Wealth Creation Blog

The top wealth and finance experts will tell you that in order to build wealth you need to have the right mindset. No surprise there, it’s what we do and talk about here all the time. Just lately we’ve been tackling the issue by discussing our emotional attitudes towards money. This is something else the top experts will tell you—in order to build wealth, you have to come to terms with your true feelings towards money.

Be One With Your Emotions

We’ve been talking a lot lately about dealing with those emotions that we hold towards money and wealth—the feelings that grow from our upbringings, experiences, exposure, and the attitudes of others around us from a very early age.

It is absolutely essential to deal with these emotions because if you do not they will quietly undercut everything you do to create wealth. However, it is not enough to just say or think that you are dealing with them; to effectively deal with your attitudes and emotions about money, you need to deal in absolute honesty with yourself.

Digging Up The Past

Many of us do not want to do that, primarily for one of two reasons:

• We do not want to admit our own denial of money or past ignorance;
• Dealing with our emotions may require us to dig up past feelings and experiences, and that can sometimes be painful.

It’s understandable that you might want to just move forward and not have to look back and relive less than enjoyable experiences. But doing that is the only way to really understand why you do what you do and what is really blocking your path to wealth. When you have the courage to be honest about your emotions and your denial of money, you clear all the space in your mind and your life for much bigger, better, more productive plans and actions.

Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009

I came across an interesting wealth creation and self empowerment tactic the other day, where a person talked about writing a commitment to himself. This struck me as a simple but empowering way to not just set goals (it’s more than that), but to make a contract with yourself to guide you.

Contractual Commitments

Formalizing goals in some way makes it easier for us to achieve them. Like the personal business plan, it gets the goals and benchmarks down in writing and gives us something to come back to regularly so that we can stay on track and remember what it was that was important and why.

This idea goes a step further. It doesn’t just list goals for a period of time (say a year), it makes promises, commitment—a commitment to yourself to do better for you.

Making You Accountable For You

Making a commitment to yourself adds a measure of personal responsibility and accountability that a list of goals just doesn’t have. A list is just that—a list. A list is neutral. A commitment on the other hand is not. It is charged with the kind of dedication, determination, emotion, and levity that you need so that you can respect it and feel accountable to it, and to you.

This commitment can be in any form—a contract, a letter to you, a blog post to you shared with your readers (going public with your goals is motivating!)…a journal entry…any form that you like. The important part is the commitment, dedication, and meaning behind it.

What is that meaning? It is that you matter to you. With this commitment you are finally, formally prioritizing the most important person in your life, the only person who can make your life better so that you can be more to those who rely on and matter to you.

Today is a good time to sit down with yourself and some quiet and make those promises and commitments that you’ve deserved all along. Make a commitment to a better life for yourself, give yourself the due respect you deserve, and walk away feeling all the better for knowing that finally, the financial freedom you want to achieve is a life’s priority because you’ve made it so.

Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009

We’ve been talking a lot about attitude and emotion and how you “should” feel about all manner of things from the local and world economy to the investment climate to the fitness of the world for wealth creation. We discussed not letting others dictate how you “should” feel about all of this, and instead being in control of your financial emotions. Now, let’s refine that a bit.

Who Cues Your Financial Emotion?

Does watching the news or the daily market report leave you feeling despondent? Do you shake your head through the entire newscast and leave your set feeling worse than when you’d arrived? Do you generally feel good about your financial position or your daily living and feel that with some concerted effort to build wealth you could be quite comfortable….but then lose that feeling as soon as you read the next internet or media report on the state of the country or world?

If this sounds familiar, you are taking too many cues from the outside world and not trusting your own instincts enough. And that will become, if it hasn’t already, a big problem for you as you continue to work toward personal wealth.

When you take your financial/emotional cues from others, you do a couple of things:

• You undercut your own confidence and ability by essentially telling yourself your own instincts and emotions are not trustworthy.
• You back-step and undo everything in wealth creation that you have already accomplished.
• You start living with a scarcity mindset instead of an abundance mentality.
• You attract more negativity and scarcity to you, instead of abundance and positive energy.

All of this makes it very hard to build wealth and achieve the end goal of financial freedom. The case is certainly not hopeless, though. All you have to do is rebuild trust in your own emotions and take your cues from you, not from the outside world.

People actually have a very good sense of the potential of things, we just suppress it. Take life head-on, trust your feelings, and continue to remain positive about any endeavor, and you will surely be an unstoppable force in creating personal wealth.

Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009

Attitude is very similar to emotion; and like emotion, attitude plays a very important role in wealth creation. Either one can make or break your efforts at creating wealth and achieving financial freedom.

Define Attitude

Here is What Wikipedia has to say about attitude:

“An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual’s degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event– this is often referred to as the attitude object. People can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object, meaning that they simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the item in question.

“Attitudes are judgments. They develop on the ABC model (affect, behavior, and cognition). The affective response is an emotional response that expresses an individual’s degree of preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual’s beliefs about the object. Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.”

As you can see, attitudes are emotional responses. They are also things that are learned or conditioned over time. That means that attitudes are not set in stone, either—they can be influenced by your concerted effort and by opening your mind through education and exposure (even informal education via books, research, etc.). Your financial attitude does not need to stay the same as it has always been, you can modify your attitude towards money if you will put in the effort.

Changing Attitude And Communication

To illustrate the fact, read further (from Wikipedia):

“Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience…

“Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland’s view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication.”

So not only can attitudes change, they are expected to do so; and the key to that change? Communication in its many forms (written, spoken, etc.). It seems that since you are here communicating via this electronic medium, you are on a great path for positive attitude development and resulting wealth creation. Cheers to that!

Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009

We talk about emotion a lot here on this blog, as do many wealth creation experts. There’s good reason for it, too; emotion rules many of the decisions and outcomes of your life, including matters of money and finance. After all, as it’s been said, if wealth were just about the numbers we’d all be rich—but we’re not, so there must be more. At any rate, considering so much time is spent discussing emotion’s effects, it makes sense to talk a bit about what emotion is.

And Wikipedia Says…

Wikipedia explains emotion in this way (it also goes on to explain more about its history and theories):

“An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from an individual point of view. Emotion is often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition.”

So what we have is an individual, subjective reaction to life’s experiences. We all agree there is a bit more to it than that, and that there is some biological/physical component, but I think we can also agree that to a great extent emotion is controllable in most situations.

Here’s another interesting bit of trivia regarding the word’s root from Wikipedia:

“The English word ‘emotion’ is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means ‘out’ and movere means ‘move’.[1] The related term “motivation” is also derived from movere.”

Hmmm…..that’s food for thought. So we now have a subjective, individual response (sounds a lot like attitude) that we can control that is closely related to motivation. In other words, our emotions can be motivating, either negatively or positively. There’s a lot that this can imply, but I think this supports our discussions about gaining control of our emotions and choosing our own views of life. Yes, we are emotional creatures, but we can just as easily make that play in our favor for developing wealth and building a better life for ourselves.

Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009