I often say there are two worlds of money: the one that lives in your bank account, and the one that lives in your head. And the only way to make that second world real is to talk about money, which many people are hesitant to do.
But I have been behind the scenes of so many peoples’ bank and investment accounts, and deep in conversation about their money stories. Over the years, I have witnessed firsthand the power of words when it comes to creating their reality–and financial future.
I’ve watched a client shift from saying “money is easy come, easy go” to “money is easy come, easy stay, easy grow,” and before long her account balances synced up with that mantra.
I’ve also had clients report that they stopped fighting with their spouse about money once they started talking openly about it–and they were able to accomplish so much more when they were on the same page.
Talking about money might seem like a tiny, negligible part of your wealth building experience–but it’s not! It’s transformative, and that’s why the third step of my 7 Steps to Wealth framework is Speak.
In this episode, you’re going to hear the nitty gritty of how my upbringing and money story influenced my financial outcomes, how I rewrote that story by changing the way I spoke about money, and you’ll walk away with new, empowered ways of thinking and speaking that you can use to replace old money stories that don’t serve you.
You really can lead your experience and results with money with your speaking, and changing the words you use will change your life. Listen to this episode and you’ll understand why!
Here’s what you’ll find out in this week’s episode of Love, your Money:
- 4:48 Where your money beliefs come from, how they show up in your financial life, and why it’s so important to talk about money
- 6:36 How my upbringing shaped my money beliefs and behaviors, and how I created a different financial reality by changing the way I speak
- 11:32 How my money conversations changed when I met my husband, and why talking about money is so important within romantic relationships if you want to be in full financial partnership
- 13:27 Stories of people who changed the way they spoke about money–and their financial outcomes–and how the way you speak can keep other people from sabotaging your wealth
- 16:15 How talking about money shows up in the way we raise our daughter–and how we hope that impacts her experiences in life
- 19:02 The most common ways I see people sabotage their wealth with their words, and why I don’t take private flights to Paris (even if I can afford it!)
- 22:13 The tension between virtue, wealth, and financial fulfillment
- 24:25 Empowered ways to think and speak about money that you can use to replace old money beliefs and outcomes
- 29:21 Actions you can take to support the Speak step–and prompts to start these conversations with the people in your life
Inspiring Quotes and Words to Remember
“There are two worlds of money. There's the one that exists in your bank account. That's bits and bytes; that's reality. And there's the one that exists in your head.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“In this really crisis moment of my life, where I was willing to reflect in the mirror in a way I had not been willing to before, I noticed and became intimately related to the relationship between my words and my results.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“This is a step that many people struggle with, because, for most of us, we live like our speaking describes reality accurately.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“I hear people sabotage their financial lives all the time. They say things like, ‘money is complicated.’ And inevitably, people who say money is complicated are doing complicated things with their money.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“I have seen people stop fighting with their spouse about money. I have seen people take a year sabbatical to Europe. I have seen people buy an RV for cash. I have seen people buy their dream house. The transformations are real, and it really starts with how you speak.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“Starting to talk out loud about money for the first time might be uncomfortable, and it might even seem like talking about money is a very small, negligible, insignificant piece of your wealth building experience. But I promise you it's not. Speaking about money and developing your language about money is transformative.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“It will actually change your life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it will. It will. You have this conversation ten times? You'll never be the same person with money.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“Changing the way you speak doesn't work like a magic incantation that summons your dreams and instantly makes them a reality. I'm not promising you that it will rain cash. It's more like many drops of water fill the ocean. Plus, the words you choose on a repeat basis create a ripple effect in your life.”
– Hilary Hendershott
“What's really powerful about this step is the way that speaking about what you want to attract, achieve, and accomplish in life enrolls other people in your vision, and they can do what they can to support you.”
