Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season we're talking about consulting insights. And one of the biggest insights I ever had was that I can't help a person to grow their business unless they personally are willing to receive more and more money. It's just kind of a simple fact. And so it led to a lot of my work being not just about business growth, but about helping individuals to open up to abundance and open up to receiving more and more. And to do that, we had to look at limiting beliefs around money, some of which were inherited from someone in their past or maybe their parents, and challenge those beliefs and help them to adapt and adopt new beliefs about the abundance that they could bring into their lives.

I would say I want you to be rich and I'm working to make you rich. And if there's a part of you which is in conflict with that, then we need to have a conversation with them. And that aspect is often needing attention and care, acknowledgment and then integration. So some of the things I'm going to talk about today are ways that you can help to raise your abundance mindset, and some of them will help you to transform any of those limiting beliefs that you might have around money.

One of the first things that I'd like to share is that I recently held a client VIP retreat here on the island of Martha's Vineyard and Martha's Vineyard has kind of an elite reputation, has a playground for the rich and famous. And one of the things that's definitely true is that many wealthy people do choose to move here because it's kind of isolated and secret and it's also an actual island. So there's no bridges or anything like that. Anything that comes here has to come from far away. And so there's this kind of implicit scarcity. And also it's expensive. It's expensive to live here and expensive to enjoy yourself. And one of the reasons I wanted to have the retreat here is because it's an incredibly beautiful and peaceful and calming place that has this kind of abundant feeling to it. So I wanted to give an experience of abundance.

Now, some people can be in this environment and feel that abundance and some people will have scarcity triggered. Like everything's expensive, everything's expensive. Well, everything's expensive is an opportunity for you to transform your relationship to what expensive is and what that really means. So I think having, seeking and inviting experiences into your life where you are maybe a former version of you would feel they were expensive or even the current version of you feels it's on the edge of what's expensive for you. That is, you beginning to experience abundance. It can be abundance that's right outside your comfort zone. So if someone is saying, yeah, well, I really actually can't afford it, OK, but that's the thing that we're going to work on.

Imagine affording it. Imagine being able to bring this into your life. When I'm working with my clients, I'm working on helping them to sell more things for more money and therefore bring lots more money into themselves. That's why I'm saying that this can be a block. So ways to overcome this block. The first chance to give yourself experiences where you're expanding what you can receive, charging more is a great way to do that. And that's what you're going to do through your business. In order to do this, you're going to expect and to charge more and to experience yourself bringing that money into your business and then trickling that through your business to yourself. So paying yourself a salary, paying yourself a profit, profits or owners draw or however you want to bring that money through to yourself. We can't let the business use up all that money so that there's nothing left for us. So how else can you give yourself experiences? Going to a beautiful place and spending time with other people who are feeling abundant and working on growing their abundance. That's a really great way to do it.

I also think back to this, just the gentle experiences I had before. I had lots of money and what I used to do with them. So I would sometimes go to the lobby of a gorgeous five star hotel and maybe have a cappuccino and work on something in a notebook. So I'm just having a little taste of it. It's probably something that everybody at every level can afford. You're just being in that atmosphere and experiencing yourself there.

That kind of thing can really go a long way towards shifting your energy and making it feel like I'm at home in a place like this. I belong in a place like this. I love to also have amazing restaurant experiences. Again, you know, you can save up and do this, but exactly where you are, you can have a big, abundant experience, like wonderful food, great service in a beautiful place. We have a place like that here. And I know a lot of people will say, oh, it's so overpriced and it's really expensive. What you're paying for isn't the food. You know, you could make that food at home for a tenth of the price. But what you're paying for is an experience and experiences shift our reality.

That's the way to make things happen for you, is you want to shift your current beliefs, you want to shift your current reality so that you open yourself up to bringing in something new.

