Ditching The Employee Mindset Around Money – Episode 17

You have a mindset about money that is broken. It was created for you, by people that created a system meant to generate employees. It’s time to become aware, and destroy your employee mindset around money!

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Ditching The Employee Mindset Around Money – Transcript

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about ditching the employee mindset around money.

Employees have a mindset around money?

I thought you were going to sing a money song. You’ve been singing all the songs lately.

Money, money, money, money. Money.

Nice.

Yeah. Some people got to have it.

You remember, the Apprentice?

Yeah.

The Apprentice was good. Did you know that originally the Apprentice, they were going to change the person, Donald Trump, they were going to change it every episode?

No, I didn’t know that.

Did you know that Martha Stewart was going to be one of the Apprentice people?

That would’ve been cool. She’s a boss.

She might’ve become president. Who knows. You got to vote for whoever you know on TV.

Lots of things could possibly happen in the future. You don’t know that that won’t happen.

Let’s not get political.

I think a lot of the times we talk about, especially when we enter podcasts, ditching the employee mindset. We really wanted to start diving into what exactly that means.

What does that mean, Erin? What does that mean?

I think what we’re going to talk about today, we’re going to tell you a little bit more about some of the myths surrounding money, but we want to make sure that we are going through it with you guys, and just making sure that we are kind of explaining ourselves when we talk about an employee mindset or a boss mindset, and the topic of money is so packed full of positive emotions, sometimes negative emotions.

Some people don’t like to talk about money.

This is true. If this is you, I really encourage you to hang in there and listen to this, because I think there’s going to be a lot of tidbits in here that you’re going to have some light bulb moments, I think.

What we’re going to try and do is we’re going to smash some myths that many people have, and you may have one of these, you may have all of these, you may have more, but we want to cover the biggest five, and the first one we want to cover is exchanging time for money.

Employees exchange time for money.

That’s right. They do. That’s a great thing. It’s not a bad thing. I want to be very clear on that, but here’s the thing, that exchanging your time for your money, you’re always going to be capped at what you can earn, other than, really, the only way you can earn more is to raise what you charge, what your rate is, but if you’re working for somebody else, you know as well as I do that the chances of you getting an increase, 20, 30, 40% increase every single year-

It’s just not going to happen.

It’s just not happening.

I think this is the biggest struggle that I see from our clients at the very, very beginning on their entrepreneurial career is that they are still in this mindset where, if I put X amount of hours in, I’m going to get X amount of dollars out.

They always ask that. They always say, “How much am I going to make per hour?” Or, “How much am I going to do this?”

“How long is it going to take?”

“How long’s it going to take? When can I make X dollars?”

“A thousand dollars a week, or whatever.”

That’s such a loaded question, because a lot of the time it just depends on your background coming into your business, the type of business you have, how much time you’re going to spend building your business, and I think this is the biggest trap, and where people feel like, “I put 40 hours into my business this week, and I haven’t earned a penny.”

That’s not true. You’re doing so much. There’s so much groundwork that has to happen.

You’re building a skillset, and I think that that’s where the boss mentality comes in, is that you’re not putting in the time to earn the money, you’re putting in the time to learn the skill, and then the money will come after you’ve become more skilled.

When you’re exchanging your time for your money, your so limited. When you go to sleep or once you leave work, frankly, you’re just not getting paid anymore. You’re getting paid zero.

Right. You’re at home, and if you go to bed, you’re not going to earn any money?

You’re not going to earn any money. No money’s coming in.

How’s that different for bosses? What do bosses do differently in terms of their money? How they earning their money when they’re sleeping?

Bosses will exchange their value for their money. What they know through info products, what they know through podcasting, advice, consulting, masterminds. There’s so many ways to exchange your value for your money, and, as a great example, in one of the businesses that we have, we basically earn 24/7, whether we’re sleeping, whether we’re working, whether we’re speaking at a conference, we’re getting paid, because we have sales happening, whether it’s two in the morning, whether it’s 10 PM, whether I’m at a concert with our kids. We’re just getting paid all the time. It sounds amazing.

We worked really hard for that. It didn’t just happen.

That’s what I wanted to say was that it was a lot of work. That first year of building that business was a lot of, if you looked at how much I was getting paid per hour, it would probably have been 50 cents an hour, if that. In the beginning, it’s probably closer to negative money. It was negative money, because I was putting money into Facebook advertising, I was putting money into buying products, I was putting money-

Events.

