Money and Personality

Have you ever asked yourself how money and personality are linked together? Here are some thoughts on that:

Money is a measure for growth. In order to earn a lot of money, you need to have the mindset for it. And in order to have the required mindset, you need to grow. Depending on how you were programmed when you were young (what you were told and what you saw), you’ll need to observe these beliefs and change them for more prosperous ones. Having the personal discipline to decide which thoughts you allow in your mind or not is quite a challenge. But if you master this, you’ll slowly realize that you can achieve whatever you want and become whoever you desire.

Money is energy. You don’t focus on making money, you focus on adding value. Put your attention on helping others. Ask yourself how you can help people doing what you love. I suggest you read my article on Finding Your Life’s Purpose through Giving for more info on that. Once you’ve found what to give, ask yourself how you can help 10 times more people. Then always multiply that number. Providing service to the largest number of people will come back to you in greater wealth.

Make sure that you focus on growth, because whatever you focus on expands. If you get excited about your objective, you’ll reach it faster. And if you focus on your problems, you’ll worsen them by giving them extra energy. As I said, disciplining your mind is a challenge, but it’s important to choose our battles wisely. If you want to determine which battles you should fight and which not, picture yourself beyond the obstacle and ask yourself if, once the issue is resolved, the energy you spent was worth it.

An important aspect of accumulating wealth is to separate yourself from it. When you start taking action outside of your comfort zone, you are bond to make mistakes. That’s fine. That’s part of the learning process. But you need to realize that the amount you earn does not define who you are. Your self worth does not equal your net worth.

I talk a lot about increasing my wealth and I’d like to say why I believe this is so important. I heard from T Harv Eker that if you work hard on your job, you make a living, but if you work hard on yourself, you make a fortune. I’ve always been a great personal growth enthusiast, and now I realize that personal growth is tied to personal wealth. Read my article titled Fearless Millionaire which talks about the link between fear and wealth. When you start working on yourself, through meditation and exercise, or by expanding your knowledge, you’ll naturally attract opportunities. Focus on feeling worthy and you will become what you visualize.

Lastly, if you think you don’t have enough time to spend on creating wealth, I believe the opposite. Having passive income streams frees up your time to do anything you want and really enjoy life. Of course, the initial effort will require some time on your part. But what is it to invest a few hours to get things started and enjoy a permanent vacation afterwards? So it’s all a matter of setting your priorities right and recognizing that time invested now multiplies exponentially in the future.

You can watch my video on Changing Your Mindset to Become a Millionaire

Click here to read my other articles on Creating Wealth.

Increase Wealth and Success – Take More Risks

Increase Wealth and Success

Many people are impressed by the level of action that I take in my life. If I feel like doing something, I do it! It doesn’t matter if it involves selling my condo with all my belongings in it, moving to a different country, being unemployed for a while, or any other uncertainty. What I see as simply following my heart, others see as a risk they are not willing to take. The truth is that you shouldn’t afford NOT to take risks. In order to increase your wealth and success, you need to take more risks. If you remain along the shore, you will never discover the very best of you. If you believed that in order to live a better life, you had to make the sacrifice of being unemployed and studying for a few years, you must realize that you took the risk that things could have not worked out for you. Yet, you took the chance and you studied. You should also understand that in order to be wealthier, you need to find the time to study how wealth is acquired. It’s the same concept, it’s just that one is more popular than the other.

Raise Your Awareness

In T Harv Eker’s interview with Keith Cunningham, Keith describes how he made – and lost – a fortune by taking risks. He says the key is developing the awareness of HOW to earn vast sums of money. Once you know how, even if you lose it, you will regain it easily because your mindset has expanded. Bob Proctor keeps saying that people don’t earn $50,000 a year because they want to, they earn that much because they’re not AWARE of how to earn $50,000 a MONTH! Keith also says that the lessons from losing money are incredible… and I believe him! I’ve learned a lot more in losing money than in earning it. It’s like learning anything: if you can get beyond the scare of making mistakes, then you can go forward. I wrote an article on “learning to do things badly” which you can read by following the link for Self-Help Perfectionism.

I also talk about the importance of taking action in my book on finding your life’s purpose, Grow With the Flow. Keith also says that: “One step in the right direction is worth a hundred years of thinking about it.” In my life, I never regretted anything. I believe regretting is a matter of choice and I choose to learn from my mistakes. Because the times when I lost a lot of money or spent more than I should have thought me a lot. I’m now unlikely to do the same errors again, or at the very least I will do much better next time. Willingness to make mistakes is a secret to wealth because it allows you to ACT.