– Hilary Hendershott
Resources and Related to Love, your Money Content
- So much of speaking is reframing what was once a limiting belief to be an expansive one. More on that in LYM 247: Stop Sabotaging Your Wealth
- How speaking about money ushered my husband and I into full financial partnership: LYM 249: How to Build a Financial Partnership: Reflections on 10 years of Marriage, Money and Hendershott Wealth Management
- Catch up on the first two steps of the 7 Steps to Wealth with LYM 258: The First Step to Building and Preserving Wealth (7 Steps to Wealth, Step 1: Decide) and LYM 259: The Linchpin of Your Financial Success (7 Steps to Wealth, Step 2: Plan)
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Transcript
Hilary Hendershott: Well, hello, Money Lover! Welcome to my 7 Steps to Wealth podcast series. If you’ve already heard this introduction to the series and you don’t wish to hear it again, please just fast forward about two minutes. If you haven’t heard it yet or want to hear it again, here we go.
Hilary Hendershott: Many years ago, as I was digging myself out of financial oblivion and creating healthy money habits for myself for the first time, I realized that if I could master this thing called money, I would have something very valuable to share with the world. I mean after all, there is plenty of information about money out there in the world, yet most people still struggle with it. So obviously something is missing in the zeitgeist about money.
Hilary Hendershott: And there came a time in my financial life where I started to look more financially healthy than damaged. There came a time when my bank accounts started to contain 6- and 7-figure balances. There came a time when I could set big, really abundant goals for my business, work toward them, and reliably achieve them.
Hilary Hendershott: The way I would say that now is, I got into right relationship with money. I stepped into having power and influence with money. So as part of sharing the lessons I learned with money, I looked back on what I had accomplished–from where I was now, with a high credit score, a multi-million dollar home that my husband and I own, and a multiple 7-figure net worth–and I asked myself, “What are the exact steps I took to get here?”, “What specifically did I do differently to change my financial reality?”, and “How exactly did my money mindset and financial beliefs change?”
Hilary Hendershott: And I created a framework called the 7 Steps to Wealth. I’ve published that framework many times, in many formats. Episode 208 of this podcast contains the entire framework in one episode; it’s a great audio resource. There’s an interactive, multimedia eBook you can download if you go to the show notes for today’s episode. And I would love for you to do that. We talk about the 7 Steps in my Money Love Notes newsletter, which you can also subscribe to in the show notes.
Hilary Hendershott: But what I’m doing now is an entire episode on each of the 7 Steps. The 7 Steps in order are: Decide, Plan, Speak, Ask, Earn, Invest and Protect. I’ll publish this series with the steps in order, but not necessarily every week. So the point is to do a deep dive on each individual step because knowing the steps makes no difference. You have to actually put them to work in your life. So if you’re looking for a different step than the one I’m talking about today, and that step comes BEFORE today’s step, just look around in the recent episodes I’ve published. If you’re listening to these as they air, and you’re specifically interested in a future step, it’s coming.
Hilary Hendershott: Well, hey, Money Lover. Today we’re talking about the third step in the framework, which is Speak.
Hilary Hendershott: You know, I often talk about how there are two worlds of money. There’s the one that exists in your bank account. That’s bits and bytes; that’s reality. And there’s the one that exists in your head.
Hilary Hendershott: And there’s only one way to give life to the one that lives in your head, and that’s to talk about it. You don’t realize it today, but you’ve been talking about the reality about money that lives in your head, and you can also use your outside voice to alter money in reality and the way money lives in your head.
Hilary Hendershott: How you talk about money matters. If you truly want to become empowered and financially savvy–and I know you’re capable of that–when you’re invited to speak freely about your finances, you really might be surprised by some of the things that come out of your mouth, and how those words might be getting in the way of your wealth building efforts.
Hilary Hendershott: So where do our money beliefs come from? You learned them when you were young. You picked them up from the people around you. For the most part, it’s your parents. It might have been elder family members. You listened to adults talk about money and your little imprintable brain went, “Oh, that’s what’s true about money!” You know, maybe your dad’s famous saying was, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Well, guess what’s true for you about money.
