Tobi Fairley: You are listening to The Design You Podcast with Tobi Fairley, episode number 107.
Female Announcer: 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’s your host Tobi Fairley.
Tobi Fairley: Okay, friends. We’re talking money today. How many of you would like to have some more money right now? I bet a lot of you, right? There’s a whole lot of money scarcity and money fears and money stuff happening right now in our current situation. I recorded this interview with Denise Duffield-Thomas before we really got into the thick of the Coronavirus situation in America, but I’m so glad I did.
Because I think I got a different perspective that’s a really important one that we might not have gotten if we were just reacting to our current situation. So, today’s episode I think is one that’s going to really help you. Denise is a money guru, a money coach. She lives in Australia, she has amazing books and programs.
I’ve just finished reading one of her books called Get Rich, Lucky Bitch! Which is all about manifesting money and it’s not what you think. It’s not just a bunch of woo. There is a little of that in there, but there’s definitely a lot more tactical showing up with your money that I really recommend the book. But on the episode today, we get into a lot of things that are probably holding you back.
We get into what are the most common blocks around money for creatives, we talk about your money stories and how you might not even know they’re there, but they’re holding you back and I’ve probably been holding you back since you were a child, and it’s really important to know what they are.
She talks about, which I love, not apologizing for the way you work or how much of the process you do. Like how a lot of designers or creatives feel guilty when they have team members doing work instead of them doing it and still charging for it, and she’s like, “Yeah, that’s being a CEO, friends. Not Chief Everything Officer, but CEO, Chief Executive Officer.”
She talks about so many places that we get in our way, apologizing for that or feeling guilty that we should be the one doing every piece of the work. She even says how frustrating it is to her when people don’t just tell the price of something and don’t just believe and have confidence in their value.
She tells some stories about how it annoys the heck out of her when she has to ask someone for the price, like 700 times and how we should just own it. So, all of those things, I know, are things that you are doing right now that are a detriment to your business and they’ve probably just been exacerbated with this whole Coronavirus situation. So, I want you to get out your pen and paper. I want you to really think about how your money story and your money blocks are getting in the way right now and get ready to hear some amazing wisdom from Denise and I’ll be back at the end of the episode to tell you where you can find Denise and how to get your moving on your money manifesting just in time for your current situation. Okay, enjoy!
Hey, Denise, welcome to The Design You Podcast. I cannot wait to talk about money, my favorite topic.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Well, I’m excited to talk about money with your audience because one of my best friends is a designer and – yes, and I can’t wait to talk about all the money blocks that are in your industry.
Tobi Fairley: Oh my gosh, they’re huge. Just the fact that I say money is my favorite topic, I mean, it takes a lot of practice for us starving artists, creatives to admit that it’s okay to want money to begin with. So, we’re going to dig into all that.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely, and us as a gender as well. Women aren’t allowed to talk about money.
Tobi Fairley: I know. So, in case people don’t already you, they’ve heard my intro about you and how amazing you are, but give us the shortest version of what you want everybody to know about you before we dig into this exciting.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Okay, the short bio is that I’m a money mindset coach. So, I help women, mostly, the entrepreneurs deal with their fears around money whether it’s fears around pricing or charging full-stop for what they do, feeling really good about charging premium prices, feeling good about making money. The other thing I describe myself is a very lazy, unbusy person because busyness is glorified in our society, but it’s not the thing that makes you money.
Tobi Fairley: I love it, so that’s busting through all the hustle and all of that stuff. We’ve got to work really hard to make a lot of money. All the things I’ve believed for years that have led me to burn out two or three times that we want to kick completely to the curb and I know you’re going to help us do that. So exciting.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely.
Tobi Fairley: Okay, so let’s dig into because your bestie is a designer, all my audience are interior designers and other creatives. Some of my clients in my membership are actually designers in Australia so they’re over where you live and I know this is going to be a topic that whether or not people get excited about it, they definitely need it.
So, what are those top blocks or fears that you encounter the most for us women and us women creatives? Tell us, call us out, like give us all the details.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Okay, so for creatives, the number one money block is I can’t be creative and make money.
