it’s turned on, can make anything happen; but when it’s turned off, the world is dead. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know when you get on a roll, and everything flows just perfectly without your even having to think about it? You ace the tennis shot. You say exactly the right thing in the meeting or walk out of the negotiation with exactly what you wanted. On the other hand, we’ve also all experienced the opposite: we couldn’t remember our home address, the name of our dinner host, or spell the word
the.
I call that the stupid state. But a few minutes later, it comes back to you: you remember the answer because you get in a different state.

The purpose of this book is not to try teaching you how to change your state—that’s the basis of many of my other books and audios, programs, and live events. But in a nutshell, you can immediately and radically change how you feel (and not just hope you feel good) by learning that
by changing your body first, you can change your mind.

I teach many ways to create immediate change in your state, but one of the simplest ways is
to change what I call your physiology.
You can change the way you think by changing the way you move and breathe. Emotion is created by motion. Massive action is the cure to all fear. Think about it, fear
is physical. You feel it in your mouth, in your body, in your stomach. So is courage, and you can move from one to another in a matter of milliseconds if you learn to make radical shifts in the way you move, breathe, speak, and use your physical body. I’ve used these insights for almost four decades to turn around some of the world’s greatest peak-performance athletes, financial traders, and business and political leaders. Last year, Harvard University did a scientific study that proved the validity of this approach.

Social psychologist and Harvard professor Amy Cuddy offered a “no-tech life hack” in her famous 2012 TED Talk when she asked the audience to change their posture for two minutes. Cuddy’s research showed that just assuming “power poses” or postures of high power (think Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips and legs firmly planted on the ground; or the guy in your office leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows out wide—you know the one) increased testosterone (the dominance hormone) by 20%, while simultaneously reducing cortisol (the major stress hormone) by 25%. The impact of this biochemical change immediately transforms your willingness to face fears and take risks. All within just two minutes of changing your body. In Cuddy’s study, 86 percent of the power posers reported feeling more likely to take chances. But when the second set of volunteers were asked to stand or sit for two minutes in more passive poses, with their legs and arms crossed tightly, their testosterone levels
dropped
by 10 percent, and the stress hormone rose by 15 percent. Far fewer of these men and women, only 60 percent, behaved assertively. Remember, these weren’t just psychological changes but actual biochemical changes, hormonal changes. What I have taught for 38 years and what all of my students knew was true through experience was now validated by science. What does this mean? It means, basically, you rock. You’ve got some swagger in your step, you’re ready to put yourself on the line, to take the necessary risks and shape your world. Two minutes of posing can lead to the changes that either configure your brain to be assertive, confident, and comfortable, or really stress reactive. Our bodies are able to change our minds!

There was a time in my life when I was overweight and depressed, living in a studio apartment in Venice, California, staring at the empty furniture and listening to Neil Diamond records. Pretty scary, huh? One day a friend who hadn’t seen me in a long time stopped by. He took one look at me and said, “Man, what
happened
to you?” It snapped me out of my trance. I decided then and there to break the pattern.

So I put on my running shoes and grabbed my Sony Walkman. (Yes, I’m ancient enough to have owned one of those.) And in those days, you had to be committed to your music: you had one album to listen to, not 10,000 songs to choose from. I turned to the legendary rock band Heart, put on the song “Barracuda,” and let the beat ignite me. I took off running with the determination that I was going to run as hard and as fast as I had ever run in my life, and I wasn’t going to stop until I spit up blood. To say I was determined to push myself beyond my limits would be a serious understatement.

I’m sure it must have been a hilarious sight, given my excess 38 pounds and my beer belly flopping back and forth in the wind as I ran like a banshee. When I literally couldn’t breathe an ounce more of air, I collapsed on the beach and grabbed a journal I had brought with me. And in that state of absolute conviction, determination, exhilaration, and exhaustion, I sat and wrote down everything in my life I would no longer tolerate. The way my body was, my laziness, my shallow intimate relationship, and my disastrous finances. Right across from it, I wrote what I was now committed to creating in my life—and in that pumped-up, invigorated state, I felt certain I could find the way.

With a strong enough state, you will develop a strong story. My story was: “
This ends here and now; my new life begins today.”
And I meant it with every ounce of my being. I discovered that when you change your state
and
your story, you find or create the right strategy to get what you’re absolutely committed to.
That’s how you create a real breakthrough—a new state with a new story and a proven strategy.

I went on to lose 30 pounds in the next 30 days, and 38 pounds total in a little more than six weeks. I was maniacal in my commitment. I set a new standard that day about who I was and what I stood for. It has not waned in the 30-plus years since that day (and my weight has never returned to that level either).

I went from earning less than $38,000 a year to more than $1 million a year just a little more than a year later. It was a level of change I couldn’t even imagine creating at the time. More importantly, I regained my emotional and psychological fitness—the two forces that truly change how someone’s life turns out. Determination, faith, and courage began to be the forces that guided my every action going forward.

Great strategies can surround you but they will be invisible to you unless you put yourself in a strong, determined, and empowered state.
A state that will automatically breed the beliefs and stories that you can, must, and will achieve—and that you are committed to. With state and story combined, you’ll not only find the strategies that work, you will execute them and experience the rewards you desire and deserve. Do I have your full attention? If there’s any area of your life that you’re living that is far less than the life you desire, it’s time to change one or more of these elements.