Hilary Hendershott: It don’t grow on trees, which probably means some version of, money is scarce in your life. And, to be frank, most people really don’t talk about money in a constructive way. Believe me, I’ve listened to thousands of people talk about money. People say silly things.
Hilary Hendershott: Even wealthy, successful, powerful people say silly things about money. The conversation about money has developed in the zeitgeist is, there’s a lot of secrecy. There’s a lot of avoidance. There’s a lot of contention around money. There’s even internal contention. I mean, it’s like for many people, not even okay to say you want to be rich. I’ve talked about that a lot on this show.
Hilary Hendershott: For example, if you and your partner yell at each other every time the topic of money comes up, you probably aren’t having constructive conversations. And, for many people, your romantic partner is the person you talk to most about money.
Hilary Hendershott: Let me just take a second. I do want to acknowledge. I know that the ability to talk freely about money is correlated with safety and privilege in the community or society or neighborhood that you live in. There are definitely places, cultures, relationships, areas, countries where talking about money can be dangerous. And you know, I’m empathetic to that.
Hilary Hendershott: And in situations where it’s safe, it is incredibly important that you engage in constructive and productive conversations with yourself and others about money.
Hilary Hendershott: Let me tell you a little bit about my story. For those of you who listen to this show you may have heard aspects of this.
Hilary Hendershott: I know personally, deeply, internally, that the words you choose about money matter because they do create your reality. The good news is this, you can choose different words. I’m gonna give you my story, show you how I created a different reality. You can, as I did, actively choose words that breed creation, confidence, or curiosity, instead of scarcity and doubt.
Hilary Hendershott: When I hit my own financial rock bottom, I had a conversation with myself. In that conversation, I said, “Hilary, it is so clear that if you keep doing the same things that you’ve been doing about money, you will continue to have these horrible, destructive and really life limiting results about money. Again, your money habits may not be as bad as mine were, but mine were pretty bad.
Hilary Hendershott: And I took a kind of an analytical view. And I said, “Where do all these behaviors come from?” I wanted my financial reality to be big and amazing, and instead, it’s debting and constraining. Where does that come from? It comes from my psychology. Psychology leads to behavior. Where does my psychology come from? Well, it’s how I relate to the world around me. And I started thinking about how I grew up about money.
Hilary Hendershott: Now, the interesting thing is, I really thought that I grew up poor, and I lived in a reality that I came from a poor background.
Hilary Hendershott: My parents fought about money viciously. I visited my dad on the weekends, lived for the most part with my mother. When she talked about money it was always about sacrifice. It was always about not having the things that I wanted. It was always about buying discount or generic brands instead of the real thing. And you know, when you’re in junior high, having brand names, it’s important. I mean, in a certain way, it’s important, right? I couldn’t have the things that I wanted. So I said to myself, “There’s never enough money. There’s never enough money for the things I want.”
Hilary Hendershott: What my mom actually said was, “I always have money for the important things.” But that’s not what I heard, right? So how she enabled having money for the important things was sacrificing on the things that–to her–weren’t important.
Hilary Hendershott: However, that’s not the lesson I internalized, and I grew up enabling and empowering this conversation in my life called, “There’s never enough money.”
Hilary Hendershott: How I manifested there’s never enough money: I got a good degree. I had a great GPA in college. I got good jobs. I was fairly well compensated. And I spent every penny that came in. Every time a dollar entered my bank account, it was already spoken for, or I borrowed money to buy cars, I spent on credit cards and didn’t pay the bills, right?
Hilary Hendershott: That was how I manifested this thing that was true for me about money called, “There’s never enough money.” Interesting sidebar: I called my mom, worked this whole thing out, had the ah-ha moment. I said to myself, “Wow, Hilary, I’ve been living in a reality about money that wasn’t true.” Right?