Yeah, events. Creating courses, renting out halls. There was a lot of stuff that happened. Really, I wasn’t making anything, but the employee mindset would say that that’s wrong, that you should quit that, that you should stop.

I did. I told you to quit it and stop it, because I was like, “This is insane. You already work 60 hours at your regular job, and you’re putting in extra.”

I don’t even know where you got the time to do it, but I just didn’t understand. I was still really trapped in the employee mindset, saying, “Where’s the money? Show me the money.”

Because we were putting in so much time. It took me a long time to understand that aspect. I still remember the first time we went on vacation, and we still earned money, even though we had no-

That was the coolest moment. We’re literally on vacation, and then we get this direct deposit on a Thursday or something like that, I won’t say the amount, but it was more than I used to earn in a month after taxes. It was crazy. We’re literally in Mexico, drinking Mojitos.

That was a good time.

Then I was like, “Told you this would work. I told you.”

He did. He did. I bit my tongue on this one.

That’s kind of the first myth we just wanted to really talk about. For you to have awareness.

It’s very powerful. We talked a lot of stuff there, but if you remember one thing, it’s that do not think about how much you’re earning per hour, per day, per week in the beginning. I’d give yourself six months to a year, and you just can’t focus on that. Remember that our strategy that we always teach is that you should work a full-time job, you should do your best at that job, you should become an all star employee if you possibly can, and use that as your investor into your side hustle business. As long as you’re doing those things, you don’t need that income to be coming in yet. You should be focused on growth and becoming the best you can be.

I did a post on my Facebook the other day, and I said, basically, “You should stop focusing on love and finances and making more money, and instead you should focus on becoming the best you can be, because if you become the best you can be, then you will attract love, financial freedom, money,” and that’s really the key with this whole thing.

Please, for myth one, promise me you’re going to focus on growing and not “How much did I earn the last hour?”

Totally. Totally.

Let’s go to the next one, Erin.

The next myth we want to kind of dispel is that school teaches you how to earn money or become rich.

I did think that at one point.

I did go to school, and I have a degree. I really subscribe to that train of thought. I thought, given my background, and seeing my parents financially struggle when I was little, I was like, “I am never going to have that happen to me. The only thing that is different is that I’m going to go to school, I’m going to get a degree, and I’m going to make a lot of money.”

Because I was always taught, if you have a degree you’re going to make a lot of money. I spent, and I’m not saying not to go to school, because I don’t want you guys to think that either. There are a lot of jobs that you still need a degree to practice, law and medicine and all that stuff, but, for me, when I went to school, I have my degree in psychology, and I got out of university expecting to make a lot of money, pay my student loans back.

All these people are going to want Erin.

I got a job making minimum wage at a bank, that I didn’t need a degree for.

You were praying for that job, because you were applying everywhere. I remember that.

No one would hire me. I was just not hire-able. I shouldn’t say no one would hire me. I was working three jobs throughout university.

You’re overqualified, you’re under qualified.

Yeah. I was in the middle. They’re like, “You have a degree? We don’t want to pay you that much. But you have no experience with that degree, so we don’t want to pay you that much.”

I was miserable, because I had spent four years in school, and then expecting to make a decent amount of money, and I got out of university, and I got a minimum wage job.

That’s the hard part with all that. We’re not saying that school’s bad and all that, but I’ll give you a perfect example real world, for our kids, in our wills and stuff, we basically told them that once they’re 21 they’re going to get a certain amount from the trust, if we die. But however, they’re not going to get a penny unless they either start a business, and there’s a lot of specifics in there, start a business, not just any business, but start a business and pour into it personal development, and attend conferences, and do all the things that they are learning to do through living with us, that’s option A. Option B is go to school.

It’s not like we’re knocking school, it’s just that school does not teach you, necessarily, how to become rich. That’s not the job of the school. The job, you got to understand, schools are created in the industrial age in order to fill positions in working class jobs. They were created so that they had a system of people coming out that could be doctors, lawyers, that could follow directions. Ring the bell, time to go to the next thing. Ring the bell again, time to go to the next thing.

It’s really like they train you to become an employee, and that’s why it’s so hard to get out of that mindset, because you’re indoctrinized into this world from when you’re really little, and you have all these hopes and dreams, and it’s like school, and if you’re a teacher, I love you, because we have some really great teachers in our lives and our kids do go to school, but for me, I just felt like it’s like, fit in, fit in, fit in, and then you graduate, and they’re like, stand out, and you’re like, “I don’t know how to do that.”

