You are listening to The Design You Podcast with Tobi Fairley, episode number 20.
Welcome to The Design You Podcast, a show where interior designers and creatives learn to say no to busy and say yes to more health, wealth, and joy. Here is your host, Tobi Fairley.
Y’all, I made it to episode number 20. That is five months of podcasting and I feel so accomplished. It’s really crazy because I thought about having a podcast for a while. Like, for years, sort of. And now here we are, already at episode 20. So thank you so much for being here with me on this fun new adventure. I love it and I hope you love it too,
So speaking of an adventure, today, I want to talk about something that takes a lot of us on a wild ride. At least in our thoughts, anyway, and that’s money. Oh money, you complicated thing, you, right? But the thing is money’s just money. It’s so innocent. So why do we load it down with all of our scary thoughts and personal baggage and emotions?
Well, the answer for most of us is because we were taught to think this way about money by our parents, or maybe we learned this thinking because of an experience with money and our past that wasn’t so great. But here’s the thing: money is neutral. It’s not good and it’s not bad. It’s just money. But our beliefs about money often make it either good or bad, right? And for so many people, money falls into the bad category.
There are so many of our beliefs that need to get undone really. We need to stop believing them for money to become our friend and our ally and our teammate. And that’s exactly what I want money to be all of the time for me. I think of money as my BFF.
So to make that happen for you too, let’s look at some of our beliefs about money that we may need to undo in order to have money showing up for us all the time. Now, if you’re like me, you were taught a lot of things about money, and I was taught – and you may also have been taught that you had to work really hard and for a really long time to make a whole lot of money.
Now, I know this is not true anymore. I used to think it was true but it’s not true. And if it were true, then the people working three jobs and working all the time would all have a lot of money, right? If you worked really hard and that meant you made a lot of money. But they don’t. In fact, a lot of times, the people working three jobs have the least money.
So it’s not about how much you work. That’s not the way to get money. And in the next episode, I’m actually going to dig specifically into this idea and talk about how you can make the most money in the least amount of time. So that’s going to be really fun to talk about. But for today, this idea of working really hard to make a lot of money is only one of the many things that you may begin to realize that you were taught to believe about money and that you need to unbelieve.
So our thoughts, even if they’re unconscious thoughts about money, often hold us back in a really big way. Like, a huge, gigantic way. So let’s talk about why we’re so afraid of money and how we need to think about money if we want it to like us back and what we can do to create an us-plus-money-equal-dreamteam situation.
Because for me, literally, it’s #dreamteam every time I think of Tobi plus money, and I want you thinking that way too and I want it to work for you. So first, let’s tackle the fear part. We’re afraid of making money, of not having any money, we’re afraid of keeping money, we’re afraid of investing money, we’re afraid of managing our money and protecting our money and not wasting money. And when we do spend it, we often attach guilt and shame and a whole bunch of other tricky feelings and thoughts to money.
Easy peasy, right? No wonder we love money so much and we just have such an easy relationship with it. Yeah seriously, we do that all the time, all of those things. Literally, there’s no part of our relationship with money that we can’t find some way to feel a negative feeling, right? We’re just really good at going to negative with money.
Now, one of the reasons for the fear is many of us don’t believe we deserve money, and if we do believe having some money is okay, then only our fair share of money is okay, right? Because here’s the thing: we believe there’s that big pot of money, or maybe we don’t even think it’s that big. Some of us don’t. But in general, we believe there’s that big pot of money out there somewhere out in the universe and this pot is limited.
And so the more I get of it, the less you get of it, and vice versa. I’ve probably talked about this before on a podcast, so this may sound familiar, but I want us to get that this idea of the big old pot of money, it’s a myth. It’s not true. That’s the big secret. The big old pot of money for all of us to share is a big, gigantic myth.
And the ability to create money for yourself or me for myself, that ability for each and every one of us is completely and totally unlimited. We can create money any time we want by adding value to the world. So yeah, all money is is an exchange of something of value for money. Like, a piece of paper. It’s sort of like an IOU or a barter system in this sense. You give me something of value, I give you money, and then you can take the money I gave you and you can spend it on something else that you value.