Hilary Hendershott: My mom and dad paid for me to go to college, right? She’s got a healthy financial life right, and how she manifested that was she sacrifices in certain areas where she’s willing to sacrifice. I just wasn’t on board with the sacrifice, and I made up things that helped me understand and navigate the world that… You know, when you’re a kid, you have to live in the world your parents create.
Hilary Hendershott: As a result of the things that I believed about money, the outcomes I created, as I’ve mentioned, were debt, and it became to be debts I couldn’t pay. Debts that were so big I couldn’t pay for my life today, and the debt I was servicing. It got to be pretty bad.
Hilary Hendershott: In this really crisis moment of my life, where I was willing to reflect in the mirror in a way I had not been willing to before, I noticed and became intimately related to the relationship between my words and my results.
Hilary Hendershott: I knew in that moment I was willing to start choosing something else and I literally got extremely transparent with people about money. I decided I was going to do everything differently. I started telling people– I told my dad, I told the people I worked with, I told my friends, “I’m in so much debt I can’t pay it.” And then I got excited about getting rid of the debt, right? And so that was the beginning of the transformation of my speaking, and therefore my behavior, and therefore my results about money.
Hilary Hendershott: That’s how I began my course correction. Again, and I always say this, hopefully it doesn’t have to be as dramatic for you. But no matter where you are with money now, you can have an abundance of it in your future, and it starts like this.
Hilary Hendershott: So, of course, like the other steps of the framework, this isn’t really a one and done situation. My life continued to evolve. I started my own business. I got married. I had a daughter. And each of those transitions required me to examine the way I was speaking about money.
Hilary Hendershott: Let’s talk about how things went when I got into my current romantic partnership. I met my husband. He has a PhD in finance. I was a financial advisor with a degree in economics, and I was already sort of on the upswing from my own financial depths, and I just thought everything was going to go great.
Hilary Hendershott: My husband grew up with the mentality that money is no problem. So when it comes to money, he had to have it be no problem which is great. And, if something’s no problem, you don’t have to talk about it, right? It’s handled. It’s already done. I’ve taken care of it. Let’s not talk about it. So I kept trying to talk about money, and it was like this thing would just be hand waved, right. And you heard me talk about this in a recent episode of the Love, your Money® Podcast, that’s episode 249.
Hilary Hendershott: And he admitted that through conversations with me, he discovered that there’s no way to be in full financial partnership without actually talking about money. So now we talk about it.
Hilary Hendershott: I mean, think about it. Marriage is both a romantic partnership and a financial one. I work with women and couples for a reason. So couples decide to make a commitment to each other. Then they plan to build their lives together, usually including things like family planning, which often includes planning to pay for someone to go to college, major purchases like a house, multiple cars, and saving for retirement.
Hilary Hendershott: To be on the same page in that process, if you’re in a couple, you have to be willing and able to talk about money. If you can’t do that, it’s almost impossible to achieve your full financial potential together.
Hilary Hendershott: I think about the women who have allowed me and my team to coach them about money. Of course we coach them about how they handle money, but also how they talk about money.
Hilary Hendershott: And some of the most beautiful evolutions I’ve seen came from women- in most cases, when I start working with them, they’re single and part of their life goals are to meet someone and get married, and I’m thinking about one in particular, who was a very, very low paid consultant when I met her. And through our work together, she became more and more empowered about money, she went on her own, started her own business.
Hilary Hendershott: She met the love of her life and got married, and her big goal was to buy a house in Los Angeles, in California, which is, of course, one of the most expensive places in the world to live.
Hilary Hendershott: We worked with them to begin saving for their down payment. We’ve worked with them now to do their financial planning, and they bought a house a couple of years ago, and this, when she started working with us, was a pipe dream.
Hilary Hendershott: And so the evolution of her money story, it includes emotional evolution and empowerment, but now, like this house, which is a real manifestation of the drastic changes and alterations that she made in her trajectory. The story that she got from her family was about, I mean her dad basically said to her, “Don’t worry about money, honey, you know I’ll handle it.” And then he became disabled and wasn’t able to earn money anymore, and her family learned that he wasn’t saving any money. He was spending it all, right.
