How to Reframe Self-Limiting Thoughts to Become Rich

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "We Should All Be Millionaires" by Rachel Rodgers. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you want to become rich and financially stable? Why do you need to adjust your self-limiting thoughts?

You may not realize it, but you’re the number one reason why you’re not making more money. This is because you have negative beliefs about yourself and money that are setting you back.

Below we’ve listed steps on how to reframe self-limiting thoughts, according to Rachel Rodgers’ book We Should All Be Millionaires.

Change Your Limiting Thoughts

Rodgers writes that your thoughts inform your actions, so to take positive steps toward earning more, you must think more positive, empowering thoughts about money. According to Rodgers, women’s self-limiting thoughts are one major obstacle that keeps them financially disempowered. Many simply don’t think they can make more money, and they justify this belief by convincing themselves that money isn’t important to them, that making money requires a grueling grind, or that they’re simply not skilled with money. This, in turn, prevents women from making changes or trying new strategies to increase their wealth.

Reframe Limiting Thoughts to Hold Onto the Money You Already Have

In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker argues that your money mindset doesn’t only determine if you make money—it also determines if you can hold onto the money you already have. Your mindset defines your “financial setpoint,” or the maximum amount of money you subconsciously trust yourself to manage. If you earn more than that amount, you’ll start behaving in ways that deplete your wealth back down to your setpoint, since your mindset causes you to doubt your ability to handle that much money.

For example, you might start spending more freely on things you don’t need. Developing more empowering thoughts, then, may help you raise your financial setpoint, which is especially critical for women, as Rodgers argues.

Rodgers suggests you practice thought work—reflecting on and transforming your negative thoughts into more helpful ones. By reframing negative thoughts, you’ll have fewer self-imposed obstacles to your financial success. Rodgers provides steps on how to change your thoughts:

Step #1: Be more mindful of your thoughts. Notice when a new thought pops into your head so that you can reflect on it. For example, you might pay attention to what thoughts pop into your mind as you apply for a new job.

Step #2: Identify whether your thoughts are helpful, empowering you to believe in yourself and make positive changes to your life, or if they trigger negative emotions that leave you feeling stuck. For example, if you don’t have some skills listed in a job posting, you might think you’re not good enough to get the jobs you want. This unhelpful thought makes you feel inadequate and discouraged, which prevents you from taking positive action.

Step #3: Challenge your negative thoughts and replace them with more empowering ones. This way, you can focus on moving forward and taking action rather than feeling stuck and powerless. For example, you might tell yourself that skills can be built and you simply need to make time to develop them.

Defuse a Negative Thought

If your thoughts leave you engulfed in negative emotions, it may be hard to take a step back and reflect on whether they’re helpful or productive, as Rodgers suggests you do. In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris provides a strategy called defusion that can help you gain distance from your negative thoughts to more easily reflect on them. Unlike the thought work Rodgers suggests, Harris’s strategy focuses not on replacing or eliminating negative thoughts, but on simply accepting them. Let’s examine Harris’s defusion technique and compare it with Rodgers’s thought work practice.

Step 1: Rodgers suggests you first be more mindful of thoughts that pop into your head. To do this, Harris would argue that you must be connected with your “observing self.” He makes a distinction between your thinking self (which judges and interprets situations) and your observing self (which is simply aware of situations). When you’re connected with your observing self, you develop a meta-awareness of the thoughts you’re having. Rather than thinking, “I’ll always be poor,” you think, “My brain is having the thought that I’ll always be poor.”

Step 2: Next, Rodgers recommends you identify whether a thought is helpful or not, but Harris suggests you first defuse it, or gain distance from the thought. To do this, you must recognize your thoughts as simply words instead of universal truths. He provides four methods for defusing, including imagining a cartoon character saying your negative thought, which gives you a different perspective from which to look at your thoughts.

Step 3: Like Rodgers, Harris also suggests you ask yourself if a thought is helpful. However, he provides different suggestions on what to do with helpful and unhelpful thoughts. He argues that negative thoughts can be helpful if they encourage you to take positive action. If there’s nothing you can productively act on, Harris writes that there’s no need to replace your negative thoughts. Instead, simply let them go by redirecting your attention to more helpful thoughts.

How to Reframe Self-Limiting Thoughts to Become Rich