Tobi Fairley: Yes. Starving artist, right?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: It’s quite a fundamental thing because that privilege has not really been afforded to a lot of women. So, unfortunately, if you haven’t seen your mother, your grandmother be able to make money and enjoy it it’s going to bring up some very conflicting feelings for you. It’s going to make you feel very guilty. It will make you feel like you should get a proper job. If you love what you do and you receive money for it, I mean, that’s the holy grail, but that’s the thing that women resist the most so I would bet that a lot of people listening actually came to design quite late because they resisted it for such a long time even if as a kid that’s literally what they wanted to do.
Tobi Fairley: Well, yeah, that’s my total story. I have an accounting degree that I first because that was a “respectable” job, right? I was almost finished with it and I was thinking, “There’s no way I can do this for a living.” So, I discovered design and I remember going back to my parents. I had put together a whole business plan to see if they would help me going to design school which they did and they’re super generous, but it wasn’t acceptable as a way to make money. They knew I was driven and I was so capable of everything.
It wasn’t necessarily that they were against it, it just wasn’t on their radar even as something that you would do. So, the respectable jobs of course were, be a businessperson, be an accountant, be a lawyer, be a doctor, all the things that sort of in our minds are worthy of making money.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: A real job.
Tobi Fairley: A real job, yeah, and then there’s all the sort of fake jobs that make us have warm and fuzzies and that we’re signing our life away to being broke for the rest of our lives, right? When we sign up for this, in theory.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely, and so that’s the fundamental thing that so many creatives have to deal with that I can be creative or I can be wealthy, but I cannot be both because doing so is somehow doing something bad. It’s not just your industry, this is in every industry because we all think we have to give up something for money, whether it’s our integrity, our creativity, our freedom.
Some people think that if they make money, they’ll be a bad mother or a bad wife or a bad friend or a bad daughter or just a bad person in general. So, that’s really, really difficult to deal with. But then let’s talk about hard work because you mentioned this right off the top, right?
So, you live in America, I’m guessing, I live in Australia. America has a relationship with hard work that’s probably more than any other country on the planet.
Tobi Fairley: Dang it.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Yeah, right?
Tobi Fairley: Why?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Yeah, and unfortunately that mentality is very much [inaudible 0:08:26] in this very linear dollars for money. You go to work and you work hard, and there’s so many sayings, another day, another dollar and you don’t get something for nothing. So, when you start to create a business in 2020 when there’s so many tools to help us and so many shortcuts and amazing systems and things like that, it actually starts to feel like we’re cheating if we take any shortcuts at all, if we delegate, if we have a team around us.
So, this is where I see friends who are in the design industry, they’re schlepping around things because they will not hire a team to help them because then it doesn’t feel like they earned the money if they’re not like literally lugging their – and it’s part of that thing, too, of I’m not too good to do this, so I’m going to muck in with my team. But it stops you from growing.
Because hard work doesn’t necessarily follow that linear pattern anymore when we have so many tools available to us. You could have a design client on the other side of the planet never even have to touch a cushion for them and still make money.
Tobi Fairley: I love it.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Don’t you find though that feels wrong? It doesn’t feel like real work?
Tobi Fairley: You’re 100% right. We won’t even delegate – I think of, I do, and I’ve worked through some of this, but I have so much farther I can go and I know I have so much to learn from you, but even just having a team and feeling like you didn’t select every single item in the house, like someone else on your team found the sofa or the lamps and you’re sort of claiming it as your work somehow feels inauthentic to people.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Even if it’s based on your system, right?
Tobi Fairley: Yes, all of it, your system, your resources, your accounts, your relationships, in your office that you’re paying rent for. The whole thing, somehow we can believe and justify that if we don’t do the work then it’s not legit and that we’re someone, like you said, cheating someone or pulling the wool over their eyes in some way which, of course, is not true, but we use this against ourselves all the time, yes.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely. I even had a friend who hired someone, so a junior designer who was with her for a couple of years and was doing really well, and she said to me, “I can’t pay myself more than I pay her.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because she’s there 40 hours a week now, and I’m not,” because she’s going in and out, she’s working on other projects and so she felt like that she couldn’t do that.
