126 | Finding Success Everywhere

Lawyers tend to look for things that could go wrong or that aren’t working, whether because of our predisposition, training, or both.

This is a great skill to have in your legal practice—not so great when you’re learning to manage your money better.

In this episode, let’s talk about why it’s important to look for and acknowledge everything that you’re doing well with your finances, especially when you’re first starting out, and the impact that finding success everywhere will have on your financial progress.

• the areas many lawyers focus on in their finances
• two ineffective types of goals people have for their finances
• the effect of focusing on ineffective goals
• why it’s important to find success everywhere
• using your brain’s cognitive bias to your benefit
• what happens when you train yourself to find success everywhere

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If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call.

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today we are talking about the importance of looking for the ways you are successful. And of course we’re going to talk about it in the context of your finances, but you can do this in all areas of your life it’s really easy to focus on all the things that aren’t working when you’re learning to manage your money better. The times where you fall off track with your plan or you don’t stick to the plan. And as we talked about before, often, it’s just because you’re making plans that aren’t realistic for where you are, you’re making plans based off what you think you should be doing, rather than what you can actually do right now. Then we will use that those times we fall off track to beat ourselves up, which typically leads to a cycle of not sticking with your plan and saying you’ll get back on track next month only to find yourself in the same place all over again. You get really used to not following through on your word to yourself and you build up this evidence in your mind of all your failures and your inability to stick with your goals and to learn how to manage your money. On top of that, we also tend to have really vague goals for our money like paying off debt and saving more. What does that mean? Like what is more, if you save $1 more is that good? If you pay off $10 of debt, are you happy with that? We need to have a more defined goal to know when we’ve hit it the other thing is we often will think about our goals in really broad terms. So it’s not just paying off debt or saving more if I need to pay off all my student loans pay off all my credit cards, which often can be pretty big goals that may take a while and feel really overwhelming. But when we’re focused on these really vague or really broad goals, we missed opportunities to see success and other ways or to celebrate the smaller successes along the way. When you’re working on paying off more debt, but you haven’t defined what more means you miss the opportunity to celebrate yourself when you pay off more because the amount you’ve paid off doesn’t feel like enough, but only because you never defined how much would be enough or when you’re so focused on the ultimate goal of paying off all your credit cards, you miss the opportunity to celebrate yourself when you pay off 10% of your debt or 25% or 50% or any other smaller increment that you want to track. The key in all of it is finding success along the way. So it’s not just the ultimate success of paying off the credit cards or saving the amount of money you want. To save. It’s the smaller successes along the way that lead to that ultimate success. Like when you stay within your budget when you don’t overspend on your credit card. When you weigh the trade offs of a purchase you’re about to make that you weren’t planning to make you weren’t planning to spend that money and you ultimately decide not to buy the thing when you save some money even if it’s not the amount of money that you want to save. When you pay off some debt even if it’s not as much as you want it. When you notice that you feel more in control of your finances, when you don’t feel anxious about opening your credit card or your bank statements. Even if you’re not all the way to the ultimate goals that you want to achieve those pieces. Those smaller successes help you get to the bigger success that you want to get to and when you keep finding success, you keep pointing yourself to the things you’re doing that are working. You start training your brain to look for those things. You build up to evidence that you can do this right that what you’re doing is working, you feel more motivated to keep going you want to achieve more success. When you’re in the habit of falling off track and not following through on your plan especially you have to find success wherever you can because it’s all too easy to latch on to this typical behavior, this habit that you’ve fallen into and use that to define yourself and discover it yourself. That’s when people start making statements like I’m just not the kind of person who can stick with the budget or I’m just not good at following through. Right everybody is the kind of person who can stick with the budget or follow through with the necessary tools and mindset and part of that mindset is just seeing yourself as someone who can follow through or who can stick with it. So train yourself to see that everywhere. Because when you do then you’re able to reframe the way that you think about yourself and your ability to manage money and show yourself that you do know what you’re doing that you can do this that it is working. You start to establish this track record of success for yourself where you’re like, Oh man, I did this right. Look at this other thing I did. I did that too. And you just keep feeding your brain nice dopamine hits with all the great things that you’re doing because you actually recognize them as great things rather than what we typically do, which is discounting them or disregarding them or disregarding them. You start to believe that you will continue to do it because you’ve shown yourself over and over again that you already are doing it that you are successful, that the things you’re doing are working and you start getting your brain confirmation bias working in your favor. So when you truly believe something, your brain starts looking for evidence to support that belief everywhere. That’s the confirmation bias. So when you believe that you’re succeeding, then your brain will start to look for evidence of that. And so your job is to find success everywhere you can build your belief in your ability to succeed with your money and your ability to do it even if it feels hard, even if it’s not going as quickly as you’d like. Because as you strengthen that belief, you’re going to motivate yourself to keep going keep pushing until you actually do achieve that ultimate success you want to achieve. That’s one of the biggest keys to improving your finances, believing you can in the first place and then finding success everywhere finding that evidence that you can that motivates you to keep going rather than quitting and if you’d like support with finding your successes and believing in your ability to succeed with your finances, just head to rho thomas.com/call to get started. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. Connect with me over on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn rho Thomas and Instagram at I am rho Thomas. Subscribe to the show and leave a review both of which helped more people find it and please make a friend or two who you think it uses information. And share it with them. As we close out friend I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently. Week after week. You’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live a life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.