And it really shouldn’t be scary at all. Money is just money. Money is not the root of all evil as you may have heard. Though some people with money can be evil, the money itself is not evil. And there’s likely many more people with money that are good rather than evil.
And think about this: what if poverty is actually the root of evil? Because those without money feel forced to do a lot of evil things to get money. That’s really an interesting way to turn some of these beliefs we have on their head, right?
So money is not the root of all evil. Money is also not greedy. Though some people who have money could be greedy, there’s plenty of people who have no money that are greedy. The money itself is not greedy because money is always, always, always neutral until we come along and assign some wacky, crazy negative or positive meaning to money. And that is where we often get ourselves in trouble with our money thinking because we start attaching all of those thoughts to money that don’t serve us.
So I realized about myself when I was reworking my own money relationship that I had mostly positive beliefs about money from my parents. I realized that I was great at spending money, sometimes a little too great at that, and not always in the healthiest ways. Like, sometimes it was a little retail therapy, you know what I mean, but what I didn’t know before I gave myself a money mindset makeover was that I didn’t have a belief that allowed me to have money.
As in, keep it and have a relationship with it long-term without spending it as soon as it came in. So if I wasn’t earning it, I was spending it. And I’m really good at both of those. I’m really, really good at earning or creating money, and I’m really good at spending it, but there wasn’t a whole lot in between.
So one of the first shifts we need to make when it comes to our money mindset, especially if we want the universe to conspire with us and not against us is to use the money that we already have, before we get a lot more of it, in the best possible way that we can. Now, this doesn’t mean to hoard your money. It means to use your money. Money is actually most productive for us when it’s circulated out into the world, when it’s invested into things that improve us and improve our lives.
Hoarding money or being afraid to spend any mean we have a scarcity mindset that comes from thinking things like, “I don’t know when I’ll have more money so I better hang on to this for dear life. Don’t spend a dime, Tobi.”
So I’ve talked to you in previous podcasts and even in the last episode about abundance versus scarcity thinking, and even though it seems a little counterintuitive, hoarding your money is not necessarily being wise. It’s being afraid. So there’s that scarcity mindset. But here’s the thing: spending it too quickly is like the other side of that same coin.
It also comes from a scarcity thinking, but it sounds more like something say, a thought like, “I better buy that stuff that I want really, really quick because who knows when I’ll get more money.” And, “I don’t want to spend this on anything else. I want to spend it on the thing I want so I’m buying it today.”
Okay, so that impulse spending is also scarcity mindset. So neither of these are money mindsets that serve you. They both come from a place of lack, of not enough, and that’s the kind of thinking that will never help you build wealth. But what if you reworked your money mindset so that you invest money in things that add value to you and to others, like maybe your family or anyone really that you want to help or that you want to use your money to benefit and that when you do this, when you invest or circulate your money that you bring long-term joy and that you get a really big return on your investment? What if that was the way you operated with money?
Now, that is a healthy money mindset. Now, buying things for instant gratification followed by at some point buyer’s remorse is an action that comes from a need to buffer our feelings. So this instant gratification buying, that is not investing. That is not planning how we’re going to spend our money well. That is buffering our feelings. And buffering our feelings comes from scarcity mindset, not abundance thinking.
Buffering never comes from abundance thinking. It comes from feeling lack or less than. So if you are either hoarding your money or you’re buffering your feelings with shopping and overspending, your money mindset isn’t as healthy as it could be.
Now, spending and saving aren’t the only parts of money mindset though. There’s also the earning or creating part of the money mindset. And believing you are an earner of money where you make dollars based on the hours you work, that’s not the place where wealth and abundance happen either. So we want to shift to being a creator of money and the way you become a creator of money is you create a lot of value in the world and you get paid far more than just an hourly wage.