I was like, “You’re taking all the risk. This is your warehouse. This is all your stock. This is your clients and your years of experience,” but she felt like she was doing the work and she wasn’t able to make money as the owner of the business.
Tobi Fairley: Yeah, and what I see so often, it blows my mind, the number of people that come through my courses and programs and all the things and I’ll for a show of hands of how many of you are paying yourself at all? It’s less than 50%. They have either another income, a spouse or somebody else and it’s sort of – even though they’re working themselves to death and they’re making beautiful product and value into the world, their believing somehow that they can’t pay themselves because they have to pay their team or their people or whatever money they generate. They keep finding reasons that it has to be put back into the business and they literally don’t pay themselves a dime. It’s so, so common in our industry.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: See, you just said something really interesting. You said you’re creating beauty for people and this is part of the problem is that we don’t think that’s worth paying for, or we don’t think that’s worth charging for is really the problem because and I think – let’s go to a different industry for a second, health coaches. Because people go, they feel bad about charging because good health should be free to everybody.
Absolutely. I 100% believe that everybody should be healthy, but some people struggle with that and they need accountability, they need somebody to do it for them. Now, I cannot see the difference between different shades of blue. I just can’t. So, I really value somebody creating something beautiful for me and saving me time and money in me doing it myself because I have painted a house gray before and it was purple.
It ended up being purple because I couldn’t see it. So, people aren’t just paying you for some nice, fluffy, beautiful thing which is totally in itself worth charging for. Beauty is so important to human beings, you guys all know that. But it’s not just that you’re paying somebody, people are paying you to save them time and time is priceless. I can see what my designer friends do and I’m totally happy to pay for design in my life because it takes me so long to sort through all the different shades of white and I psych myself out and then I end up – I literally didn’t have bedside tables until I was like 35, because it was so overwhelming. Then I can hire somebody to do that and they’re like, here’s the lamp. I’m like, “Oh, my life feels so much more harmonious.”
So, we have to get over that thing that beauty is not something that’s worth charging for because it actually improves people’s lives immeasurably, but it also saves them time and money.
Tobi Fairley: Yeah, and I think we, a lot of times, just take it for granted. We think, everybody can do this, and there are plenty of people who can take a stab at it, and that’s fine, but there’s also people that can do all kinds of things and it doesn’t negate the fact that it adds value to the people who are willing to pay, right?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: You know what, and don’t assume that people can’t pay your rates because we all value different things. At the moment, this phase of life that I’m in with young kids I don’t value designer clothes, I don’t value designer shoes, but I am at home all of the time so I value a beautiful home because I’m not taking three young kids on vacation until they’re like 10, and so I really, really value that. Sometimes people, they pre-judge clients.
So, when I go into a store, I’m dressed like I am today. I’ve just come from tapdancing class, I’m wearing my yoga pants, so often I’ll go into a high-end store between errands and people don’t think that I can afford the most expensive thing in it and I had this very interesting experience where I was – it was not in your industry, but it was crystals, decorative crystals so it’s the – still the same.
I said, “Oh, this is beautiful. How much is it?” She said, “Oh, it’s very expensive.” I was like, “Okay.” She goes, “It’s $70,” and I was thinking, “That’s not expensive for a really beautiful crystal because I value that.” So, don’t pre-judge your clients and don’t make decisions for them because you can give them an array of options. If you want one room it’s this, if you want your whole house… Assume that they want their whole house done, maybe they do.
Tobi Fairley: I love it. I love this topic. I was just working on this today with some of my members because I think you’re so right and we have already decided, we thought through all the worst case scenarios, we decided our clients don’t have money, that they’re poor, all these things and we’re not even ourselves a chance to make money.
We’ve literally decided not to even make the offer so often. I think we feel sort of even sleazy and salesy and like we’re taking something from someone if we’re putting an offer out there that is expensive. So, what do we do about that? How do we start get okay and know that it doesn’t mean we’re greedy or mean or horrible or bitchy or some other insert adjective there if we’re believing that not only is our service is worth a lot of money but we’re willing to go tell everybody what they cost?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely. So, the first thing I want to say on the other side of that, so I am someone who, as I said, really values beautiful design even though I can’t do it myself, right. So, I’m also somebody in my business who hires a lot of people. So, I will hire a consultant to help me. I will hire editors. I am happy to outsource everything in my life.