Learn to Love Money

Now, take a few minutes to write down all your beliefs around money. Do you believe that earning money requires hard work? Do you believe that wealthy people are mean and greedy? Are these beliefs serving you well? All your beliefs, even though you don’t think about them consciously, play a huge role in shaping your daily actions and thoughts. If you don’t believe that you can earn a lot of money, you won’t even entertain thoughts that could make you earn a lot of money. Money is like a lover or health, you have to treat it right for it to stay with you. I used to trick myself into thinking that I was “ABOVE” money, while I subconsciously was enslaved by it. I desperately needed to have a lot of money and to be “generous” to show others how careless about material things I was. I was acting in the opposite way of what I was thinking deep down inside. Now that I’ve let this belief come to the surface, I’ve been able to let it go and truly reestablish a sane relationship towards owning money. I see money as it is: a tool that increases my comfort and allows me to provide service beyond my physical presence. Money is my measure for personal growth. The more I grow, the greater receptacle for money I become. I now see my fears as exciting challenges to overcome because I know that overcoming them will make me a better, freer and richer person.

Once you become aware of your negative beliefs around money, you need to let them go. Most people see this process as long and difficult, but it can also be very quick and easy. If you trusted someone for 30 years, but suddenly realized that they were screwing you, you would stop trusting them right away. You can go the same with your liming beliefs. You should read my article on the Sedona Method to learn a very simple and effective technique to let go.

What risks are you willing to take in your life to increase wealth and success? You can start small, but be aware that “Behind your greatest fear, lies your greatest gift.”

Rich Thinking Poor Thinking

Rich Thinking Poor Thinking. I just finished reading Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T Harv Eker. It struck me to realize how rich thinking differs from poor thinking in so many ways! He says for instance that poor people focus on their salaries, while the rich on their net worth. That’s a major difference! Instead of focussing on how much you earn, you focus on how much you’re worth. When focusing on what you earn, if you do end up earning more, you will simply increase your spendings simultaneously and will only see little difference. But when you focus on what you accumulate, you have a real incentive to increase your wealth! And it is so important to do so! I used to think that wealthy people were mean and greedy, but I don’t believe that anymore. I heard many times that money doesn’t change you, it simply amplifies the person you already are. So if you are a nice person, and have a lot of money, you’ll have the opportunity to be even nicer!

Another important point in the book is the “both” and “either/or” mentality. Poor people think in “either/or”, which means that they need to sacrifice something in order to get something else. On the other hand, rich people think “both”, meaning that they think creatively to come up with alternatives that will allow them to get both options they desire. The belief that I cannot have everything is a strong one in me. I did a little research and I found out that I’m not alone! The saying: “You can’t eat your cake and have it too” exists in many other languages, in very interesting variations. In French, the expression is: “You can’t have the butter and the money for the butter” And I like the version of Venezuela which goes: “You cannot have the bottle full and the girl drunk.”

I find it very sad that we are so conditioned to play small and to satisfy ourselves with as little as possible. I have grand ambitions and I’m proud of them because they allow me to grow and to become a better person. I wrote in my article Fearless Millionaire that wealth and fear are closely related. Bob Proctor also says time and again that goals are not for getting: they are made for expansion. I realize now more than ever that this is true. And I see what Marianne Williamson meant when she wrote that “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” The more I break through my fears, the more I regain my power and the more I see no limit to where I can go and to what I can do. When I started my Master’s Degree in International Relations, I laughed at people who said they wanted to “save the world!” Now I see that this is part of my desires and I want to acquire massive wealth to do my share in distributing it more evenly on earth. I see this as a very important role I have to play.

And you? What are your beliefs and desires around money? Can you easily picture yourself being wealthy?

Click here to read more articles on Creating Wealth.

Getting started with passive income

Getting started with passive income. The more I talk about my project of retiring within 4 years (I will be 37), the more interest I get from other people who want that for their lives too. The concept is very enticing: not having to work because you HAVE to, simply if you WANT to. Having the ability to chose any activity that you like doing and not having to factor in the salary. For instance, I’ve considered customer service hotel jobs for a long time, but always stayed away because of the lower wages than what I’m earning now.

But how to do you get started? The best first question you can ask yourself is: What activity would I do voluntarily, 1 hour every day, for an entire year. Because chances are really high that the activity that you pick won’t bring you any money in the first year. If you get discouraged along the way, then the time spent on building your passive income stream will be lost. (Which is, statistically, more likely to happen than not!) So you want that lost time to have been spent on something you like. Most people I met who live solely on passive income did it in 3 years. Answering the question about what you would do for free will also ensure that you pick something that you feel truly passionate about, not something that will simply get you money fast. Because if you pick something for the latter reason, you’ll struggle in the perseverance part of the project. (Read more on perseverance here) Once you have found your topic, you have to share it with people. We get money in return of the value we provide. You get that salary that you have because it roughly equates to the value you contribute to society. The problem with regular jobs though, is that you can only be in one place at one time, so your income is always tied to your physical presence. When you develop an information product, such as recording a song or a course, writing a blog or an ebook, or selling a membership, then your income isn’t tied to your physical presence anymore. If what you produced provides enough value to enough people, then you will make enough money to live solely from that income. It is still preferable to diversify your sources of income, so that if one fails, you have a few other ones to rely on. But it is also imperative to start with only one source, as it too easy to spread out your efforts and end up not having a single steady source of income.

