141 | Your Money Self-Concept

With personal finance, people typically think about the strategies and what to do.

But the way you see yourself has a huge impact on your ability to manage your money and achieve your financial goals.

When you believe you’re bad with money and don’t feel confident with it, you can do all the “right” things and still not make the progress you want or have the experience you want with your money.

In this episode, let’s talk about the importance of your money self-concept and how it impacts the way you manage your money.

• what your money self-concept is
• the things people tend to focus on in personal finance
• why it’s important to look at your money self-concept
• choosing your self-concept
• the effect of a negative money self-concept
• what happens when you try to power through and do the “right” things with your money without addressing your self-concept
• how to change your money self-concept
• the impact of changing your self-concept

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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 your money self concept. In psychology, the term self concept refers to the way a person thinks about or perceives themselves. So for our purposes, we’re talking about your money, self concept. So the way you think about or perceive yourself as related to money and your ability to manage it. When people think about personal finance, they typically think about the strategic things like how do I create a budget? Or how much should I spend on X, Y, and Z? How do I cut expenses to save more money? Where should I be saving? How much should I be saving? What debt plan should I use? And don’t get me wrong? It’s important to know financial strategies right? If you don’t know what to do with your money, you’re not going to get very far with your financial goals. But at the same time, it’s more important to look at your money self concept, how you think about yourself and your ability to manage your money. Because your self concept flows into all the things you do. You can do all the right strategies and still feel terrible and feel like you don’t have a handle on your finances. For example, I’ve had clients who have saved what many people consider a significant amount of money before we ever started working together, but they didn’t feel good about it. They were doing the quote right things, but their self concepts were that they didn’t know what they were doing or that they couldn’t do enough to get ahead. And their saving was driven by fear and scarcity and lack and it didn’t feel good to them. So even though they were doing the right things and implementing a strategy that was building their savings, it wasn’t a good experience for them. Lawyers often have terrible money, self concepts, like people tell me things all the time. Like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve made so many mistakes. I can’t get this right. I’m just a person who spends a lot of money. I’m not good at keeping up a budget, right? Like these are the stories that many lawyers are telling themselves. on repeat. But did you know that you get to choose how you think about yourself and how you talk to yourself. You get to choose your money, self concept, all of it is subjective. So you can choose to think whatever you want to think about yourself. And as I say all the time, there are two sides to every story. So maybe you have evidence to support these negative things that you’ve been thinking about yourself, but I guarantee there’s evidence to support the opposite as well. And you just haven’t been paying attention to it you could just as easily identify that evidence and put more focus there like what else could be true? The thing with having a negative money self concept, first of all is it just feels bad. Like why talk to yourself that way? Why talk about yourself that way? But then secondly, it’s never helpful. Most often it’s going to be you avoiding your family or a significant other or friend, and they’re trying something new and you’re like I don’t know why you’re even trying because you can’t do it anyway. Right? Like we wouldn’t make that kind of thing to someone. Else, especially someone we love. But we speak so harshly to ourselves, and we’re the worst with ourselves. And just like you’re not going to motivate your loved one to try something new by telling them how much they suck at it. You’re not gonna motivate yourself to manage your money or to achieve the financial goals you have by telling yourself how much you suck either. Your Money self concept is everything when it comes to managing your money better. If you don’t see yourself as someone who manages your money, well, you might be able to power through and do the right thing sometimes, but it won’t stick because you’re not used to seeing yourself as someone who knows how to manage your money. You’re used to seeing yourself as someone who’s bad with money or who struggles with money, so you might sign up for a new budgeting app or do a no spend month or save most of your bonus or pay down a credit card. But then you go right back to where you’re used to being and the person you see yourself as so you subconsciously sabotage your progress because you’re not used to this way of managing your money. You’re not used to being this person. So you want to do things to get yourself back in line with the vision that you have. of yourself and who you are. If you believe that being bad with money is just who you are, than the things that you do in line with being good with money are going to feel like you’re fighting against who you are. And when you’re fighting against the person that you inherently are. It’s automatically going to be an uphill battle and more of a struggle than when you’re doing things in line with the person that you see yourself as. So how you change your money self concept it goes back to what we were talking about earlier of choosing different thoughts about yourself. You can start with asking yourself better questions. How are you already good with money? That’s something that we’ve talked about before, right? How do you already know what you’re doing? When you do something that you want to repeat like building or savings or paying off debt or staying within your budget? Ask yourself how you did it? What are all the choices you made and all of the decisions and all of the things that you were thinking that led to you doing those things? Because my clients had to tell me they don’t know. And it just happened, but that’s not true. Right? It didn’t just happen to you. You did that? How did you do it? And as you see yourself as a person who manages your money, well, who knows what’s going on with your money, who’s not afraid to look at your finances, who makes good financial decisions and you keep doing things that that person would do? You become that person, you strengthen that self concept, versus when you’re believing that you’re bad with money and you’re trying to do things that feel like you’re fighting against yourself, as you do the things you need to do to achieve your goals. It’s going to come from a place of much more ease, you’re going to achieve your goals faster, and it’s gonna feel a whole lot better as you do it. And the other thing I’ll say is this. When you change your self concept, and managing your money well becomes who you are, you’re able to more readily adapt to changes that happen in your life where you need to be managing your money differently. So let’s say a job loss or some other change in income, right? That self concept changes everything about how you approach your finances, and what you’re able to do with them going forward. You never feel like you don’t know what to do. You always know exactly how to manage your money, no matter what’s going on in your life. Because it’s just the person you are. You figure it out. You make the decisions that you need to make for the health of your finances. Your self concept is so much more important than the particular strategies you use. I say all the time, all the strategies work. There are 50 million articles and books and podcasts and whatever else telling you how to manage your money and what to do, but you’re not going to consistently do any of it. If you believe that you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re bad with money. So let’s change that. Come work with me. And let’s shift yourself concepts. So you see yourself as someone who knows exactly what you’re doing and who feels confident with money. Yes, we will work on this strategy as well. But the key and all of it is changing that self concept. So head to rho thomas.com/call To schedule your consultation, and let’s talk about how we can work together. All right, that is it for this week’s episode. Come 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 help more people to find it. And please think of a friend or two who use this information and share the episode 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 the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.