Hilary Hendershott: And so it was this big betrayal, and what that could have done to her is made her angry and disempowered about money. But that’s not the future she was authoring for herself. So you know, miracles are possible, and I’ve seen this happen time and time again, as a woman begins to embody, kind of reject old stereotypes and gender roles and limitations, that are sort of foisted on us as we grow and develop almost inevitably. It’s rare that I meet a woman who doesn’t experience some level of disempowerment because of something that happened in her past or something someone said directly to her.
Hilary Hendershott: I personally have been witness to the transcending of these limitations. And so I just want to remind you and encourage you that this is all possible, and it really begins with this.
Hilary Hendershott: With speaking in an empowered and different way than the way you’ve spoken in the past. You may be thinking, Hilary, “I’m not sure I have anything empowered to say about money.” I get it, and I’m going to address that. Just hang on to that thought and keep listening.
Hilary Hendershott: And getting back to the story about myself and my husband, and the way we evolved in our conversation about money. Of course, now we have an 8-year old daughter, and how we relate to our money will get passed on to our daughter. You know, she’s only 8, and she’s a very interesting human being. She doesn’t want for much. She doesn’t ask me for toys. She doesn’t ask me for clothes. She doesn’t ask me to go to Disney Land.
Hilary Hendershott: I have thought and assumed that I would enter into the money conversation with her, based on her wanting things, and I would give her a budget and teach her about trade offs and opportunity costs, and I do think that that’s in her future.
Hilary Hendershott: But I ask her, “Do you want money?” And she says, “What would I do with money?” So that’s her reality about money. Again, she has books. This is what she asks for, is $8 books. So, you know, I show her the bill at the restaurant. I say, this is how much this costs. I ask her, you know this house that we’re–I’m currently in a house that we’re renting, we own a house in Puerto Rico–I tell her how much that house cost, how much it’s worth now. I tell her about our rent price. And she, you know, she just gets like big eyes and says…
Hilary Hendershott: She just says, “I can’t even understand those numbers.” But I’m doing my best to give her a sense of, what are the numbers that her dad and I deal with on a daily basis? And this is something my parents never did. They never told me their income. They never told me their asset level, and that’s fine. I’m not saying they should have. This is how I’m choosing to do it with Harlyn. Of course, Harlyn hasn’t turned out financially, so I can’t claim I’m a big win story, but that’s how I’m thinking about it now.
Hilary Hendershott: If it turns out exactly the way I want it to for Harlyn, as a human being I want her to experience that she doesn’t have to be constrained or limited by the things people tend to be constrained or limited by. Now that’s about things more than money, but money is intertwined in that narrative, right? So I want her to experience power and authority, and dominion about her financial life, and I want her to experience that she can earn and save and preserve and grow money to support her to live the life that she wants.
Hilary Hendershott: Hopefully, that will begin with what she studies in college if she chooses to go to college, and of course, how she begins to create her career and her professional pursuits in her twenties.
Hilary Hendershott: And certainly it’s my goal that she lives in a world that doesn’t include financial scarcity; that she experiences she has choice and power about how money comes into her life, and that that’s a joyful experience for her.
Hilary Hendershott: So I know that saying, “Just change how you speak” is easier said than done. I do.
Hilary Hendershott: And this is a step that many people struggle with, because, for most of us, we live like our speaking describes reality accurately. We look around. Our brain is psychologically trained to see money and the financial world in a particular way, and we describe it with our speaking. And you’re thinking to yourself, Hilary, “But it is that way. How can I say something that isn’t true?”
Hilary Hendershott: Right? And my communication is that maybe it isn’t actually that way. Maybe it looks and seems that way to you because of how you speak about it. I hear people sabotage their financial lives all the time. They say things like, “Money is complicated.” And inevitably, people who say money is complicated are doing complicated things with their money.
