Empowering Beliefs About Money: 4 Steps to a New Mindset

What beliefs are secretly sabotaging your financial success? How can shifting your mindset transform your relationship with money?

Understanding your beliefs about money is the first step toward financial freedom. Many people unknowingly carry limiting beliefs that prevent them from reaching their full financial potential. By developing empowering beliefs about money, you can break free from self-imposed limitations and create lasting wealth.

Keep reading to discover how to identify and transform your money mindset into one that supports your financial goals.

Adopt Empowering Beliefs About Money

Since disempowering beliefs wreak havoc on your relationship with money, T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) argues that the only way to improve your financial situation is to replace your disempowering beliefs about money with empowering ones. This will reprogram your money mindset to raise your financial setpoint, which in turn will enable you to comfortably accumulate and manage more money.

Entrepreneur and investor MJ DeMarco (Unscripted) adds that, before you can successfully adopt empowering beliefs about money, you first need to identify and address the disempowering beliefs you hold about money so you can free yourself from their influence.

In You Are a Badass at Making Money, Jen Sincero explains why: Until you identify and address your disempowering beliefs about money, these unhelpful beliefs will continue to power your money mindset, control your behaviors, and prevent you from changing your approach to money. For example, let’s say you want to adopt the empowering belief that you’re capable of investing your money wisely. However, your money mindset includes the belief that money is the root of all evil, which makes you feel guilty for wanting more money. Until you address this belief, you’ll likely sabotage your efforts to invest money—for instance, by procrastinating or making poor investment decisions—without realizing why.

We’ll explore how to identify and remove disempowering beliefs from your money mindset, replace them with empowering ones, and feel more in control of your finances. We’ll cover this information in four steps:

1. Spark motivation to address your beliefs about money.
2. Identify your disempowering beliefs about money.
3. Analyze and reframe your disempowering beliefs.
4. Align your behaviors with your new empowering beliefs.

Let’s look at each of these steps in detail.

Step #1: Spark Motivation to Address Your Beliefs About Money

If you feel powerless to change your beliefs about money, it can demotivate you from taking the steps to identify and replace your disempowering beliefs. To kickstart the motivation to improve your money mindset, self-help guru Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) suggests the following two-part process:

1. Define the consequences of maintaining your current money mindset by answering the following question: What are the financial and emotional costs of not changing your mindset? In other words, what are you missing out on?
2. Weigh these consequences against the benefits you stand to gain by adopting a more empowering money mindset. You can clarify these benefits by answering three questions: How will you feel about yourself if you make this change? How will this change increase your happiness? How will this change impact your loved ones?

Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) offers a complementary exercise to help you clarify these consequences and benefits: List all your “wants” and “don’t wants” about money. Examples: “I don’t want to work all my life.” “I don’t want to be an employee.” “I want to relax and have fun with my kids instead of feeling stressed about having to earn more money.” “I want to be able to buy groceries without feeling guilty.”

Step #2: Identify Your Disempowering Beliefs About Money

Completing the first step will give you a clear idea of the benefits you expect to gain from improving your money mindset. Now, let’s identify the specific beliefs that hold you back from taking control of your finances and enjoying these benefits.

Since you’re likely unaware of your unconscious beliefs about money, identifying your disempowering beliefs will require some investigation. Experts suggest you can pinpoint such beliefs by noticing how you think, feel, and talk about money.

In We Should All Be Millionaires, Rachel Rodgers suggests that you can identify disempowering beliefs by observing whether your thoughts encourage you to believe in yourself and make positive changes or if they trigger negative emotions that leave you feeling stuck. Each time you notice a negative thought, she suggests, reflect on the beliefs that might be influencing this thought. For example, if you notice the thought “I’ll never be able to afford anything nice,” you might trace it back to the following belief: “No matter how hard I work, I’ll always struggle to make ends meet.” 

Eker adds that paying attention to what you say about money can provide insights into your disempowering beliefs. He pinpoints the following expressions as indicators of such beliefs:

• Blaming others for your financial problems: “It’s the economy’s fault that I’m not making the amount of money that I want.”
• Resenting others’ good fortune: “They think they’re so much better than me!”
• Rationalizing your lack of wealth: “It’s okay, there are more important things than money.”
• Complaining about your financial situation: “I hate my job and it doesn’t pay enough.”
• Limiting your choices: “I can’t be rich and be there for my family and friends.”
• Feeling unworthy of financial success: “I’m not good enough to earn more money.”
• Focusing on your problems and fears: “I’m not going to try in case I fail.”
• Aiming low and seeking security: “What’s the point in working more than I have to?”

