317 | Truth Bombs from Coaching Real Lawyers

Think you’re the only lawyer who struggles with your money?

After coaching hundreds of lawyers, I can confidently say that’s not the case.

In this episode, I’m sharing some of the sticky scenarios my clients faced with setting goals and their money mindset over the years and how I coached them through.

• • the importance of setting goals
  • the purpose of your goals
  • the impact of your mindset on your finances
  • client issues with setting goals and money mindset and how I coached them

• Episode 79: “It’s Not Enough”

You’re listening to Personal Finance for Lawyers. 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, and happy summer. I am doing something I have not done in the six years I’ve recorded this podcast, and that is taking the summer off.

In place of recording new episodes, I’m sharing webinars I’ve done, trainings from private programs, and past episodes. So, please enjoy today’s episode, and I hope you’re having a great summer.

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I want to talk a little bit today about setting goals and the importance of your money mindset. So, one of the first things that I work with my clients on is setting goals that they want to achieve during our time together. This is important, because if you think about, like, where you are right now as a start here point on a map, that is useless. Knowing where you are is useless if you don’t know where you’re going.

The goals help to give you direction, you know what you’re working toward, and you can easily see if you are on track or not. And something that’s really important is when you’re setting goals that are a bit more intangible, like I want to feel more confident with money, I want to do x better, it’s important to define what that means to you, right?

How will you know that you’re more confident with money? Or how will you know that you do x better? Figuring out what it means, like how you’ll know that you’ve achieved your goal, is really important. Because again, when you know where you’re going, then you will be able to keep yourself on track to make sure that you are making the progress that you want to make.

The other thing is the importance of your money mindset. If you had the chance to watch or attend the May session that we did on money matters, I talked a lot about the importance of your money mindset. Mindset runs through all of the areas of your finances and your life, but we’re talking about money coaching, so all of the areas of your finances.

It’s the most important because you can know all the strategies, like you probably do know a lot of strategies, because you can do a search on Google or read a book, or whatever it is, but mindset is what is going to actually cause you to implement that strategy. Knowing the strategy and implementation are two different things, and so having your mindset right, having your mindset, the way that you think about your money, the way that you think about yourself, and your ability to manage your money is going to be the difference between whether you achieve the goals that you set or not. So I have pulled a few examples of coaching situations from my private clients on these two topics, so I thought that they would be useful to you.

All right, the first example was a client who had a goal to pay off $40,000 of student loans, and then she also wanted to build up her savings to hit $30,000. She already had some money in savings, but she wanted to top it up to $30,000 and after working through the math of what it would take to pay off the $40,000 in six months, she wanted to decrease her savings goal.

We coached first on her asking permission, like, oh yeah, can I decrease my savings goal, because she’s the boss of her own finances, but that’s not the part I want to share here. I asked her why she wanted to decrease the savings goal.

And she said she wanted to make sure that she was able to accomplish her first goal of paying off the amount of student loans that she wanted to pay off, and that she didn’t want it to seem too overwhelming, and she said, I know that sounds crazy, because the debt is overwhelming.

I asked her what would happen if she didn’t hit that first goal, if she wasn’t able to pay off the amount that she wanted to pay off in her student loans. She said that she would be disappointed, she would be really upset, she didn’t want to feel like she had failed. And when I asked her why, she said that she felt like she had been kind of doing nothing related to her student loans for the last five years, and so she already had a sense of failure there. Then, since we had started working together, and we had developed this strategy, that there was no reason that she should fail now.

I asked her what she thought the point of setting goals was, and she said it’s to have something to achieve. There’s a typical lawyer response. We think, like, oh, yes, obviously, I set the goal so that I can achieve things. I just have to keep doing and taking action. I asked her, what if that’s not the point? There are no goal police who are going to get you if you don’t achieve the goal that you set, and it goes back to what I said at the start of the call, that the goal is there so that you know what you’re working toward. Maybe you don’t hit the goal in the time frame that you want to, but the worst that happens there is maybe you feel disappointed, you feel upset, but you get to decide how you’ll treat yourself if that happens.