Even if you think about it, usually if you’ve gone through the school system, when you get a job, what are the first things you look at? You don’t look at all the things that should matter. You’re like, “How many breaks am I going to get? How long do I get for lunch? When does the bell go?” Basically.

When do I get to leave and go and do what I want to do?

When do I get my paycheck, AKA, when do I get my report card, so I can get paid from my parents?

All these things that you’re taught in school that, if you want to be an entrepreneur, they’re not necessarily going to help you.

There’s been a lot of clients that we worked with who, they’ve gone to school, they have their degree, they start their job, and they realize they hate it, and it’s a really big shift for them to decide to kind of put that schooling, I don’t want to say throw it away, because I don’t think that you do, but put it to the side as not defining who you are, and build something else that is really your passion.

I think, if anything, school teaches you a lot of social skills, it teaches you, at least for me, I can only talk personally, it teaches you that. It teaches you how to work hard, it teaches you how to study, it teaches you all those things.

I think it teaches you discipline, because even as an entrepreneur, one of the hardest things, because we’re kind of like herding cats when it comes to accounting a lot of the time, is that it teaches us to be disciplined in things that we don’t necessarily want to do, but we need to.

Exactly. That’s kind of our take on that. We could do a whole episode on my thoughts on the school system.

We won’t, because we realize that some of you are in it, and we still love you.

Ultimately, again, it’s not a negative, it’s just you have to be aware. It’s kind of if you go to a bar. You could say, “I’m not going to drink,” but at the end of the day, as long as you’re aware that that environment, after 12, everyone’s going to be smashed out of their minds.

If you choose to hang out there, you just got to know what’s going to happen.

The external forces influencing you are going to be greater if you keep surrounding yourself with that.

Right. Same with school. Just know what’s going on there, and I never learned how to do my taxes or pay my bills or how to buy a house or square footages. All the things that I actually use.

Actually, it’s funny. We went to go into a high school for one of our kids, and we kind of made a joke. They’re like, “Do you guys teach people how to buy houses yet?”

She was like, “Ha ha?”

No, but that would be really useful.

That would be really useful.

So you don’t get screwed over a million times. Anyway. Let’s go on the next one.

We could ramble on a lot about that, but let’s talk about the next one. I think this is a really fun one, because it’s in a lot of our mindsets, and we don’t really even know it. Let’s talk about the myth that there’s a finite amount of money in the world.

Go for it.

I think this is in our mindsets, it’s kind of like socially ingrained into us. It’s usually a cultural thing. It’s usually stuff that we’re brought up with, and we asked our little awesome group, the bosses in the Science of Building your Online Empire group on Facebook, I asked them, “What was your relationship with money growing up? Did you talk about it? How did your parents feel about it? How’d they talk to you about it?”

A lot of the times, if I said, “Money is the root of all blank.”

Evil.

Right. “Money doesn’t grow on…”

Trees.

I think there’s tons of-

“Go to school and get a…”

Job.

“So that you can pay off all your…”

Bills.

“So you can work until you…”

Die? Retire.

Let’s be honest, no one’s retiring from their job.

The stuff that people have to retire on now, it’s not enough for our life expectancy anymore, but I think a lot of the times people feel like there’s only so much money to go around, and I think one of the biggest mindset shifts that bosses make is to realize that there is as much as money out there as we want to be.

Can I just say something here?

Yeah, totally.

Here’s the thing. Many people with the employee mindset, they think that the only way to make more money is to go to their boss and ask for a what?

A raise.

A raise, right. Here’s the thing, and I’m going to help bosses as well that might be listening, but are like, “Oh, no. You’re teaching my employees to go leave me.”

That’s not what we’re doing at all. Here’s the biggest thing. When you go ask your boss for a raise, chances are if you work for someone that appreciates you, they’re probably paying you the most they possibly can, and of course they’re going to give you increases and things like that, but if you really want to change your lifestyle, and you want a $10,000 raise, the chances of that happening, depending on where you’re at, is going to be very minimal, but then, as an employee, then you start getting upset, and you start maybe not liking a job that you actually liked, because you’re not getting the money you want, because your friend went and bought a new car, and they’re making more money than you, and you’re a little bit behind. All these things start to spiral, but imagine if you change your mindset, and you’re like, “Wait a minute. I love my job. I get paid pretty well, consistently. I do a good job. I’m appreciated.”

