Have you ever wondered what domino kicks off the chain reaction to a healthy habit?

If you knew the starting point that naturally led to the result you want, it would be smart to focus your energy on this critical piece of the puzzle. If you did so, you could rely on the natural flow of healthy habit creation rather than having to fight tooth and nail to establish them. In fact, my favorite part about this approach is that you don’t need to rely on motivation or discipline to get you where you want to go.

I’m not generally an advocate for laziness, except that this is intelligent laziness – which I am all about.

This video will walk you through the causal connections between your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, actions, habits and results.

I recommend watching this video twice. The first time with financial habits in mind and the second time around, watch it with another area of your life in mind that you would like to see different results in.

Transcript:

Enough with feeling stuck in bad financial habits. Here is how you turn your finances and maybe even your life around. We’re going on a little journey here, so stick with me.

All right. Let’s start at the end. Your habits are a result of the actions that you take over and over. If you’ve got good habits that’s because you’ve repetitively taken smart action until it became second nature. If you’re not happy with where you’re at, it’s because you programmed yourself with unhealthy habits by taking wrong action over and over again. We’ve all been there, but you’re not stuck here.

Step number one in getting good money habits is knowing the right actions to take. You can figure out what your right actions are. If you want to skip over all the research on the action items, I’ve got an entire system outlined in my book, Save Yourself, develop the financial fitness to spend in alignment with your values and not ego. But don’t stop at figuring out the best actions to take, we’ve got a little more work.

Let’s move back from there. What determines if you take an action, even if you know the right one to take? Think about it for a second. If we’re being honest, it’s our feelings. We would like to think that we’re rational beings, but we are quite emotional. Unless we’re ultra disciplined, we don’t take action unless we feel like it, and we’re constantly looking for ways to stay motivated so that we feel like doing something that we know we should do. Or we try and change how we feel and try, and be more positive, but I don’t think this is sustainably a good approach. Don’t give up though. Just go about it a different way.

We got to go one step back into what informs our feelings. Ever wondered what makes you feel the way you do about taking action? Let me ask you something personal. How do you feel about yourself and money? If, deep down, you don’t think that you’re deserving or worthy of having a good amount of money in the bank, then you won’t feel like taking smart action. In fact, you’ll probably make some regrettable moves. If you believe that no matter what you do, you’ll never have enough money, then you’re not going to feel like taking the action you need to have more money than you need to get by. Even if you know the right things to do with that mindset, it would be incredibly hard to make yourself take those actions enough times that they would become habitual.

The name of the game is to transform your limiting thoughts and beliefs so that what you think and believe causes you to feel good about taking action. Only then will you take the right actions often enough to turn them into healthy financial habits. I know that it’s easier said than done, so I’ve got a video specifically on catching and dismantling limiting beliefs. I’ll catch you there.