The thing that I see a lot with lawyers is we tend to beat ourselves up when we don’t achieve the goal. We feel disappointed. We feel upset that we didn’t hit this goal that we wanted to hit, and then we make ourselves feel really bad. We are really mean to ourselves, which then makes it a lot harder to motivate yourself to do the work to achieve the goal, even if it’s not within that original time frame, so be mindful of that for yourself.

If you have goals and you are beating yourself up if you don’t achieve it, or you’re putting this pressure on yourself to achieve it, that’s not going to help you. It’s not going to keep you moving forward toward the goal. You get to decide how you’re going to treat yourself, and you don’t have to beat yourself up and be mean to yourself just because you don’t achieve a goal within an arbitrary timeframe that you set.

All right, the next episode is a client who thought she didn’t know how to achieve her goal. The goal was to increase her emergency fund by a set amount, and she said she thought it was possible because it wasn’t an enormous amount of money, and she said, “I just don’t know how to do it.”

I asked her if that was true, because when we’re telling ourselves we don’t know, typically that’s not true, right? She said she knows how to do it, but she struggles with accountability. She thinks, “I screwed up already, so there’s no point in continuing on,” and then she tends to go to giving up if she makes one mistake and thinks it’s easier to just not try if it seems like she’s not going to succeed.

I asked her what it meant to succeed, and she said success means that she achieves the goal. I told her that that’s a very narrow definition of success. It’s either I hit the goal and I succeed, or I don’t and I fail. Like, what if you get halfway to the goal? What if you get three quarters of the way? 90% of the way? Is that still failing?

I didn’t have her response in my notes, but I did ask, how much she had saved the previous month. She hadn’t saved anything, and so I told her to notice that in her mind, even a drastic improvement over what she had done the previous month would be failing if it wasn’t 100%.

Notice if you go to that all or nothing place, where it’s like either I have to be 100% of the way, A++ there, or I’ve failed because even little improvements, smaller improvements than what you want, are improvements, and they are worth celebrating, as well.

Notice that her automatic reaction was, I don’t know how to do it, but when we explored it, really, that wasn’t the issue, right? It was the all or nothing thinking, and you know, anything less than 100% was failure.

All right. The next one is a client whose predominant belief about money was that she didn’t have enough. So this one’s really interesting, and I have a podcast, if you didn’t know, it’s called Wealthyesque. You can find it on my website, rhothomas.com

But this client, this particular scenario inspired episode 79 of the podcast called “It’s Not Enough.” We were talking about how she was feeling about her money overall, and the overarching theme was that she didn’t have enough money. Thoughts about money were, she wished she had more; she tries to hold on to it as long as possible; it comes and goes.

Unfortunately, she said her savings number has declined a bit because of paying bills, so she was trying to work harder to get it back to where it was. There was so much stress involved, you know, all of these things. Do I have enough? I don’t think I do. And so this thought about wishing that she had money, the underlying thought was that she didn’t have enough money.

We looked at what she’s doing when she’s thinking she doesn’t have enough money, and for her, she was always thinking about how to get more money, trying to do more to bring in more money. She wasn’t being grateful for the money that she did have. She was focusing on what she didn’t have.

I asked her about when she first started practicing, or even when she was still in school, if that version of her would have thought that she didn’t have enough money. She recognized the irony that when she started out she believed that the amount of money that she was making now, if she had made that amount, she thought that she’d be set. She was like, “Oh yeah, if I just made x amount, then I’d be set.” And now here she is making that amount, and she was thinking it wasn’t enough.

The coaching for her was about how that amount was enough, and as she explored it, she talked about the beautiful house that she lives in, that she was able to buy because of the amount that she makes, that she was able to spoil her kids, that she and her husband are able to take care of her mom and her mother-in-law. She has money for the things that she wants and things that she needs.

If any of you are in this space of not enoughness, it’s very hard to create abundance from scarcity. If what you have isn’t enough now, making more is not going to feel like enough either. This client was the perfect example because when she first started practicing, she thought, oh, if I just made x amount, it would be more than enough. I’d be set. Now here she is, I think she was seven years in, making that amount, and now she’s telling herself that it’s still not enough.