In my case, blogging is the first building block of my passive income. I started 4 months ago and I’m still not earning any money from it. But my audience is growing and I don’t want to pollute my blog with too much publicity. For the time being, I focus on providing valuable content. I already published my first ebook on Amazon, which talks about the subconscious mind. If you are interested, you can get it by clicking on this link.

I also bought a $37 course to learn how to set up a blog. It’s a very complete and detailed course that teaches you how to get started, step-by-step, in 30 days. I knew nothing about blogging before and I highly recommend it. You can get it here. They will try to sell you already-made blogs when you purchase the course but I wanted to build my own from scratch. There is another version of the course that includes videos. This one is $97 but I haven’t tried it. If you find that videos are worth the price difference, then you can get it here.

With that you will also need is a hosting plan to save your blog and allow the world the see it. I use GoDaddy which is the world’s largest domain name registrar. You can get your domain name here. The cheapest plan is $10/month.

Finally, you need to have a clear image of WHY you want to be financially free. The most difficult challenge you will face along the way is discouragement. It will come from other people but from the voice in your own mind too. I suggest having a very clear idea of where you want to go with this project, what it will allow you to do once your passive income streams are set up, and even a visualization board that you can look at daily to remind you why you are putting in the efforts.

So that’s it! With a strong determination, a $37 course plus $10/month you can have your window to the world, share your passion and start earning money!

If you need more details on how to do this, it will be my pleasure to help you out!

Happy earning!
Martin

Wallace Wattles – The Science of Getting Rich

In less than a week now I will be at the Science of Getting Rich seminar in Los Angeles. The seminar is given by Bob Proctor and it’s based on the original book by Wallace Wattles. It starts of with the “right” to be rich. I really like this concept. Many authors even talk about the “obligation” to become wealthy and the “sin” to remain poor. I believe more and more that becoming rich is part of my life’s mission. Spirit is all about expansion and I now understand how the process of acquiring wealth is related to knowing myself better. I also remember Marianne Williamson who said that we are not as afraid of our weaknesses as we are afraid of our grandeur, our own magnificence and our ability to accomplish astounding things.

I somewhat always knew that I was meant to become a millionaire. Since as far as I can remember, I always said to my friends that a pleasure that is free, such as gazing at the starry sky, is worth as much as a thousand-dollar evening in a fancy hotel and restaurant. How can you tell which one is worth more? There might be one that cost more, but the outcome amounts to the same level of satisfaction. And both are complementary to each other. You can’t always depend on expensive activities to find your pleasure because you’ll eventually lose the value of money. That’s what happened to me when I lived my 6-figure lifestyle. But the opposite is also true: only being able to afford free of very cheap pleasures keeps you in the envy of having more freedom.

In order to be truly happy, you need to feel total freedom. And that level of freedom only comes when your financial resources are vast. If you haven’t watched it already, take a look at my video on Changing Your Mindset to Become a Millionaire. I also stumbled upon the blog of a 23 year old who gave himself the objective of becoming a millionaire by 25. He unfortunately failed to achieve his goal, but at least he tried, and I’m sure he’ll keep trying.

So what is your reason for not doing it? Fear of failure? Did you know that a vast majority of people on their deathbeds don’t regret their mistakes but regret what they haven’t tried? I remind myself of this when I feel discouraged and I keep on trying!

Happy trying!
Martin

Bob Proctor Terror Barrier – How to Overcome Fear

Bob Proctor Terror Barrier. Tonight I have a video for you titled: How to Overcome the Terror Barrier and Reach Your Goals

In this video, the goal is to become a millionaire, but it applies to any big goal you might have!

To reach that goal, you need:

1. Understanding with Bob Proctor http://bit.ly/MAg49v

2. Practical exercises with T Harv Eker http://bit.ly/1kcVUOd

Enjoy!
Martin

Fearless Millionaire

Fearless Millionaire. I’m starting to realize how fears and wealth are related. In order to enjoy wealth, you need to explore yourself fully, and going in deep means facing your own personal fears. I didn’t realize how much my fears were holding be back. I often read that we usually don’t notice many of our bad habits simply because we’ve become so accustomed to them. I also read that you cannot get out of a mental prison if you don’t know you’re in one. Well that was my case. That’s at least what my feeling of fearlessness indicated me today! I felt so incredibly good! So peaceful and powerful! I cannot believe how mentally imprisoned I was!