Hilary Hendershott: I don’t do things with my money that I think are complicated because I don’t want my financial life to be complicated, right? You’ll find that your speaking and your behavior and your results are all intertwined. It’s a chicken and egg situation, right? Consider the phrase, “I can’t afford that.”
Hilary Hendershott: What you’re saying when you say I can’t afford that is, “I really want that in my life, but I am so incompetent at bringing money and resources into my life to pay for it that I’m going to give up before I even try.” Right? I can’t afford that. Now, can I, I purchase private flights to Paris? I do not. I do not purchase them. Could I afford one? Yes, I could.
Hilary Hendershott: Does putting that in my spending plan make sense? It really doesn’t. It really does not given what I earn and what my asset level is, I could probably do that for five years, and then my financial life would be extremely constrained. I would have altered my financial future for the worse forever.
Hilary Hendershott: Right? So it just doesn’t make sense. So I don’t say, “I can’t afford that.” I just say, “I’m not a private flight person. That’s not me. It’s just not my life right now. I’m not putting that in my spending plan.”
Hilary Hendershott: I had a client once who used to say, “Easy come, easy go. Money is easy come, easy go.” And I said to her, “Okay, now you’re gonna say easy come, easy stay, easy grow.”
Hilary Hendershott: She thought that was so silly, and she started saying it, and she has doubled and tripled her net worth since we worked together just a couple of years ago. It’s really profound.
Hilary Hendershott: How about, “I resent people who make more money than me.” Right? Oh, okay. If I resent people that make more money than me, then there’s this big divide between me and people who make more money than me. I’m not talking with them about how they got to that situation in life, so I’m not learning. I’m not aligning myself with them professionally, or putting myself in rooms where I might be chosen to be part of their employment group or their income level.
Hilary Hendershott: “I resent people who make more money than me” puts a permanent chasm in between me and people who are at the income level that I want to be at. That’s just not productive. Right?
Hilary Hendershott: There’s one I’ve talked about on this show before that I think is actually subliminal and maybe subconscious for many people, especially many women, and that’s either it’s not safe for me to be rich, or it’s not even safe for me to want to be rich. I think you could replace safe with virtuous. It’s not virtuous for me to want to be rich. It’s not okay for me to even say that, right? This is gonna cause really strong internal conflict.
Hilary Hendershott: It is okay for you to want to have lots of resources around you. It is absolutely virtuous for you to want to be well compensated for putting forth your best time and effort; for spending years and years making yourself someone who is full of skill sets and wisdom that bring value to the planet, right? Yet these lessons about how the rich aren’t virtuous, or rich people are greedy.
Hilary Hendershott: This all comes from people who are jealous of other people who have more resources than them. Right? So we demonize them. I grew up doing it. I mean, I thought rich people were lucky or special. I mean, I never quite demonized them, but I definitely had them in a different strata than me.
Hilary Hendershott: And that is really the best way to keep money out of your life and financial fulfillment, right, financial fulfillment being the emotional experience that can go with having more resources than you need.
Hilary Hendershott: And what I have found is that as I have earned and saved and preserved money for the first time in my life, in my 30s and 40s, that there is a natural sense of confidence and pride that comes with that.
Hilary Hendershott: So if you are imbued with, “It’s not safe to be rich. Greedy people are rich. It’s not safe for me to want to be rich.” I am talking to you. These beliefs were foisted upon you, and you do not have to make them yours. Today, this conversation is your invitation to step out of that thinking and discover what more is possible for you.
Hilary Hendershott: Here are some empowered, growth-centered things you can say about money instead. So we’re going to lead with our speaking, right?
Hilary Hendershott: We decided, I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg, right? Does money seem the way it seems to me because it is that way, or because I talk about it that way? Well, Hilary is saying maybe it’s because I talk about it that way. So let’s get into curiosity. Let’s say some things that you can say that have integrity, right? You can’t just say, “I have more money than Midas”, because that’s not true.