It’s not ever the actual amount of money that you make. It’s the thoughts that you’re bringing to it. And when your predominant thought is “it’s not enough,” you’re never going to see it as enough. Your brain is going to always look for the evidence to prove the thought that you have true, so all you’re going to see is why what you have isn’t enough.

All right, this next one was a client who felt bad about having money. On one hand, she said that having money made her feel more put together, more powerful, because she had more control over the things in her life and could do more things, but on the other hand, she felt guilty.

She said she thought she shouldn’t spend on nice things. I asked her what she meant by nice things, and she gave me some luxury items as examples. She was very troubled by the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty in her city, and she felt like she would be contributing to that if she had more money.

One of the things that I work on with my clients is using the money that they’re bringing in and keeping more of it for themselves versus it all going out with unintentional spending. I asked her what about Oprah? What about other people that she knows who have more money? What about me? And she said, well, that’s different, but she wasn’t able to articulate why.

I asked her if the people she’s thinking about, the impoverished people in her city, would have more money if she had less? She said, “Well, no, that’s not it.” And so then I asked her, “How is it better if she has more money?” And she said she’ll be able to give more and help to improve the state of poverty within her city.

I told her that having more doesn’t mean that anyone else has less, and her having less doesn’t mean that they have more. These two are not correlated. Because money amplifies who we already are and the things that we’re already doing, if you are the type of person who is concerned about different causes, like whatever the cause is that you’re concerned about, you having more money means that you are in a better position to give to those causes to help to support them better than you not having money.

So think about this if it comes up for you, if you have this guilt about building wealth, or if you have negative thoughts about people who have money. Because I don’t think that you are really thinking about the fact that these two things aren’t correlated, right? If you’re in that position and you’re like, oh, well, I shouldn’t have this money because there are so many people who have less because you are a good person, and you want to have, or you want those people to have more, you are in a better position to help those people to have more, or to help whatever the causes are that are important to you, when you have more money and are able to direct it in the way that you want to.

Alright, the next example is a client who was thinking that she’s not good with money, and she asked about how to change her thoughts about herself. I told her she only believes she’s not good with money because she constantly tells herself that she’s not good with money, and she could choose to tell herself something different. She asked about how to change that mindset, and I told her it takes practice.

One thing that I do, an exercise that I’ll share with you, is when I’m working on changing my thought about something, changing my mindset around something, I will ask myself why that thing is true every day, if it’s something that you’re trying to prove is true. Asking myself why is it true that I’m good with money, and write in my journal every day all of the reasons why that’s true. Anything that you can think of—the fact that you didn’t overspend last month, or you didn’t overdraft your account, or you were able to save some money, or whatever it is, because as you build up that evidence, it helps to strengthen that belief in your mind.

It’s similar to when you’re thinking about building evidence in your cases. You’ve got your side, your position, and then the other side has their position. You’re working with the same facts in the case, but you’re going to choose those facts that support your position, and the other side is going to choose those facts that support their position, right? You’re going to highlight the ones that support your position. They’re going to highlight the ones that support their position. And you’ll try to minimize the ones that kind of contradict or don’t strengthen your position.

Same thing here. If you think about it in that way, like there are all kinds of thoughts that you can choose, all kinds of facts that you can look at in your life. We are just talking about intentionally choosing those facts that support whatever the belief is that you’re trying to build, and not paying as much attention to the ones that support the beliefs that aren’t serving you, such as not being good with money.

The other thing is finding a better feeling thought that you can believe. For this particular client, she could believe that she was learning to be good with money. She couldn’t get all the way to “I’m good with money,” but she believed that she was learning to be good with money. That’s one that I offer often. If you believe you’re bad with money, try on “I’m learning to be good with money.”

If you can do that, if you can believe that you’re learning to be good with money, you can build your belief there over time. You can also build it from I’m learning to be good with money to I am good with money.

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Alright, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and got a lot out of it. If you have not done so already. Please subscribe to the show, leave a review, and/or share this episode with a friend or two who you think could use this information. All of that is how we get this podcast in the hands of more lawyers, and as always, I appreciate your support.

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 take back control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.