Have you ever wondered why you struggle financially despite doing your best? Have you ever put in a tremendous amount of work yet ended up with nothing to show for it in your bank account?

Perhaps you’ve studied all the strategies and postulates for business success and growing wealth, but you find yourself unable to use the knowledge in everyday work. If you still struggle with money, even though you’re driven and inspired, it’s possible that your beliefs about wealth are holding you back.

How Limiting Beliefs Affect Your Financial Well-Being

If you believe that only your hard work and effort translate into cash, you couldn’t be more wrong! The beliefs and attitudes you have about money are not only shaping your bank account but also your entire future.

Have you wondered what the difference is between people who save a lot of money, those who always live paycheck to paycheck, and those with nice earnings that don’t seem to reflect on their quality of life?

The answer is in what people believe and value. However, beliefs about money aren’t as straightforward as they appear. It’s not like you can start chanting, “Money is good; I love money, and I can have it” and change your situation immediately.

Your beliefs about money, wealth, and spending affect your attitudes and everyday actions. For example, if you feel like the only honest way to earn money is through hard work, then you might only be paying attention to those occupations and jobs that, indeed, require hard work to make decent earnings.

Moreover, many people are raised to believe that wanting to make money is dishonest and arrogant, since it applies that money is important. This limiting belief comes from a dichotomy of striving toward financial well-being with hard work and believing that being rich is wrong or even sinful.

If you start analyzing billionaire’s biographies, you’ll learn that their life journeys became similar like anyone else’s. The real peak of earning came when they designed an innovative idea and immersed themselves into fulfilling it.

Other contributing factors to gaining wealth were also present, like above-average intelligence; skills in managing money; persistence and will to sacrifice for their vision; and of course, business smarts.

Most people aren’t able to grasp these complex ideas; to them, getting rich from honest work looks impossible, so if someone’s rich, they must be a real predator.

Limiting Beliefs About Money

Limiting beliefs about money include the following:

• Believing that money is bad and that wanting and liking money and material goods makes you a bad person
• Believing that earning is only honest when it’s difficult, and that all easy labor is less valuable than heavy labor
• Believing that all rich people are bad and having an irrational appreciation for the martyrdom of poverty
• Believing that you, personally, can’t or don’t have the right to make money because you’re not smart or worthy enough

Beliefs About Life

However, many limiting beliefs about money also result from other limiting beliefs about life, like:

• It’s impossible to be happy, healthy, and live in financial existence—you can’t have it all.
• Good things attract misfortune—one of them being wealth.
• Being wealthy means giving up other important things in life.
• Gaining wealth means losing loved ones whose financial situation doesn’t match yours.
• You need to serve others before yourself or else, you’re selfish and a bad person.
• Setting boundaries/saying “no” is selfish; you have to please everyone.

Beliefs About Productivity

Aside from the previous, there are also many beliefs about work and productivity that are keeping you away from financial bliss, like:

• Working hard relates to how much money you’ll make; profiting is a lot more complex, and hard work is only one piece of the equation that affects the work result.
• The only honest work is hard work. If you find more efficient ways to do your job, you’re a cheater; unless you’re breaking the law, causing harm to others, or breaking company rules, finding easier and better ways to get results is the right thing to do.

These beliefs are preventing you from aligning your work methods and practices with science-based principles of productivity known to provide best results. You might want to work harder than needed to meet your goals or, on the other hand, work as little as possible if you think that demanding goals isn’t worth your effort.

Either way, the best way to overcome these beliefs and start advancing financially is to first evaluate your limiting beliefs and then work toward overcoming them.

Change Your Limiting Beliefs in Four Steps

Letting go of limiting beliefs is difficult because they’re there to make you feel safe. Beliefs make us feel like we know certain things about life, and that certainty drives us to follow—even those beliefs that do us harm. Letting go and changing beliefs is scary.

When you first try to evaluate what you believe in, you might start to feel anxious, afraid, and worried about making a big mistake that might ruin your life. Remember: Your actions and the things that you do based on planning and analyzing situations create your life experience. Beliefs affect it indirectly.

If you’re afraid of changing your beliefs, reassure yourself that you’re a smart, responsible person—you’re always in control of your actions. You’re always able to think about the outcome of what you’re planning to do and then choose to do those things that seem like the smartest idea.

With that in mind, here’s the sequence of actions needed to change your limiting beliefs:

Step #1: Inspect Your Limiting Beliefs

You can’t change what holds you back before you know what it is. For that reason, review some of the most common self-limiting beliefs and check off those you think you have. Remind yourself that those particular beliefs have been proven wrong by decades of research and experts’ experiences.

Step #2: Learn and Research the Evidence

After identifying your limiting beliefs, begin beating them with evidence. Do some research and find specific studies that show a particular claim is inaccurate and to see which opposite views align better with real-life experience.

Step #3: Build a Positive Mindset

Start a journal in which you’ll line out positive beliefs that you find to be accurate. Write down information, statistics, and expert testimonials that encourage you to be more proactive, independent, and unbiased when making evaluations related to money and financial well-being.

Step #4: Affirm Positive Views

After each journal entry, write an affirmation that sums up the truth about a particular aspect of life, work, and money making that you need to work on. Sum up the knowledge you’ve gathered into a one short, present tense, accurate, and positive sentence.

Commit to writing and reviewing your journal each day, as well as repeating affirmations that reflect optimistic, encouraging beliefs. Over time, your mindset will begin to change. Don’t force this change—just observe how different ideas about what you want to do appear and make a conscious choice about moving forward.

Start Thinking and Believing Like a Millionaire! 

While limiting beliefs do steer your everyday assumptions, thoughts, and actions, they’re only one part of the “big picture.” Changing your beliefs will help improve financial well-being, but what if you’re striving toward something greater?

As mentioned earlier, other facts contribute to “making millionaires,” as opposed to forming self-limiting beliefs, like:

• Growing up in a supportive home with at least middle- to upper-middle-class income
• Being a second or a third generation of driven, inspired workers and academics
• Growing and nurturing hard (technical, practical) and soft (personality, social, listening, interpersonal, business, and economics) skills and knowledge
• Devotion to pursuing an innovative vision over making money
• And much more!

Being in a supportive, creative, and driven environment kept these individuals from learning limiting beliefs, so they entered their careers with focus on innovation and growth. If you haven’t had a set of the desired conditions for forming a growth mindset, there’s good news!

In “The Millionaire Mindset,” you’ll find out about other pieces of the puzzle that you can start fitting together to grow beyond simple, comfortable living.