Hilary Hendershott: Lying to yourself is not going to make a difference. So let’s get into curiosity. Let’s start wondering.
Hilary Hendershott: I wonder, how can I bring more money into my life?
Hilary Hendershott: I wonder if that person is really greedy and evil the way I said they were just because they have more money than me.
Hilary Hendershott: I wonder what beliefs I came out of my childhood with about money.
Hilary Hendershott: I wonder why my bank account balance continues to be at $962. For six years, it’s been right around the same dollar amount. Why is that? Do you notice that? How money always seems to go the same way for you?
Hilary Hendershott: How about, if you are a person who says I can’t afford that, just shift that right now. Today. “I’m not going to put that on my spending plan. I’m just not gonna buy that. That’s not happening. I am not trading my dollars for that thing.”
Hilary Hendershott: Just take accountability for it.
Hilary Hendershott: How about this? “You know what, I checked in with myself, and if I accept your offer, I actually won’t experience feeling well compensated. What can we do about that?”
Hilary Hendershott: You might want to add a dollar amount to that that would have you feel well compensated. But this is like a safe thing to say. “I checked in with myself, and that offer doesn’t make me feel well compensated.”
Hilary Hendershott: What kind of return is my savings earning right now? That is a good question to ask. That’s a good thing to have in your mind. What return is my savings earning right now?
Hilary Hendershott: The final thing I’ll suggest you include in your money vocabulary today is, “Everyone around me has the opportunity to be wealthy, including me.”
Hilary Hendershott: I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a lot of clients adopt some of these growth-centered ways of thinking or speaking about money. And I’ve talked about some of the outcomes they started to experience. I’ve seen total transformation in people.
Hilary Hendershott: There was one time, I was coaching this circle of women, and we were six months into the coaching experience. It was in person. We would get together–physically together–just something people don’t tend to do anymore. But this woman walked in, and we had altered how she was speaking about money. We had altered the balances of her bank accounts. We had altered how she understood her income. We had altered her willingness to hire people to support her so she could take weekends off.
Hilary Hendershott: And she walked in, and I almost didn’t recognize her, and neither did the other women in the group. She walked tall and proud.
Hilary Hendershott: She looked confident and sexy, I mean in this case–and I’m not saying for all people you’re gonna get better looking as you get wealthier. It might happen, but for this woman embodying her own financial power was a physically altering experience.
Hilary Hendershott: I have seen people stop fighting with their spouse about money. I have seen people take a year sabbatical to Europe. I have seen people buy an RV for cash. I have seen people buy their dream house. I mean the transformations are real, and it really starts with how you speak.
Hilary Hendershott: The point is to become aware of and present to what you’re saying about money.
Hilary Hendershott: For most people, this means beginning to talk out loud about money for the first time. I mean, if you’re really honest with yourself, for most of us… Some of us talk to our boss about money, about how much we earn. Some of us talk to our romantic partner about money–although money tends to be a huge divisor in romantic relationships, so maybe that’s just cantankerous. You mostly talk to yourself about money.
Hilary Hendershott: So, starting to talk out loud about money for the first time might be uncomfortable, and it might even seem like talking about money is a very small, negligible, insignificant piece of your wealth building experience.
Hilary Hendershott: But I promise you it’s not. Speaking about money and developing your language about money is transformative. You can lead your experience of money and your results with money, with your speaking.
Hilary Hendershott: So this is your invitation to examine the words you use when you talk about money, when you think about money. To be honest, I used to think in pictures and like feelings about money, so that’s where it started for me. And consciously creating an empowered dialogue that puts you in the driver’s seat of your financial journey.
Hilary Hendershott: Let’s talk about some action steps I recommend. Here’s one simple action step to help you actively engage with the Speak step to building wealth.
