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One Saturday I took my children shopping and found I had only one £2 coin left in my purse. We were hungry and decided to share one kid’s meal in that famous burger chain. We each had one chicken nugget and about four fries each!
From that moment, I realized something had to change. I decided I would go to the business section of the local library and read every finance and business book I could get my hands on. I enrolled in a women’s money-and-investing weekend that year and later signed up for four property courses. I purchased my first tiny one-bed rental flat in Scotland four months later as a no-money-down deal.
Only 18 months after my first property purchase, I now have eight investment properties and have resigned from my full-time job. We live temporarily in one of our investment properties while I’m renting out my family home. I have experienced a huge improvement in my quality of life by doing so. My painting hobby is now turning into a lucrative business, and I’ve ditched the hamster wheel of daily commutes into Central London. I no longer feel miserable in a job that made life unbearable.
Today I am my own boss. I accomplished all this primarily with the financial education I acquired through books, seminars, and just getting out there and doing it.
That is the value of seeking out the financial education that works for you.
The second missing piece of the puzzle that holds women back is the invisible.
Beyond the knowledge that comes from financial education lies the invisible, where the “secret formula” is found. This secret formula has very little to do with facts and figures. It’s invisible because it cannot be seen, and it’s secret because it’s hidden from most of us.
A woman’s true strength, purpose, and genius reside in the invisible. The secret is to make the invisible visible. And that is what we will do.
To realize your financial dreams, you must blend the information of what to do and how to do it with the thoughts, emotions, and spirit of the invisible. We’ll explore the details of this invisible secret next.
To rise beyond what’s visible to you takes…
You have your left brain—the logical, analytical, practical side of your world. And you have your right brain—the creative, innovative, intuitive part of your world. And then you have the physical, the spiritual, and everything in between. Rising to meet your financial dreams takes all of it. It takes all of you.
Body
We obviously need our body to get anything done in this physical world we live in. It doesn’t have to operate perfectly, but it’s an important tool for our financial journey.
Your body will give you signals. Have you ever had a moment when you had a physical sensation in your heart that something was wrong? Or you suddenly felt queasy in your stomach when you were around someone you didn’t trust? This is your body giving you clues. Trust those signals. Your body is the physical conduit of your thoughts, emotions, and spirit.
Mind
The brain, a critical part of the body, collects, stores, organizes, and recalls the facts, figures, stories, and information that we need to make sound decisions. Your physical brain is a mass encased in your skull, but have you ever seen a mind or a thought? Your thoughts are part of your invisible world, but they are ever so powerful. They are a driving force in determining the results you have in your life. The tricky part is that some of our thoughts are conscious thoughts, while other thoughts are subconscious and lie hidden under the surface. These hidden thoughts have as much, if not more, power than the thoughts we are aware of.
For example, when you hear the word “investing,” what immediate thoughts come to mind? Are they positive thoughts? Negative thoughts? Does the idea of investing excite you, or put you to sleep?
When you hear the words “financially independent,” what thoughts do you have? Do you say to yourself, “Yes! I can do this! This journey will be fun!”? Or are you saying, “I’d rather be happy than rich. This sounds too hard. I don’t want to lose money.”? It’s the “I-can’t-do-it” or “I-don’t-know-how” thoughts in your mind that will prevent you from having the financial success you want.
Janet, a friend of mine, and I were talking about what kind of car she should buy. She is young, bright, single, and attractive. I asked her, “Have you ever test-driven a Porsche?”
She immediately got flustered and irritated. She snapped at me, “I don’t want a Porsche!” I was taken back by her instant emotion around this.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m not that kind of woman!” she said quickly.
I had to do my best to keep my cool because—I had a Porsche! I kept calm and curiously asked, “What kind of woman?”
She looked at me like I should know the answer, “The kind that is flashy, loose, flaunts her sex, has no brains, and wants to be seen.”
“Wow!” I thought to myself. “How in the world does she associate Porsche with all that?” That thought made no logical sense at all to me, but somewhere in Janet’s subconscious, the idea that a female Porsche driver equaled a stupid sex bimbo made perfect sense to her. I decided to skip the psychoanalysis and stop talking cars with her altogether.
The Power of Your Thoughts
One of my favorite books of all time is As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, written in 1902. He explains that the purpose of the book is “to stimulate men and women to the discovery and perception of the truth that—They themselves are makers of themselves.” He goes on to say, “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.” He puts this concept into a poem:
Mind is the Master-power that moulds and makes.
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The Tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills;—
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.
We Hear What We Want to Hear
According to Allen, your thoughts create your world. Your thoughts also determine how you process the information you take in.
Let’s talk about this in relation to money. Imagine that the glass in the diagram represents your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and judgments—in