I can tell when I’m working with someone who has money blocks and I can tell you it’s so annoying when someone just doesn’t tell you the price, when someone just doesn’t have confidence in their value. Do you know how many times I have to ask for the invoice? “Hey, send me that invoice. Hey, send me that invoice. Hey, send me that invoice.”
So, just remember that not everyone is like you and not everyone is being the scenes looking at your proposal going, “What a bitch.”
Tobi Fairley: Exactly, “How in the world could she have spent that much time looking for a sofa or whatever?” We have all these stories in our head and you’re exactly right, I think creatives are so bad about just sending the invoice and we’re nervous and we make up all these stories and then we lop 25% off the bill because we’ve already decided that they’re going to go ballistic when they see that price.
We self-sabotage in every possible way and then we’re like, “I just don’t understand why I don’t make any money, ever, and why I don’t have financial freedom, and why I’m hustling and I’m exhausted and I’m burned out.” It just doesn’t make any sense which is hilarious because it makes perfect sense and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot all the time.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: So, let’s go back then. Let’s go way, way back because most of our money blocks honestly come like pre-7 years old and you’ve seen bits in lots of other studies that, who you are by the time you’re 7 is pretty much your personality. So, you’ve got to think like where do these money blocks come from and yes, there are definitely cultural and collective money blocks, I see that in countries. Often, countries have a flavor of money block that permeates the culture, but everyone’s family has their own money blocks, too.
So, if you were to think of the lineage that you came from, some of us come from like our story around money is always struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, and that’s just the through line of our lineage. Other people though come from a feast or famine kind of thing, so it’s like every second, third generation makes money and then the next generation loses it.
Or you come from a lineage of gamblers, people who’ve taken risks with businesses and lost them. Or you come from a lineage everyone is an accountant and we’re very safe and secure. We all come into the world with a little bit of money baggage from the start and that will really impact how you see yourself as an entrepreneur and how you see money and how risky you feel like you can be with money.
So, there’s that and then the fact that probably most people are female, I’m guessing, most of your audience here?
Tobi Fairley: Mostly, yes, for sure.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: So women come into the world with our own money stuff, too, and there are studies that even today, even today girls are paid less in pocket money than boys are which is like oh my God. There are studies showing that girls are more likely to have things bought for them whereas boys are given the money to buy it for themselves.
You think, that sets up expectations in itself, not to mention what you see with your parents who earned the money, who had the power, who was allowed to talk about money in your family, who was allowed to do the negotiating, who had to be quiet? Most of us have our moms have running away money. So, we’re kind of seen as like money is not our friend. Money is something you have to squirrel away for bad times.
Already, just those five examples I’ve given everyone probably listening is thinking about all this baggage that you’ve come into the world with, right? Then you think of our first interaction with money for most of us it is that we had no concept of money, even though we were born into a family that has it’s own stories about money, and then we go to, “Oh, what is this amazing thing?” We go to put it in our mouth and the first thing we’re told about money is, “Don’t do that. Money is dirty.”
Tobi Fairley: Oh yeah.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Don’t money in your mouth, money is dirty.
Tobi Fairley: It’s so dirty. You don’t where that’s been. Everybody’s touching it. Yes, exactly.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: It’s a scary thing, too, where it’s like, “Don’t put that in your mouth!” Of course, we’re worried that our kids are going to choke on a dime or something, but it’s not that message. The message is, “This isn’t for you. This is something that’s scary and complicated.” So, there’s a lot of baggage there.
Then, each of us have our own experiences with what we’ve been taught. My family, actually, didn’t talk about money a lot except something they said really stuck with me. They said, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice.” That was like our family motto, and so, for some reason, in my head I took that to mean, you can’t be a leader. I don’t know how I wrapped this up. You can’t be bossy, you can’t be a leader. It just felt like I wasn’t allowed to do something different like be an entrepreneur because that wasn’t nice. It wasn’t nice to ask people for money.