If you take that money part out, and you put it on yourself, and you say, “Wait a minute. I could just go start a side hustle. I could make $10,000 more on my own. I could start my own business. I could have write-offs.”

That whole mindset is so key.

Totally. I’m just going to give a real-world example for us. When we started our businesses, and we wanted to buy a larger house, we went to the banks, and they looked at us like, “You guys run your own business. We don’t know what to do with that.”

They didn’t know how to give us money, because they didn’t know how to deal with the money that was coming in.

“Your income fluctuates.”

It fluctuates.

Yes, it’s a business.

It’s gone up a lot for the last three years.

That’s no sustainable.

No. Their mindset was, “It’s going to come crashing down. What if your businesses fail?”

I actually told one of them, “What if you get fired from your job, and you’re not here? Are you secure?”

This is the thing. People have, and I did too, when we left our secure, full-time jobs, we were getting paid every two weeks, that false sense of security. Banks would’ve given me probably way more money back then, when I had two weeks, same pay, all that kind of stuff, then they kind of would now, but it took us a long time, and some convincing, and the right type of people to work with us, and lots of financial statements, because, and this is the thing, they asked us. They’re like, “What if it goes away?”

We’re like, “We’ll find another way to make money.”

We’re not concerned about that. It’s like, if I had a job-

If it goes away, all the knowledge I have in my head will not be sucked out of me.

No. We can find another way to build a business. This is the thing, when we have a job we think it’s security, and I used to work in HR, so I know how many weeks you have to pay someone when you want to let them go, or in lieu of notice, and all that stuff. Guys, it’s not a lot of time. It’s not a lot of time, and for every $10,000 that you want to make in a regular job it’s going to take you that many months to find the job.

That’s so true. That’s so true.

Ultimately, what we want you to understand here is that there is so much money out in the universe. It would blow your mind. Not only is there so much money out there, there are so many people that are willing to pay for the business that you’re looking to start. If you want to get into course development, there are people out there that are willing to pay $97, $295, over $1000, $10,000. We’re in a mastermind right now where we’re paying $50,000 a year to learn from specific individuals. There are, and let me just be really clear, seven years ago, if you told me, “One day you’re going to pay 50 grand a year to learn from two dudes.”

I would’ve been like, “Are you insane? That’s not happening.”

Because we’ve built our business in such a way, we’ve realized there are so many people, and let me tell you, we thought, “Who could ever afford this?”

When we signed up for this thing, I think there was over 2000 people that were in an audience of 7000 at an event, that all had the income and had the money and signed up and did it.

They’ve found a way to have the income, and we want to make sure you guys understand. There isn’t a set amount of money in the universe solely just for you. It’s not you’re only going to make X amount of dollars. Maybe that’s the employee mindset for that, but when you decide to open up your mindset around money and realize that as long as you work smart for it, and you develop different things, and you develop your skills, and you develop your mindset, and you do a lot of learning, your potential is endless.

Even for us, and again, we can’t promise that you’ll make any money starting your online business, full caveat out there, that’s all up to you, but at the same time, at the same time I can tell you, once we got to 100 grand that we were earning per year in our side businesses, at first I was like, “That could be really hard to do.”

But we did it, and then I was like, “Wow. I wonder how hard it would be to get to 250?”

Then we did that, and then it was half a million. We did that, and then it was million a year, and we’re like, “That one’s not say hard. How do we get to 10 million?”

It’s not like there was no limit. The only limit is yourself, and I think that’s a big key in this myth.

This ties into the next myth that we’re going to talk about. We talk a lot about the movie the Secret, and if you haven’t seen it, definitely give it a watch or read the book, but a lot of people think that if they just secret the money that it will show up. If you build it, they will come. No, that’s not really how that works. Secreting the money is not going to.

I think there’s two parts of manifestation. You have to definitely be open to it, and talk like you deserve all of the income that you working for and providing value for, but the other half is actually doing the work.

Let’s talk about myth number five.

This is an interesting one, because there’s a lot of different thoughts out there, or stream of thoughts I guess we’ll call them, about how to get more money, how to save money, how to earn money. If you look at Rich Dad, Poor Dad versus Dave Ramsey. They have different methods, and there’s a really big one that most people subscribe to, which is…

Save money. Cut costs.