Hilary Hendershott: Go share your decision to be rich with the people in your life. After all, they’re all expecting you to continue to be the person that you’ve been up to this point. So by sharing your decision, you’re making it real. You’re making it concrete. You’re putting a stake in the ground, and you’re creating a circle of support and accountability around you.
Hilary Hendershott: I know it takes courage to tell people you intend to be rich. It’s not a common conversation. After all, you’re potentially violating some social norms. Sorry about that. And having these conversations is really powerful.
Hilary Hendershott: It will actually change your life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it will. It will. You have this conversation ten times? You’ll never be the same person with money.
Hilary Hendershott: Here are some great conversational prompts to get you started. Number one.
Hilary Hendershott: “You know, I’ve never really talked about this before, but I’ve really been living in scarcity about money. I always thought there wasn’t enough money. But now I see that that’s just a thought. And since thoughts become things, I’m starting with changing my thoughts about money. What do you think about money?
Hilary Hendershott: It’s a great prompt.
Hilary Hendershott: Here’s prompt two.
Hilary Hendershott: “So recently, I got really honest with myself, and I admitted that if I’d been saving more money I’d actually be much closer to my financial goals. I know that seems obvious, but I don’t think I really admitted it before, and I really want and intend to achieve financial freedom. So I went and I increased my 401k contributions, and I cut up my credit cards. Have you ever done that?”
Hilary Hendershott: Prompt three.
Hilary Hendershott: “I know you and I don’t usually talk about money, but something really exciting is happening in my life, and I wanted to share it. I’ve decided to be courageous so that I can get to financial freedom. I’ve always saved money, but I kept big portions of it in cash because I was terrified of losing money, but I took the leap, and I hired a great investments advisor. And now I’m on my way.”
Hilary Hendershott: Alright, so those are just suggestions. You can create your own way to declare and share your exciting decision, but to successfully complete step three, you do have to start speaking up about money. So you get to choose how you accomplish this.
Hilary Hendershott: Maybe it’s by setting up monthly money talks with your spouse, or partner, or family, or best friend. By the way, interviewing your family about money, about how your money was when you were growing up? Amazing experience. Highly recommend. If it’s possible in your family, just call them and go, “I remember money being this way. Do you remember this thing that happened when I was 7? How was that for you?” It’s a transformative experience.
Hilary Hendershott: You can share your decision with your tribe, or you can join or create a wealth mastermind. I mean, maybe it’s just getting in contact with me and my team. You can use hello@hendershottwealth.com. There are so many options out there. Just pick one and get started.
Hilary Hendershott: So no matter how you decide to do it, or who you feel most comfortable starting a financial dialogue with, the important thing is to start right away. Start talking about money.
Hilary Hendershott: And as you practice this step, remember that changing the way you speak doesn’t work like a magic incantation that summons your dreams and instantly makes them a reality. I’m not promising you that it will rain cash. It’s more like many drops of water fill the ocean. Plus, the words you choose on a repeat basis, create a ripple effect in your life.
Hilary Hendershott: What’s really powerful about this step is the way that speaking about what you want to attract, achieve, and accomplish in life enrolls other people in your vision, and they can do what they can to support you. That’s where the real magic happens, because you can do so much more with the right people in your corner. I mean, the really strange thing is, if you look, how I built a multi 7-figure business is by talking about how I failed at money. It doesn’t make sense. But it happened. You can go share about your financial goals, dreams, commitments. You will be shocked at the miracles and unexpected outcomes that will arrive at your doorstep.
Hilary Hendershott: So this has been the third in the 7 Steps to Wealth framework, which is called Speak, and the next step is Ask. And we’ll be talking about that in the next episode of this series. I will see you there.
Disclaimer
Hendershott Wealth Management, LLC and Love, your Money do not make specific investment recommendations on Love, your Money or in any public media. Any specific mentions of funds or investments are strictly for illustrative purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice or acted upon by individual investors. The opinions expressed in this episode are those of Hilary Hendershott, CFP®, MBA.