So, what do you think your motto was around money or success?
Tobi Fairley: Mine was definitely around the working hard thing. Like the dirtiest word in our house was “lazy,” and I was led to believe that I can be and do anything, absolutely anything which gave me a ton of confidence and it has led to a lot of success, but with that it had to come with a lot of hard work. Just, “Go for it, but it’s going to be hard.” The day’s a wasting, get up with the sunrise and what are the – make hay while the sun shines and don’t waste any time or energy and literally to this day I still have a hard time relaxing. I have a hard time sitting around on a weekend and just doing nothing because the message is that I need to be doing something and I have that so attached to money which shoots you in the foot in so many ways as you know because it’s not about hard work always.
I mean, definitely, there are some benefits to that to a degree, but there’s a point in which it’s a diminishing return and it doesn’t make a difference. We can all look at people who work really, really hard every single day, work three jobs and are making minimum wage. So, I know intellectually it’s not about hard work, but it’s just so ingrained in me that to make money you have to work harder.
So, for me, it wasn’t an inability to hit a six-figure or a seven-figure business, I’ve done both, but at some point you hit your threshold of time in the day and energy, so there is a cap, there’s a ceiling you hit if your belief is you have to work really hard because there’s no more energy, there’s no more time. So, then I guess, I’m like, “Well, I’m at my ceiling. That’s all I can make.”
Denise Duffield-Thomas: I love that you said this and actually as you were saying it, I was thinking, “The early bird gets the worm.” We have all these stories about if you’re not getting up 4 o’clock in the morning and getting 5 hours sleep well then you could be doing more. If you’ve got time to lean you’ve got time to clean.
Being an entrepreneur is like always having an assignment due. There’s no time off because there’s always something more that you can do, but I love that you said that it’s a diminishing return and that is so, so true. At some point you do have to step into that CEO role not Chief Everything Officer role. That does not stand for Chief Everything Officer.
I fell into that trap, too. When you said, “I’ve burned out a few times.” I was like, “I totally have as well,” because I just really thought, “Nope, I have to just keep on hustling, hustling.” Instead of making decisions in my business to work smarter. So, everyone listening will have their own mottos whether it is something like another day another dollar or nothing comes for free or money doesn’t grow on trees, all of that stuff really keeps us stuck and small and burnt out.
Tobi Fairley: Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to talk about, and you may have somewhere else you want to go first, so definitely feel free to lead the way, but I really do want to talk about this ability to charge a lot of money for what we do because I think that’s so interesting. The dichotomy of an industry like the design industry is on one hand we don’t think we can charge at all and we’re not paying ourself anything, yet the goal is to charge five or six figure for these luxury – a million dollars for this luxury project that’s soup to nuts and every little detail and we’re constantly striving to try to get that kind of job or that kind of budget, yet we literally won’t even charge what we should be charging or what our work is worth at $1,000 or $2,000.
So, how we think that magically one day we’re going to get the right client and we’re just going to have the ability to charge a million dollars for our work, I don’t know how that computes, but it’s what we’re thinking. It’s like if we just can find – I always call it the island of ideal clients, if we can just find the mystical island of ideal clients, the ones that just pay you a million dollars or whatever your number is then everything will be fine, which of course it’s all in the thinking. I know all the way up and to that if we can’t do it at the lower level, how could we ever do it at the higher level?
So, what are we doing wrong? What is the thinking? The though fallacy there? Because I know you know the answer.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Yes. So, the thing is first of all, we’ve got to stop thinking that we’re for everybody and that picking a target client is being exclusionary and excluding people because that’s so drummed into us from a young age, too. Is that we’ve got to help anyone who wants our help.
At some point, at the start of your business, with any industry, you help anyone with anything. You do, of course you do, and picking that magical price it is going to attract your magical client. I really wish there was a scientific answer around that. There really isn’t.
What you need to do is after each job or when you work with a client you have to feel like there’s an energetic win for both of you. I experienced this last year when I started to do more speaking engagements. Because I’ve got young kids, I hadn’t done some for a couple of years and so I started just dipping my toe in the water, usually with friends, and so I was undercharging them and I would come away from the event feeling so sick.