And this is a huge and important shift in finding financial freedom. This going from being an earner of money to being a creator of money, okay? So most people who are scarcity thinkers, they believe that they earn money based on the amount of hours that they work. There’s a problem with that, right? Because there’s only so many hours in a day. And they believe that their money always comes from the exact person that they do the work for.
So like, they go to work, they work this number of hours, they work it for you and you pay them. Makes sense. I get why they think that and you can probably understand that too. But abundant thinkers are different. Abundant thinkers create value by pouring themselves completely into what they are passionate about and they create value for others consistently and they overdeliver in that value consistently in the area where they are most talented and gifted and that brings the most value and they keep putting that out into the world for people to buy.
And they know that it’s not about the number of hours that they work because if they created something that is very valuable to their audience but it only took them five hours to create, they can get paid far more than five hours’ worth. They can make millions of times return on their time investment. All based on what they created, no matter if it took five hours or five minutes or five weeks or five years, no matter. If it was huge value to their audience, it gets big results or it creates pleasure for their audience, then it doesn’t matter how much time it took to create it.
So the point being, if you can create something of huge value in five minutes or five hours and sell it a million times over, it’s so much more abundant in the way it creates wealth for you, okay? So it’s creating money that you could never do in that dollars for hours kind of mindset because you only have 24 hours in the day, right? You don’t have millions of hours to create things.
So an abundant thinker doesn’t care where the money comes from. They get that they may be creating something of value and selling it for a smaller dollar amount to a whole bunch of people, but they know that it’s going to pay off in a huge way and in ways they can’t even imagine, and they trust that their job is to just keep creating value and the money part will take care of itself. And they do that every day at their highest level.
Now, when I shifted to this way of thinking and this way of working, the result blew my mind. I became a person like these other abundant thinkers that are so confident in their ability to create value and create change in other people’s lives that they don’t worry about the money or fear that it won’t show up.
Now, for you to fully shift into this idea of creating money versus earning it, there’s something else you must understand. You must understand that if you are creating something of high value for your clients and they pay you money for it, you aren’t taking something from them when you take their money.
Scarcity thinkers believe that if you pay me money, say, $279.99 per month for my Design You coaching program maybe, then I am taking money from you and your business and now I have your money and you don’t have it. So essentially, you lose, I win. But that’s not how this works when you’re an abundant thinker. That is not true.
A healthy and abundant mindset understand that if you give me $279.99 a month and I’m creating a really, really high value product or service for you and I give it to you even at the value of hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of value a month, far more than your small investment because I overdeliver every day that I’m not taking anything from you.
And here’s the thing: this is a real scenario, and I don’t hold back. I don’t hold myself at $279 worth of value in my coaching program because I’m not afraid that I should be a “wise” person and not give too much for that small investment. I’m an abundance thinker and I have all the confidence in the world that giving my hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of value means that my hundreds or thousands of dollars are on their way to me every month, even though it might not come directly from where I expect it to.
It might not come just from my coaching membership clients, and it doesn’t. It often comes from other people who see the work I’m doing there and who want to go deeper in this work with me and grow their businesses faster and so they want to hire me say, for private coaching for a lot more money. But this is the idea of creating money by creating value.
This sort of confidence around money is liberating. Do you see that when you contribute at your highest value to the world every single day and you do charge for what you create, don’t get me wrong, you charge for it, and you have no reason to fall into scarcity mindset ever about money because you’re putting value out and the money’s going to come back to you, right?
But do you get that even if every single dollar you have was taken away, you could easily create value immediately with those same gifts and talents that you have and you could rebuild your money by giving of yourself and your talents and your gifts at your highest level? Because when you do that the money comes back to you. It’s so exciting.
And when you realize this and realize it’s not about the money but it’s about your ability to create money any and every time you want to, that is when true abundance thinking kicks in and when all of your fears around money completely fall away.
Now, each person – each and every one of us has the ability to make unlimited amounts of money based on how much value we create. And in this really cool book I recently read called Earth is Hiring by Peta Kelly, she talks about two really cool concepts of money. I’ve never heard them before, but I absolutely love them.