Right. That’s the only way you’re going to have money.

This is, I think, where I strongly would, I don’t want to say disagree, for me, because there’s different people. For you, saving money might work great for you, and if that works great for you, and it gets you out of debt, that’s amazing. Do that. I’m going to tell you that what I find works the best is to create more income. Be careful where you spend your money. If you’re making X dollars, I would recommend that you invest it all into your business. I wouldn’t worry so much about becoming “debt free”, because I think there’s good debt, and then there’s bad debt. I’m not here to give you financial advice, but the big myth I want you to break here is that the only way to get money is to save money. That’s a huge myth. If you just start saving money, if I relied on that, let’s say I didn’t invest in my business seven years ago, I’d still be working a full-time job, I’d still be earning a little bit over six figures, which is great, but I wouldn’t have what we have right now, not even close, because instead of saving that money, and maybe saving up, I don’t know what I would’ve saved by now, but what I did is I invested into business.

Even time that our business takes a next step forward, we invest more into the business. We buy better podcasting equipment, we buy better video equipment, we take out more Facebook ads, we hire a new person when we can. We do all these things. I would say that one of the best ways to get more money is to invest more money into yourself, into your business, into taking action with myth four like Erin said. You can’t just secret the money, and say, “I want money.”

It’s never going to happen. Imagine if just kneeled down right now and be like, “Please, let money fall from the sky.”

I’m not going to open my front door, and all of sudden there’s going to be a box of a million dollars. I believe that if you put that out into the universe, and you apply hard work and effort, and you take money you’re bringing in from your full-time job, and investing it into your side hustle. Think about it. Let’s do a quick exercise here, and then we’ll go onto the challenge. If you, let’s say, every two months, you have $1000 of income that you could use for whatever you want. In there, maybe it’s going out for dinners, maybe it’s going to a movie, maybe it’s buying new clothing, items like that. Thousand bucks every two months. That means that in a year you got $6000 that you could use discretionary however you want. Imagine if you took that $6000, and we divided that up, and you took a course from us, and you learn how to run Facebook ads properly, and now you’re spending 300 of that per month on Facebook ads, and growing your Instagram following by thousands, or your Facebook following by thousands. You’re connecting with new people. Maybe you take some more of that money and you buy sample products for, let’s say, a new eyelash business you want to start from China, and you buy products.

There are so many other things you could do with that money. If you choose to take that six grand per year, and blow it on going out, having fancy dinners, and going out to movies, all that kind of great stuff, that’s on you. That’s your call, but I would say, then, if that’s who you are, then maybe start saving money. If you’re someone that wants to grow a massive business, take that money, and invest it into your business, and I think your returns are going to be absolutely exponential.

Totally. I could not agree more.

Why don’t we move onto the challenge for today, because I know we gave everyone a lot of information around mindset and myths and money and all that stuff. I think this is just going to be such a great challenge for you guys to do. What I would love for you guys to do is, obviously if you’re listening to this you can’t do this right now, but what I want you to do is, you have to look at the myths that you have currently in your life that surround your relationship with money, and I’m not kidding. I mean, you actually have a relationship with money. You might be like, “I don’t understand.”

What I want you to do is write a letter to money. Have you mistreated it in the past? Have you abused it? Have you not cherished it?

Like, Dear Money?

Dear Money. Seriously. Dear Money, and I want you to kind of go through your history with money in your life. Maybe it’s been an ebb and flow, maybe you just struggled with it all your life. I want you to kind of look at how you’ve treated it. Have you wasted it? Have you appreciated it? Have you had gratitude for it? Really take time to do this exercise, because when I’ve worked with clients who’ve done this exercise, they had no idea they had all these preconceived notions about money that was actually holding them back from earning more.

I hope you guys take the time to do this, because this will be kind of like the stuff that makes your mindset around money stick.

I love it. Let’s summarize.

Myth number one that we crushed is exchanging time for money? I don’t think so.

Myth number two: school teaches you to become filthy rich.

No. J-O-B, guys.

Not a chance.

Myth number three: there is a finite amount of money in the world?

No.

Myth number four: if you secret money, it’ll just come?

Also no.

And myth number five: the only way to get more money is to…

Save money.

All right. Hopefully you’ve figured all those things out. Hopefully you’ll take us up on that challenge, and with that one I want to remind you to ditch the employee mindset.

And start living the Boss Life.

We’ll see you in the next episode.

Bye, guys.