It took me a while to figure out what was happening. What was happening it wasn’t a win-win, it wasn’t a give and take, it wasn’t an equal exchange, so I was feeling the deficit in my body. The people I was doing it for were feeling like, “Oh my God, I got all this value,” and I was like, “Yeah, great. I have to deal with that. That’s coming out of my energy.”
So, I could feel that in my bank account of Denise, right? So, that’s the magical price and that changes over time just to make it even more complicated. That does change over time. So, you can charge a million dollars for someone but it could be the wrong client and it’s not going to feel like it’s enough. It’s not going to feel good for you.
Tobi Fairley: Oh, interesting. I love that you said that it’s not enough. You didn’t say that it’s too much, you’re like, actually you can charge a million dollars and it not be enough to put up with the energy output, the exchange that you would have to put into that job. That’s awesome. I love how you said that.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely, which is why we have to take the morality out of pricing. Your price is just your price. It’s not a literal reflection of your self-worth as a human being. We’ve got to take that away because teachers are more worthy than me of getting paid, right? Daycare workers, janitors, doctors, all of those people are more worthy than doing a creative thing. I totally believe that and that’s not how life works.
So, the price is just the price. There’s no morality in charging, lower is better than higher, that’s not a thing. Higher is not better than lower. That’s not a thing either. So, the annoying thing when you start your business is that you have to set your prices and it has to be energetically in line with what you want to charge and the client you want to attract, that’s it. Don’t you think it’s better or worse or more moral?
Tobi Fairley: I love it, but I think that’s such a great compass that a lot of us haven’t had because we’re like, “Oh, we need to look at what our friends are charging, or what the industry will bear,” but what you’re saying is if we feel physically depleted, energetically depleted, if we feel somehow bad in the exchange, even though it can feel uncomfortable to charge an amount that we really want, if we consistently feel depleted in some way, we can’t pay our bills or whatever, that’s a sign to us that it’s not a good, equal exchange of value which I think is amazing and I’ve never heard that before. I absolutely love that, it’s so good.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: One thing that everybody can do as well, just to test this out for yourself, is you can sit with your prices and literally sit with it energetically and just see how it feels. See if there is that deficit in your body where you think, “Oh no, this is actually draining me a little bit more than it’s giving to me.” So, it’s weird because you have to really feel it.
It’s like a little zing inside where you go, “Oh okay, that feels good.” It feels a little scary, but it feels fair. It feels fair and that is going to change over time. So, try that, but then here’s a really good exercise to trigger some stuff for you is come up with your bells and whistles service that you don’t think anyone’s going to buy from you, okay?
Because no one is going to buy it from you, there’s no pressure. No one is going to buy it, so don’t even worry. Because they totally will, but you’ve got to tell yourself that it’s okay. So, come up with like, “A limousine is going to pick up my client, we’re going to do a shopping day in the most amazing place,” or, “I’m going to create this amazing thing for them,” I don’t know, whatever it is, the most crazy mood boards or whatever. “We’re going to do a shopping trip in Milan together.” Just come up with something that’s so outrageous it gives you total goosebumps and put that on your site.
Because sometimes the comparison thing is really interesting, someone goes, “Oh my God, that’s going to be on my bucket list, but hey in the meantime, can I get your standard service?”
Tobi Fairley: Yeah, you’re like, “Well, that’s like $400,000, but I’d love to pay you $40,000 for this other thing.” It seems like such a bargain to them at that point, right? That’s so amazing. I love that.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: It does, but it stretches your mindset of what’s possible because when you first write it down you’re like, “No one is freaking every going to buy this ever, ever, ever, ever, but that’s fine I’m going to put it down there anyway.” But each time you see that on your website or each time you think, “Well, I do offer that. I legitimately will offer, if someone wants to pay me that, I will do it, so therefore it is an offering,” but it’s just going to shift your brain a little bit to be like, “Hang on, I’m going to step into that version of myself. Not a different person, but a version of myself who can receive that and who can deliver that.”