So first she says stop with that big old pot of money thing that we’ve already discussed because we don’t have one big pot of money that we share. We each have our own abundant source of money waiting for us to tap into by giving of our gifts. Now, that is true abundant thinking that I absolutely love.
So here’s the thing: that means I can tap into my pot and you can tap into your pot but our pots are not connected. I can maximize my efforts and I can stand under that tap of money of mine and no matter how much I tap into, it doesn’t deplete your money supply because yours is unlimited too. they’re both – they’re both separate but equal and they are limited only by our beliefs and our willingness to add value to the world in our most free and abundant way.
This concept guarantees that there are millions or even billions of dollars, really unlimited, right? So trillions and however far you can count of dollars of unclaimed money with our name on it every day when we don’t cash in to our tap by giving and creating value.
So every day we don’t give and create value at our highest level is a day that we’re probably living in scarcity mindset that is absolutely unnecessary because it’s there waiting for us. One of the reasons I love this thinking so much is it takes the guilt and the shame off the table when it comes to money.
Because if we each have our own unlimited supply and they’re not connected to each other’s, then I’m not selfish for tapping into my abundant money source because it’s there just for me. And you have your own so I’m not taking from you or anyone else when I tap my supply. And if I don’t take advantage of my money tap, it’s just going to sit there unused because you can’t tap into my money source, only I can do that because you have your own.
Isn’t this so cool? I absolutely love this thinking. It makes it totally okay to be okay with having money and wanting things that money can buy because really, it’s each of our birthright to step into our abundance financially and in every other way really, but especially financially. So if we can step into that by creating value, then we can completely be free of guilt for having, wanting, needing, spending, using that money.
It’s awesome, right? And does it make us bad people or show a lack of character to want money or even to love money and all the wonderful things that money can provide us? And in fact, it’s really important to want things, even expensive things because that’s exactly what spurs us to step under our own money tap and partake in our own abundant share, right?
Now, the other thing Peta talks about in her book, Earth is Hiring, about money that I just love is that she says money isn’t really ours. It’s on loan to us and it’s on loan from whatever you think your source is. Whether you call that the universe or you call that God, or you call that source, whichever you prefer to call it. I call it God but whatever that is for you, that higher power, that’s who loans us the money.
The way we can help this concept sink in is understanding that you know, when we get money, we don’t write our name on it. Well, you might have seen the bill floating around with someone’s name on it, but we don’t all write our name on it and then loan it out or spend it and then try to get that specific money back later like it was ours, like it was our car or favorite sweater, right? We don’t go looking for our money.
So money just is and it circulates so it’s on loan to us sort of, and we just circulate it out into the world but it’s not really ours. But this is a cool thing because if money is just on loan to us and it’s our job to get it and make the best use of it by circulating it out into the universe in exchange for other types of value, this is really great news. It’s sort of like money is free to us just for doing what we do best, which is creating our own unique at our highest contribution to the world just for doing that like the money’s free for us to use.
And when we do this, money comes to us easy peasy, y’all. So why don’t we act like this? Why don’t we act like it’s easy? Why do we act like it’s so hard to get money? Why don’t we just give freely of our highest selves, our highest value, our highest talent every day and then step under that money tap and receive our share? Because it’s there waiting for us.
So what the heck are we waiting for, friend? It is time. It is time to give your highest and most valuable contribution to the world. And then let all that money goodness just flow straight to you. Because you know what? Money is ready to be your BFF. It’s not scary. It’s our ally, our partner. So kick your scarcity thinking to the curb today and start receiving all that money that is rightfully yours, it’s waiting on you.
Do it, friends, and I’ll see you next week when we talk about making the most money in the least amount of time. It’s going to be a super cool concept too and I can’t wait to see you then. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Design You Podcast. And if you’d like even more support for designing a business and a life that you love, then check out my exclusive monthly coaching program Design You at tobifairley.com.