Another way that I've done this in alignment with my values is with really good theater seats. We've seen Broadway shows that were hundreds of dollars for the seats we had. But when you have that experience, you not only saw the show, but you were right up there and you get great seats. You hear the actual voice of the singer before it goes through the sound system. You can really see, you know, details and clothing and what the actors are doing. You can sometimes get a little glimpse backstage. It's really having a magical experience. And again, this is whatever is in alignment with your values. Maybe theater's nonsense to you and you want to go on an adventure tour, do it, allow yourself to have experiences that shift your energy and elevate your ability to receive so you can receive more and more once you're in the practice of receiving more and more.

So if I said what's the most you could charge right now, you're going to have a number, right? Let's say it's a hundred thousand dollars. And if I said “triple it,” Can you receive that much? For some people, they can't. For some people, if they sit with it for a little while, they can. So I want you to think, “What is my goal? What do I want to be receiving and where are the gaps in my getting there? What are the beliefs that keep me stuck between here and there?” For some people, it's just the reality. The reality is I'm just not quite there financially. OK, so back when my husband and I were not earning too much in the early days of my consulting business, we would sometimes get an unexpected bill or, you know, we would just have to pay our regular bills. And one of the things that he would affirm in sort of a fun and slightly sarcastic way was, “Good thing we're rich!”

So were we rich? Not quite, but we affirmed, “Good thing we're rich!” And over and over it became a joke for us, something that we felt fun, it felt fun to say, it was funny. And we shared that both as a laugh and also as an aspiration. And that went on for years. For years. We would return occasionally and say, good thing we're rich or woof! What a huge bill or wow, an unexpected check. Well, good thing we're rich. And little by little over time, we began to feel more and more rich. Now, rich is a totally relative term. My rich might be your broke or vice versa. Certainly a billionaire would look at all of us and say they're not very rich. But the feeling of being rich, of being a sustaining and confident financially, it came to us eventually, many years after saying good thing we're rich. So it was a way for us to affirm what we wanted to have in our lives and where we were going.

So I want you to think about something that you can say, whether it's something that makes you laugh or shifts your energy, puts you in a positive mood again. But to know that you're building something. I mean, you can just affirm I am working to be richer and richer every day. I love affirming. Every day I grow richer and richer in every way because I love to think of my life as rich in various aspects and not just financially.

So we are talking about financially. So I want you to think about other ways that you can affirm bringing abundance into your life. And I've said before that one of my favorite ones is I'm welcoming abundance into my life from expected and unexpected places because I don't want you to just think about money coming to you through your business from clients in this one specific way, you working hard. I want you to be open to the idea that there could be passive revenue, that you could get referrals so business could just drop in your lap. I want you to be thinking that you could get checks from other places that business could come into that money could come into your life from other places other than your business.

So opening yourself to abundance from all ways is an amazing way to open yourself to receiving. And by the way, make that happen. It was only once I started affirming that that I started seeing money coming in from unexpected places. I was going to say crazy places, but hey, every place is crazy if you don't expect it.

The last thing that I want you to do is really work on having positive wealth models. It's too easy for us to say, oh, rich people are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah billionaires. They're just terrible people, you know, wasting money going into space and never paying taxes. Sure, it's easy for us to say those things. But what I want you to do is build a habit that we never say negative things about wealthy people or people who are the way that we are wanting to become.

So I don't know, you might be a billionaire in a few years, and I don't want us to be making that impossible by the things that we're doing today, by any negative beliefs about money.

So nurturing positive beliefs about money, first of all, is the thing you heard that you need to do in 360 degrees. You need to definitely surround yourself with people who are also open to having positive wealth models and having positive beliefs about money. This might be hard conversations that you have to have with family and friends or your spouse or anybody else. So I would say let's not talk bad about rich people. I'm really working on becoming one or let's not talk bad about billionaires. I'm on a path towards that and I don't want anything to get in my way.