Tobi Fairley: I love that so much because I think so many people I deal with don’t even feel like they can receive – like they can’t even fathom making amounts of money that seem really small to me now because, like you said, over time things change, but like they could never say a day with me. Just a day to pick my brain is $5,000. They’re like, no way. It’s $450.
I just can’t imagine what it would feel like to put a luxury price and for them to believe that they were worthy of it. I love what you’re saying like, how do you stretch yourself to start showing yourself, wow, if all of this is this price what are some of the other things in-between there and the lower end of what I do? It’s really good.
So, one thing I would love to talk about before we go today, is just in general how we shift from scarcity to abundance in our day-to-day life because I find that most of us just live in this whole scarcity mindset, there’s never enough time, there’s never enough money, there’s never enough anything. I think in America, for sure it’s the culture we live in. We’re always wanting more, more, more yet we never feel like that we can have it. I’ve tried some different things and I’ve read and I’ve practiced, but I would love to know how you think the best way is to shift into abundance.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Well, I’ve got some really great news for you because, again, everyone might think that next version of yourself is a really big leap, right, and it could take a lot of time or effort or if you were to imagine yourself as that you might think, “Well, she’s thinner or more glamorous,” or whatever.
This is great. I’m glad you asked this question because it goes to what is our day-to-day? What our incremental upgrades that we can make to crowd out the negativity? Most of these things you can do and make them really automatic so you never have to think about them. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
So, when you turn on your computer or you open up your laptop, what do you see? Do you have a screensaver? Do you have something inspiring? Do you have your dream board on there? You could create something that has your goals on there. Like, I easily attract a million-dollar client. That is something that you can take five minutes to create and I know all the designers will probably love doing that because so many interior designers can also do a little bit of graphic design. I know you guys can.
So, create that on Canva or something. That is one little thing that you can do and then you layer in all the other things. So, your phone screensaver, mine actually at the moment is it’s a goal of mine, I don’t know if you can see it. “Hello Sunshine acquires 87 weddings for a million dollars.” That’s one of my big, big goals.
So, every time I pick up my phone, I see that. So, you can use that. You can change your passwords to be an income goal or a career goal. So, say for example, you wanted to win an award, an industry award, you could change your password to be like – what’s an industry award for you guys?
Tobi Fairley: There are some awards like ASID awards, but I think more than that people would rather be published on the cover of a magazine or that kind of thing. That feels like the biggest awards that we can get or some high level of recognition for most people.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: I love that. You could do little pop-ups on your phone. I do it in my calendar, so every day it will pop-up and say, “Congratulations, you’re a best-selling author.” There are all the really easy things you can just take five-minutes to do, right? But then I want you to look around in your environment.
So, you would do this for a client, you’d go into their house and you would probably say, “Well, what stuff makes you feel stressed?” But I want you to see what makes you in your daily life feel, poor, inconvenienced, stressed, economy class? It could be really, really small things. So, it could be not enough phone chargers in your house, it could be that you’re using a chipped mug, it could be that your office chair is a little squeaky. This is a good one for me, my R key on my laptop was sticky and so it was so annoying.
You eliminate these little things one by one and you upgrade them and this stuff, most of the time it’s free, right because most of the time you have a beautiful mug, you’re just not using it. You have a beautiful candle that you’ve never burned.
Tobi Fairley: A good pillow, the linens on your bed, just all of that, a great towel, perfume, some kind of make-up, you’re saving for something. Just like using the good China is what you’re saying, right?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Absolutely. I love that this is so applicable to your industry because you would totally do it for your clients, but how many of you are creating beautiful spaces for your clients and you’re using your towels with a hole in them or metaphorically or literally wearing underwear that has a hole in it. So, that’s how you change your mindset, beyond doing the reading books, and affirmations I love, it’s the little things as well in your daily life, the practical things. Changing your sheets more often, it’s those little things that will make you feel like a million dollars before you make the million dollars.