Step #3: Analyze and Reframe Your Disempowering Beliefs

Once you’ve identified your disempowering beliefs, the next step is to dissect them—by considering their origins, how they influence you, and the potential benefits of letting them go. This process will bring your disempowering beliefs into the open, allow you to fully grasp their impact on your finances, and guide you toward adopting more empowering beliefs.

To analyze each of your disempowering beliefs, ask yourself the following five questions (adapted from poet Brianna Wiest’s 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think):

1. When was the first time I came across this idea? For example, you might believe that others are to blame for your financial problems, and you might trace this back to hearing your parents blame their financial troubles on the economy.
2. How does this belief influence my judgment of myself, other people, and my experiences? Continuing the previous example, believing that others are to blame might make you feel like you have no control over your finances, which causes you to resent those who have an easier time with money.
3. How might adopting opposing beliefs impact me? If instead you choose to believe that you’re the only one accountable for your finances, you might start to see every challenge as a chance to learn and gain confidence in your ability to handle money.
4. How would I choose to think about this if my beliefs already supported my financial success? You might see financial slip-ups as part of the journey to getting better at managing money, not as reasons to cast blame.
5. What empowering beliefs might I adopt instead? Examples: “I am fully accountable for my finances.” “I’m willing to learn from my mistakes.” 

Step #4: Align Your Behaviors With Your New Empowering Beliefs About Money

After answering the five questions above, you’ll have a list of beliefs that will empower you to take control of your finances. In this final step, we’ll focus on how to effectively adopt these beliefs. Experts suggest you can achieve this by aligning your behaviors with the empowering beliefs you want to live by.

First, take a small action that aligns with one of your empowering beliefs. For example, if you want to believe that you’re capable of saving, invest a small portion of your income into an interest-bearing savings account. According to Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), taking this first step initiates a positive feedback loop that reinforces the influence of your new, empowering beliefs. When you make beneficial changes to your behaviors, you inevitably produce successful results that make you feel good. 

• For example, the deposit you make into your savings account will trigger a feeling of accomplishment and confidence in your ability to manage your finances effectively.

These positive results empower you to maintain your improved behaviors and make even more beneficial changes so that you can continue to feel good about yourself. 

• For example, seeing how much interest your deposit accumulates will encourage you to make regular deposits and make you feel confident enough to try other wealth management strategies, such as investing in stocks and shares.

After you complete an action that aligns with your empowering belief, make habits of  your new empowering behaviors. For example, deposit leftover funds at the end of every month or check how much interest your accounts have accumulated once a week. The more you practice your new behaviors, the more you rewire your brain and weaken its reliance on the beliefs that supported your earlier disempowering behaviors. As a result, your brain naturally replaces the disempowering beliefs that don’t support your new and improved behaviors with ones that do.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear uses the concept of identity to clarify why aligning your habits with your chosen beliefs helps you effectively adopt those beliefs. He notes that your actions reinforce your identity and vice versa. So, the more you act in a certain way, the more you start to believe that’s who you are. Therefore, if you act as if you already have empowering beliefs, your actions will make you naturally start feeling like you have empowering beliefs, and you’ll continue behaving in that same manner. 

• For example, if you spend an hour every week reviewing your finances, you’ll start to feel like a person who’s financially responsible. This identity will motivate you to keep tracking your finances and use your money wisely because you’re a financially responsible person and that’s what financially responsible people do.

Overcome Resistance to Changing Behaviors

While Sincero also advocates aligning your behaviors with your new beliefs, she notes that this process can often create mental resistance—for instance, you might feel fear or start thinking of excuses not to change. This resistance is a natural consequence of challenging ingrained beliefs and habits. She suggests that you can overcome mental resistance by identifying your disempowering thoughts, allowing yourself to feel and release any associated emotions, and then visualizing the positive results you expect to achieve from changing your behaviors.

Robbins provides an alternative way to overcome mental resistance and change your behaviors: Ask yourself positive and empowering questions that lead to satisfying solutions. For example, if you feel resistant to creating a budget, ask yourself, “How can I make creating a budget effortless and enjoyable?”