So whether you care about being a billionaire or not, a mere multimillionaire, may be enough. So make sure that all your beliefs are nurturing positive things going that direction. So I think in general, it helps to nurture positive financial beliefs with everyone around you and to make sure that you're surrounded by other people who are successful and for whom doing better financially is an aspiration. I know that people can get wound up in the idea that money isn't what motivates me. And I don't want to have a bunch of people around me who are just money motivated. I think there is a big difference in that. And I'd like for you to just look in your own community and in your own circle of friends for that.

There can be people who are aspiring to do better and better, and they aren't money motivated. So they're freedom driven, joy driven, quality of life driven. They want to have more free time. A lot of people are creativity driven. I have a number of friends, colleagues and clients who want to do sabbaticals because they actually want to spend time doing something else other than work. So I think those are fabulous people to surround yourself with and offer abundance into that group of friends and invite abundance from that group of friends, because that is what's going to fuel and nurture you even if you're not motivated by money.

Now, I personally am not motivated by money, but I am motivated by achievement. And I know that I achieve when I earn a certain amount, I achieve my goals. So I bring money through the business, I bring things into existence. So think about what is actually inspiring and motivating you and how money is connected to that. It's probably not going to be solely a money goal. It's almost always going to be a freedom, joy or creativity goal or relationship goal as part of that. So I get to spend way more time with my family. I get to work a three day workweek, for example, when I earn this much. And that allows me to fund vacations or time away or singing lessons, whatever it is that that abundance brings to you, that's what I want you to think about rather than the pure abundance itself. And I don't want you to hold a relationship with money which is limited in any way. So, you know, money's bad, but freedom is good. Those things are intertwined in the life of a consultant, those things are going to be intertwined. And so if you make peace with money and money can be at worst neutral, you know, it's just a means to getting us more of what we want, then that's what I'd love for you to do.

So as we look at, you know, all billionaires are bad or something like that, it's like let's find a few billionaires who aren't that bad. You know, Sara Blakely started Spanx, but it's not a bad business. It's not abusive. It's a great product. A lot of us are wearing them. So I think we can have positive ideas about a billionaire. Oh, there's another billionaire I can think of. Whitney Wolfe, who started a dating app that prioritized women over men, experience sexual harassment within that role and overcame it to come back and take her company back again. So that's a pretty inspiring billionaire's story.

Those are stories about ingenuity and coming up with an idea that other people hadn't had or a version of that idea that they didn't have, like somebody else didn't do it, and managing not to be incredibly abusive of the system and of their employees. I also like looking at an example that might often be a little more fraught, like an heiress. So Alice Walton is the heiress to the Walton fortune. She's one of Sam Walton's children. And with her money, what did she do once? She's done many things because she has like 68 million dollars. But one of the things she did was started a Museum of American Art in northwest Arkansas, where I've been twice. It's a beautiful museum, and for all my snobbery about American art, I was very transformed by the experience when I was there. The museum is integrated into the landscape, its beautiful four seasons of the year. It's free, by the way, to go. It's a museum with free admission and it tells the story of America back to us through paintings and other art. It's really a magical experience. So, hey, if I ever think heiresses and heirs, you know, inherited their family's money and what did they do with it just off on yachts or some nonsense like that? Well, guess what? Now I have another example.

So I really prefer to nurture these positive wealth models. And I think even though they're billionaires and you might not feel any relationship to that, the defining aspects of them in many ways are their money, the money that they have made. And we can use a positive relationship towards somebody who did something spectacular with money to help affect and impact our own relationship with money.

I'm offering these to you today because I want you to be rich in all ways. I want you to bring tons of money through your business, to you, into your life, into your personal life, so that you can pursue creativity, have time off, be with your family and friends, do good work in your community, be with yourself, experience yourself. These are things that having more money will allow you to do. And I want to make sure you don't have anything blocking you from doing that.

And if you'd like to grow your business, please reach out to me the work that you do to help yourself to receive more money coming through your business that is going to make all the growth that you are looking for possible. With that, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.