I believe that this is still part of the effects of the exercises I did last weekend at the Millionaire Mind. We explored our hidden beliefs, we re-experienced our childhood and I was surprised to see how active many of my old beliefs still were. But the exercises were so powerful that I truly overcame some of my deeply buried fears. For one of them, I even thought I was going to pass out!! That’s how much fear didn’t want me to do the exercise! But by raising my energy level, which I did unconsciously because of stress, I was able to go through my fears.

And 3 days later I am reaping the benefits! The fearlessness feeling! I am reconnecting with my past! Have you ever wondered why everybody is attracted to newborns? Why we feel the urge to go towards them? One of the reasons is that they are fearless. They are pure loving beings and love attracts love. That’s one of my goals in life: return to my original level of love. Yes! Just like the book A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson.

But back to the beginning: how do you become aware that you are in a prison? You expand your mind! When it completely fills your mental prison, you expansion will burst the walls open and you will feel freedom. Read my article on How to Raise Your Awareness to learn more.

Enjoy!
Martin

Millionaire Mind Intensive 2014 – Day 3

On day 3, we busted through our emotional blocks! It was quite fascinating to realize how emotionally attached I still was to some issues that are 10, 15 and even 20 years old! I realize that the key to making a change is ENERGY! Just like Bob Proctor says it, when you add energy to water, it changes state and becomes steam. If you add energy to a human, his or her vibrational level rises and he or she also changes state. On Day 3 of the Millionaire Mind Intensive 2014, I gained FREEDOM! I’m now free of so many fears that I had! My relationship towards money has completely changed. This is so so important when we know that the very first change that will bring more money is opening up the MINDSET for it.

I already wrote an article which compared the cost of attendance of Bob Proctor’s live seminars to the programs that you can do at home. The very first reason why you must attend a LIVE event is because of the level of ENERGY required to make a serious change in your life and which can only be found in person! There is simply no substitute to the synergy of hundreds of people going through their terror barriers all at once! Everybody’s energy contributes to everybody’s change! What’s great also is that higher energy makes changes a lot easier to occur! The only remaining though part is making the change permanent. We received a 90-day workbook after the seminar to allow us to continue the exercises and to make all this beautiful change sink into our subconscious mind. Make sure to partner up for the exercises, that will make the follow up a lot easier! After I attended Matrixx, I did the 30-day persistence exercise with a friend and I saw how much effect it had making the mindset change permanent.

Click on these links to learn what I experienced on Day 1 and Day 2 of the Millionaire Mind Intensive 2014!

If you want to find out when is the next Millionaire Mind Intensive 2014 near you, follow this link!

Finally, you can watch my video on How to Change Your Mindset to Become a Millionaire which I recorded just before the event!

How to create wealth

Everybody can be a millionaire. You just need to have a plan for it. But how to create wealth? The first big obstacle is believing that it’s possible. Because, if you don’t even believe that YOU can be a millionaire, then you won’t even start to look for ways to do it. As Bob Proctor, Napoleon Hill, T Harv Eker and many others have said before, being wealthy starts with the mindset. First, you need to have a vision, a dream that animates you enough to set yourself in motion. Once you have a goal, then you need a plan to reach it. For me, the wealthiest people are not the ones with the most money, they are the ones with the most freedom. Of course, money gives you the freedom to do a lot of things. But what is it worth if you need to work 80 hours a week to earn your million dollars? Even 40 hours a week is way too much for me. I like Tim Ferriss who suggests to work only 4 hours a week. You should read his book if you haven’t read it already!

Then your limiting beliefs will come in the way. Consciously, everybody wants to be wealthy. But unconsciously, we have many “invisible programs” that keep us away from wealth such as “earning a lot of money means cutting down on family time”, “you need to be well educated to be wealthy” or “you need to have an extraordinary idea to start a business”. I made a video that explains how to identify your limiting beliefs and changing them.

In order to create wealth, you need to provide value to people. If you trade you time for money (a regular job), then money will always be limited. Even if your hourly rate is $1000, you still have a limited number of hours in your week. But if you write a book, record a song or build a training course on video, then you can separate your revenue from your physical presence. You will get the most money is the scenario that will provide the most VALUE to people. You get more value depending on the need for your service, your ability to do it and the difficulty to replace you.

So, do you have ideas that will provide value to others? It doesn’t have to be far fetched. Just being yourself provides value to others. Share your opinions, inform and educate others. There are tons of ways to moneytize that!

Have fun!
Martin