Tobi Fairley: I love it. I love it. That’s so, so good. I’m going to have so much fun thinking about all of the ways that I can literally up level, upgrade – and I’m already pretty good at doing this. I mean, I love candles and I do all the things for myself, but I know there’s so many places that I can up level this. I love that. I especially love the passwords and all of those little things that we take for granted we’re using some, who knows, our dog’s name instead of a luxury place we want to vacation.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Or maybe you put a client that you want to nail and you can type that in. Put a picture somewhere you can see it every day and every time you see it you go, that’s for me. That’s for me. I am a million-dollar business owner. I am a million-dollar interior designer.
You know what’s funny, any time I see a product with “million dollar” on it, you know there’s like Billion Dollar Brows and I saw a mascara the other day that was like Million Dollar Mascara. I see that and I go, yes, but I’ve been doing that for years before I was a millionaire because I was like, “Yes, yes, I am a millionaire.” I was taking all of those things as little signs that I was on my way, but you can reverse engineer those signs. Don’t wait for the signs to come out of the blue, create them because it will strengthen the belief that it is your time and you’re ready for that next step.
Tobi Fairley: So good! I know you have so much more to share and you have courses and books and all kinds of things. Where should people go? Because we’ve just whet their appetite for knowing the money blocks and then how to start, essentially what you’re saying right now is how to start manifesting what you want in your life, and stepping in to making the money that you dream of. So, where should they go to get all of that information?
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Okay, so all of my books are on Amazon, we’ve got them in Audible, and Kindle, and paperback so you can find them where books are sold. Then, I love hanging out on Instagram. That’s my favorite place at the moment and my handle is @DeniseDT and I love when people screenshot the podcast image. Tell me something that you’re changing in your life, tell me something you’ve upgraded, something practical because as a Virgo that’s like my love language is being of service to people. So, yeah, I’m @DeniseDT all around the web, but go grab my book and then tell me one of your ah-has.
Tobi Fairley: Yes, okay, and this is the book. I’m actually almost through it, this one, Get Rich, Lucky Bitch! So much wisdom in there, my mind is already blown and then you just built on it with all of these little nuggets today. So, definitely I’ll be talking about that. I think, for sure, needs to be book club in my membership because money blocks are such a huge thing and we have got to bust through those. I want to remove all the ceilings for us. We can all be millionaires, right? We absolutely can be.
So, thank you for putting us on that path, for reminding us that we can just decide to be rich just because we want to.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Why not? Money’s not a bad thing.
Tobi Fairley: Yeah, money is not a bad thing and we’re not greedy or rude or anything else. I love it so much. Thank you for sharing all of that. I can’t wait to hear what everybody has to say. So, we’ll all make sure and encourage everybody to catch you on Instagram and then maybe you and I will have to do some collabs out on Instagram sometime soon.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Oh my gosh, I would love that, and this year I’m writing a series of books, Money Mindset for different professions and interior designers is going to be on my list, so watch this space.
Tobi Fairley: Wow, that’s huge. I mean, like we can be your whole career, just us by ourselves.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: I love it. Thank you so much, Tobi.
Tobi Fairley: You’ve got a lot to help us with. Thank you so much, Denise. See you later.
Denise Duffield-Thomas: Bye.
Tobi Fairley: Bye.
Okay, was she right or was she right? She knows us. She said her best friend is a designer, but I think she has some of these tendencies herself, these creative tendencies and blocks and she knows them so well. So, I hope you found so much wisdom and connection in this episode with Denise and the things that she’s saying that we’re probably doing.
This is really one more step in you getting out of the way and throwing away that starving artist mentality. So, if you want to know more about Denise as she said, reach out to her on Instagram, let me know, too. I’d love to know what you think about this episode over on Instagram and then if you want to check out her website it is DeniseDT.com or LuckyBitch.com and you can check it out. I highly recommend Denise creates and well, I haven’t taken her courses, but her books for sure. So, head over and get those on Amazon and get to work on your manifesting today. I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for listening to The Design You Podcast and if you are ready to dig deep and do the important work we talk about here on the podcast of transforming your mindset and creating a scalable online business model there has never been a more important time than right now. So, join me and the incredible creative entrepreneurs in my Design You coaching program today. You can get all the details at TobiFairley.com.
